The Procane Chronicle (14 page)

“A little. You’d better find Procane and tell him.”

“What’ll I tell him?”

“That the cop called Francis X. Frann is dead, that he’s parked outside my hotel, that I’m going to have to call the cops, that Procane’s probably going to have to talk to them some time tonight, and that he’d better be able to prove where he’s been.”

“Anything else?”

“You’d better scoot.”

She nodded again, turned, and walked quickly up Forty-sixth Street. I went around in front of the car and wrote down the license number and the fact that it was a New Jersey plate. I went back up to my apartment and asked information for the number of Frank Deal. He lived in Brooklyn and a woman answered the phone. When I asked for Deal I could hear her call, “Frank, it’s for you.”

After he said hello I said, “This is St. Ives.”

“Now what?”

“It’s about Officer Frann again.”

“Me and Oller haven’t been able to run him down. Oller’s here now. What’s the matter, Frann still hanging around?”

“Sort of.”

“Where?”

“He’s in a car parked right outside my hotel.”

“Well, hell, he can keep till tomorrow.”

“He might even keep forever.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means he’s dead,” I said and hung up.

A
TOW TRUCK CAME
for the yellow Camaro, an ambulance came for Officer Frann, and Deal and Oller came for me.

“They say he was stabbed,” Deal said, “right in the heart.” He and Carl Oller sat at the poker table. I wandered around the room, making myself useful by straightening pictures, lining up books, and chain-smoking cigarettes.

“Why don’t you sit down, St. Ives?” Oller said. “You’re giving me the jitters.”

“Have a drink,” Deal said. “You look like you could use a drink.”

“I can,” I said and crossed over to the kitchen to pour myself a Scotch. “You want one?”

“Not me,” Oller said.

Deal shook his head. “Me neither.”

I carried my drink over to the poker table and sat down. “All right,” I said, “I’ve told you all I know about Frann.”

“The way it looks to me is he was gonna try to shake down your client,” Oller said. He was wearing a tweed sport coat that wouldn’t quite button anymore because of his stomach. The jacket had gray suede leather patches on its elbows.

“And you haven’t told us the name of your client,” Deal said.

“Or what it was you were buying back for him this morning.”

“Private papers,” I said. “Personal stuff.”

“It must have been goddamned personal if he was willing to pay ninety thousand bucks for it,” Deal said.

“We’re going to have to talk to him,” Oller said.

I nodded. “That’s what I told him.”

“What’d he say?” Deal said.

“He didn’t like it.”

“But he agreed to talk.”

“He agreed.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

Deal looked at Oller who nodded. “Tonight’s good. Who is he?”

I took a long drink of my Scotch and water. “His name’s Procane. Abner Procane.”

The two detectives looked at each other and then Deal shrugged elaborately, bringing his shoulders up high and dropping them. “Never heard of him.”

“What kind of business is he in?” Oller said.

“Investments, I think.”

“Loaded?” Deal asked.

“He’s not poor,” I said.

“I mean really loaded?”

“He’s worth a few million.”

“What I was thinking was if the kid wanted to shake him down for a few thousand, would it bother him enough to do something drastic about it, like sticking a knife in the kid?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t think he’s much of a suspect.”

“But you’re gonna let us decide that, aren’t you?” Oller said and gave me a slow smile to show how sweetly reasonable he thought his request was.

“Sure,” I said.

“I suppose you can account for where you were this afternoon and evening,” Deal said.

“Here.”

“Alone?”

“Most of the time.”

“Who else was here?”

“Frann for one.”

“And for two?”

“A girl.”

“And you were probably sticking it into her while somebody else was sticking it into poor old Frann.”

“Probably.”

“We may want her name,” Oller said.

“I don’t think so.”

“You know something, St. Ives?”

“What?”

“We don’t really give much of a shit what you think.”

“Look,” I said, “I’ve told you all I know. About the airline terminal, about the buy back and about who my client is. I’m not going to bring anybody else into this unless you charge me with something and I probably wouldn’t even do it then.”

