Free The Procane Chronicle by Ross Thomas Page A

we’re gonna go out and open up the trunk and guess who it’ll be?”
    “Him,” Deal said.
    “I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I think St. Ives is gonna get one of these go-between deals and he’ll be delivering a little bag full of money somewhere, maybe trying to buy back some jewelry, and he’ll run into some hardnose who’s decided that he’s got a big need for both the jewelry and the money. That’s when they’ll call us in.”
    Deal leaned across the table toward me, his hands clasped tightly in front of him. When he spoke, he spoke to Oller, but he looked at me. “There’s one other thing,” he said.
    “What?” Oller said.
    “When we start looking around for who killed St. Ives, you know what I hope?”
    “What?”
    “I hope that everybody we talk to is gonna be just as nice and cooperative as he’s being here today.”
    Oller smiled. “Yeah, that would be nice, Frank, wouldn’t it?”
    Outside I caught a cab and gave the driver the address of a restaurant on Lexington between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth. The restaurant wasn’t crowded and I ordered a martini and a club sandwich. The first drink went down so well that I ordered another one and when the sandwich came I asked for a glass of milk. By the time I’d ordered coffee, the young executive crowd had moved into the place. They wore colored shirts and bright, wide ties and suits whose jackets had lots of buttons and nipped-in waists. Although their clothes were a little gaudier than those of the late fifties and early sixties, their look of desperate confidence remained much the same. I decided it was the look of men who’re sure that they have to be back at the office by two, but who are never quite sure why.
    There was no desk waiting for me, so I called for the check, paid it, went outside, and leaned against a light pole trying to decide what to do with the rest of the afternoon. A cab came by and I hailed it and got in. The driver had to ask twice before I could think of somewhere I wanted to go. But after I told him the Joplin Hotel on East Thirty-fourth, I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to go there at all.
    You would expect to find the Joplin Hotel down near the railroad station, if New York had been a smaller town. It was the kind of place whose twelve stories had been built to accommodate the old-time commercial traveler who didn’t have a draw, depended solely on commissions, and wasn’t quite sure what an expense account was.
    You could almost predict what the rooms would be like from the looks of the lobby. They would be small with one window that stuck in the summer and refused to close all the way in the winter. They would have a steam radiator that clanked a lot around five in the morning. There would be a sink in one corner, but all that came out of the hot-water faucet would be some choking gasps. There would be a chair and a floor lamp with an orange shade and a forty-watt bulb. There would be a narrow bed with a thin mattress, springs that shrieked, gray sheets, and a pillow not much thicker than a magazine. If there were a television set, it would be the coin-operated kind that got only one channel.
    The lobby had a high ceiling, a few worn chairs, a sagging sofa, a television set that didn’t work, and the fiftyish room clerk who yesterday had stared down at the body of Jimmy Peskoe and repeated over and over that he had lived in room eight-nineteen.
    The room clerk didn’t move anything but his pale eyes as I approached the counter that he leaned on, supporting his chin in the palm of his right hand. When I stopped in front of him, he said, “You don’t want a room.”
    “No.”
    “You wanta ask some questions about the guy who did the jump out of eight-nineteen. Peskoe.”
    “I could tell you that I was his brother.”
    “You could tell me that.”
    “But you wouldn’t believe me.”
    The clerk moved his eyes up and down, as if assessing how much I had paid for my $150 topcoat They were pale-blue eyes