The Procane Chronicle by Ross Thomas Read Free Book Online

going to take me several hours to arrange for it.”
    I made a list of the denominations I wanted, but I didn’t ask how he was going to arrange for a hundred thousand dollars on Saturday. I suppose people who are worth a million or so can do things like that. On weekends I have a hard time cashing a check at my hotel for twenty dollars, but I’ve only lived there six years. Procane, however, didn’t seem at all concerned about raising one hundred thousand dollars. Maybe he planned to steal it.

6
    I THOUGHT ABOUT MY first and only meeting with Abner Procane as Myron Greene showed off his driving skill by speeding up Sixth Avenue as fast as the early Sunday-morning traffic and the red lights would allow, which was about eighteen miles per hour. The fancy car reflected another of his semisecret desires: Myron would like to have been a gentleman racing driver.
    When we got to Forty-fifth Street I said, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to see Procane until I get rid of this jailhouse smell.”
    Myron Greene sniffed. “You weren’t really in jail.”
    “It smells that way.”
    “It must have been—uh—uncomfortable.”
    “Confining, too.”
    Myron was explaining how my last comment could be taken as a joke when he drove up in front of the Adelphi and stopped.
    “Thanks for getting me out of jail,” I said and started planning my escape from the cockpit of the de Tomaso Mangusta whose midmounted engine popped and spat as it idled at what sounded to me like thirty-five hundred revolutions per minute.
    “I must confess that I rather enjoyed rousing those people out of bed at four-thirty in the morning,” Greene said. Being a topflight criminal lawyer was another of his occasional fantasies.
    I finally found the lever that opened the car’s door and it only took another fifteen seconds to figure out how I could swing my feet onto the sidewalk without rupturing something. “Thanks for the ride,” I said.
    “Be sure to call Procane,” said Myron Greene, the worrier.
    “If there’s somebody else who now wants to sell him back his journals, they can wait till I take a shower.”
    I had to bend far down from the waist to see the dubious nod that Greene gave me as an answer. Then I slammed the door shut and watched him streak off toward Darien and the $165,000 home that he called a bungalow.
    Indifferent, I suppose, was the best word to describe the atmosphere at the Adelphi Hotel because its food, service, and maintenance lay somewhere between fair and awful. The only time the place showed any zip was around the tenth of the month if you hadn’t come up with the rent.
    The hotel catered to permanent guests such as myself who lived alone and didn’t demand too much in the way of service. The guests were mostly widows with rather large pensions and very small dogs; a few UN diplomats who didn’t entertain much; three or four industrious call girls who were on the wrong side of thirty and trying to sock a little away; several peripatetic businessmen who muttered to each other in the elevator about the rotten state of the economy, and a couple of rich, quiet alcoholics who smiled a lot and didn’t bother anyone.
    The hotel also offered a bar and grill and restaurant called the Continental that had to depend on total strangers for its survival.
    Caring for the wants and whims of the guests was a true son of Manhattan, Eddie, the bell captain. He was somewhere in his forties and owned a couple of tenements in Harlem and a taxi that was driven by his two brothers-in-law. He also ran a short string of call girls, accepted all bets, and answered all Questions, including those about the weather, in a whisper that bordered on the conspiratorial.
    I carried the blue airline bag over to the desk and watched the day clerk lock it away in the safe. Eddie was waiting for me by the elevator.
    “You look like you had a big night,” he said.
    “Did you get that jack-o’-lantern to my son?”
    “Yeah. You done a good job