I had a fairly nice time feeling sorry for myself, smoking cigarettes, and wondering about how frightened I might become. When I got tired of that, I thought about Abner Procane, the thief who kept diaries.
Not too many persons in New York suspected that Abner Procane was a thief. A few cops did, but they had never been able to prove it and after a while they didn’t even bother to try. Some of the racier types that I occasionally palled around with assumed that Procane was a thief, but because they couldn’t figure a percentage for themselves, they weren’t really interested.
When I had got through telling Myron Greene on that pre-Halloween Friday about what I suspected Procane to be, Greene had replied, “Hearsay. That’s all you have. Pure hearsay.”
“That’s sometimes all you need when you’re a reporter.”
“Well, you’re not a reporter now.”
“I was when I first heard about him.”
“Ah, but you didn’t write it, did you?”
I had let that pass and said, “What if he is a thief, would you still be his lawyer?”
“I’ve seen his holdings; the man couldn’t possibly be a thief.”
“But if he were?”
The idea of being a top thief’s counsel had delighted Myron Greene, of course. But he wouldn’t admit it. Instead, he had drawn himself up a little stiffly and said, “Every man is entitled to representation. Of course, I’d be his lawyer.”
“All right then, I’ll be his go-between.”
I’d first heard about Abner Procane some six or seven years back when Billie Fowler came out of retirement to try his skill on a new Mosler 125-S executive wall safe that was supposed to contain twenty-five thousand or so that an eye, ear, nose, and throat doctor had forgotten to report to the Internal Revenue Service.
Billie had opened the safe without too much trouble and was cleaning it out when he was hit by a heart attack. The doctor discovered him the next morning, still sprawled in front of the half-empty safe, his pockets stuffed with fifty-dollar bills. They had made a deal. The doctor agreed to get Billie to a hospital if Billie agreed not to tell the 1RS about the twenty-five thousand dollars.
It was another one of those stories that I couldn’t write and Billie, sensing my disappointment, had tugged at his hospital gown, and said, “Why don’t you do a write-up on Abner Procane?”
“Who’s he?”
“You never heard it from me, unnerstand?”
“All right. Who is he?”
“He’s the best thief in town, that’s who. Maybe the best thief in the whole fuckin world. You wanna know why?”
“Why?”
“Because he never steals nothing but money. But you never got it from me, right?”
“Right.”
I started to poke around a little and the next word I got on Procane came from an old-time con man who liked to boast that he’d helped take J. Frank Norfleet for forty-five thousand dollars in the famous Denver big store back during the twenties. He claimed to have heard that Procane had stolen more than five million dollars in his time. “Now that’s a hell of a lot of money,” the old man had said and after a couple of more drinks, we’d both agreed that it was probably too much.
I had some vague idea of doing a column on Procane so I kept checking on him in a haphazard fashion. One fairly successful ex-thief who had turned Jehovah’s Witness claimed that he had heard of the poor sinner and even prayed for him whenever he thought about it, which wasn’t often.
“But I don’t think it does any good,” he’d added, as we stood there on the corner at Forty-third and Broadway. “The guy’s never taken a fall and I hear that he don’t pull but one job every year or so. Now what kind of a thief is that?” A smart one, we’d both agreed. “I don’t even know what jobs he was supposed to have been in on,” the reformed thief had said as he stuck a copy of The Watchtower under the nose of a passing cop.
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.”