“Yes, and to Amsterdam, and to Paris, and once to Greenwich Village. I think that little adventure made our mother most unhappy of all. Lila liked to travel, and of course, we had the resources to do it. She would occasionally just pick up her travel bags and go.”
“When was the last time this happened?”
“When she was about seventeen.”
“So not for quite a long time.”
“No.”
“Do you think that’s what happened this time? Your brother seems to think it is.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Mickity. Maybe Jerome is right. I just have a bad feeling about it. If she comes back a week from now smiling and carefree, I’ll eat my words. But I don’t think she will.”
“Why not?”
“Because I think that man did something to her. I know it makes no sense, because then why did he hire you, but in my heart I feel it. Tell me something, how much is he paying you?”
I thought about it for a second and then I told her.
“While you’re investigating, could you do me a favor and do a little investigating of him as well? I’ll pay you the same amount, and no one need know.”
I almost told her that she didn’t have to do that, that I would be looking into Leon Culhane’s life as a matter of course. But instead I just thanked her, said yes, I would and took her money. There’s honest and then there’s stupid, after all.
“By the way,” I asked her as she took me back to the front door, “what kind of doctor is your brother, exactly?”
“He’s a Jungian psychiatrist. He specializes in devising therapy to repair what he calls ‘antisocial disinhibitions.’ That’s as much of it as I understand, I’m afraid. Why?”
“I was just wondering.” I thought of asking her whether his patients ever concealed important information from him, the way my clients do from me. Then I decided that the answer had to be yes, and if it wasn’t she wouldn’t know anyway.
“Thanks for being open with me,” I said. “It’s a nice change of pace.”
“Just find my sister, Mr. Mickity. Please.”
The 17th Precinct is not the busiest in the city, but it’s busy enough. When I looked in on my way back to my office, Scott Tuttle, my ex-partner, was on two phones at once. He was a big guy with a head that had always looked too small for his body; now that he’d lost the last of his hair it looked even smaller. With a phone at either ear and a stack of reports up to his chin he looked like more of a prisoner than the guys in the cage at the back of the room.
I took a Post-it note off his desk, scribbled on it, and added it to the stack in front of him. It said, “Back in a minute. Help with fingerprint?” He glanced at the note and nodded.
My office was just two blocks away. I went over there, took the foil-wrapped package from my freezer, and carried it back to the precinct house. Scott was only on one phone now, and when I dropped the package on his desk, he looked at it and said, “I’ll call you back” to the person on the other end of the line. He hung up slowly.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“I want to run a print from it.”
I followed him into a back room where he got out a stamp pad, unwrapped the finger, and rolled it in the ink. Then he pressed it down firmly on a piece of white cardboard, his thumb pushing on the nail and rolling it slightly to either side. He lifted the finger carefully and used a paper towel to wipe it off.
“What the hell is this, Doug?”
“It’s a case.”
“A case.” He held the finger out to me. I didn’t really want to take it, but I took it. “This is what you work on now? Someone cuts off a woman’s finger and you carry it around in your pocket? I thought you left the force to get away from stuff like this.”
“I thought so, too.”
“So what happened?”
“You can’t get away from it,” I said. “It’s everywhere.” I wrapped the finger in the aluminum foil again.
“Jesus,” he said. “What a world.”
The library at 50th Street and Lexington was a one room wonder. To get there, you had to descend a flight of stairs into a subway station and then take a sharp left turn through a pair of doors so heavy I had trouble moving them. Past the doors was a windowless chamber with only enough room for six or seven rows of stacks, a checkout desk, and two computers. Whose idea it had been to cram a library in there, I don’t know.
But one had been crammed in, and because it was so close to my office, I was probably its best customer. Not for the books — for the computers. A computer can be kept in a broom closet; if it’s connected to the right source of information, it’s still the most powerful tool in the world.
I ran all the names I had through the machine. “Lila Dubois” came up blank. “Rachel Dubois” got me a few newspaper articles, including the notice in the Times from when she got married. I hadn’t realized that the Dubois family was as well known or as well-to-do as the article led me to believe. They weren’t Rockefellers, and Rachel had certainly married up when she wed the scion of the Hoeffler clan, but they weren’t exactly hurting for cash, either. Papa Dubois, the Times was careful to note, had been a prime source of funds for the Reagan reelection campaign. Mamma Dubois had the maiden name of Kelter, as in the Kelter Inn chain of hotels.
“Jerome Dubois” produced a long list of publications, including contributions to scholarly journals and books with impenetrable, forty-word-long titles. I dug up a few reviews of his work, one of which started, “If Jerome Dubois would spend more time in the real world and less in his head, he would surely have a different outlook on human psychology.” There was also an article in New York magazine on the city’s psychiatric establishment. The author of that article described Dubois as a “consummate theoretician” and “a zealous proponent of his ideas,” which ideas he called “reactionary and barbaric.”
I went to the stacks to see if I could find any of these reactionary and barbaric books, but that was asking too much. This branch hardly had two books to rub together, and neither was by Jerome Dubois.
Before logging off the computer, I also had it do a search on “Leon Culhane.” None of what it found surprised me. Fourteen arrests. Two convictions. References to him in articles in the Village Voice, the News, and the Post. No books with long titles. No contributions to scholarly journals.
I dialed the number Leon Culhane had given me and left a message for him saying that I wanted to talk to him. I didn’t have anything to tell him that couldn’t have waited, but I wanted him to know what I had done. He called back in about ten minutes.
“Have you found her?”
I hate that question. “Not yet, Mr. Culhane. The search is still young. You get any more fingers?”
“That isn’t funny.”
“It’s not meant to be. I think there’s a good chance you’ll be hearing again from the people who sent you the finger, especially since they didn’t send a note the first time. They didn’t send a note, did they?”
“No, they didn’t. I told you.”
“You did. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t found one since then.”
“No.”
I waited. Nothing came. “Okay, in that case, let me tell you where I’ve been.” I opened my notebook and made sure he could hear the pages turning. “I’ve talked to Jerome and Rachel. They don’t seem to like you very much.”
“Don’t fool yourself, Mickity — they don’t like you either.”
“I’m sure they don’t. But they seem to have a particular dislike for you.”
“What’s your point?”