The Procane Chronicle (2 page)

“You know the dead guy?”

“I knew him. Not well.”

“What’s his name?”

“Bobby Boykins.”

“What’d he do?”

“I think he was retired.”

“What’d he do before he retired?”

“I think he was a con man.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m sort of retired, too.”

“You mean you were sort of planning to retire on that ninety thousand bucks?” Deal said.

“No.”

“Does it belong to you?”

“No.”

“Who does it belong to?”

“A friend.”

“What’s your friend’s name?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I’d better say anything else until I talk to a lawyer.”

Deal nodded, almost indifferently, I thought. “Read him about his rights, Ollie.” Oller fished out a small card and in a bored voice read what the Supreme Court had ruled that they were supposed to read to me. It had a somehow comforting sound.

“You’re under arrest, Mr. St. Ives,” Deal said.

“For what?”

“Suspicion of murder and grand larceny.”

“All right.”

“It doesn’t seem to worry you much,” Oller said.

“It worries me.”

“It would worry the shit out of me,” Oller said.

“This the first time you ever been arrested?” Deal said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“I don’t think so either,” I said.

T
HE THREE OF THEM
finally took me in, Deal, Oller, and the young patrolman whose name turned out to be Francis X. Frann. They let him be the arresting officer, perhaps because a murder one might look good on his record.

We didn’t have far to drive, just over to the Tenth Precinct on West Twentieth. We went past the desk officer, a middle-aged sergeant who looked at me without any curiosity at all, and then Deal and Oller took me up one flight to the detective squad room where somebody else took my fingerprints.

“You can make three phone calls,” Deal said, handing me a jar of jellied cleanser and some paper towels to get the ink off my fingers.

“I thought it was just one,” I said.

“Three,” he said. “If they’re local.”

“I want to call Connecticut,” I said. “Darien.”

“That’s long distance,” Deal said.

“I’ll pay for it.”

“Who do you want to call?” Deal said.

“Myron Greene. There’s an
e
on the end of Greene.”

Deal asked me whether I had the number, wrote it down when I told him what it was, and then said, “What’s Greene, your lawyer?”

“He’s a little more than that,” I said.

“What?”

“He’s the guy who got me into this mess.”

It had begun late Friday morning when the pumpkin arrived a quarter of an hour before Myron Greene did. I had already carved the top off the pumpkin and was sending the seeds and the fiber down the disposal when I heard his knock. I turned off the disposal and carried the pumpkin over to the hexagonal poker table that I’d covered with the October twenty-ninth edition of the
Times.
After letting Myron Greene in I asked, “What do you know about jack-o’-lanterns?”

“Everything,” he said and moved over to the poker table to give the pumpkin what he must have felt was an expert appraisal.

“Well?” I said.

“God knows, it’s big enough.”

“The bell captain got it for me.”

“Eddie?”

“Eddie.”

Myron Greene used the stem to lift off the top. He peered inside. “You did a good job of cleaning it out. How much did it cost?”

“Ten bucks.”

He shook his head a little sadly, much as he would have done were I to tell him that I’d decided to take a flyer on pork-belly futures. “When’s the last time you bought a pumpkin?”

“It’s been a while,” I said.

“That’s a three-dollar pumpkin. Maybe three-fifty. I could have got you one in Darien for two.”

“As big?”

“Almost.”

“Well, Eddie had to take a cab.”

“To the pumpkin farm?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Myron Greene shook his head again as he shrugged out of his topcoat whose brown-and-cream checks were patterned after a hound’s tooth, the Hound of the Baskervilles probably. He glanced around as if searching for some place to hang the coat or for me to remember my manners. I reached for it and saw that it could also be worn as a cape. I’d always thought of Myron Greene as one of those persons who manages to stay just behind the latest fashion and that topcoat and double-breasted brown suit and his fat, old gold tie did nothing to change my opinion.

He pulled a chair out from the table, made sure that its seat was clean, and settled into it with the air of a man who wants to talk about something that may take a while. “Draw it first,” he said.

“The face?”

“A soft lead pencil’s good.”

