by Ross Thomas
If the rumors that I heard about Procane were spicy, the facts that I dug up were dull. He had been born to middle-class New Canaan, Connecticut, parents in 1920 and after a totally uneventful childhood and adolescence, had been graduated from Cornell with an engineering degree in 1941. The army had sent him overseas in 1943 as a second lieutenant. He took his discharge in Marseilles in 1945 and remained there until late 1946 when he returned to New York and married Wilmetta Foulkes who died in an airline crash five years later. There were no children and the story about the plane crash was the only time Procane’s name had even appeared in a New York paper.
He had never been arrested. He had never been employed. He lived in a town house on East Seventy-fourth and employed a Negro housekeeper who arrived at 10 A.M. and left at 7 P.M., Monday through Friday. Procane spent most of his weekends at a rundown farm that he owned in Connecticut. His phone number in New York was unlisted. The Connecticut farm had no phone.
I’d kept on checking him out in my own desultory fashion, not pressing too hard because I really wasn’t much of a muckraker, preferring instead to write about the human foibles of our time, probably because I could so easily identify with nearly all of them.
One afternoon, almost six months after I had first heard about Procane, I found myself drinking draft beer in an East Orange, New Jersey, bar with a retired Manhattan detective sergeant and the chief investigator of one of the larger casualty insurance companies. Because we were running out of things to lie about, I brought up the name of Abner Procane.
“I hear he’s a thief,” I said, again demonstrating my faith in the disarming effect of the subtle query.
“You hear from who?” said the detective sergeant who for reasons known only to himself and God had selected East Orange as his retirement haven. His name was Seymour Rhynes.
“Other thieves,” I said.
“They don’t know nothing,” Rhynes said. “I bet they can’t even name you one job he’s pulled.”
“I can,” the insurance investigator said. He was a mild-looking South Carolinian who wore rimless glasses, clip-on bow ties, and favored shapeless gray worsted suits, winter and summer. His name was Howard Calloway.
Rhynes let his suspicious blue eyes wander over Calloway. After a while he nodded and said, “Yeah, maybe you can.”
“What was it?” I said.
“About five years ago there was this United States senator that we had a floater policy on,” Calloway said. “Well, it seems that the senator had come into a hundred thousand in cash. He kept it locked away in a suitcase in his suite in the Shoreham down in Washington. Well, one day Procane knocks at his door, sticks a gun in his stomach, handcuffs him to the radiator, gags him, goes right to the closet, takes out the suitcase that holds the hundred grand, nods good-bye, and leaves.
“Well, a maid discovers the senator and when the cops come, he tells them that he has to make an important phone call. So he calls us and wants to know if his floater policy will cover a hundred thousand in cash. So we ask if he’s reported it and he says no, not yet. Then he hems and haws a little and says maybe it wasn’t a hundred thousand after all. He finally tells the cops that he only got hurt for two hundred dollars.”
“How’d you know it was Procane?” I said.
Calloway shrugged. “Luck mostly. One of our men was going back up to New York from Washington and spotted Procane on the shuttle. He kept an eye on him till he caught a cab and he was carrying a fancy bag just like the senator put in a claim for.”
“Where’d the hundred thousand come from?” I said, not really expecting an answer.
Calloway looked into his beer. “I don’t think that’s as interesting as trying to figure out how Procane knew it was in the closet. We settled the senator’s claim for the two hundred cash he lost plus another two hundred bucks for the bag.”
“What’d you do about Procane?”
“Nothing,” Rhynes said. “What could we do?”
“Could the senator identify him?”
“Sure,” Calloway said. “But he wouldn’t, because if Procane knew that the hundred thousand dollars was in the closet, he also knew where it came from, and the senator wasn’t about to bring that out in the open.”
Rhynes picked up the pitcher of beer and filled all three glasses. “They say he knocked over a high-stakes poker game at the Waldorf in fifty-nine for close to seventy-five thousand. They say that in 1964 he took close to a hundred thousand out of the wall safe of a Park Avenue shrink. They say that last fall he stopped more than seventy grand in juice money that was supposed to be on its way to a city councilman. It never got there. They say.”
“I heard about the juice money,” Calloway said. “I never heard about the others.”
“Well, we sure as hell never heard about them officially. I never heard about the senator before either.”
“No complaints, huh?” I said to Rhynes.
He shook his big head that was shaped like a wrinkled bullet and said, “Who’s to complain? The city councilman? The shrink who’s cheating the government? The big-shot muckety-mucks who’re playing high-stakes poker, and one of them the head of a big charity outfit?”
“How do you know it was Procane?” I said.
“What would you say to an eyewitness?” Rhynes said.
“That would be pretty good.”
“Well, this bagman who was carrying the seventy big ones got a little upset, know what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said.
