The Procane Chronicle (8 page)

“Yes.”

“He should have waited.”

“Why?”

“Then he could have told Mr. Procane how much I don’t like it.”

D
ETECTIVES OLLER AND DEAL
didn’t much like it Monday when I wouldn’t tell them the name of the person who had handed me ninety thousand dollars to deliver to a laundromat at three o’clock in the morning.

“What have you dreamed up, St. Ives,” Carl Oller said, “some kind of go-between’s code?”

“Nothing so fancy,” I said. “It hasn’t got much to do with morals and ethics. It’s just how I make a living. If I talk too much, I’ll be out of business and then I’ll have to go look for an honest job and I’m too old for that.”

“You’re not even forty,” Frank Deal said.

“I feel old.”

We were in one of those small, brown interrogation rooms at Homicide South and I’d already been there for an hour. Deal and Oller had taped my statement first, a brief, bare, formal one that was studded with facts, and now they were asking the informal questions, the ones that I didn’t have to answer unless I wanted to, and I was being choosy.

“You know what we could do, don’t you?” Oller said. “We could charge you with failure to report a felony.” He said it in a tone that didn’t carry much conviction, probably because he didn’t believe it either.

“No you can’t,” I said, “because you’re not sure that one’s been committed. All you know is that I was delivering ninety thousand dollars to a laundromat and happened to stumble across a dead body. I don’t have to tell you where I got the ninety thousand. And I don’t even know whether Boykins was supposed to get it. Maybe he was, but I’m not sure.”

Deal took a package of Pall Malls from his shirt pocket and shook one out, lighting it with a wooden match that he struck beneath the table. He inhaled some smoke, blew it out, and then carefully wiped some imaginary dirt from the top of the table with his right hand.

“Bobby Boykins was working on something big,” he said. “Big for him anyhow. We heard that around. He’d come into a little money and he was trying to parlay it into a big score.”

“I don’t see how that affects me.”

“If you’ll tell us who your client is and what he wants to buy back, then we can probably connect up with who killed Boykins and why.”

I shook my head. “You expect me to say no to that, don’t you?”

“We don’t know what you might say,” Oller said. “That’s why we keep asking you dumb questions. We figure you might come up with some smart answers.”

Oller stood leaning against the wall to my right. He wore a dark blue suit. Its shiny elbows and narrow lapels meant that it was at least five years old. His coat was open and his white shirt bulged out over his belt. He wore a red-and-blue tie that had a small dark stain on it just below the knot. He dressed like a man who had too many kids and not enough money.

“Anything else?” I said.

Deal brushed some more imaginary dirt from the top of the table. “There’s not too many rules in your business, are there?”

“Not too many.”

“I was just wondering if you got any rules about how you’re supposed to feel when some poor old guy gets killed who didn’t mean two hoots in hell to you or anybody else. You got any rules about that, St. Ives?”

I stood up. “No, I haven’t got any rules about that”

“That’s all we’re trying to do, you know,” he said. “Just find out who killed some poor old bastard who didn’t mean a shit to anybody. We’re not trying to put you out of business or anything.”

I started toward the door and stopped. “You get some proof that Bobby Boykins was supposed to collect that ninety thousand dollars and maybe I can help you.

“Maybe,” Oller said as if he didn’t like the word. He looked at Deal. “You know what?”

“What?”

“Someday we’re gonna get a call from somebody who’s been shot or stabbed or both and probably stuffed into some car trunk. And then we’re gonna go out and open up the trunk and guess who it’ll be?”

“Him,” Deal said.

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I think St. Ives is gonna get one of these go-between deals and he’ll be delivering a little bag full of money somewhere, maybe trying to buy back some jewelry, and he’ll run into some hardnose who’s decided that he’s got a big need for both the jewelry and the money. That’s when they’ll call us in.”

Deal leaned across the table toward me, his hands clasped tightly in front of him. When he spoke, he spoke to Oller, but he looked at me. “There’s one other thing,” he said.

“What?” Oller said.

“When we start looking around for who killed St. Ives, you know what I hope?”

“What?”