I found an Edo King 503, the last of what must have been a gross or two of pencils that I’d brought home one by one, or two by two, from a long defunct and little mourned newspaper that I’d once worked for, and started to sketch a jack-o’-lantern’s face on the pumpkin’s flame-colored skin.

“Make the eyes slanted,” Greene said. “You don’t want a happy-looking jack-o’-lantern.”

I made the eyes slanted and then turned the pumpkin all the way around for his inspection. He nodded. “Sinister,” he said. “That’s how they like them to look. Sinister.”

“He’s only six.”

“At six they really like them sinister. When did you last see him, Saturday?”

I nodded. “This’ll be his first jack-o’-lantern.”

“How does he like his new stepfather?”

“Fine,” I said. “When he grows older and realizes how rich his stepfather is, he’ll like him even better.” I rose, moved over to the Pullman kitchen, found the paring knife, and came back to the table. The knife sank easily into the pumpkin. I cut out a triangle for the nose and again turned the pumpkin for Myron Greene’s inspection. He nodded and I turned it back and started to work on the eyes. They were harder to do than the nose.

“Who do we talk about that you couldn’t talk about over the phone?” I said.

“I didn’t say we couldn’t; I said I didn’t want to.”

“How rich is he?”

“What makes you think he’s rich?”

“Because you said he was a client and you don’t have any other kind. Except me.”

“You’re not exactly starving now that she’s remarried and you’re off the alimony hook.”

“I haven’t worked in a while.”

“Nine months,” Myron Greene said. “You haven’t worked in nine months.”

“That’s a while.”

“You’ve had some opportunities,” he said.

“I wouldn’t call them that.”

“That oil company was a most reputable firm,” Myron Greene said as he rose and moved around the table so that he could see how I was coming with the teeth. The teeth were even harder to do than the eyes.

“I don’t know of many reputable oil firms who go around ransoming kidnapped South American generals,” I said.

Greene went back to his seat on the other side of the table. “I’m still convinced that the kidnappers would have returned the general, if they’d been paid.”

I looked up at him and shook my head. “And I’m convinced that the go-between the oil company finally hired was smart to skip with the money. If he hadn’t, the kidnappers would have killed him, just like they killed the general.”

“Well, this isn’t anything like that.”

“It’d better not be.”

“It seems a simple enough transaction.”

“As long as it has nothing to do with the diplomatic set,” I said. “I don’t know why, Myron, but a call from the State Department can somehow convince you that the Republic will founder unless I’m on the next plane to Belgrade. Well, I tried that once and you know what happened.”

Myron Greene sniffed, as if he remembered something that smelled bad. “It happened nearer to Sarajevo,” he said, “and the entire scheme was incredibly inept—which I pointed out to the Secretary in my letter, if you remember.”

“I remember his reply better,” I said. “He said he’d never heard of me.”

By now I had been Myron Greene’s client for nearly six years. Before that I had written a newspaper column that dealt mostly with the life styles of those New Yorkers who made their livings by doing something or other that the law said they shouldn’t. Most of the people I had written about were small time grifters, con men, hustlers, assorted thieves, and unlucky horse players.

One of my constant readers had been an occasional thief who had once stolen some jewelry from one of Myron Greene’s clients and then had offered to sell it all back providing that I served as the go-between. Greene had approached me and I had agreed. Shortly after I had bought the jewelry back the paper folded and I was among the unemployed until Greene again approached me, this time to serve as the go-between in a kidnapping.

Because there seemed to be a better than fair chance that I might get shot or dumped in the East River, I was paid ten thousand dollars for my efforts, which was ten percent of the ransom figure, and quite a bit more than anyone really believed my life to be worth.

After that, I became Myron Greene’s client—or he became my keeper. He paid my bills, handled my income tax, reluctantly saw me through my divorce, and collected ten percent of whatever I earned in a calling that wasn’t terribly overcrowded and which offered a service that promised to remain in demand as long as thieves stole things from people, or, in some instances, stole people from people.

