by Ross Thomas
I still don’t know how he judged those curves. Not at night at that speed. There were four of them and the warning signs along the road said that none of them should be taken faster than forty-five. In daylight. Just before he went into them Wiedstein was hitting eighty. At night. He would brake to sixty-five and come out of them doing at least eighty-five. It could have been luck, but I preferred to think of it as skill.
On the last curve, a treacherous S-shaped affair, I thought he’d lost his touch. We started a skid that the rear wheels couldn’t dig us out of, but Wiedstein steered with the skid for a moment, and then we were racing straight ahead again, but with the lights off.
“What happened to the lights?” I said.
“He turned them off,” Procane said.
“Why?”
“He doesn’t have time to explain. You’ll see in a moment.”
It took a little while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did I could barely make out the road and its white dividing strip. The clouds had disappeared, just as Janet Whistler had promised, and there was part of a cold moon. From its pale light I could see that the road ahead was straight.
I looked behind us. The Oldsmobile was still fighting the curves and no longer in sight. I looked ahead again just in time to see the approaching intersection. Wiedstein slammed on his brakes and at the same time mashed the accelerator all the way to the floor. He spun the steering wheel sharply to the left, let up on the brake, caught some loose gravel at the intersection with his rear wheels, and in less than a second had completed a classic example of what some folks refer to as the bootleggers’ racing turn.
We had spun around and now we were speeding right back where we had just been. The lights were still off. Wiedstein had the Chevrolet straddling the center white line. We were doing at least eighty-five by the time the Oldsmobile came out of the last of the curves.
I don’t think the driver of the Oldsmobile saw us until Wiedstein flicked on our lights. The bright ones. We were less than two hundred feet from the Oldsmobile then and on its side of the road and the two of us were traveling at a combined speed of around one hundred fifty-five miles per hour.
So the driver of the Oldsmobile had a bare second to decide between the certain death of a head-on crash and the uncertainty of going off the road. He decided to go off the road. He had to go through a guard rail to do it, but he crashed through that without too much trouble. Beyond the guard rail was a gully that was at least ten feet deep and twenty feet wide. It had a fairly gentle slope to it and I watched the Oldsmobile plunge down the slope, turn end over end, and then roll halfway up its farther side before it came to a stop. No doors burst open this time.
“Did it burn?” Wiedstein said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“We’ll go back another way,” Wiedstein said.
We eventually took Route 7 to the beltway and the George Washington Memorial Parkway to the District of Columbia line. None of us said anything until we turned right off Key Bridge into Georgetown. Then Procane looked at his watch and said, “It’s ten past ten. We’re right on schedule.”
He unfastened his chest harness and turned around in the seat toward me. “Well, Mr. St. Ives, how did you enjoy our million-dollar theft?”
“It was swell,” I said. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
23
WIEDSTEIN DOUBLE-PARKED THE car in front of the house on N Street. Everyone got out. Wiedstein moved back to the trunk and unlocked it and lifted out the three suitcases. Procane picked up two of them and turned to me.
“Will you give me a hand, Mr. St. Ives?”
“Sure,” I said and picked up the other one.
Carrying his two suitcases Procane turned toward Wiedstein. “Get rid of the car,” he said.
Wiedstein nodded. “I’ll leave it some place with the keys in it. Somebody’ll steal it.”
“I’ll be back in New York tomorrow around noon.”
“We’ll see you then,” Janet Whistler said.
My suitcase was growing heavy. I wished that they would end their conversation so that I could carry the suitcase to wherever it was supposed to be carried. It was a new case, I noticed, a two-suiter made out of cloth fiber and trimmed with a plastic that was supposed to look like blue leather, but didn’t.
“Is there anything else you can think of, Miles?” Procane said.
Wiedstein said he couldn’t think of anything.
“Janet?”
She shook her head.
“Mr. St. Ives?”
“This suitcase is getting heavy.”
“Yes, well, I’ll see you two tomorrow.”
They nodded at him and we stood there on the sidewalk and watched them get in the Chevrolet and drive off down N Street.
I followed Procane up the short flight of steps that led to the door. He had to put one case down so that he could find his keys. As he was rumbling the key into the lock, he said, “You’re welcome to spend the night here, Mr. St. Ives, if you’d like.”
“I’ll decide after I have a drink,” I said. “I may want to go back to New York.”
“Whichever you prefer.”
Procane had the door open now. He went inside, switching on the hall light. I followed. Procane turned on a lamp in the living room. It all looked much the same as it had nearly two hours before except for the man who sat in one of the spindly-legged chairs and pointed the revolver at us.
I guessed that the man was in his late forties. His legs looked long enough to make him well over six feet tall, but it may have been because of the way he had them stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. It was a casual pose, but there was nothing casual about the way he aimed the revolver at us. It had a long barrel and I thought that it looked like a .38 caliber. The man moved the barrel from side to side a little, as if he couldn’t make up his mind about which of us he wanted to shoot first.
