The Procane Chronicle (19 page)

I
HELPED GET THE
three suitcases out of the Mustang’s back seat. We put them in the trunk of Wiedstein’s car. The one that I carried didn’t weigh much, not more than thirty pounds, so I assumed that it was the million dollars in currency. It can weigh far less than a million dollars in heroin.

“What’re you going to do with it?” I said as I got in the back seat next to Janet Whistler.

Procane turned to look at me. “With what?”

“The heroin.”

“Destroy it, of course. I’m not quite sure—”

He didn’t finish his sentence because Wiedstein, not quite into the driver’s seat, looked back and said, “Down!”

I turned instead and saw the dark Oldsmobile slide to a stop just behind Procane’s car which was still smashed into the Mustang. The four doors of the Oldsmobile again flew open and four men tumbled out. They did some gesturing and some pointing and when they were through with that they seemed to start aiming something in our direction and I lost interest and ducked down behind the rear seat.

Wiedstein had the car moving by the time I heard the first shots. Janet Whistler was also half-lying on the rear seat, her face no more than six inches from mine, her eyes closed. When we felt Wiedstein skid the car onto Highway 27 she opened her eyes and looked at me. Then she smiled and winked. We sat up.

Procane was looking back toward the drive-in’s exit. “They’re going to try to come out the entrance,” he said.

Wiedstein nodded. “I know. I thought Mace was supposed to last longer.”

“It does when properly applied.”

“They looked awfully unhappy.”

“Yes, they did, didn’t they? Can you lose them?”

Wiedstein shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

By now we were just past the entrance to the drive-in and it felt as though we were already hitting eighty miles per hour.

Procane looked back. “They’re coming out of the entrance now. Are you sure you can’t lose them?”

“I don’t know these roads,” Wiedstein said. “I might turn down a dead end.”

Procane nodded. “Then we’ll have to use your alternative method, won’t we?”

“Yes,” Wiedstein said, “I suppose we will.”

I started to ask what the alternative method was and how many persons it might kill and whether I might be among them, but Procane had his own questions and he had to shout them because the speedometer said that we were now doing close to ninety. That was far too fast on that road at night. It was really too fast in daytime. My answers to Procane’s shouted questions were almost mechanically shouted replies because I kept watching the road—not only in front of us, but also behind us where the two headlights of the pursuing Oldsmobile crept steadily nearer.

What Procane wanted to know first was, “How did you know—that those two men—were Deal and Oller?” He shouted it above the wind noise in phrases because he kept running out of breath.

“They had to be,” I yelled back.

“Why?”

“Little things.”

“What little things?”

“At the laundromat.”

“What?”

“It was too much of a coincidence.”

“How?”

“That they just happened to drop by—right after I found Boykins’s body.”

Procane shook his head. “That could happen.”

“There was something else.”

“What?”

“They knew where the body was.”

“So?”

“They shouldn’t have known because it was hidden. Out of sight. Behind the last dryer. Deal went right to it.”

“That didn’t worry you then?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t think about it then.”

“Is that all?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“That second phone call you got. The one that set up the switch in the airline terminal.”

“What about it?”

Before I could answer Wiedstein twisted around for a brief second. “Put those seat belts on,” he shouted.

Janet Whistler and I buckled the belts. Procane drew the front seat’s harness belt across his chest. He couldn’t turn around now so he shouted his questions at the windshield.

“What about that phone call?”

I turned to look out the rear window before answering. The Oldsmobile seemed closer. Much closer.

“It was the airline bag,” I yelled back at him.

“Well?”

“He told me to use that ‘same Pan-Am bag.’ ”

“Ah.”

“So how’d he know it was a Pan-Am bag?” I said, still shouting. “He must have seen it. All right. Who had seen the bag? Just the two detectives, Deal and Oller. And the kid cop, Frann.”

“And that’s all?”

“Some other cops saw it—at the precinct, but they didn’t count. Neither did Myron Greene. He saw it, too.”

“And the motor-scooter patrolman Frann. He recognized them in the airline terminal?”

