“What’d you do about Procane?”
“Nothing,” Rhynes said. “What could we do?”
“Could the senator identify him?”
“Sure,” Calloway said. “But he wouldn’t, because if Procane knew that the hundred thousand dollars was in the closet, he also knew where it came from, and the senator wasn’t about to bring that out in the open.”
Rhynes picked up the pitcher of beer and filled all three glasses. “They say he knocked over a high-stakes poker game at the Waldorf in fifty-nine for close to seventy-five thousand. They say that in 1964 he took close to a hundred thousand out of the wall safe of a Park Avenue shrink. They say that last fall he stopped more than seventy grand in juice money that was supposed to be on its way to a city councilman. It never got there. They say.”
“I heard about the juice money,” Calloway said. “I never heard about the others.”
“Well, we sure as hell never heard about them officially. I never heard about the senator before either.”
“No complaints, huh?” I said to Rhynes.
He shook his big head that was shaped like a wrinkled bullet and said, “Who’s to complain? The city councilman? The shrink who’s cheating the government? The big-shot muckety-mucks who’re playing high-stakes poker, and one of them the head of a big charity outfit?”
“How do you know it was Procane?” I said.
“What would you say to an eyewitness?” Rhynes said.
“That would be pretty good.”
“Well, this bagman who was carrying the seventy big ones got a little upset, know what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said.
“He didn’t think the guy who’d given him the money to deliver would be too understanding, so he comes to us and asks for protection. Well, what could we do? There wasn’t no evidence, just his story. So we showed him some pictures of Procane that we’d taken with a long-distance lens and he says, ‘That’s the son of a bitch, all right’ But still, what could we do? If we talked to Procane, all he’d have to do is laugh and say, ‘What seventy thousand?’ And the guy who was gonna juice the councilman with it sure as hell wasn’t about to admit anything. So all we had was the bagman’s story, which wasn’t worth nothing, so we finally turned him loose.”
“What happened to him?” I said.
Rhynes took a deep draught of beer and then said, “He sort of went away.”
“I reckon that fella Procane’s my favorite thief,” Calloway said. “One, he never steals anything but money. Two, he never steals it from anyone who’ll make a complaint about it. And three, I’m not so sure he’ll ever get caught.”
Rhynes belched. It was a rumbling one that started as a harsh crackle and ended as a mild roar. “Oh, he’ll get caught one of these days,” he said, patting his belly comfortably. There was plenty to pat.
“When?” I said.
“When he finally gets careless,” he said, nodding his head with the absolute certainty that’s born of thirty years’ experience. “They finally all get careless, you know.”
“Bullshit,” Calloway said as politely as it can be said. “I don’t agree with that at all. Not at all. Procane might get himself caught one day, but it won’t be by the cops.”
“Who by?” I said.
“If he doesn’t get himself killed by someone he’s stealing from, he’ll get hurt in a different way and it’ll hurt bad. Real bad.”
“How?”
“Someday,” Calloway said in a voice made thoughtful by five beers, “somebody’s gonna steal something from Mr. Abner Procane because he’s gone and made himself such a big, fat target. And when that day comes I’d like to be around just so I could watch Procane.”
“Watch him do what?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Calloway said. “That’s why I’d wanta watch.”
4
They came for me at six o’clock and took me back downstairs without saying a word. They took me into a small room that I hadn’t been in before and a young, uniformed policeman handed me back the contents of my pockets.
“What now?” I said.
“Wait here,” he said and shoved a form at me. “Count your money, check your possessions, and sign this. It’s our receipt.”
I counted the money in my billfold and signed the receipt. “Is it all there?” the young cop said, not because he cared, but because it was what they had told him to say.
“I’m short about ninety thousand.”
“You break me up,” he said, turned and left.
It was another grim, bare room that contained nothing but a gray table and two matching chairs. I sat down in one of them and waited some more. In about fifteen minutes the door opened and Detectives Deal and Oller came in. Deal carried the blue airline bag. Neither of them looked as if they had had any sleep.
“You got nice connections, St. Ives,” Deal said, placing the bag on the table. “Real nice. They’re going to let you walk.”
“When?”
“When you finish counting the money,” Oller said and unzipped the bag. “You can start any time.”
I started counting and they watched. When I was nearly a fourth of the way through, Deal said, “That money kept the kid up all night, you know.”
“What kid?” I said, almost losing my count.
“Officer Frann. You remember Officer Frann. He put the cuffs on you.”
I nodded and kept on counting.
“He stayed up all night making a record of all the serial numbers on the money,” Deal said. “That was before anybody told us what you did for a living. You got quite a reputation downtown, you know.”
“I didn’t,” I said, dropped a thousand in my count, and went back to pick it up.
“Of course, me and Deal being in homicide, we wouldn’t have much call to do any business with you, unless somebody wanted to ransom a dead body, and we haven’t run across one like that yet.”
“Yet,” Deal said and then they were both silent until I finished the count and zipped up the bag.
“It’s all there,” I said, and signed another form that Oller handed me.
“If you go ahead and turn that money over to whoever you were planning to turn it over to, are you going to tell ’em that we got the serial numbers?” Deal said. “That’s strictly an unofficial question. I just got curious.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll get them a new batch.”
“You sort of like to cooperate with thieves, huh?” Oller said.
“I sometimes have to,” I said.
Deal nodded as if trying to show that he found that perfectly understandable. He almost succeeded. “Well, you’re no longer a suspect now that we got it on the very best downtown authority that you’re not the type who’d go around killing anybody like that old guy we found trussed up in the laundromat. But me and Oller were sort of wondering if we might drop by and ask you a few questions? As a witness, I mean, not as a suspect.”
“Any time,” I said and waited for the rest of it, the part that wouldn’t be quite so polite.
“We might drop around more than once,” Oller said and gave me a bleak smile that somehow failed to go with his fat man’s face.
“And you might even drop around to see us,” Deal said and they cracked out the rest of it: “Like tomorrow at ten A.M.”
“You want a statement,” I said, seeing no reason to make it a question.
“That’s right,” Oller said.
“Where?”
“You know where Homicide South is?”
“Yes.”
“Just ask for either of us.”
“Oller and Deal.”
“Carl Oller,” Deal said, “and Frank Deal.”