The bus let me off next to a video arcade. I crossed to the other side of the avenue, away from the beeps and lasers and the sound of quarters being gobbled up, and turned down a side street. All the houses here looked the same. This was the border between the good and the bad parts of Hoboken: good enough not to be slums, but not good enough to keep from being crammed with identical prefabs. Some of the houses had building numbers; others had lost theirs. I consulted the slip of paper on which I had written Leon’s address and made my way slowly down the block.
It was only by counting doorways that I figured out which one was 1317. It was a two story rectangular box with a cinder block foundation and pale blue siding. The roof was gabled, and the drainpipes were rusty. There were no curtains in the windows. The lawn was patchy, but well-kept.
There was a row of cars parked in the street, and I kept them between me and the house the first time I passed. I chanced a glance in one of the windows. I didn’t see anyone.
I went back, this time walking on the sidewalk, going slowly, looking in each window. The rooms looked comfortable, though they didn’t have much in the way of furniture. The kitchen was well stocked with sixpacks, and I saw a shotgun leaning against the refrigerator.
I rounded the corner, hoping to get a look at the rest of the house and maybe even find a way inside. Instead, I got a look at another shotgun, the twin of the one I had seen in the kitchen. This one was pointed directly at me. It was in the unsteady hands of a man who, though both tall and ugly, was not Leon Culhane.
“Step back, put your hands up, and don’t even think of trying to run,” he said.
I stepped back until my back was against the wall of the house. I put my hands up. I thought about trying to run but tried not to let it show. “My name is Douglas Mickity,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. I was hired by the owner of this house to—”
“Like hell you were,” the man said, jamming the barrel of the shotgun under my chin. “I’m the owner of this house, and you’re sure as hell not the P.I. I hired. Now you start talking or I’ll blow your head off.”
I felt the metal at my throat, pressing against my Adam’s apple. “I was looking for Leon Culhane’s house. Thirteen seventeen.” I opened my left hand and let him see the slip of paper in it. The shotgun wavered at my throat, brushing my chin. “Leon Culhane hired me to find his fiancée. That’s the truth.”
“So why do you want to go snooping around his house?”
“I don’t know.” My mind was racing for an acceptable answer. “To be thorough. To make sure he didn’t miss anything.”
“What agency do you work for?”
“I work for myself.”
“Take your I.D. out and show it to me,” he said. “Slowly.”
I did what he said. He looked at my driver’s license and my investigator’s license. Then he lowered his gun. I started to breathe again.
“Sorry,” he said. He turned away and started walking toward the back porch of his house.
“Hold on,” I called after him. “What did you mean ‘You’re not the P.I. I hired?”
“Just what it sounds like,” the man said. “I hired Arthur Chase. You’re not him. When you said you’re a detective, I thought maybe you work for him. But you don’t, so that’s that.” He opened the door and waited for me to leave.
“Can you at least tell me which house is Culhane’s?”
He nodded toward the house behind me.
“And your name?”
“None of your business.”
The door banged shut behind him.
I rubbed my throat. I could still feel where he had held the gun on me. I had accidentally miscounted houses, and for that simple mistake I had almost gotten killed. Scott’s words came back to me: Jesus, what a world. Two houses picked at random in Hoboken, New Jersey, and both of the owners had hired detectives, both had guns, both were willing to use them... No, it didn’t matter whether you were on the force or not. You couldn’t get away from it.
I went down the block to Culhane’s house. It was a little better furnished than the other house, his lot a little worse maintained. There was a small stack of mail at the front door. I looked through it. Most of the mail was addressed to Leon R. Culhane, but two envelopes were addressed to Howard Gross at 1319 and a supermarket circular was addressed to Sheila Hanover at 1315. So I had been speaking to Mr. Gross — or Mr. Hanover, if there was a Mr. Hanover.
There was more I could have done if I hadn’t been so jumpy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Mr. Shotgun, whatever his name was, was peeking out at me from between his Venetian blinds.
I took one last look at the doorstep where Culhane had found the finger and then I headed back to the bus stop.
My first stop in the city was at 41st Street and Fifth Avenue: the Mid-Manhattan Library. I used one of their computers for a few more database searches, and I found something under “Hanover” that caught my eye. It was a newspaper article from a few weeks back. I printed it out and took it with me.
But the main reason I was there was not for the computer. I went through the stacks until I came to the D’s. Of five books listed in the card catalogue, only one was on the shelf. I took it.
I also went back to the 17th Precinct. Scott dug through his files while I read the PBA announcements tacked above the Quik-Cool Ice Cream Bar Machine. Eventually he turned up the print match he’d run for me.
I promised Scott dinner at the restaurant of his choice. In return, he told me whose finger I had stashed in my office icebox.
It wasn’t Lila’s.
The book was fascinating. I tore through it the way some people read potboiler mysteries and others the sports pages.
Its title was Strategies for Mental Retrogression. The title was followed on the book’s cover by a subtitle of three or four lines, the gist of which was that psychology had taken a wrong turn some time around the middle of the century, and that we would all be better off if we stopped coddling the mentally ill and went back to reliable methods of treatment such as straitjackets, wet-ties, electric shocks, and lobotomies. It was a book calculated to shock and titillate its audience of white-coated academicians, whom I pictured reading it under the covers with a flashlight.
I didn’t understand half the words, which I’m sure was the point of his using them. The half I did understand kept adding up to such hogwash that I wanted to throw the book down the incinerator chute and start fresh with a good Robert Ludlum or Lawrence Block. But I didn’t. I made it all the way from the first chapter, about making the insane aware that they are insane, to the last, which said that if all methods of treatment were unsuccessful, one should incarcerate the mad person until, inevitably, new methods are developed.
The text was peppered with cheery anecdotes, most about well-intentioned but naive psychiatrists who started out by asking their patients for input into their therapy and ended up roasted on a spit, strangled with their stethoscopes, or chopped up into little bits. On the other side were case studies that showed how electroshock helped Clara S. lead a normal life and how being restrained for a solid year turned Allan G. into a productive citizen.
I took the book along with me on the train up to Riverdale.
When Jerome came to the door, I asked him to autograph it. He almost smiled, then saw that it was a library book and frowned. He stared into my eyes, as though trying to pry open my odd, aberrant psyche. “Is this a joke?”
“No joke. I read the book. It’s very impressive.”
“You read the book?” He said this in a tone that suggested that what he really wanted to say was, You can read?