“That’s right.”

“So when you told them that he had, they killed him.”

“No.”

Procane tried to twist around in his seat. When he couldn’t because of the harness belt, he unsnapped it and turned around. “They didn’t kill Frann?”

“They couldn’t have,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because right after I found Frann dead I called Deal. He was home. Oller was with him. He lived in Brooklyn. Frann hadn’t been dead that long, not long enough for Deal and Oller to make it to Brooklyn.”

“They both had a motive.”

“Maybe. But I think they would have tried to cut Frann in for a share rather than kill him.”

“All right, who did kill Frann?”

“I don’t know. Did you?”

Procane stared at me, a little surprised, I thought. Finally he said, “No. I didn’t kill him.”

“You had a motive so I thought I’d ask.”

“Well, I didn’t kill him.”

“Then I don’t know who did.”

“What about the safecracker?”

“Peskoe?”

“Yes.”

“They killed him,” I said.

“Oller and Deal.”

“Yes.”

“Another hunch?”

“Not really.”

“What?”

“The room clerk at the hotel where Peskoe lived.”

“What about him?”

“He told me that just before Peskoe died he saw two men go up in the elevator.”

“Oller and Deal?”

I shook my head. “He wasn’t sure. He didn’t even remember what they looked like. But he did remember one thing.”

“What?”

“He never saw them come back down.”

“So?”

“So after Peskoe died there were a lot of homicide cops around the hotel. Oller and Deal could have thrown Peskoe out of room eight-nineteen, gone up to the roof, and then come back down and mingled with the other cops when they got there. It was perfect camouflage. It might not have been their case, but nobody was going to ask them why they were there. Homicide was their business. That’s why the hotel clerk never saw them again. When they went up, they were just two men he didn’t pay much attention to. Whey they came back down, they were cops. In his mind they couldn’t be the same.”

“Put that belt back on,” Wiedstein told Procane.

“Yes, of course,” Procane said and turned back around. “That’s an interesting theory you have, Mr. St. Ives.”

“It’s not anything more than that,” I said, peering over Wiedstein’s shoulder at the speedometer.

“How fast?” Janet Whistler asked.

“It says ninety-five.” I twisted around again and saw that the lights of the Oldsmobile were still gaining on us.

“Soon?” Procane asked Wiedstein.

Wiedstein nodded. “I remember a place up here after a series of curves, but we’ll have to gain on the curves.”

Wiedstein was good, very good. Although he braked sharply, I still thought we had gone into the first curve far too fast because I felt the rear end start to go. Wiedstein felt it, too, and at just the right moment tromped on the accelerator so that the Chevrolet’s rear wheels bit into the asphalt and hurtled us forward.

I still don’t know how he judged those curves. Not at night at that speed. There were four of them and the warning signs along the road said that none of them should be taken faster than forty-five. In daylight. Just before he went into them Wiedstein was hitting eighty. At night. He would brake to sixty-five and come out of them doing at least eighty-five. It could have been luck, but I preferred to think of it as skill.

On the last curve, a treacherous S-shaped affair, I thought he’d lost his touch. We started a skid that the rear wheels couldn’t dig us out of, but Wiedstein steered with the skid for a moment, and then we were racing straight ahead again, but with the lights off.

“What happened to the lights?” I said.

“He turned them off,” Procane said.

“Why?”

“He doesn’t have time to explain. You’ll see in a moment.”

It took a little while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did I could barely make out the road and its white dividing strip. The clouds had disappeared, just as Janet Whistler had promised, and there was part of a cold moon. From its pale light I could see that the road ahead was straight.

I looked behind us. The Oldsmobile was still fighting the curves and no longer in sight. I looked ahead again just in time to see the approaching intersection. Wiedstein slammed on his brakes and at the same time mashed the accelerator all the way to the floor. He spun the steering wheel sharply to the left, let up on the brake, caught some loose gravel at the intersection with his rear wheels, and in less than a second had completed a classic example of what some folks refer to as the bootleggers’ racing turn.