“I hope that everybody we talk to is gonna be just as nice and cooperative as he’s being here today.”

Oller smiled. “Yeah, that would be nice, Frank, wouldn’t it?”

Outside I caught a cab and gave the driver the address of a restaurant on Lexington between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth. The restaurant wasn’t crowded and I ordered a martini and a club sandwich. The first drink went down so well that I ordered another one and when the sandwich came I asked for a glass of milk. By the time I’d ordered coffee, the young executive crowd had moved into the place. They wore colored shirts and bright, wide ties and suits whose jackets had lots of buttons and nipped-in waists. Although their clothes were a little gaudier than those of the late fifties and early sixties, their look of desperate confidence remained much the same. I decided it was the look of men who’re sure that they have to be back at the office by two, but who are never quite sure why.

There was no desk waiting for me, so I called for the check, paid it, went outside, and leaned against a light pole trying to decide what to do with the rest of the afternoon. A cab came by and I hailed it and got in. The driver had to ask twice before I could think of somewhere I wanted to go. But after I told him the Joplin Hotel on East Thirty-fourth, I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to go there at all.

You would expect to find the Joplin Hotel down near the railroad station, if New York had been a smaller town. It was the kind of place whose twelve stories had been built to accommodate the old-time commercial traveler who didn’t have a draw, depended solely on commissions, and wasn’t quite sure what an expense account was.

You could almost predict what the rooms would be like from the looks of the lobby. They would be small with one window that stuck in the summer and refused to close all the way in the winter. They would have a steam radiator that clanked a lot around five in the morning. There would be a sink in one corner, but all that came out of the hot-water faucet would be some choking gasps. There would be a chair and a floor lamp with an orange shade and a forty-watt bulb. There would be a narrow bed with a thin mattress, springs that shrieked, gray sheets, and a pillow not much thicker than a magazine. If there were a television set, it would be the coin-operated kind that got only one channel.

The lobby had a high ceiling, a few worn chairs, a sagging sofa, a television set that didn’t work, and the fiftyish room clerk who yesterday had stared down at the body of Jimmy Peskoe and repeated over and over that he had lived in room eight-nineteen.

The room clerk didn’t move anything but his pale eyes as I approached the counter that he leaned on, supporting his chin in the palm of his right hand. When I stopped in front of him, he said, “You don’t want a room.”

“No.”

“You wanta ask some questions about the guy who did the jump out of eight-nineteen. Peskoe.”

“I could tell you that I was his brother.”

“You could tell me that.”

“But you wouldn’t believe me.”

The clerk moved his eyes up and down, as if assessing how much I had paid for my $150 topcoat They were pale-blue eyes that I thought had a hurt look about them, as if they had seen too much—or perhaps not enough, and never would now that they were stuck behind the reception counter of a cheap hotel.

“No,” the clerk said, “I wouldn’t believe you.”

“What if I said I was just nosey?”

The clerk seemed to
think
about that. He made his fifty-year-old face go into a frown. His gray upper teeth bit down hard on his thin lower lip. The only thing in his face that wasn’t working was his tiny nose so he used his left hand to pull on that a couple of times. “You’re not a cop,” he said. It wasn’t a question so I didn’t say anything.

“You could be a reporter,” he said. “You sorta look like a reporter—or what a reporter thinks he oughta look like. You know, when guys get your age they’ve pretty well made themselves look like what they are.”

I thought about telling him that he looked like a philosopher, but decided not to. “I used to be a reporter,” I said.

“But you’re not anymore?”

“No.”

“How much do reporters make nowadays, about three hundred?”

“About that,” I said. “Some make more; a lot make less.”

“I didn’t think you was a reporter,” he said. “You wanta know why?”

“All right. Why?”

“Because nobody’s gonna send anybody who’s making three hundred a week down here to ask questions about a nobody like Peskoe, that’s why.”

“You didn’t like him?”

“What was to like? He stayed in his room. Eight-nineteen.”

“How long did he stay here?”

The clerk yawned and didn’t try to cover it up. The yawn gave me a good look at the inside of his mouth. His teeth were gray all the way back, except where they were black. Or the fillings were. His tongue was mostly yellow. There didn’t seem to be much pink in his mouth. When he was through yawning, he said, “You know how I got this job?”