“He didn’t think the guy who’d given him the money to deliver would be too understanding, so he comes to us and asks for protection. Well, what could we do? There wasn’t no evidence, just his story. So we showed him some pictures of Procane that we’d taken with a long-distance lens and he says, ‘That’s the son of a bitch, all right’ But still, what could we do? If we talked to Procane, all he’d have to do is laugh and say, ‘What seventy thousand?’ And the guy who was gonna juice the councilman with it sure as hell wasn’t about to admit anything. So all we had was the bagman’s story, which wasn’t worth nothing, so we finally turned him loose.”
“What happened to him?” I said.
Rhynes took a deep draught of beer and then said, “He sort of went away.”
“I reckon that fella Procane’s my favorite thief,” Calloway said. “One, he never steals anything but money. Two, he never steals it from anyone who’ll make a complaint about it. And three, I’m not so sure he’ll ever get caught.”
Rhynes belched. It was a rumbling one that started as a harsh crackle and ended as a mild roar. “Oh, he’ll get caught one of these days,” he said, patting his belly comfortably. There was plenty to pat.
“When?” I said.
“When he finally gets careless,” he said, nodding his head with the absolute certainty that’s born of thirty years’ experience. “They finally all get careless, you know.”
“Bullshit,” Calloway said as politely as it can be said. “I don’t agree with that at all. Not at all. Procane might get himself caught one day, but it won’t be by the cops.”
“Who by?” I said.
“If he doesn’t get himself killed by someone he’s stealing from, he’ll get hurt in a different way and it’ll hurt bad. Real bad.”
“How?”
“Someday,” Calloway said in a voice made thoughtful by five beers, “somebody’s gonna steal something from Mr. Abner Procane because he’s gone and made himself such a big, fat target. And when that day comes I’d like to be around just so I could watch Procane.”
“Watch him do what?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Calloway said. “That’s why I’d wanta watch.”
4
THEY CAME FOR ME at six o’clock and took me back downstairs without saying a word. They took me into a small room that I hadn’t been in before and a young, uniformed policeman handed me back the contents of my pockets.
“What now?” I said.
“Wait here,” he said and
shoved a form at me. “Count your money, check your possessions, and sign this. It’s our receipt.”
I counted the money in my billfold and signed the receipt. “Is it all there?” the young cop said, not because he cared, but because it was what they had told him to say.
“I’m short about ninety thousand.”
“You break me up,” he said, turned and left.
It was another grim, bare room that contained nothing but a gray table and two matching chairs. I sat down in one of them and waited some more. In about fifteen minutes the door opened and Detectives Deal and Oller came in. Deal carried the blue airline bag. Neither of them looked as if they had had any sleep.
“You got nice connections, St. Ives,” Deal said, placing the bag on the table. “Real nice. They’re going to let you walk.”
“When?”
“When you finish counting the money,” Oller said and unzipped the bag. “You can start any time.”
I started counting and they watched. When I was nearly a fourth of the way through, Deal said, “That money kept the kid up all night, you know.”
“What kid?” I said, almost losing my count.
“Officer Frann. You remember Officer Frann. He put the cuffs on you.”
I nodded and kept on counting.
“He stayed up all night making a record of all the serial numbers on the money,” Deal said. “That was before anybody told us what you did for a living. You got quite a reputation downtown, you know.”
“I didn’t,” I said, dropped a thousand in my count, and went back to pick it up.
“Of course, me and Deal being in homicide, we wouldn’t have much call to do any business with you, unless somebody wanted to ransom a dead body, and we haven’t run across one like that yet.”
“Yet,” Deal said and then they were both silent until I finished the count and zipped up the bag.
“It’s all there,” I said, and signed another form that Oller handed me.
“If you go ahead and turn that money over to whoever you were planning to turn it over to, are you going to tell ’em that we got the serial numbers?” Deal said. “That’s strictly an unofficial question. I just got curious.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll get them a new batch.”
“You sort of like to cooperate with thieves, huh?” Oller said.
“I sometimes have to,” I said.
Deal nodded as if trying to show that he found that perfectly understandable. He almost succeeded. “Well, you’re no longer a suspect now that we got it on the very best downtown authority that you’re not the type who’d go around killing anybody like that old guy we found trussed up in the laundromat. But me and Oller were sort of wondering if we might drop by and ask you a few questions? As a witness, I mean, not as a suspect.”
“Any time,” I said and waited for the rest of it, the part that wouldn’t be quite so polite.
“We might drop around more than once,” Oller said and gave me a bleak smile that somehow failed to go with his fat man’s face.
“And you might even drop around to see us,” Deal said and they cracked out the rest of it: “Like tomorrow at ten A.M.”
“You want a statement,” I said, seeing no reason to make it a question.
“That’s right,” Oller said.
“Where?”
“You know where Homicide South is?”
“Yes.”
“Just ask for either of us.”
“Oller and Deal.”
“Carl Oller,” Deal said, “and Frank Deal.”
“Can I go now?”
“Sure,” Deal said, “if you don’t mind answering just one little personal question?”
“What?”
“Doesn’t this business you’re in sort of make you a little sick when you look in the mirror?”
“Sure,” I said, “but I usually take something for it.”
“What?”
“Money.”
