The Procane Chronicle

6

I thought about my first and only meeting with Abner Procane as Myron Greene showed off his driving skill by speeding up Sixth Avenue as fast as the early Sunday-morning traffic and the red lights would allow, which was about eighteen miles per hour. The fancy car reflected another of his semisecret desires: Myron would like to have been a gentleman racing driver.

When we got to Forty-fifth Street I said, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to see Procane until I get rid of this jailhouse smell.”

Myron Greene sniffed. “You weren’t really in jail.”

“It smells that way.”

“It must have been — uh — uncomfortable.”

“Confining, too.”

Myron was explaining how my last comment could be taken as a joke when he drove up in front of the Adelphi and stopped.

“Thanks for getting me out of jail,” I said and started planning my escape from the cockpit of the de Tomaso Mangusta whose midmounted engine popped and spat as it idled at what sounded to me like thirty-five hundred revolutions per minute.

“I must confess that I rather enjoyed rousing those people out of bed at four-thirty in the morning,” Greene said. Being a topflight criminal lawyer was another of his occasional fantasies.

I finally found the lever that opened the car’s door and it only took another fifteen seconds to figure out how I could swing my feet onto the sidewalk without rupturing something. “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“Be sure to call Procane,” said Myron Greene, the worrier.

“If there’s somebody else who now wants to sell him back his journals, they can wait till I take a shower.”

I had to bend far down from the waist to see the dubious nod that Greene gave me as an answer. Then I slammed the door shut and watched him streak off toward Darien and the $165,000 home that he called a bungalow.

Indifferent, I suppose, was the best word to describe the atmosphere at the Adelphi Hotel because its food, service, and maintenance lay somewhere between fair and awful. The only time the place showed any zip was around the tenth of the month if you hadn’t come up with the rent.

The hotel catered to permanent guests such as myself who lived alone and didn’t demand too much in the way of service. The guests were mostly widows with rather large pensions and very small dogs; a few UN diplomats who didn’t entertain much; three or four industrious call girls who were on the wrong side of thirty and trying to sock a little away; several peripatetic businessmen who muttered to each other in the elevator about the rotten state of the economy, and a couple of rich, quiet alcoholics who smiled a lot and didn’t bother anyone.

The hotel also offered a bar and grill and restaurant called the Continental that had to depend on total strangers for its survival.

Caring for the wants and whims of the guests was a true son of Manhattan, Eddie, the bell captain. He was somewhere in his forties and owned a couple of tenements in Harlem and a taxi that was driven by his two brothers-in-law. He also ran a short string of call girls, accepted all bets, and answered all Questions, including those about the weather, in a whisper that bordered on the conspiratorial.

I carried the blue airline bag over to the desk and watched the day clerk lock it away in the safe. Eddie was waiting for me by the elevator.

“You look like you had a big night,” he said.

“Did you get that jack-o’-lantern to my son?”

“Yeah. You done a good job on it. The kid was real tickled.”

“You saw him?”

“Sure I saw him. I wasn’t gonna turn a ten-dollar pumpkin over to just anybody.”

“What did he say?”

“Aw, it wasn’t what he said, it was the way he looked. You know how kids are.”

I nodded, entered the elevator, and went up to my empty “deluxe” efficiency apartment to see whether I could wash away the precinct grime. I tried to think of something better to use than soap and water, but I couldn’t come up with anything.

I spent at least twenty minutes under the shower, for some reason thinking about the night before when the hundred thousand dollars had been delivered to me by the man and the woman who, if they’d been only a few years younger, I would have thought of as the boy and the girl.

They had knocked at the door about nine-thirty. I was in my favorite chair half-watching a movie on television and half-reading all about Mr. Thomas Gradgrind of Coketown in Hard Times, a novel that I had never been able to get all the way through. I put Dickens down for what must have been the hundredth time and went over to open the door. The man carried the blue airline bag slung over his left shoulder. He kept his right hand deep in the pocket of his topcoat. The woman stood slightly behind him and to his left, the side that the money was on. He looked at me for a while as if trying to decide whether my face went with the description that someone had given him. He apparently decided that it did because after a moment or two he said, “Do you always open your door like this, Mr. St. Ives?”

