The Procane Chronicle by Ross Thomas Page B

snarl. I followed his glance. There were a couple of whores at the far end of the bar. Three of the booths were occupied by couples, and only one of them wasn’t fighting about something. There were two other men at the bar. One of them, a beer nurser, looked grim and gray and pale, as if he might have just got out of prison and didn’t much like what he had found. The other man was in his late thirties, had a round face that smiled a lot, and dressed in a manner favored by some minor Boston politicians that I had once known. He wore a pale-gray, almost-white homburg and a dark-gray cashmere topcoat with a black-velvet collar. They didn’t seem to go with his pastrami sandwich. His name was Finley Cummins and he stole for a living and he had nodded and smiled at me when I came in.
    I turned back to Swell. “The usual bunch,” I said.
    “You know what they are?” he said. “They’re the dregs of humanity, that’s what.” He liked the phrase and it must have been the dozenth time he had used it on me.
    “I thought Bobby Boykins usually dropped in about this time,” I said.
    Swell leaned his heavy arms on the bar. He had his shirt sleeves rolled up and his forearms were covered with thick hair that was turning gray. Just below his left sleeve was the fading red-and-blue tattoo of a shield that read, “Death Before Dishonor.” Swell shook his head after I mentioned Boykins’s name.
    “Now there’s a case for you,” he said. “An old man like him who’s drawing social security and still trying to con the suckers with the pigeon drop.”
    “He was still working it okay the last time I heard.”
    Swell again shook his head. “He’s too old to be going around dropping a billfold in front of people. I mean it’s not dignified.”
    “Have you seen him lately?”
    “He was in here Friday late,” Swell said. “I didn’t talk to him but Cummins there did. You wanta know about Bobby Boykins, talk to Cummins. Another creep.”
    “I think I will,” I said and moved down the bar to the round-faced man who was eating the last bite of his pastrami sandwich.
    “How’s it going, Finley?” I said.
    Cummins licked his left thumb. “Best pastrami sandwich in town,” he said. “That’s the only reason I come in this crumb joint. What brings you around, St. Ives, slumming?”
    “I thought Bobby Boykins might be here.”
    Cummins gave his thumb a final lick and then held it out as if he wanted to make sure that he had got all of the mustard off. “No you didn’t,” he said.
    “I didn’t?”
    “Bobby got hisself killed early this morning over on Ninth Avenue. You should know. You were there.”
    “News gets around.”
    “You should know about that, too.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I was there. How’d Boykins get so far out of his depth?”
    “How should I know?”
    “Swell said you were talking to him Friday.”
    “Hey, Swell,” Cummins called without turning his head.
    I looked down the bar at Swell who didn’t look up from the Sunday comics. “What?” he said.
    “You talk too fuckin much,” Cummins called in a voice that could be heard all over the bar. Nobody looked up, not even Swell.
    “You don’t like it here, stupid,” Swell said, still studying Dick Tracy, “go somewheres else.”
    Cummins turned to look at me. The smile was gone from his face. In its place was a frown, a suspicious one. “What were you doing down in Chelsea?”
    “I was working,” I said.
    “A buy back? One of those go-between deals of yours?”
    I nodded.
    “How much?”
    “Ninety thousand.”
    “Son of a bitch. The old bastard wasn’t lying after all.”
    “Why?”
    Cummins shook his head, still frowning. “I don’t wanta get messed up in this.”
    “You won’t,” I said. “Not by me.”
    Cummins seemed to think it over. He looked at his empty glass. If he were going to tell me anything, I was going to have to pay something, even if it were only the price of a glass of beer. I ordered another Scotch