“You can put that away, John,” Procane said. “There’s no need for it now.”
“Set the bags down, Abner,” John said. “You, too, St. Ives.”
I still didn’t know who he was, but I put the bag down anyway. When the bags were safely on the floor, the man said, “Now both of your put your hands on top of your heads.” I did just what he wanted. Procane didn’t. Instead, he said, “This is ridiculous.”
“Put your hands up there, Abner,” the man said. This time Procane did as he was told.
I turned my head slowly toward Procane. “Who’s John?” I said.
“John Constable.”
“Ah,” I said, “the analyst.”
“That’s right, St. Ives,” Constable said, “the analyst.”
I ignored him. “He’s the one you always talked to about your problems,” I said to Procane. “About whether you wanted to get caught.”
Procane just nodded. His face had grown pink. I didn’t know whether it was embarrassment or anger.
“You told him all about tonight,” I said, not making it a question because there was no need to.
“I told him all about it,” Procane said.
“Is it becoming clear, St. Ives?” Constable said, rising from his chair. He wasn’t quite as tall as I’d thought, just barely six feet. But his legs were still long, too long really for his short trunk, and it made him look bird-legged. He tried to cover it up with a carefully tailored, extra-long jacket, but it didn’t quite come off. He still looked bird-legged. His jacket was cut from a soft-brown plaid that looked expensive and so did his dark-brown gabardine trousers and his French blue shirt and his dark-blue tie that had small brownish-red fleures on it that could have been unicorn heads. He wore a pair of gleaming dark-brown alligator ankle boots that must have cost him $150 and maybe even more now that alligators are getting scarce.
Constable’s face was wedge-shaped and a curling mass of iron-gray hair grew especially thick along the sides, probably because his big ears stuck out. They had long, thin dangling lobes that were bright pi
nk in color and seemed almost transparent. His eyes were chocolate brown and set deep back underneath heavy brows. His eyes had a damp look about them as if they were always on the verge of tears and I couldn’t decide whether that would be a handicap or a help in his profession. His nose was big and fleshy and his mouth, wide and thin-lipped, made him look hungry for some reason. His chin had a deep cleft in it that his female patients must have liked. I didn’t much care for it.
“I asked you a question, St. Ives,” Constable said.
“I know. You asked me if things are becoming clear.”
“Well, are they?”
“It’s clear that you intend to kill us. But that shouldn’t trouble you much.”
“Really? Why?”
“They say that the second time’s always easier than the first and that the third time’s even easier than the second. I’ve heard that anyway.”
“And you assume that I’ve already killed somebody?”
“I don’t assume it. I know it. You killed a cop called Francis X. Frann.”
Constable turned slightly toward Procane, but not enough so that he still didn’t have me in full view. “You told me he was really quite quick, didn’t you, Abner?”
“All I know is that I told you too much,” Procane said.
“You liked talking about it. And I liked listening. For a while.”
There was a pause that seemed longer than it really was. And then Procane asked his one-word question. The word came out as a choking sound that was filled with disillusionment and shock and even bitterness. Procane asked, “Why?”
Constable didn’t answer right away. First he raised — himself up on his toes and then let himself back down. He patted his gray hair around the left ear. When he was sure that it was in place he gave his chin a contemplative stroke or two. He seemed to like to touch himself. It may have helped him think.
“Why do you think I killed a young cop, St. Ives? Frann, you called him?”
I was eager to talk. I would have talked all night if he would have listened. I would have told him tales of high adventure and tragic love. If he were still interested, I would have told him about my childhood in Columbus, Ohio, and about how my parents thought I’d caught polio in the summer of 1942 and how they believed that I’d been cured by a Christian Science practitioner that my great-aunt had called in until they discovered that what I had really had was a bad case of the summer flu that was going around that year.
It was the third time that night that a gun had been pointed at me. And this time there was no Janet Whistler or Miles Wiedstein to come out shooting. There was only me, Procane, looking suddenly older and somehow defeated, and a psychoanalyst with a gun who, before he killed me, wanted to know why I thought that he had killed a cop called Francis X. Frann. I decided to tell him. At length, if possible.
“Nobody else could have known about him,” I said, my voice cracking just a little on “known.” I don’t think anyone noticed.
Constable shook his head. He looked disappointed, as if he had been expecting brilliance, but had been met with numskullery. “That isn’t sufficient reason,” he said.
“Not by itself. But everyone else was accounted for. Janet was with me. Wiedstein was with his wife. Two cops who might have killed him couldn’t have. That left either you or Procane. Procane said he didn’t kill him so it has to be you.”
“Why me?” Constable said. “Why not Procane here despite his denial? Don’t you think he’s capable of it?”
“That doesn’t really enter into it. I guess anyone’s capable of murder if sufficiently provoked. Or sufficiently greedy. You were having dinner with Procane that night. He must have already told you about Frann and what he was up to earlier that day. Probably over the phone.”
