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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