Free The Procane Chronicle by Ross Thomas

have waited.”
    “Why?”
    “Then he could have told Mr. Procane how much I don’t like it.”

9
    D ETECTIVES OLLER AND DEAL didn’t much like it Monday when I wouldn’t tell them the name of the person who had handed me ninety thousand dollars to deliver to a laundromat at three o’clock in the morning.
    “What have you dreamed up, St. Ives,” Carl Oller said, “some kind of go-between’s code?”
    “Nothing so fancy,” I said. “It hasn’t got much to do with morals and ethics. It’s just how I make a living. If I talk too much, I’ll be out of business and then I’ll have to go look for an honest job and I’m too old for that.”
    “You’re not even forty,” Frank Deal said.
    “I feel old.”
    We were in one of those small, brown interrogation rooms at Homicide South and I’d already been there for an hour. Deal and Oller had taped my statement first, a brief, bare, formal one that was studded with facts, and now they were asking the informal questions, the ones that I didn’t have to answer unless I wanted to, and I was being choosy.
    “You know what we could do, don’t you?” Oller said. “We could charge you with failure to report a felony.” He said it in a tone that didn’t carry much conviction, probably because he didn’t believe it either.
    “No you can’t,” I said, “because you’re not sure that one’s been committed. All you know is that I was delivering ninety thousand dollars to a laundromat and happened to stumble across a dead body. I don’t have to tell you where I got the ninety thousand. And I don’t even know whether Boykins was supposed to get it. Maybe he was, but I’m not sure.”
    Deal took a package of Pall Malls from his shirt pocket and shook one out, lighting it with a wooden match that he struck beneath the table. He inhaled some smoke, blew it out, and then carefully wiped some imaginary dirt from the top of the table with his right hand.
    “Bobby Boykins was working on something big,” he said. “Big for him anyhow. We heard that around. He’d come into a little money and he was trying to parlay it into a big score.”
    “I don’t see how that affects me.”
    “If you’ll tell us who your client is and what he wants to buy back, then we can probably connect up with who killed Boykins and why.”
    I shook my head. “You expect me to say no to that, don’t you?”
    “We don’t know what you might say,” Oller said. “That’s why we keep asking you dumb questions. We figure you might come up with some smart answers.”
    Oller stood leaning against the wall to my right. He wore a dark blue suit. Its shiny elbows and narrow lapels meant that it was at least five years old. His coat was open and his white shirt bulged out over his belt. He wore a red-and-blue tie that had a small dark stain on it just below the knot. He dressed like a man who had too many kids and not enough money.
    “Anything else?” I said.
    Deal brushed some more imaginary dirt from the top of the table. “There’s not too many rules in your business, are there?”
    “Not too many.”
    “I was just wondering if you got any rules about how you’re supposed to feel when some poor old guy gets killed who didn’t mean two hoots in hell to you or anybody else. You got any rules about that, St. Ives?”
    I stood up. “No, I haven’t got any rules about that”
    “That’s all we’re trying to do, you know,” he said. “Just find out who killed some poor old bastard who didn’t mean a shit to anybody. We’re not trying to put you out of business or anything.”
    I started toward the door and stopped. “You get some proof that Bobby Boykins was supposed to collect that ninety thousand dollars and maybe I can help you.
    “Maybe,” Oller said as if he didn’t like the word. He looked at Deal. “You know what?”
    “What?”
    “Someday we’re gonna get a call from somebody who’s been shot or stabbed or both and probably stuffed into some car trunk. And then