“My point is that they think that if something happened to Lila, you’re probably the one behind it. Now, I don’t believe that’s the case. But I want you to know that that’s what they’re saying.”
“I don’t care what they’re saying. All I care about is where Lila is.”
I flipped some more pages. “A friend of mine in the police department took the print from the finger. He’ll run it through the computer and see what comes up.”
“That won’t help,” Culhane said. “Lila never had her fingerprints taken.”
“No, I wouldn’t have thought she had. But maybe the person who lost that finger has. Assuming that it’s not Lila’s.”
“Oh.”
“Right: oh. We should have results on that in a day or two.”
“Fine. What else?”
He didn’t need to know I’d looked up his rap sheet. “That’s it,” I said. “I’ll let you know if anything happens. And you’ll call me if you get any more packages?”
“Yeah, I’ll call you.” He hung up. I took an Excedrin. It stuck in my throat, the way they always do when I’m too lazy to break them up. It took three shots of whisky to get it down.
I went to visit Carmine Stampada down on Mott Street. When I’d found his wife, he’d paid me handsomely and told me his door was always open. Since then, I’d never had a reason to see if that was true. This seemed like as good an occasion as any.
His face didn’t exactly light up when he saw me, but my arrival didn’t obviously make him unhappy, either. He disengaged from the conversation he was having with two slick-haired men who were about as tall and broad-shouldered as Leon Culhane and came over to pump my hand. I looked at the two men and suddenly realized how Leon must fit into this world. It was babysitting, all right — after a fashion.
The two bodyguards followed Carmine as he led me down the block to a trattoria called Intimo. They took a table near the front; we took one in the back.
“Sorry to bother you—”
“No bother. I needed to take lunch anyway. What can I do for you?”
“Leon Culhane,” I said.
Stampada nodded. “So he did go to you. That’s what I figured. When I saw you coming, I said to Jimmy, this is a good man, but I’ll bet he is not just coming to pass the time with us.”
“No, Mr. Stampada, I wouldn’t waste your time like that.”
“No waste, but go on.”
“Who is Leon?” I asked.
“Who is Leon? Leon and me, we grew up together. Just a couple of blocks away from here, in fact. Leon’s a good man.”
“What does he do for you?”
Stampada gave me a tight little smile. “I know you’re a trustworthy man, Douglas. But what a person does, you don’t discuss.”
“Does he do what Jimmy does, for instance.”
Stampada looked over at his bodyguards. I didn’t know which one was Jimmy, but it hardly mattered. “Leon’s older. He’s been through a lot more than Jimmy has. But yeah, more or less.”
“Do you have any idea how he met Lila Dubois?”
“Of course I do.”
A waiter arrived with two cups of espresso on his tray. He placed them on the table along with a glass of anisette for Stampada. Stampada took a sip from each.
“It was about — what? — five, six years ago? Six, I think. Leon was on his way home, it’s maybe one o’clock in the morning, and he passes this guy and this girl making out in a doorway. Nothing so unusual about that, right? So he walks on. But one thing Leon’s got is good hearing, and maybe five steps later he hears this girl making sounds and she does not sound like she is enjoying herself, you know what I mean? Now he could have kept walking. It’s a big city; lots of people in it and you can’t mind everyone’s business. But he didn’t keep walking. He turned around and went back.”
He took another sip of espresso. “The guy had a knife to her throat. When Leon pulled him off her, her neck was all bloody from little cuts. The guy hadn’t meant to cut her, but he was so excited he couldn’t help himself. He slashed Leon across the forearm, and let me tell you, I saw it afterwards, that cut was down to the bone. But Leon picked the guy up — this is with blood pouring down his arm, remember — and he smashed that little bastard against the wall so hard that if I took you there right now you could still see the marks.”
“God.”
“That’s how they met. A regular Harlequin love story, right? Leon took her home — his home — and they bandaged each other up. I didn’t see Leon for a week. Then she disappeared back to her Cadillacs and her Riverdale mansion and Leon came back to work. I thought that was the end of it. But they stayed in touch. Just this year they started seeing each other again. Now they’re supposed to be married.” He finished the anisette in one swallow. “And that’s the whole story.”
“Except now she’s missing and her family thinks Leon’s done something to her.”
“You tell them different. You tell them that’s impossible,” Stampada leaned forward. “Listen, I know this man, thirty-six years now I know this man, and this is a man who, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, has made more than one person wish he were dead. This goes no farther than this table, Douglas, but between you, me, and the lamp-post, Leon Culhane has done some things to some people that even make me uncomfortable. And I am not an easy man to make uncomfortable. But I’m telling you Leon Culhane would kill himself before he’d hurt that girl. And if anyone else did anything to hurt her... let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be in that man’s shoes for any amount of money.”
“So what do you think happened to her?”
“I have no idea.”
“Could it have been another woman, someone who was jealous of her? Someone who wanted Leon for herself?”
Stampada pointed to his bodyguards. “Look at Jimmy. There’s a boy who never has to go to bed alone. And Aldo, maybe he’s not so handsome, but he’s big, and ugly he ain’t. Those boys dress well, they comb their hair every day, they get looked at on the street. They carry big guns and they work for me. Now Leon carries a big gun and he works for me, but the only woman I ever saw look at him is Lila Dubois. Most people, when they see him, they just pray to God he’s not looking at them. Leon’s not a pretty sight, Douglas. He’s a damn good man, loyal, but he’s also ugly as sin. Until he met Lila, there’d never been any woman in Leon’s life — and if you don’t find her, I have a feeling there’s never going to be another.”
“Then could it be someone who’s trying to get at you?”
“What, through Leon?” Stampada shook his head. “Or did you mean someone who wants his job? No, then they’d just kill him. Or try to. Why take the girl?”
“Then who would have done it?”
“You’re the detective,” Stampada said. “If I could answer that, we should trade jobs.”
I got two things from Stampada before I left. The first was Leon Culhane’s address in Hoboken. The second was a promise that he wouldn’t tell Leon he’d given it to me. I didn’t want Leon to know I was poking around in his life.
On the bus over to Jersey I thought about what Stampada had told me. The man was not known for his honesty in general, but everything he’d said to me had the ring of truth. He’d had no reason to lie.
Culhane was as violent and unregenerate a sociopath as any I had met. That’s what Stampada had been telling me in his careful, delicate way. Here was a man who had no friends and no lovers, who’d spent his life feared and hated, and who had been good enough at what he did to earn the respect of one of the most violent capos in the Mob. Leon Culhane was probably a killer many times over, and worse things, too.
He was also in love.
Was this possible? Could it be that this monster was tame in the presence of Lila Dubois? Could Rachel have been wrong? Maybe. Maybe.