Oliver Bleeck
The Procane Chronicle
1
It was near Twenty-first Street over on Ninth Avenue, one of those decaying Chelsea blocks that look as though they’ve been dipped in wet soot, and except for a couple of dreary bars that kept stubborn closing hours, the laundromat was the only place open.
When it had been a pet shop a few years back the laundromat’s smeared plate-glass window might have served some useful purpose — such as giving the puppies a view of the street. Now it just splashed dirty yellow light all over the sidewalk’s week-long collection of garbage and trash.
At five minutes until three I drove past the laundromat in the gray Ford Galaxie that I’d rented from the Avis outlet. I drove past at six miles per hour, which was slow enough to let me count twelve flat-top washers, six tall dryers, and no customers.
Although it was cold and nearly three o’clock of a Sunday morning the small blue neon sign in the laundromat’s window seemed undiscouraged as it tried to beckon some business by flashing its one-word message: Neverclose.
I drove around the block and double-parked in front of the place. I wasn’t worried about a ticket. At that hour in that neighborhood I would have welcomed one along with the cop that went with it.
I got out of the car and looked around, trying to see whether there was some logical spot from where the thief might be watching. There wasn’t. He could have been anyplace. Across the street in a dingy, second-floor apartment would be good. Or in a parked car. If he had field glasses, he could have been on a rooftop halfway down the block.
I made sure that I had a dime for a dryer, went back to the trunk, unlocked it, took out the blue Pan-Am carry-on bag, slung it over my left shoulder, and slammed down the lid of the trunk. I again looked around carefully, taking my time, but there was still nobody in sight. I held up my left wrist and made a show of examining my watch. It was straight up three o’clock. No one could say that I wasn’t prompt.
I crossed to the plate-glass window and stared into the laundromat. The dryers were on the left; the washers were on the right. There were two backless, wooden benches near the window for customers who wanted to wait, but they were vacant except for a discarded box of Bold, an empty jug of Lysol, and a darned gray sock.
When I pushed through the glass door a dingaling bell rang, probably a holdover from the pet-shop days when there had been a proprietor on the premises. It signaled no one now. When the bell stopped ringing there was no sound at all except for a faint hum that came from the three rows of fluorescent lights.
There should have been another sound and it should have come from one of the dryers as it tumbled and tossed something that the thief had promised to wrap in a blanket. I peered through the glass of the first dryer’s round door, but its gray, perforated tumbling drum was empty and still. So was the drum of the second dryer and so were they all.
The bank of six dryers protruded some three feet into the room and ended less than two feet from the rear wall, creating a shielded spot that was about half the size of a hall closet. It wasn’t much space, but it was plenty of room to tuck something away out of sight, especially if it were folded just so, and that’s exactly what someone had taken great pains to do.
His legs had been folded and tied so that his chin rested on his knees. Ordinary brown insulation wire, the kind that is used to plug in the toaster, had been tightly knotted around his thin neck. The wire had been run beneath his bony knees so that they could be drawn up against his chest, providing a rest for his chin. The other end of the brown wire was also tied around his neck. His hands were behind him so I assumed that they, too, were tied.
I knelt down on one knee for a better look. Someone had worked him over and they had done a messy job of it. Dark bruises covered his forehead and cheeks. His nose was broken in at least one place. His lips were split and swollen. His mouth gaped open and his upper teeth were gone, although a dentist might have done that. His eyes were open, too, but nothing had been done to them. They still seemed to glisten with tears and they were still just as innocent and as blue as those of a ten-day-old kitten.
When alive those blue eyes had belonged to Bright Bobby Boykins, a dapper little man in his sixties who for more than thirty years had used their tearful innocence to work variations of the short con on the inexhaustible supply of gullible but greedy New York tourists.
I tried to remember Bobby Boykins’s voice and whether it could have been the mechanically distorted one that had telephoned the instructions at 11 A.M. the previous day. If I wanted to be logical about it, that distorted telephone voice should have belonged to a thief, an expert safe man. And logically that would have eliminated Bobby Boykins because he didn’t know how to peel a safe. Besides, he was too scared to have tried and too old to have learned.
I was halfway up from my kneeling position and still pondering the logic of it all when the dingaling bell sounded. I started to turn, but stopped when the voice called, “Police, fella; hold it right there!”
I held it right there, not looking left or right, not moving, trying not even to breathe. The voice sounded young and if it were young, the speaker might be inexperienced, and I wanted nothing to do with a young, inexperienced policeman.
His shoes squeaked a little as he walked toward me. “Okay,” he said, “turn around toward that wall and get your hands against it. Get your feet out behind you.”
I turned slowly toward the laundromat’s rear wall and did just that. He was still walking toward me when he said, “Is that your gray Ford out—” He never finished the question. I thought I heard him gulp once before he whispered, “Dear sweet Jesus Christ!” which must have been how the body of Bright Bobby Boykins affected him. Or he may have said that about all dead bodies.
After a moment the young voice asked, “Is he dead?”
“He’s dead.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No.”
“All right, fella, just hold still.” He ran his hands over me quickly, not bothering to check the small of my back or the insides of my ankles. I could have been carrying a little gun or a large knife in either place, but I didn’t think I should mention it. He’d learn.
“Now straighten up and put your hands behind you,” the young voice said. I put my hands behind me and he snapped the handcuffs around my wrists. It was the first time that I’d ever had handcuffs on, real ones anyhow, and I didn’t like the feeling. They didn’t hurt, but the indignity of it all did.
“Turn around,” the voice said, so I turned around and found myself facing what must have been 190 pounds or so of strapping Irish youth who wore the white crash helmet and the black-leather boots of the New York Police Department’s motor-scooter patrol.
“What’s your name, mister?” the young cop asked, taking out a notebook and pencil. I told him and he wrote it down after asking me how to spell it.
“Where d’you live?”
“The Adelphi on East Forty-sixth.”
“What’re you doing down here?”
“I was looking for something.”
“In a laundromat? At three in the morning?” The skepticism in his tone nicely matched the incredulity on his face.
“That’s right.”
“What do you do? For a living, I mean.”
I had to think about that one. “I’m in the mediation business.” He had a little trouble spelling mediation.
“What do you mediate?”
“Disputes.”
“Like labor disputes?”
“No, they’re mostly private ones.”
He had dark-brown eyes that took on a suspicious glow when they lit on the airline bag. “What’ve you got in the bag, laundry?”