I think Myron Greene kept me on as a client not because he needed the money, but because he felt that anyone who rubbed shoulders with thieves must dwell far beyond the pale of respectability in a land peopled by marvelously free souls who lived swift-moving lives, never grew old, and got up late in the morning. He seemed to find it all rather dashing and because I treasured my own illusions, I saw no reason to destroy his.

Through Myron Greene the go-between assignments came my way two or three or even four times a year. They paid the rent on my ninth-floor “deluxe” efficiency in the Adelphi on East Forty-sixth, allowed me to patronize, if not frequent, a few of the better saloons, let me travel whenever the mood struck, which it did less and less, and enabled me to ignore the help wanted ads, except for a sneak glance or two on Sunday.

So now there was the possibility of another assignment and after I finished the jack-o’-lantern’s mouth, I turned the pumpkin around for Greene’s inspection. “Tell me about your client,” I said.

Greene tilted his head to one side as if trying to make up his mind about whether the jack-o’-lantern was an example of true folk art. “He’s a man of moderate means and—”

“What’s moderate?”

He looked up at the ceiling and gave his $12.50 haircut a thoughtful pat “He has some rather nice holdings, but nothing spectacular. He’s worth around two million, I’d say. Possibly three.”

“Manages to scrape by.”

“All right, damn it, he’s not poor. If it weren’t for the wealthy, you’d have to find a job.”

“You’re wrong, Myron. If it weren’t for the thieves, I’d have to find a job.”

Myron Greene reached for the paring knife, pulled the pumpkin over, and started doing something to its mouth. “Let’s agree that my client is of moderately substantial means. Does that satisfy you?”

“Perfectly.”

He turned the pumpkin around. I don’t know what he had done to the mouth, but it looked far more sinister.

“How’s that?” he said.

“Much better.”

Greene leaned back so that he could admire his handiwork. “My new client was recommended to me by his broker, an old friend of mine, who asked me to take him on as a personal favor. That was a little over three weeks ago and I really haven’t done much for the client—just some routine work. He called late yesterday and wanted to know if you were available. I told him I’d find out.”

“You want a drink?” I said.

Myron Greene looked at his watch. “It’s a little early, isn’t it?”

“Probably.”

“Well—”

“I’ll make it weak.” I went over to the sink and mixed Greene’s drink and one for myself so he wouldn’t feel that he was sinning alone. “What’s he want?” I said.

“I’m getting to that.”

“Here,” I said, handing him his drink.

He tasted it suspiciously. “Well, while my client was away over the weekend, someone broke into his house and stole certain personal documents. Two days ago whoever stole the documents called him and offered to sell them back for a substantial sum.”

“How much?”

“One hundred thousand.”

“What kind of personal documents?”

“My client would prefer not to say.”

“Come on, Myron, I can’t handle it unless I know what I’m buying.”

“Well, I can say that the documents are in the form of a diary that goes back twenty-five years.”

“Nobody keeps a diary that long unless he’s never grown up.”

Myron Greene stiffened his face. “My client is just past fifty.”

I decided to light a cigarette, my first in over an hour. By tapping some heretofore unsuspected reserves of self-discipline, I had cut down to a pack and a half a day. I kidded myself that I would stop altogether by Christmas. Or maybe New Year’s.

“They must be incriminating,” I said. “If they weren’t, nobody would steal them. And he’d never spend that much just to check back on whether it was the winter of fifty or fifty-one that he caught the tarpon off Bermuda.”

Myron Greene frowned and the resulting wrinkles were thoughtfully legal and made him look wise and grave beyond his thirty-six years. It was a look that would have gone over well with a jury, but Myron Greene was far too good a lawyer to ever let a case of his be decided by twelve strangers. When he spoke, his tone was as grave as his look.

“A person,” he said, “can place a high premium on the privacy of his past without it meaning that his past necessarily entails something incriminating.” He paused to frown some more. “Privacy commands its own price, especially if one is a person of means.”

I thought some of that was arguable, but I shrugged and said, “All right, who suggested me?”

“The thief. Or thieves.”

“And your client agrees?”

“That’s why he called me.”