The Procane Chronicle by Ross Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

on it. The kid was real tickled.”
    “You saw him?”
    “Sure I saw him. I wasn’t gonna turn a ten-dollar pumpkin over to just anybody.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Aw, it wasn’t what he said, it was the way he looked. You know how kids are.”
    I nodded, entered the elevator, and went up to my empty “deluxe” efficiency apartment to see whether I could wash away the precinct grime. I tried to think of something better to use than soap and water, but I couldn’t come up with anything.
    I spent at least twenty minutes under the shower, for some reason thinking about the night before when the hundred thousand dollars had been delivered to me by the man and the woman who, if they’d been only a few years younger, I would have thought of as the boy and the girl.
    They had knocked at the door about nine-thirty. I was in my favorite chair half-watching a movie on television and half-reading all about Mr. Thomas Gradgrind of Coketown in Hard Times, a novel that I had never been able to get all the way through. I put Dickens down for what must have been the hundredth time and went over to open the door. The man carried the blue airline bag slung over his left shoulder. He kept his right hand deep in the pocket of his topcoat. The woman stood slightly behind him and to his left, the side that the money was on. He looked at me for a while as if trying to decide whether my face went with the description that someone had given him. He apparently decided that it did because after a moment or two he said, “Do you always open your door like this, Mr. St. Ives?”
    “Except when I’m in the shower,” I said. “Then I don’t open it at all.”
    “I’m Miles Wiedstein. This is Janet Whistler. Mr. Procane sent us.”
    “Come in,” I said.
    After they were in they looked around the place as if automatically checking to see whether there was anything worth stealing. I looked, too, and was mildly surprised to find that there wasn’t. The TV set was black and white and more than five years old. The books were mostly paperback, except for the blue leatherbound Oxford edition of Dickens. The best piece of furniture in the place was the poker table, which I also ate on. The silver wasn’t silver at all; it was stainless steel, and I wouldn’t have been embarrassed by an earnest offer of nine hundred dollars for everything.
    Wiedstein removed the airline bag from his shoulder and placed it on the poker table. “We’d like you to count it.”
    “You want a drink or a cup of coffee while you watch?”
    Wiedstein looked at Janet Whistler. She shook her head no. “We’re fine like this,” he said.
    They didn’t quite stand over me while I counted the money, but they watched. Carefully. There were a few new bills, mostly hundreds, but not enough to cause any bother. It was all there and when I finished counting, I said, “Do you want a receipt?”
    “That would be nice,” Janet Whistler said. She was attractive enough if you liked tall, rangy girls with slender figures and easy, natural movements. I didn’t mind them. She wore a loose gray-tweed coat that ended just above the black, over-the-calf boots that had to be laced all the way up to the top. Her hair was straight, brown, and shiny and fell halfway down her back and sometimes into her eyes so that she had to keep brushing it away. Her face had pleasant features, although some might have called them sharp. I thought of them as finely chiseled—except for her mouth, which was a bit on the wide side. Her eyes were a deep, dark brown and I don’t think she wore any makeup, but nowadays I have a hard time telling.
    I crossed over to the typewriter, took its cover off for what must have been the first time in three weeks, rolled in a sheet of paper, and typed: “Received from Miles Wiedstein and Janet Whistler, One-hundred-thousand dollars ($100,000).” Then I typed in my name and the date, rolled the paper out, signed it, and gave it to Wiedstein. He read it,