The Procane Chronicle (7 page)

Swell again shook his head. “He’s too old to be going around dropping a billfold in front of people. I mean it’s not dignified.”

“Have you seen him lately?”

“He was in here Friday late,” Swell said. “I didn’t talk to him but Cummins there did. You wanta know about Bobby Boykins, talk to Cummins. Another creep.”

“I think I will,” I said and moved down the bar to the round-faced man who was eating the last bite of his pastrami sandwich.

“How’s it going, Finley?” I said.

Cummins licked his left thumb. “Best pastrami sandwich in town,” he said. “That’s the only reason I come in this crumb joint. What brings you around, St. Ives, slumming?”

“I thought Bobby Boykins might be here.”

Cummins gave his thumb a final lick and then held it out as if he wanted to make sure that he had got all of the mustard off. “No you didn’t,” he said.

“I didn’t?”

“Bobby got hisself killed early this morning over on Ninth Avenue. You should know. You were there.”

“News gets around.”

“You should know about that, too.”

“Okay,” I said. “I was there. How’d Boykins get so far out of his depth?”

“How should I know?”

“Swell said you were talking to him Friday.”

“Hey, Swell,” Cummins called without turning his head.

I looked down the bar at Swell who didn’t look up from the Sunday comics. “What?” he said.

“You talk too fuckin much,” Cummins called in a voice that could be heard all over the bar. Nobody looked up, not even Swell.

“You don’t like it here, stupid,” Swell said, still studying Dick Tracy, “go somewheres else.”

Cummins turned to look at me. The smile was gone from his face. In its place was a frown, a suspicious one. “What were you doing down in Chelsea?”

“I was working,” I said.

“A buy back? One of those go-between deals of yours?”

I nodded.

“How much?”

“Ninety thousand.”

“Son of a bitch. The old bastard wasn’t lying after all.”

“Why?”

Cummins shook his head, still frowning. “I don’t wanta get messed up in this.”

“You won’t,” I said. “Not by me.”

Cummins seemed to think it over. He looked at his empty glass. If he were going to tell me anything, I was going to have to pay something, even if it were only the price of a glass of beer. I ordered another Scotch for myself and another beer for Cummins. After Swell served them and went back to the comics, Cummins said, “Friday night he told me he had a hot one. He wanted me to go in with him.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“That it would cost me three thou and that I stood to make fifteen.”

“What did he want you to do?”

“Deliver something to a laundromat. Around Twenty-first and Ninth.”

“He didn’t say what it was?”

“He said it was hot. He said I could buy in half for three thou and make fifteen more just like that.” Cummins snapped his fingers. “He said he paid six thou for it and that he was selling it back for thirty. He didn’t say anything about ninety thousand though. Were you really carrying that much?”

I nodded. “Where’d Boykins ever get six thousand dollars?” I said.

“His brother died last August out in California. He left it to him.”

“Did he tell you what he’d bought?”

Cummins shook his head. “He didn’t talk much after I said no. But he told me who he bought it from.”

“Who?”

Cummins looked at his beer glass again. It was empty. I started to order him another, but he said, “I ain’t thirsty.”

I sighed and said, “All right. How much?”

“Christ, if you’re working a ninety-thou deal, you gotta be flush.”

“It all comes out of my pocket, Finley. You know that.”

“A hundred.”

I shook my head.

“Seventy-five.”

“Fifty,” I said.

“Let’s see it.”

I took two twenties and a ten from my billfold and handed them to Cummins. He stuffed them into his topcoat pocket. “You ever hear of a guy called Jimmy Peskoe?”

“The name’s familiar. He was a safe man, wasn’t he?”

Cummins nodded. “One of the best. Or he was until they sent him up to Dannemora about ten years ago. He just got out. Well, somehow he hears about this safe and he goes in and opens it up, but there ain’t no money in it so he just grabs whatever there was. Then when he finds out what he’s grabbed he gets all nervous. He done a bad ten years up there, I hear. So he sells it to Boykins for six thou. At least that’s what Boykins said. But, shit, he lied a lot. That worth fifty to you?”

“It might be if I could talk to Peskoe.”

