“I hope not. I don’t think there will be. But, I’ll give you this, it’s pretty strange.”
“Yeah and not the sort of publicity we’re looking for.”
“I don’t know, you could probably get a sellout crowd showing up just to see if anything was going to happen. People dig this weird shit, look at all the folks into the whole vampire thing,” I said, then sipped.
“That is so not the sort of fans we’re looking for. We’ve worked really hard to get beyond the image of strippers on roller skates and then something like this comes along.”
“Maybe it’s someone who gets their kicks getting headlines, you know their fifteen minutes of fame sort of deal. If that doesn’t happen, if you keep it quiet, maybe the guy will just go away.”
“Or get more aggressive,” she said.
“There is that.”
“Who would let some guy cut off their finger?” she said, then shuddered swallowing her beer.
“I’ve been thinking about that. At first I was thinking, it’s him, you know some nut case doing it to himself but there are too many middle fingers for one guy. Then, I thought maybe homeless people, druggies, but that seems sort of far fetched. I’m guessing someone with ready access.”
“Ready access? To fingers? You gotta be kidding. How does that work?”
“Maybe it’s someone who works in a hospital or a morgue or a funeral home, something along those lines.”
“Oh, that’s comforting.”
“Just thinking out loud.”
“You hear back from Miss Cosmopolitan?” she asked, moving quickly away from the subject of fingers.
“No, not really interested,” I said. I saw no benefit admitting I heard Carol’s stupid French phone message. I could only hope little old Nicholas was just that, little.
“Need a hug?”
“What?”
“Get over here, stupid,” she said and took her glasses off.
Chapter Five
“I wrote the Hustlers’ phone number on the back of my card, here,” Justine said, then pushed her card next to my coffee cup. It was almost six in the morning and if I was going to be up at this hour I was in desperate need of coffee and lots of it.
Justine was already dressed in blue hospital scrubs, doing something to her eyes using a brush and a mirror while she sat at her kitchen counter.
“Jimmy is the manager’s name, if he’s not the guy to talk to he’ll know who is. He’s a little hard to understand, you know, the accent.”
“I’ll give him a call this morning. They flying in tomorrow?”
She glanced over at me.
“No, they’re on a team bus, coming out of Denver. They’re probably west of Omaha right now, somewhere in the middle of Nebraska.”
“Gee, the romance of show biz.”
“Denver’s a nice town.”
“I wasn’t referring to Denver.”
“Oh yeah, that. We should be looking pretty good to them by the time they get up here. I just hope everything goes okay and nothing happens while they’re in town.”
“I’ll make sure nothing happens.”
“Let’s hope,” she said.
It was almost noon before I reached Jimmy McNaughton on his phone. I’d spent the morning forcing myself to work through the stack of job applications. Between Jimmy’s accent and phone coverage in the middle of Nebraska I could only make out about every third word he said. But I got the gist of it. He gave me the name of their hotel. When they expected to arrive and then casually added, “Looking forward to meeting you, mate. Had another little surprise waiting for us last night.”
“A surprise?”
“Taped to the door of the bus. An envelope addressed to Harlotte, another finger inside.”
“She okay?”
“Didn’t want to bother her about it.”
“What’d Denver police say?”
“Didn’t care to wait, to tell you the truth. The girls have a schedule to keep. We’d lose a day waiting for them to tell us I was right, it was a finger. You’d think your man would be running out of mates at this point.”
“How many does that make?”
“Four, that we know of.”
“All the middle finger?”
“Right.”
“You said four you know of, you think there may be more than that?”
“I’m not sure what to think.”
“Let me do some checking on this end, I’ll be waiting for you at the hotel.”
“Cheers,” Jimmy said and hung up.
“Homicide” the voice answered three minutes later.
“Detective Manning,” I said, against my better judgment.
“Who’s calling?”
“Devlin Haskell,” knowing this was bound to slow things up.
“Just a minute.”
I knew it wouldn’t be a minute, or two or even three. I waited for close to ten, was just about to hang up when he graced me with his voice.
“Manning.”
“Detective Manning, Devlin Haskell.”
“Oh, damn it, it’s you calling. I thought they said someone was calling you in DOA. My mistake,” he said, then cracked the ever present piece of gum into the phone.
“Sorry to ruin your day, Detective.”
“I’m used to it,” he said, not joking.
“Say, I just wanted to touch base with you. I’m providing security for an individual and she…”
“Security? You? She must be nuts.”
I ignored his comment.
“She’s been receiving threats for some time. The thing’s escalated to some nut case mailing her human fingers. She started receiving…”
“This that English Roller Derby broad, Harlotte Davidson?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact.”
“They’re heading our way from Denver?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re aware of it.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“Doing about it?”
“Yeah, is there a plan, are you putting extra people on?”
“Extra people? Have you read the damn newspapers or turned off the cartoons and watched the news the last couple years? We’re down by almost fifteen percent. Put some people on, gee, why didn’t I think of that? Tell you what, I’ll just walk over to the squad room, you know find a-half-dozen guys who are sitting around eating doughnuts and tell them to stand by. In fact, good thing you called, now you can tell them, here hang on a minute, just let me put you on speaker phone.”
“I’ll take that as a no, there isn’t a plan.”
“A plan, yeah I got a plan. We’re watching every post office, one of those envelopes comes in with no return address we’ll be the first to let you know.”
“They weren’t all mailed, the fingers.”
“You must be referring to Chicago where the guy slipped it under the door of the hotel room?”
“Not just Chicago, Detective.”
“You mean the envelope taped to the door of the bus in Denver last night? Checked out like all the others.”
“Have you guys thought of maybe running the fingerprint on the thing. I mean, does it strike you as strange you got four people missing a finger and no one has reported an assault or a body or a missing person or anything?”
“Wow, Sherlock, amazing you aren’t a cop with all those great ideas you have. Yeah, I think the various departments thought about running the fingerprint, just one problem, there isn’t one.”
“Isn’t one?”
“The finger print, it’s missing. Whoever’s doing this cuts off the finger tip. Anything else you care to add? Pardon the pun,” Manning chuckled at his humor.
“Do you have a plan?” I asked again, not sounding too sure.
“A plan? Yeah, I got a plan. Hope nothing happens here and that they’re all out of our jurisdiction sooner rather than later. How’s that sound to you, Haskell?”
“Sounds like a plan detective.”
“Always a pleasure,” he said, and hung up.
Chapter Six
Jimmy McNaughton and the Hastings Hustlers arrived about seven that night. They looked like you’d expect after riding on a bus for a thousand hours from Denver up to St. Paul, tired and cranky.
“Right, the girls will check in, meet in the lobby in an hour or so. I’d say that gives us just enough time to get acquainted over a pint. Lead on, mate,” Jimmy said, fleeing the checkin scene in the lobby and sounding like he could use a break from the ladies.