“He’s a real fuckin gentleman, isn’t he, Frank?”

“Knock it off,” Deal said. “What’s this Procane’s number?”

I told him and he said, “Is he home?”

“I think so.”

Deal rose and crossed to the phone, dialed the number, and then identified himself. “We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Procane. I think St. Ives has told you why.” He listened for a moment and then said, “Ten o’clock’ll be fine,” and hung up the phone. He walked around the room looking at pictures and books, even taking down a volume of Kipling’s poetry and thumbing through it, perhaps looking for “If.”

After a while Deal turned and said, “We got ourselves assigned to this one, St. Ives, because we’re pretty sure it’s tied into the Boykins killing. But Frann wasn’t just some two-bit hustler who got himself beat to death. He was a cop and that means that we’re not going to be working it alone. There’s going to be a whole swarm of us because cops don’t like cops getting killed. Am I making myself clear?”

“You’re getting there.”

“Well, what I’m telling you is this: if you haven’t told us every goddamn thing about Frann that you know—I mean if you’re keeping something back about him or about who might have killed him and then somebody finds out that you were keeping it back, well, you’re going to be in one hell of a lot of trouble. I mean real bad trouble.”

I thought a moment. “I told you everything he told me.”

“But you’re not sure he was really gonna try to work a shakedown?” Oller said.

“He didn’t come right out and say so. He just said that he thought Procane might like to know who carried that United airline bag into the men’s room this morning. I thought that if he were going to shake somebody down, he’d try it on the guy who carried the bag. But maybe he was planning to work both of them. Or it may even have been because of what he said was the real reason.”

Deal had moved over to the door and Oller was joining him. They both stared at me.

“What real reason?” Deal said.

“That he just wanted to stop riding that motor-scooter.”

Procane called at midnight. “How’d it go?” I said.

“Not too bad; not too bad at all. They were very polite and very considerate, I thought.”

“What did they ask you about Frann?”

“Whether I knew him and whether he’d approached me.”

“What’d you say?”

“That I’d never heard of him. They must have asked me the same question a dozen times in as many different ways.”

“Did they believe you?”

“They seemed to. Eventually.”

“What’d you tell them about the journals?”

“That they were personal papers that could be embarrassing and that I could afford not to be embarrassed. So I bought them back.”

“Did they ask to see them?”

“No, they seemed quite understanding although they said they thought that they could have saved me a lot of money if I’d gone to the police first. I tried to appear a bit crestfallen.”

“Anything else?”

“I simply told them what had happened, how I came to get in touch with you through Myron Greene, and how you bought the journals back this morning after the previous attempt failed.”

“How long were they there?”

“A full two hours. They just left.”

“They took long enough.”

“Well, they really were quite thorough. They asked me to tell the entire story several times and they examined the safe and looked around the house. Most conscientious, I thought.”

“Do they want to talk to you again?”

“They said that they will. I told them I’d be away tomorrow and they said that that was all right because tomorrow was their day off. Or it’s today, now, isn’t it? Wednesday.”

“And you’re still going through with it?”

Procane’s tone stiffened. “I really don’t have much choice, Mr. St. Ives.”

“No, you don’t, do you.”

There was a small pause and then he said, “I trust that you haven’t had second thoughts about joining us.”

“Not second thoughts. Mine are up in the hundreds.”

“I really must know your decision now. The timing and logistics aren’t such that they can accommodate last-minute regrets.”

“When are we supposed to meet at your place?”

“At noon today.”

It took a long time for me to reply because I had to run through each of the three dozen reasons why I should say no so I could decide on which one to use. But the next voice I heard seemed to belong to somebody else because I heard it saying, “I’ll be there at noon.”

I
WAS THINKING ABOUT
getting a cat and calling it Osbert when the first gray light edged its way into the room. A cat would have been someone to talk to at ten past three in the morning when you know the night will never end. My watch said that it was a little after seven and the last of the longest night the world has ever seen. I knew it was the longest because I had measured every second of it. Twice.