“I ain’t stopping you.”

“Where could I find him?”

“I ain’t information.”

“Another ten for Peskoe’s address.”

Cummins gave it to me with a proper show of reluctance. It was a hotel over on East Thirty-fourth. He watched me write it down and when I was done, he said, “Was what you wanted to buy back really worth ninety thou?”

“At least three people thought so,” I said.

Cummins turned that over for a moment. “Boykins and the guy who was putting up the ninety thou are two. Who’s the third one?”

“The guy who killed Boykins,” I said.

Neither the ambulance nor the cops had arrived yet, but a knot of people were already gathered in front of the cheap hotel on East Thirty-fourth when I got out of the cab. They were looking down at the smashed, sprawled body of a man. One of them was a skinny individual in his fifties who was coatless. I guessed he was the hotel clerk because he stared at the body and kept saying, “He was Mr. Peskoe and he was in eight-nineteen.”

I turned to a tall, stooped old man in a thin black sweater who was picking his long nose and staring at Peskoe through thick bifocals.

“What happened?” I said.

The old man inspected something that he’d found in his nose and wiped it on his sweater. “Suicide, that’s what. Some drunk probably.” He looked at me, sniffed, and then stretched his mouth into a tight line of disapproval. “Lot of drunks around nowadays. In high places, too. Washington. Albany. Everywhere.” He kept staring at me suspiciously so I looked away, over his shoulder, toward the entrance of the hotel.

If it hadn’t been for the old man’s suspicion, I might not have seen the man and the woman who hurried from the entrance and headed up Thirty-fourth Street, away from the body of Jimmy Peskoe. But I didn’t have any trouble recognizing them. The man was Miles Wiedstein. The woman was Janet Whistler.

T
WO HOURS LATER JANET
Whistler didn’t smile or nod when I came into the Adelphi’s lobby and walked over to where she sat in a brown club chair. She wore a long belted coat of dark-green leather and the same pantsuit that she had worn earlier in the day. She was smoking a cigarette and as I approached she snuffed it out with the air of someone who has smoked too many of them while waiting too long.

“I think we should talk,” she said.

“My place or the bar? They’re both private.”

She hesitated just long enough for me to decide that a proper upbringing could still do occasional battle with the liberation movement. “The bar,” she said.

It wasn’t difficult to find a table because they were all empty. We chose one near the door and when Sid came over from behind the bar she ordered a bourbon and soda. I asked for a Scotch and water that I didn’t particularly want or need.

“Where’s Wiedstein?” I asked after we had tasted our drinks.

“He’s picking me up here later.”

“What’s it like?”

“What?”

“Working with Procane.”

“I like it.”

“That doesn’t tell me what it’s like.”

She started unbuttoning her leather coat and then shrugged out of it before I could help. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever done before,” she said. “But then I haven’t done much.”

“College?”

“Three years.”

“You want me to guess?”

“Don’t bother. It was Holyoke.”

“Then what?”

“I drifted. A little modeling, mostly in Paris; some acting out on the Coast and here.”

“How did you hook up with Procane, answer an ad?”

“Procane’s analyst recommended me. I was seeing him, but not professionally. He told Procane that I had all the attributes of a cunning thief. We met, talked it over, and that’s how it happened.”

“What’s Procane’s problem?”

“Does he have to have one just because he’s seeing an analyst? That’s a terribly old-fashioned attitude.”

“I’ve been told that I’m rather out of touch.”

“Didn’t you ever feel the need just to talk to someone? A person like Procane might feel that. Or perhaps he’s just afraid of heights. Don’t you have some secret doubts or fears that you’d like to talk to someone about?”

“Probably,” I said. “Most people do.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean you’re crackers, even if you do wake up some mornings and wonder why you’re doing what you do, which I think is really a silly sort of a business.”

“The hours are good,” I said.

“Is it that or are you afraid that you couldn’t hack it anymore at what you used to do? You wrote a column, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“And now you’re doing something that’s just a little shady, something that has just a bit of a smell to it.”

“Some people think it’s glamorous.”

“But what do you think?”

“That its demands are just about right for someone without too much ambition.”