“How?”

“My wife kicked me out. So I checked in here because it was cheap. Then I got fired from my job and got behind in my rent so they let me work nights. For a while I tried to find another job, but who wants to hire anybody fifty-three years old?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What kind of work did Peskoe do?”

The clerk was still wrapped up in his own problem. “I get my room and sixty-six bucks a week. Twenty-five of that goes for alimony. That leaves me forty-one a week and with withholding and social security that leaves me about thirty-five a week. Did you ever try eatin’ on thirty-five a week?”

“It sounds tough,” I said and pulled a twenty from my billfold and smoothed it out on the counter. It lay there for all of two seconds before disappearing into the clerk’s pocket.

“Peskoe was here for a month,” he said. “He didn’t do nothing. I mean he didn’t work. He just stayed in his room most of the time. He didn’t have no visitors. He didn’t get no calls or no mail. He just stayed in his room except when he went out to eat. Once in a while he’d go out at night. But not a lot”

“Did he drink?” I said.

“Nah. Maybe a pint a week.”

“Then he wasn’t drunk when he went out the window.”

“He wasn’t drunk.”

“Did he seem depressed?”

The clerk looked at me curiously. “You with an insurance company?”

“Why?”

“I’ve heard if it’s suicide, you guys don’t have to pay off. On life insurance, I mean.”

“I’m not with an insurance company.”

The clerk seemed to believe me. He nodded a couple of times and then looked around the lobby. “You ask if he was depressed. He lived here, didn’t he? We haven’t got no happy guests. None I know of anyhow.”

I brought out a package of cigarettes and offered the clerk one. He took it and I lit both of them. “What do the cops say?” I said.

The clerk shrugged. “Fell or jumped.”

“Not pushed.”

A crafty look went halfway across his face before it stopped and changed into greed. “Why would anyone wanta push a guy like Peskoe out of a window?”

I inspected the tip of my cigarette. “Maybe he owed them a little money and he wouldn’t pay it.”

That made sense to the clerk because he nodded a few times. “Maybe he owed you a little money, huh?”

“Maybe.”

“And maybe he owed quite a few people a little money and maybe as long as he was alive there was a little chance that he might pay it off, huh?”

“Not a little chance,” I said. “A big one. Peskoe was a safecracker. One of the best. Now do you understand?”

He started nodding his head again. “Now I get it,” he said. “Now it makes sense.”

It didn’t, of course. But he was just smart enough not to want to seem stupid. “Did you notice anyone around just before Peskoe jumped or fell?”

The clerk lowered his eyes and started moving his finger back and forth across the surface of the counter. “Like I said, I make about thirty-five a week take-home and—”

“Here,” I said and slid a ten across to him.

He pocketed the bill and then looked around the lobby. It was still empty, but he seemed to like the conspiratorial nonsense. “I ain’t telling you anything I ain’t already told the cops.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“There were two guys who went up just before Peskoe went out the window.”

“Where’d they go?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. They coulda gone to eight or five or three. I don’t know.”

“They go up together?”

“They went up together.”

“What’d they look like?”

He spread his hands in a gesture of defeat. “I don’t know, I swear to God I can’t remember. I saw em go up, but I didn’t pay no attention. It’s just like I told the cops, who pays attention in a place like this? All I know about em is what I didn’t notice.”

I sighed. “Okay. What didn’t you notice?”

“I didn’t notice em come back down.”

T
HE NEW BATCH OF
twenty-dollar and fifty-dollar bills amounting to ninety thousand dollars was delivered to me at 8
A.M.
Tuesday at the Adelphi by Miles Wiedstein who this time accepted a cup of coffee while I counted the money and gave him another receipt. By 10
A.M.
I was pushing my way through the entrance of the West Side Airlines Terminal’s men’s room, the blue Pan-Am bag slung over my left shoulder.

The first stall was occupied so I waited in front of it. A well-dressed man came out of the third stall down and saw me waiting. “Here,” he said, holding the door open. “I’ll save you a whole dime.”