Myron Greene was waiting for me at the entrance to the Tenth Precinct and we went down the two steps and made our way through the small knot of uniformed cops who were admiring Greene’s new and unticketed de Tomaso Mangusta that he had just traded his Shelby Cobra for. Before that, he had owned an Excalibur until someone had told him it was corny.
We didn’t speak until we had fitted ourselves inside the thing and Myron had revved it up a couple of times to the cops’ delight. Then we streaked off down Twentieth Street for about fifty yards to where the red light was.
“Who’d you have to call?” I said.
“An assistant district attorney and a guy in the mayor’s office that I went to school with.”
Sometimes I felt that Myron Greene had gone to school with half of the nation’s public servants. The other half had gone to Yale.
“Anyone else?”
He turned to look at me. “Procane.”
“What did he say?”
“He was concerned, of course.”
“So am I.”
“He wants to see you.”
“When?”
“Now, if you can make it.”
“I’m pretty scruffy.”
“He thinks it’s quite important, and I agree with him.”
“Why?” I said and grabbed for something to hold on to as Greene drifted his eleven-thousand-dollar machine around the corner and up Sixth Avenue.
“Because,” he said, “he got a call this morning from somebody else who wants to sell him back his diaries.”
I had met Abner Procane for the first time only the day before, but it now seemed weeks ago. Yesterday had been October thirtieth, a Saturday, and there had been just enough bite in the air to make the long walk from Forty-sixth to Seventy-fourth a pleasure instead of an ordeal. I like to walk in New York on Saturday mornings when the weather is fine and the people are few—or relatively so. It reminds me of what the city was like twenty years ago when I first saw it as a visiting teen-ager from Ohio. It had held a lot more promise then. But so had I.
As New York neighborhoods go, Procane’s was fairly clean. At least I didn’t have to wade through the garbage because most of it was neatly tied up in green plastic bags. The bags seem like a good idea to me, but I’m sure there must be something wrong with them, just as there’s something wrong with disposable bottles and flip-top beer cans. It may be that children can crawl into the bags and suffocate. I don’t know that this is true, but it’s something else to worry about.
Myron Greene had set our appointment for ten o’clock and at one minute past ten I was scraping dog shit off my left shoe on the bottom step of Procane’s four-story town house. He must have been waiting for me because he came out to watch.
“I could never understand those who keep large dogs in a city such as this,” he said, much as he might have mentioned it to a neighbor who lived four doors down.
“I’m a cat man myself,” I said. “They like to crap in private.”
After I cleaned off my shoe I went up the steps and shook hands with him. He had a firm, dry shake, much like what you would expect from a CPA or a high school principal.
“You’re a bit younger than I thought you’d be,” he said, and to prove it he let his face display some mild surprise. But then he had a mild face, almost round, with thinning hair the color of old ginger, greenish eyes widely spaced above a broad nose, a moustache of sorts that had more gray in it than did his hair, a pleasant enough mouth that seemed to move around a lot, even in repose, and a round chin that went nicely with everything else.
He opened a wrought-iron gate that barred the way to his front door, which he unlocked with a key, and then we were in a thoughtfully furnished hallway. Procane crossed to a door and held it open. “I think this will be comfortable,” he said.
I entered a rather large room that seemed to be half office and half study. Its windows fronted on Seventy-fourth. There was a fireplace, which was working, a carved desk, a lot of books, some chairs, a leather couch raised at one end like the psychiatrists in
cartoons have and which I’ve been unable to find, a large globe, and a number of oil paintings of some pleasant rural scenes.
Procane walked over to an electric coffee pot and filled two waiting cups. “Cream and sugar?” he said.
“A little sugar.”
“Do sit down,” he said and after I chose a comfortable-looking chair next to the fire he handed me a cup. He lowered himself into a chair opposite mine and, what with the fire going, I thought it to be all rather cheery.
“I assume that Mr. Greene filled most of it in for you,” Procane said.
“He told me what he knew,” I said, “but he didn’t mention one thing because he didn’t know it.”
“What was that?”
“That you’re supposed to be the best thief in town.”
I’m still not quite sure what response I expected from Procane. Perhaps nothing more than the cool smile I got.
“You did some checking on me about six or seven years ago when you were still with the paper, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I was pleased, but surprised that you never wrote anything.”
“I could never find a fact to hang it on.”
“Would a fact or two now help things along?”
“It might.”
Procane shifted his gaze from me to the fire. Then he smiled slightly and said, “You’re quite right, Mr. St. Ives; I am a thief.”
5
ACCORDING TO ABNER PROCANE, he never stole anything in his life until he was twenty-five years old. He was in the army then and he stole a truckload of American cigarettes and sold them on the Marseilles black market. He sold them to a man called Marcel Comegys, and if it hadn’t been for Comegys, Procane would be in jail today. At least that’s what Procane thought.
“He was a master thief and he taught me how to steal, what to steal, and whom to steal it from,” Procane said.
Comegys taught Procane to steal only money and to steal it only from those who were in no position to complain about their losses to the police.
