There was. A woman’s little finger, severed between the first and second knuckles.
I closed the box before the bile that was crawling up my throat could reach my mouth.
“Lila’s?” I asked.
“How the hell should I know?” Culhane walked up to my desk and leaned on it with both hands. “I hope the answer is no. But I’m supposed to think it’s yes. I want to know why. I want to know who sent it, I want to know where my fiancée is, and I want you to bring her back.”
“You realize,” I said, “that it may very well be her finger. That there’s a good chance she’s already dead and that if she’s not, she may have disappeared of her own free will.”
“Well, that’s what you’re going to find out,” Culhane said.
“Both of us,” I told him.
Culhane gave me all the information he wanted me to have and left out all that he didn’t, simple things like what he did for a living. He could have told me. He wouldn’t have been the first Family man I’ve done a turn for. But he didn’t know that I didn’t have a wire in my pants or a brother on the police force or a Good Citizen complex cluttering up my head, so I couldn’t really blame him for keeping a lid on his more questionable activities.
Of course, I didn’t know for certain that that’s what he wasn’t telling me. For all I knew he earned his keep in some legitimate way, like opening doors in a ritzy apartment house, or babysitting. The fact that a man has Mafia written all over him doesn’t make him a wise guy any more than my looking like a P.I. makes me a detective. It’s my license that makes me a detective, that and the fact that people are willing to hire me to find their fiancées. It was the bodies dumped in the East River that made Culhane a mob boy, that or maybe the broken kneecaps in Canarsie, or Little Italy, or wherever. That his hands had held a baseball bat, and not in regulation play, I’d have been willing to bet the agency on.
What else didn’t Leon Culhane tell me? Things like where I could reach him after hours, how well-laundered the hundreds were that he was paying me with, what cute names his mamma had had for him when he was just a little Culhane, things like that.
What he did tell me was where I could find Lila’s brother Jerome and, while we were at it, her sister Rachel. Culhane had called Rachel, to no avail, but I wrote her number down anyway. He gave me the number of an answering service that could get a message to him at any hour of the day as long as the hour was between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. He gave me five hundred-dollar bills, each with its own serial number — I checked. And he gave me a stiff neck from looking up at him leaning over me for so long.
When he left, I got out the bottle of Excedrin I kept in my desk drawer, poured a few pills into a cloth handkerchief, wrapped them up, and then smashed them six or seven times with the butt of my revolver. I took the handkerchief into the bathroom, poured its contents into my toothbrushing cup, and filled the cup with cold water from the tap. I stirred it all up with the handle of my toothbrush and watched as the fragments pretended to dissolve.
I drank the medicine quickly, refilled the cup, and drank again.
I felt sick. Seeing a woman’s severed finger is not my idea of lunchtime entertainment. To top it off, Culhane had left the finger behind. He didn’t want it.
Well, I didn’t want it, either. But I couldn’t throw it away, I couldn’t do anything with it, and I certainly didn’t want to look at it. So I wrapped it in aluminum foil and stuck it in the freezer compartment of my office’s miniature refrigerator. The velvet box, lined inside and out, was ruined by bloodstains. That, at least, I threw away.
I sat down to look over my notes. Lila Dubois, pronounced the un-French way, do-boys, soon to be Lila Culhane, had vanished. Maybe, I thought, she took a good look at the marriage bed she was climbing into and bailed out. If so, who could blame her? On the other hand, if so, where did the finger come from?
Could Culhane’s rivals have kidnapped his fiancée? Sure. Kidnapping was their stock in trade. And the finger? Why not? If I could imagine Culhane cutting off a girl’s finger, and I could, in a Bronx minute, it didn’t take much to imagine his peers doing the same.
But “could have” is not the same as “did,” and even if Culhane’s rivals did send the grisly package, “why” was still a big question. Fingers usually come with notes of explanation. There had been no note with this finger.
No, it didn’t add up — not yet. But Lila Dubois had to be somewhere. And someone had to know where.
Jerome Dubois answered the door in a Ralph Lauren bathrobe and slippers that must have cost a hundred dollars apiece. He had a tidily cropped beard and unhappy eyes that looked like they were looking at something they didn’t want to see. Right now they were looking at me, but I didn’t take it personally. Guys like this are unhappy looking at anything except their well-groomed faces in their gold-framed bathroom mirrors.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “I am Dr. Dubois. Leon told me you were coming today.” He lifted a cut-glass decanter from the minibar set up in one corner of the living room. “Port?” I shook my head. He poured himself a glass and carried it to the couch in the center of the room. He waited for me to join him before sitting down.
Then he waited for me to talk.
“When did you see Lila last?” I said.
He rolled his eyes back in his head for a second. “Oh, a week ago, two weeks. Something like that.”
“Can’t you be more specific?”
“Not really, I’m afraid. I have a terrible memory for dates.”
“I’m not asking about the Civil War, doctor. I’m asking you did you see her last Tuesday or the Tuesday before that.”
“I don’t remember.”
I waited while the doctor sipped his drink.
“She didn’t ask to come visit you over the weekend?”
“No.”
“She didn’t come here Friday night?”
“No.”
“She wasn’t here at all over the weekend?”
“No.”
“You didn’t talk to her—”
“No.”
“—over the weekend.”
“No.”
We sat.
“Listen,” I said finally. “Leon Culhane has hired me to find out what happened to your sister. I’d think you’d be interested in knowing this, too, except maybe you don’t give a damn or maybe you know and just aren’t telling me. That’s fine with me. It’s stupid, but it’s fine. What is not fine is wasting my time, which is what you are doing. So why don’t you just tell me what you’re going to tell me and then I’ll go find out how much of it is a lie?”
“I imagine,” Dubois said, “that you find this approach effective when you deal with men in Leon’s circle. I find it vulgar, personally.” We stared at each other for a while.
“What do you do, doctor?” I asked.
“If you mean what do I do professionally, I have a successful private practice, in addition to which I spend a good part of each year preparing and presenting papers for seminars. I also teach a graduate-level course at Columbia.”
“In the field of psychology?”
“Abnormal psychology, yes.”
“And in your successful private practice, doctor, if one of your patients is uncooperative, what do you do?”
“I work with him to identify the root cause underlying this behavior and then eliminate it. But if you are implying that I am being uncooperative, you are mistaken. There are better ways I could be spending my time than speaking with a friend of Leon Culhane’s.”
“Leon Culhane’s not my friend.”