The Procane Chronicle

24

Constable was still on his knees and he stayed on them for nearly a second before he slumped forward into a sprawl. The Walther should have knocked him backward, but it hadn’t. His damp brown eyes were open and they seemed to be staring at Procane. The lower half of his face was covered with blood and some of it had dripped off and was soaking into the worn oriental rug.

I looked at him for several seconds and then I looked at Procane. After that I looked down at the Walther in my hand. It was smeared with blood, Procane’s blood. He would have repaired it, of course. He was like that. Malfunctions probably offended him. On our way back to Washington he would have fixed whatever had gone wrong with the gun. He might have been working on it while Wiedstein was playing chicken with the Oldsmobile.

I remembered that there was a half-bath in the reception hall. I went in there and took a strip of toilet paper and started smearing the blood on the automatic. I flushed the paper down the toilet but kept a small piece wrapped around the trigger guard. I stuck my small finger through the trigger guard and carried the thing that way.

On my way out of the bathroom I caught a glimpse of somebody in the mirror. There was something wrong with his eyes. They glowed a little wild. Something was wrong with his mouth, too. It was half-open and the lips looked loose and slack and almost gray. It looked like the face of someone who wanted to throw up. I clamped my lips together and narrowed my eyes, but it didn’t do any good. I still wanted to throw up.

I went back into the living room and stood next to Procane, looking down at him, trying to remember whether he was right- or left-handed. I couldn’t remember so I took a chance and carefully placed the automatic near his right hand. Then I knelt, picked up the hand, and inserted it beneath his jacket. I moved it around a little and when I brought it back out it was bloody. I gently placed it on the carpet next to the blood-smeared automatic.

If he were right-handed, they would find traces of nitrate on it — the result of his bad marksmanship at the drive-in. As for fingerprints, the gun was so smeared with blood that I didn’t think they’d worry about them too much. They’d find his prints on its magazine, if they bothered to look.

I moved back to admire my handiwork. It wasn’t particularly original, but the newspapers would have a good time with the story. Shoot-outs in Georgetown aren’t all that common. The cops would love it, too.

I looked at the three suitcases. I had got them mixed up and couldn’t decide which contained the heroin and which contained the money. I picked one at random and tried to open it. It was locked. I took out a nail clipper and started fiddling with the locks. They were cheap cases and the locks proved to be no problem. A sixteen-year-old dropout from Harlem had once spent an afternoon showing me how to pick simple locks. At one time I could open any General Motors car with nothing more than a fingernail file.

I opened the lid of the case. There wasn’t any heroin. Just money. They were fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills, old ones. They were bundled into neat stacks that were bound with strips of brown paper. The figure ten thousand had been written on each strip with a ballpoint pen.

The money fascinated me. I must have looked at it for a long time. I thought about how easy it would be to lift out four or five stacks and tuck them away. The inside breast pocket of my jacket would hold two easily. I could get another couple of packets into my hip pockets. They wouldn’t be uncomfortable. I heard something and it almost startled me. But it was nothing to worry about. It was only a sigh, a sad one tinged with regret, my own brand.

I closed that suitcase and picked up one of the cases I hadn’t opened and took it back to the kitchen. Then I went back and got the remaining one that I hadn’t inspected.

I opened them both on the kitchen floor next to the sink. Inside they were packed with carefully arranged double clear-plastic bags. Inside the bags was a white crystalline powder. I picked up one of the bags. It seemed to weigh a little more than a pound. I turned on the water in the sink and then ripped the bag open. I wet my finger and stuck it inside the plastic bag and then gave my finger a tentative tongue lick. It wasn’t milk sugar.

I found the switch for the disposal and turned it on. It made a harsh, grinding roar. I dumped the white powder into the sink. The water caught it and swirled it down the drain. It took me nearly thirty minutes to open the hundred half-kilo plastic bags and flush a million dollars’ worth of heroin down the disposal and into the sewer system that led to the Potomac. I found myself wondering what it would do to the fish and decided that that was something else for the Izaak Walton League to worry about.

I gathered up the empty plastic bags and put them into one of the suitcases. I found a sponge and carefully mopped up the drainboard, the sink, and the floor. I let the disposal and the water run for another five minutes. It they took the plumbing apart, they could probably find traces of heroin. If they were looking for it. I didn’t think that they would be.