“Like you?” she said.

“Like me,” I said and smiled to show that I wasn’t taking any of it very seriously.

She swallowed some more of her drink and said, “Someday we’ll have to talk about what made you run out of ambition.”

“All right. Someday we will. But you wanted to talk about something else. What?”

“Jimmy Peskoe,” she said and then watched me carefully.

“What about him?” I said.

“You know him?”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“He’s dead.”

“So?”

“We think he’s the one who stole Procane’s journals.”

“We?”

“Miles and I.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Miles found someone Peskoe was trying to sell the journals to.”

“Who?”

She shook her head. “That’s not important. He’s reliable. He says Peskoe was willing to sell them for ten thousand dollars.”

“But he didn’t buy?”

“No.”

“Did he know what they were?”

“Not really, but Peskoe said he should get a hundred thousand for them.”

“Why didn’t Peskoe do it himself?”

“He was too nervous.”

“Not too nervous to be a thief though.”

“That takes a different kind of nerve.”

“Why didn’t the guy buy the journals from Peskoe?”

“Simple,” she said. “He didn’t have the money.”

“And you say Peskoe’s dead?”

“That’s right.”

“When?”

She looked at her watch. “A couple of hours ago. He jumped, fell, or was pushed from his hotel. Room eight-nineteen of the Joplin Hotel. It’s on East Thirty-fourth.”

“You were there?”

“Just after he jumped. Or was pushed or—”

“Fell,” I said. “What did you do?”

“It happened just before we got there so we went over to look at him. We didn’t know who it was then. A few seconds later the desk clerk came out and said it was Peskoe and that he was in eight-nineteen. He kept saying it over and over. So we went into the hotel and lifted the key to eight-nineteen, took the elevator up to the tenth floor, walked back down, and then went through Peskoe’s room. The journals weren’t there.”

“Did you find anything else?” I said.

Her eyes had brightened when she told me about it. She must have liked the excitement. Searching Peskoe’s room had taken nerve, I had to admit, although I didn’t much want to for some reason, probably because she thought I was in a silly business. I was almost beginning to agree when she said, “We didn’t find anything. What else could there have been?”

“Six thousand dollars,” I said and felt a bit smug.

“What six thousand?”

“The six thousand that Bobby Boykins paid Peskoe for the journals.”

The excitement went out of her eyes and it was replaced by a kind of thoughtful reappraisal. At least that’s what I interpreted it to be when she said, “You’re not quite as indolent as you look, are you? Maybe you’d better tell me about what you’ve been up to.”

So I told her about the unsuccessful approach that Bobby Boykins had made to Finley Cummins and how Cummins had furnished me with Peskoe’s name for a price and how Peskoe was lying dead on the sidewalk when I arrived at the hotel on Thirty-fourth Street.

“What do you call these people you talk to,” she said, “ ‘contacts?’ ”

“I just think of them as friends and acquaintances.”

“It didn’t take you long.”

“It doesn’t when you know where to ask. You found out about Peskoe and it didn’t take you long either.”

She shook her head. “We’re in the business.” She said it seriously and I didn’t laugh at her perhaps because she really felt that there was honor among thieves, especially the kind who had spent three years at Holyoke.

“It doesn’t matter how we found out,” I said, “because all we know is that Peskoe probably stole the journals from Procane and probably sold them to Bobby Boykins who got killed before he could collect on them for ninety thousand dollars. We don’t know who’s got the journals now. Whoever has them probably killed both Boykins and Peskoe.”

Something was bothering her so she decided to ask me because there was no one any wiser around. “Why would they kill Peskoe?”

“You found out that Peskoe was trying to peddle the journals to at least one other person besides Boykins. And I found out that Boykins was trying to sell a share in them to at least one person. God knows how many others the two of them approached, maybe half a dozen. So maybe one of the ones that they approached decided to cut himself in without putting up any cash. So he killed Boykins and took the journals. And maybe Peskoe knew who it was—or at least could figure it out. So Peskoe jumped out of his window, or fell, or was pushed.”

“Mr. Procane isn’t going to like this at all,” she said.

“Is that where Wiedstein is now—telling him?”