“What’s moderate?”
He looked up at the ceiling and gave his $12.50 haircut a thoughtful pat “He has some rather nice holdings, but nothing spectacular. He’s worth around two million, I’d say. Possibly three.”
“Manages to scrape by.”
“All right, damn it, he’s not poor. If it weren’t for the wealthy, you’d have to find a job.”
“You’re wrong, Myron. If it weren’t for the thieves, I’d have to find a job.”
Myron Greene reached for the paring knife, pulled the pumpkin over, and started doing something to its mouth. “Let’s agree that my client is of moderately substantial means. Does that satisfy you?”
“Perfectly.”
He turned the pumpkin around. I don’t know what he had done to the mouth, but it looked far more sinister.
“How’s that?” he said.
“Much better.”
Greene leaned back so that he could admire his handiwork. “My new client was recommended to me by his broker, an old friend of mine, who asked me to take him on as a personal favor. That was a little over three weeks ago and I really haven’t done much for the client — just some routine work. He called late yesterday and wanted to know if you were available. I told him I’d find out.”
“You want a drink?” I said.
Myron Greene looked at his watch. “It’s a little early, isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
“Well—”
“I’ll make it weak.” I went over to the sink and mixed Greene’s drink and one for myself so he wouldn’t feel that he was sinning alone. “What’s he want?” I said.
“I’m getting to that.”
“Here,” I said, handing him his drink.
He tasted it suspiciously. “Well, while my client was away over the weekend, someone broke into his house and stole certain personal documents. Two days ago whoever stole the documents called him and offered to sell them back for a substantial sum.”
“How much?”
“One hundred thousand.”
“What kind of personal documents?”
“My client would prefer not to say.”
“Come on, Myron, I can’t handle it unless I know what I’m buying.”
“Well, I can say that the documents are in the form of a diary that goes back twenty-five years.”
“Nobody keeps a diary that long unless he’s never grown up.”
Myron Greene stiffened his face. “My client is just past fifty.”
I decided to light a cigarette, my first in over an hour. By tapping some heretofore unsuspected reserves of self-discipline, I had cut down to a pack and a half a day. I kidded myself that I would stop altogether by Christmas. Or maybe New Year’s.
“They must be incriminating,” I said. “If they weren’t, nobody would steal them. And he’d never spend that much just to check back on whether it was the winter of fifty or fifty-one that he caught the tarpon off Bermuda.”
Myron Greene frowned and the resulting wrinkles were thoughtfully legal and made him look wise and grave beyond his thirty-six years. It was a look that would have gone over well with a jury, but Myron Greene was far too good a lawyer to ever let a case of his be decided by twelve strangers. When he spoke, his tone was as grave as his look.
“A person,” he said, “can place a high premium on the privacy of his past without it meaning that his past necessarily entails something incriminating.” He paused to frown some more. “Privacy commands its own price, especially if one is a person of means.”
I thought some of that was arguable, but I shrugged and said, “All right, who suggested me?”
“The thief. Or thieves.”
“And your client agrees?”
“That’s why he called me.”
“What do you think?”
Myron Greene decided to examine the ceiling again. “It seems straightforward enough,” he said. “And you can certainly use the ten thousand. Incidentally, it’ll come off the top of the hundred thousand. The thief stipulated that when he asked for you.”
“That’s unusual,” I said.
“Yes. That’s what I thought.”
“All right,” I said after a moment. “I’ll take it. What’s your client’s name?”
“Abner Procane.”
I was trying to swallow some of my drink when Myron Greene said the name and the drink stopped about halfway down and then backed up, a lot of it spurting out of my nose. After I got through coughing and blowing Myron Greene said, “What was all that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” I said, “that your new client is probably the best thief in town.”
3
Detective Deal had used the area code to direct-dial the Darien number and the phone rang nine times before Myron Greene’s voice came on, sleepy and thick, with a muttered, “Hello.”
“This is St. Ives,” I said. “I’m in jail.”
“Ah, Jesus. It’s almost four.”
“If you don’t wake up, it’s going to be five and I’ll still be in jail.”
There was a pause and then Greene said, “All right, I’m awake,” and his voice sounded crisp and alert. Maybe his wife had brought him a cold cloth. “Where are you?”
“The Tenth Precinct on West Twentieth.”
‘“What’s the charge?”
“They’re thinking about two of them. Suspicion of murder one and grand larceny.”
“Jesus,” Myron Greene said again and then asked, “What happened?” I told him what I could, making it as succinct as possible. There was a brief silence while he probably sorted through his bag of legal tricks. “What have you told them?” he finally asked.
“My name and address.”
“All right,” he said. “I’m going to have to call some people and it’s going to take a while. I’ll try to keep our client’s name out of it and that may be difficult and time-consuming, so you’d better plan on spending a little more time right where you are. But I’ll try to get you out before they send the wagon around in the morning to take you downtown.”
“I don’t like it here,” I said, “but I’d like it even less in the Tombs.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“Do that,” I said and hung up.
“You want to call anybody else?” Deal said.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then let’s go down and talk to Sergeant Finn.”
Sergeant Finn, the desk officer, still looked bored, even when they told him about the dead body of Bobby Boykins. He perked up a little though when they got around to the ninety thousand dollars and agreed that it wouldn’t do at all to turn me loose upon society and that they should hang on to me for a few more hours. By then they would have talked to someone in the district attorney’s office and the wagon would be around to haul me down to the Complaint Court at 10 °Centre Street
After that they made me empty my pockets and an elderly cop sniffed as if to see whether I’d been drinking, apparently decided that I hadn’t, and let me keep my cigarettes and matches. Then they took me back upstairs to the detective squad room.
It was a medium-sized room, about fifteen by twenty, with four gray metal desks, a couple of typewriters, and a tacky-looking bulletin board with a reward poster on it offering $5,000 for the arrest and conviction of somebody who’d stolen $600,000. The walls were two shades of green — medium dark to about halfway up and then light green all the way to the white ceiling. The floor was covered with black asphalt tile and didn’t show the dirt much.
Just off the squad room was another, smaller room with two desks, four chairs, and brown walls. They put me in there, closed the door, and forgot about me.
I sat down in one of the chairs and felt sorry for myself, the way the falsely accused always do. The precinct didn’t have any cells, just a detention cage for the violent cases that was made out of green iron mesh, and I told myself that I was lucky they hadn’t put me in there because it contained nothing to sit on other than the floor.