I carried the suitcases back into the living room. The one that contained the empty plastic bags I carried into the half-bath in the reception hall. I took the bags out five at a time and flushed them down the toilet. There were a hundred of them and I had to flush the toilet twenty times. I would have used the living room fireplace, but fire doesn’t do much to plastic except melt it into a smelly glob. I don’t know what fire does to heroin. Probably nothing.

After I was finished in the bathroom, I picked up the two empty suitcases and started up the stairs. The fourth floor was an attic. I thought it would be. Old houses like that have attics. This one was full of junk. There was a bureau with peeling veneer. A couple of old-fashioned steamer trunks. Some heavy cardboard boxes with twine tied around them. Three rolled-up rugs. A forty-year-old RCA radio-phonograph, as big as a small pony, with cabinet work that was too good to throw away. Five four-foot stacks of the National Geographic. Three shadeless floor lamps, and a dusty couch covered with velveteen that had worn spots on its arms and back.

The couch was against the wall so I pulled it out enough to put the two suitcases behind it. I piled some copies of the National Geographic on top of the cases. They might be found tomorrow or next year. I didn’t really care.

I went back downstairs and looked around the living room. My watch said it was eleven-fifteen. I lit a cigarette and looked about for something else that I could tidy up. I didn’t see anything except the two dead bodies, but there was nothing else that I could do for them.

I used the toilet to get rid of the cigarette. Then I went back and picked up the suitcase that held the million dollars. It weighed about thirty pounds. That’s what a million dollars should have weighed at 490 bills to the pound. Ten thousand fifty-dollar bills. Five thousand one-hundred-dollar bills. Thirty pounds of money. A million dollars.

Carrying the suitcase, I went carefully down the back stairs into the garden. I followed the glittering white path to the alley where I stopped to rest. My arm ached. I picked up the suitcase again and made it to the end of the alley where I put it down again. Thirty pounds shouldn’t have been that heavy, but by the time that I got to Wisconsin Avenue I had put it down and picked it up ten times.

There weren’t any cabs, of course. I stood at the curb, the suitcase at my feet, and waved at anything that went by. A young kid of about twenty with long hair and a Chester A. Arthur moustache watched me for a while. He was leaning against a wall, wrapped up in an old army officer’s overcoat that was three sizes too big for him. When he got tired of watching me he came over and said, “Excuse me, sir, have you got any spare change?”

I found forty-two cents in my pants pocket and handed it to him. I always do. They’re the future of the country. “Have a good time,” I said.

He looked at the coins. “Thank you, sir. Now I can buy a gallon of gas.”

“Have you got a car?”

“Well, it’s sort of a car.”

“It’s worth ten bucks for me to get to National Airport.”

At the mention of ten dollars his eyes lit up. As I said, they’re the future of our country. “You’re almost there,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

He was right. It was sort of a car. Fifteen years ago or so it had been used to deliver milk. Now it was covered with various shades of glo-paint and a lot of bright sayings such as, “Free Sirhan Sirhan” and “Save our Piranhas.”

The kid helped me store the suitcase in the back where the milk used to be. Now it contained a mattress, a small gasoline stove, a frying pan, and a cardboard box of canned goods. “Home,” the kid said.

“Looks lived in,” I said and went around to the front of the truck. At one time there had been a folding seat behind the wheel for the milkman to sit on. But it was gone and the kid had to drive standing up all the way to National Airport. I couldn’t feel sorry for him because there was nothing for me to sit on either.

“You a salesman?” he asked when we were almost there.

“Yes,” I said.

“It figures.”

“Why?”

“That suitcase. It was heavy.”

“I know.”

It was eleven forty-five by the time we got to Eastern’s entrance at the airport. I gave the kid his ten dollars and he thanked me and we went back and got the case out of the rear.

“I’d help you with it but I can’t double park here.”

“That’s okay.”

He eyed the suitcase. He wanted something else so I waited to find out what it was. Finally he said, “Why dontcha let me have a free sample?”

I shook my head. “You wouldn’t like it”

“Why?”

“It makes some people sick.”

That interested him. Drugs would. “How sick?”

“Some people die from it,” I said, picked up the case, and walked toward the terminal.

I managed to buy a seat on a midnight flight to New York. After I checked the suitcase through I found a pay phone, dropped in a dime, and dialed 444-1111. When the man’s voice said, “Police Emergency, Officer Welch,” I said, “There’re two men dead.” Then I slowly recited the number on N Street.

“Northeast?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Northwest. In Georgetown.”