Procane was silent for a few moments and then he said, “What did he say when you mentioned Boykins?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you think he’s the one who killed him?”
“Possibly.”
“But you’re not going to tell the police?”
“I don’t have anything to tell them yet. I don’t even know if Boykins was involved. All I know is that Boykins’s dead body was found at a laundromat I happened to be visiting at three o’clock this morning.”
“There must be some connection,” Wiedstein said.
“Maybe. But Bobby Boykins was a small-time con man, not a thief. He wouldn’t know how to steal a hub cap, but he knew a lot of people who do.”
“You’re suggesting that he might have been the thief’s go-between?” Procane said.
I shook my head. “I’m not suggesting anything. But between now and Tuesday morning I’m going to nose around. I know some people who knew Boykins. They might have heard something. Whoever killed him worked him over when they really didn’t have to. He was an old man. When you get that old you don’t refuse to talk because you’ve learned that there’s no percentage in it. The only reason that could have kept Boykins from spilling everything he knew was that he also knew that as soon as he did talk, he’d be dead.”
Procane leaned back in his chair and looked at one of his paintings. This one showed a half-grown deer hesitantly leaving a sunlit copse. I decided that Procane liked to paint sunlight and that he did it very well. The deer was good, too. “It would appear that our simple transaction is becoming complicated, Mr. St. Ives,” he said.
“Extremely so,” I said. “But murder never simplifies anything, although that’s why a lot of them are committed.”
“I never thought of it in just that way.” He paused, as if taking time out to give it a thought or two now. “I do believe you’re right,” he said after a moment. Then he shifted his gaze from the painting to me. “Are you still adamant about working alone?”
“Why?”
“You said that you might nose around in an effort to determine whether Boykins had any connection with the theft of my journals. I was wondering whether you would object if Miss Whistler and Mr. Wiedstein were to do the same thing, but perhaps from a slightly different approach.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “In fact, I wouldn’t mind at all if they were hanging around outside the men’s room at the West Side Terminal Tuesday morning. If I don’t come out after twenty or twenty-five minutes, Mr. Wiedstein might even come in to make sure that I’m not lying dead on the floor of the first stall.”
“Yes, I was going to suggest something like that,” Procane said.
“Perhaps you should also mention the time element, Mr. Procane,” Janet Whistler said.
He looked at her and then at Wiedstein who nodded his agreement. Procane cleared his throat the way some people do when they think they have something weighty to announce. “It’s imperative, Mr. St. Ives, that the journals be returned to me by no later than Wednesday morning.”
“I can’t guarantee that,” I said.
“Yes, I know. But should the person who called here today want to postpone the transaction, I must insist that you press for the time that we’ve agreed on.”
“What if he stalls anyhow and I can’t get them back by Wednesday morning?”
The three of them exchanged looks that left me completely out of whatever it was that they had to say to each other. “If that happens, Mr. St. Ives,” Procane said, “then we’ll have to take certain steps that may or may not involve you.”
“I don’t think I quite understand that,” I said.
Procane smiled and I could see nothing but reassurance and confidence in the way he did it. “Let’s hope that you won’t have to,” he said.
There’s a bar on Forty-second Street just west of Ninth Avenue that’s called The Nitty Gritty. A few years ago it was called The Case Ace and before that, The Gung Ho. Back during World War II, somebody told me, it had been called The Hubba-Hubba, but I didn’t believe it. Although the name of the place changed every few years, the owner and the clientele stayed the same. The owner was Frank Swell and the clientele was composed of the losers who hang around that neighborhood. For the most part they were pimps and whores, thieves and shylocks, checkwriters and fences, and a varied assortment of down-and-outers who were always trying to borrow five till Friday. I’d never seen anyone lend them a dime.
Frank Swell didn’t like his customers and he kept changing the name of his place in hopes that they would go away. Sometimes when I felt depressed I would drop into Frank’s and after I left I invariably felt better because I knew that there was no real reason that I had to go back there unless I wanted to feel better again after I left. It had that kind of atmosphere.
At six o’clock that Sunday evening I was sitting at the bar listening to Frank Swell read off a new list of prospective names that he hoped might drive his customers away.
“Listen to these, Phil,” he said.
“I’ll take another Scotch and water first.”
“Sure.” He served me the drink and then started to read from his list. “The Chez When, The Third George, The Aquarius — that’s sort of timely.”
“Sort of,” I said.
“The Blue Apple, Greenbeard’s, The Triple Eagle, and here’s one I like, The Blue Blazer.”
“That’s class,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I need. Something real classy, then these creeps maybe wouldn’t come around no more.”
“I’ve got one for you,” I said.
Frank Swell whipped out his ballpoint pen. “Okay.”
“Swell’s,” I said. “Just that”
He didn’t even write it down. Instead he shook his head, folded his list of names, and stuck them away in his shirt pocket. “Nah,” he said. “That’d just help em remember. I want one that they don’t like, one that’s too classy for em so they’ll feel uncomfortable, you know what I mean?”
I nodded and he looked around sourly. He was about sixty and he had owned the place for nearly thirty years. “Look at em,” he said, twisting his thick, gray lips into a sneer that was almost a snarl. I followed his glance. There were a couple of whores at the far end of the bar. Three of the booths were occupied by couples, and only one of them wasn’t fighting about something. There were two other men at the bar. One of them, a beer nurser, looked grim and gray and pale, as if he might have just got out of prison and didn’t much like what he had found. The other man was in his late thirties, had a round face that smiled a lot, and dressed in a manner favored by some minor Boston politicians that I had once known. He wore a pale-gray, almost-white homburg and a dark-gray cashmere topcoat with a black-velvet collar. They didn’t seem to go with his pastrami sandwich. His name was Finley Cummins and he stole for a living and he had nodded and smiled at me when I came in.
I turned back to Swell. “The usual bunch,” I said.
“You know what they are?” he said. “They’re the dregs of humanity, that’s what.” He liked the phrase and it must have been the dozenth time he had used it on me.
“I thought Bobby Boykins usually dropped in about this time,” I said.
Swell leaned his heavy arms on the bar. He had his shirt sleeves rolled up and his forearms were covered with thick hair that was turning gray. Just below his left sleeve was the fading red-and-blue tattoo of a shield that read, “Death Before Dishonor.” Swell shook his head after I mentioned Boykins’s name.
“Now there’s a case for you,” he said. “An old man like him who’s drawing social security and still trying to con the suckers with the pigeon drop.”
“He was still working it okay the last time I heard.”