“Except when I’m in the shower,” I said. “Then I don’t open it at all.”

“I’m Miles Wiedstein. This is Janet Whistler. Mr. Procane sent us.”

“Come in,” I said.

After they were in they looked around the place as if automatically checking to see whether there was anything worth stealing. I looked, too, and was mildly surprised to find that there wasn’t. The TV set was black and white and more than five years old. The books were mostly paperback, except for the blue leatherbound Oxford edition of Dickens. The best piece of furniture in the place was the poker table, which I also ate on. The silver wasn’t silver at all; it was stainless steel, and I wouldn’t have been embarrassed by an earnest offer of nine hundred dollars for everything.

Wiedstein removed the airline bag from his shoulder and placed it on the poker table. “We’d like you to count it.”

“You want a drink or a cup of coffee while you watch?”

Wiedstein looked at Janet Whistler. She shook her head no. “We’re fine like this,” he said.

They didn’t quite stand over me while I counted the money, but they watched. Carefully. There were a few new bills, mostly hundreds, but not enough to cause any bother. It was all there and when I finished counting, I said, “Do you want a receipt?”

“That would be nice,” Janet Whistler said. She was attractive enough if you liked tall, rangy girls with slender figures and easy, natural movements. I didn’t mind them. She wore a loose gray-tweed coat that ended just above the black, over-the-calf boots that had to be laced all the way up to the top. Her hair was straight, brown, and shiny and fell halfway down her back and sometimes into her eyes so that she had to keep brushing it away. Her face had pleasant features, although some might have called them sharp. I thought of them as finely chiseled — except for her mouth, which was a bit on the wide side. Her eyes were a deep, dark brown and I don’t think she wore any makeup, but nowadays I have a hard time telling.

I crossed over to the typewriter, took its cover off for what must have been the first time in three weeks, rolled in a sheet of paper, and typed: “Received from Miles Wiedstein and Janet Whistler, One-hundred-thousand dollars ($100,000).” Then I typed in my name and the date, rolled the paper out, signed it, and gave it to Wiedstein. He read it, nodded, and handed it to the girl. I decided that he was twenty-four and she was twenty-three.

While she read it, Wiedstein said, “Mr. Procane told me to ask whether you were quite sure that you won’t be needing any assistance tonight?”

“I take it you’re the ones who’re in that on-the-job training program of his.”

Wiedstein smiled at that, a brief, even fleeting smile, but one that lasted long enough to show that there had been a concerned orthodontist somewhere in his childhood. Although his looks wouldn’t turn any heads, he was tall and seemed fit enough and the length of his light-brown hair wasn’t anything to fret about, regardless of your taste.

“He insisted that we ask you,” Janet Whistler said and handed the receipt back to Wiedstein. He stuck it away in the left-hand pocket of his double-breasted brown topcoat that had a sheepskin collar. The coat looked warm.

“Tell him that it was nice of him to ask, but that I won’t be needing any assistance.”

Wiedstein let his eyes wander over to the money that lay stacked on the poker table. “Your share’s ten percent of that, right?”

“Right.”

“Let me know when there’s an opening on your staff.”

“Dissatisfied with your present setup?”

He shook his head. “Not at all. Yours just seems to be a pleasant business. Low risk and high pay.”

I looked at him for a moment or two and decided that his gray eyes weren’t set too far apart after all. His nose just had a wide bridge. “If you study hard with Procane,” I said, “we might do a little business someday.”

“We might at that,” he said and turned to Janet Whistler. “Let’s go.”

She smiled at me and I smiled back and together they moved toward the door. When he had it open, Wiedstein turned and said, “I’d be a little more careful about opening my door, if I were you, Mr. St. Ives. You never can tell who’ll be on the other side of it.”

“You mean thieves,” I said.

Both of them smiled again. “That’s exactly who I had in mind,” he said. “Thieves.”

When they had gone I went over to the poker table and counted out ten thousand dollars. It made an impressive looking stack. I counted it again to make sure that I wasn’t cheating anyone, especially myself, then looked at it some more and decided that it was far too much money for one night’s honest work.

By the time I took it downstairs and locked it away in the hotel’s safe, I had convinced myself that what I had to do that night wasn’t all that honest.