The Procane Chronicle Read Online Free Page B

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.”
    “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