It had been a while since I had seen a dawn so I got up and went over to a window and looked out. It was cloudy and it looked like rain and I decided that I hadn’t been missing much.

On my way to the bathroom I turned on the burner under the kettle. I was going to need a lot of coffee that day to keep awake and I tried to remember if there were anything in the medicine cabinet that could help. A quick inventory produced a bottle of aspirin, a package of Stimu-dents (unused), a razor, a tube of Lip-Ice, a box of Band-aids, a bottle of Mercurochrome, a gift bottle of shaving lotion that I’d never used, and some foamy pain-killer that could be sprayed on minor burns. There was also a pill bottle with a label that read, “Take one every four hours if pain persists,” but it was empty so the pain must have been persistent although I couldn’t remember it.

After I found that there was nothing to put me to sleep, or to wake me up, or to make me feel any better, I said to hell with it and went back to the Pullman kitchen and fixed a cup of instant coffee and poured a shot of brandy into it. Drinking that early in the morning always made me feel wicked and that’s exactly how I wanted to feel.

After the coffee I stood under the shower for a long time, shaved, and then cooked myself a large breakfast of three eggs, Canadian bacon, buttered toast with strawberry jam, a chunk of Liederkranz, and more coffee. Much more. By the time I was dressed in the dark-blue suit, blue oxford shirt, black knit tie, and black loafers—the outfit that I always wore to funerals and million-dollar heists—I was ready for a nap. I had some more coffee instead.

By eight-thirty I was not only breakfasted, dressed, and jittery, but also ready to go someplace. Even an office would have looked good. Instead, I turned on the television, which I considered to be almost as wicked as drinking in the morning.

I half-watched the news for thirty minutes or so and then some cartoons came on and I got really interested in one that was all about two bears and a tiger who spoke with a ripe Brooklyn accent. The bears seemed to be from the South.

The morning passed somehow, not quite as slowly as the night, but nearly so. At eleven I was jabbing the elevator button. When I came out of the elevator and into the lobby Eddie, the bell captain, shot his eyebrows up in surprise or maybe shock and said, “Christ, you’re up early.”

“It’s not all that early.”

“It is for you. You gotta lead on a steady job?”

“Not today.”

“Well, one of these days something’s gonna turn up.

“Let’s hope so.”

“You wanta get a little something down on the fight?”

“What’re they giving?”

“Eight to five on the champ.”

“I’ll take him for eighty.”

“I got some tickets I can letcha have for a hundred.”

“Ringside?”

“They’re a little further back than that.”

“Ten rows?”

“More like maybe fifteen.”

“Or twenty?”

“Nineteen.”

“I’m going to be busy tonight.”

“You got a date? That was a swell-looking piece you came out of there with last night. Maybe a little young though. For you, I mean.”

“I’ll see you, Eddie.”

“Eighty on the champ, right?”

“Right.”

I walked or rather strolled, I suppose, the twenty-eight blocks or so to Procane’s house. It was windy and chilly and threatening to either rain or snow, but I decided that the walk would do me good. How, I wasn’t quite sure, but that’s what a walk was supposed to do. Everybody said so.

I celebrated the halfway mark by turning into a familiar bar and joining the morning drinkers in a Scotch and water. It was a good way to kill twenty minutes or so and for some reason I didn’t want to arrive at Procane’s early. On time or a little late, yes. Early, no.

I got there at five minutes past twelve. It had been a long morning. Procane met me at the door and once again ushered me into the office-study. He had a fire going; applewood from the smell.

“You’re the first to arrive,” he said after I took one of the chairs by the fire. He stood in front of it, his hands behind his back, rocking a little on his heels. He wore a dark-gray suit, a white shirt, and a tie with black and white stripes. He looked as if he were headed for a meeting of the board and had some good news for its members. His eyes were bright and twinkling and a jolly smile kept peeping out from underneath his ginger moustache.

“I was about to have a drink, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. “Would you care to join me? I don’t think one will do us any harm while we wait.”

I started to show off and say no, thanks, but common sense prevailed and I said, “Yes, I think I will.”