“I told him,” Procane said, his voice dulled and flat.
“All right. He told you about Frann. When I came out of my hotel at eight last night, Frann was dead, stabbed to death, sitting in his car in a no-parking zone. He couldn’t have been there much more than thirty minutes or the beat cop would have noticed him.” I turned my head slowly to look at Procane. “What time did your pal here show up for dinner?”
“Around eight.”
“And when did you tell him about Fran?”
“Just after you called me yesterday. Around two, I think.”
I looked at Constable. “That gave you nearly six hours to set it up. First you had to locate Frann, arrange a meeting with him, kill him, and then drive him around and park him in front of my hotel. That was a nice touch.”
“I thought it would confuse things,” Constable said, smiling a little. His teeth were almost the same shade of gray as his hair. I remember wondering whether he had grown up in some section of the country where there was a lot of fluoride in the water supply.
Procane stared at Constable and asked his one-word question again, “Why?” and once more the word was filled with the melancholy echoes from a shattered faith.
There was a lot of contempt in the look that Constable gave Procane. “Because he could have ruined everything,” he said. “You’d have abandoned the entire scheme if Frann had even breathed on you hard. I know you, Abner. Oh, God, how I know you! I had to make sure that Frann was dead and that you knew he was.”
“He doesn’t mean that,” I said.
“Mean what?”
“He doesn’t much care about why you killed Frann.”
“Oh,” Constable said. “I see.”
“Well?” I said. “Aren’t you going to tell him?”
“We’ve talked too much already.”
“You mind if I tell him?”
“I don’t know that you’ll have the time.”
“It won’t take long.”
Constable seemed to think about it for a moment before he said, “All right. Tell him.”
“A million dollars,” I said to Procane and then turned back to Constable. “See. It didn’t take long.”
My analysis of why he had double-crossed his patient seemed to disappoint Constable. He frowned and gave his head a small, stern shake. “That wasn’t it. The money is only the icing.”
“All right. You tell him. You owe him that much.”
“I don’t owe him anything.”
“I think you do,” Procane said in a low voice. “You owe me that much.”
The contempt in Constable’s voice matched that in his eyes. “How long have we known each other, Abner, five—six years?”
“About that.”
“And all this time you’ve been talking almost endlessly about how perfectly content you are to be a thief. How perfectly marvelous you think that your chosen career is. You spent hours with me poking at it and probing it and picking away at all the reasons that you think make being a thief the most wonderful thing in the world. And then once a year, or possibly twice, you’d go out and steal more money than I made in a year and then come back and tell me about how easy it was and ask me why more people of intelligence didn’t turn to it. Believe it or not, Abner, I’m human. And so when you told me about this million dollars you planned to steal, I became extremely human. I asked myself the old, old question, ‘Why him and not me?’ And I really didn’t come up with any satisfactory answer because, to be quite frank now that I can afford it, I’ve never really liked you, Abner. I don’t like you at all.”
To prove it, he shot Procane twice. Procane said something that sounded like “Uff” before he staggered back a step. I didn’t watch him fall because I was in the air, throwing myself at Constable’s spindly, birdlike legs. My left shoulder caught Constable at the knees and he started to say something like, “No, you don’t,”, but all he could get out was “No, you—” before he went over backward. I heard his gun skitter across part of the oak floor that wasn’t covered by the worn oriental rug.
I looked up and saw Constable crawling rapidly after the gun which had skidded almost into the dining room. He would reach it in a few seconds. I turned on my hands and knees and scra
mbled toward Procane. He looked dead. His mouth was open and so were his eyes. I thought they looked a little crossed.
I reached inside his jacket pocket and felt around until I found the Walther. I jerked it out and when I did I saw that my hand was covered with blood. I turned, still on my knees, and pointed the Walther at Constable. He was turning fast, nearly all the way around now, the .38 revolver in his right hand.
“Hold it right there,” I yelled, even then a little self-conscious about the phrase that I had heard a hundred times on television and only once or twice in real life.
He saw my gun and paused, just long enough for me to say, “I can make three holes in your shirt before you can get off your first shot.” It was a bluff, of course, and a terribly corny one at that. But I didn’t have time to polish it up. All I could do was lock my eyes on his and force a confident smile on my face, the kind that I use when I’m betting a pair of queens into three sixes
I think he almost folded. I’m sure he started to. The muzzle of the gun dipped a little, but then it came back up. He gave his head a small shake, the kind that I’ve seen poker players give me when they’ve decided that they’d rather lose their money than suffer the embarrassment of being bluffed.
There wasn’t anything else for me to do except pull the trigger. And I did that only because it was better than doing nothing. All I expected to hear was that dry admonishing click of misfire, like the one Procane got when he had tried to” shoot the thing at the drive-in. I wasn’t really aiming the Walther, just pointing it, so the sound of the blast that it made surprised me.
The large red hole that blossomed where Constable’s upper lip had been surprised me even more.
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.