We had spun around and now we were speeding right back where we had just been. The lights were still off. Wiedstein had the Chevrolet straddling the center white line. We were doing at least eighty-five by the time the Oldsmobile came out of the last of the curves.

I don’t think the driver of the Oldsmobile saw us until Wiedstein flicked on our lights. The bright ones. We were less than two hundred feet from the Oldsmobile then and on its side of the road and the two of us were traveling at a combined speed of around one hundred fifty-five miles per hour.

So the driver of the Oldsmobile had a bare second to decide between the certain death of a head-on crash and the uncertainty of going off the road. He decided to go off the road. He had to go through a guard rail to do it, but he crashed through that without too much trouble. Beyond the guard rail was a gully that was at least ten feet deep and twenty feet wide. It had a fairly gentle slope to it and I watched the Oldsmobile plunge down the slope, turn end over end, and then roll halfway up its farther side before it came to a stop. No doors burst open this time.

“Did it burn?” Wiedstein said.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“We’ll go back another way,” Wiedstein said.

We eventually took Route 7 to the beltway and the George Washington Memorial Parkway to the District of Columbia line. None of us said anything until we turned right off Key Bridge into Georgetown. Then Procane looked at his watch and said, “It’s ten past ten. We’re right on schedule.”

He unfastened his chest harness and turned around in the seat toward me. “Well, Mr. St. Ives, how did you enjoy our million-dollar theft?”

“It was swell,” I said. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

W
IEDSTEIN DOUBLE-PARKED THE
car in front of the house on N Street. Everyone got out. Wiedstein moved back to the trunk and unlocked it and lifted out the three suitcases. Procane picked up two of them and turned to me.

“Will you give me a hand, Mr. St. Ives?”

“Sure,” I said and picked up the other one.

Carrying his two suitcases Procane turned toward Wiedstein. “Get rid of the car,” he said.

Wiedstein nodded. “I’ll leave it some place with the keys in it. Somebody’ll steal it.”

“I’ll be back in New York tomorrow around noon.”

“We’ll see you then,” Janet Whistler said.

My suitcase was growing heavy. I wished that they would end their conversation so that I could carry the suitcase to wherever it was supposed to be carried. It was a new case, I noticed, a two-suiter made out of cloth fiber and trimmed with a plastic that was supposed to look like blue leather, but didn’t.

“Is there anything else you can think of, Miles?” Procane said.

Wiedstein said he couldn’t think of anything.

“Janet?”

She shook her head.

“Mr. St. Ives?”

“This suitcase is getting heavy.”

“Yes, well, I’ll see you two tomorrow.”

They nodded at him and we stood there on the sidewalk and watched them get in the Chevrolet and drive off down N Street.

I followed Procane up the short flight of steps that led to the door. He had to put one case down so that he could find his keys. As he was rumbling the key into the lock, he said, “You’re welcome to spend the night here, Mr. St. Ives, if you’d like.”

“I’ll decide after I have a drink,” I said. “I may want to go back to New York.”

“Whichever you prefer.”

Procane had the door open now. He went inside, switching on the hall light. I followed. Procane turned on a lamp in the living room. It all looked much the same as it had nearly two hours before except for the man who sat in one of the spindly-legged chairs and pointed the revolver at us.

I guessed that the man was in his late forties. His legs looked long enough to make him well over six feet tall, but it may have been because of the way he had them stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. It was a casual pose, but there was nothing casual about the way he aimed the revolver at us. It had a long barrel and I thought that it looked like a .38 caliber. The man moved the barrel from side to side a little, as if he couldn’t make up his mind about which of us he wanted to shoot first.

“You can put that away, John,” Procane said. “There’s no need for it now.”

“Set the bags down, Abner,” John said. “You, too, St. Ives.”

I still didn’t know who he was, but I put the bag down anyway. When the bags were safely on the floor, the man said, “Now both of your put your hands on top of your heads.” I did just what he wanted. Procane didn’t. Instead, he said, “This is ridiculous.”

“Put your hands up there, Abner,” the man said. This time Procane did as he was told.