Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

Nobody Wins by Charles Ardai

Leon Culhane was one of those men you look at twice when they pass you on the street, the sort who looks as though he stepped off a poster for a horror movie once and couldn’t figure out how to step back on again. He had the kind of face that would scare small children, and more than a few adults.

When he came into my office, he had to duck, and even so, the top of his head brushed the lintel of the door. I offered him a seat across from me, but we could both see he wouldn’t fit in the chair. I only wished I had seen it before I had offered. He didn’t take offense; he just leaned one elbow on top of my filing cabinet, put his chin in his hand and started telling his story.

I tried to listen without looking. I tried to — I couldn’t. His face was flat, as though someone had smashed it with an iron, and when he talked, the words came out of a pair of lips that looked drawn on — they never moved. His eye sockets could have held golf balls with room to spare, and if there was an inch of skin on his face that wasn’t pocked with acne scars, I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t a face you wanted to look at, but it wasn’t a face you could do anything but look at, either.

When he came to a pause, I shook my head and asked him to start again. I hadn’t heard one word.

“Carmine Stampada gave me your name,” he said slowly, and this time I just looked down at my notepad and listened. “He said you know your way around a missing persons case, that you found his wife when she took off for the Keys.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I found her facedown in a swimming pool.”

“You found her,” he said. “Now I want you to find somebody for me. Her name is Lila, and she’s my fiancée. I have a picture that I’ll show you if you look up.”

I looked. He held out a four-by-five still of a lovely girl with auburn hair. I couldn’t imagine her marrying him in a million years. But imagining isn’t my job. I handed the photo back. “Attractive,” I said.

He nodded. “Three days ago she told me she was going to her brother’s for the weekend. She was supposed to be home this morning. She never showed up.”

I looked at my watch. It was I only twelve thirty. “Maybe I she’s stuck in traffic.”

“Maybe she is,” he said, “but the traffic’s not on the way home. I called her brother, and he never saw her. He didn’t know anything about her coming for the weekend.”

I thought I knew what he was implying. “You think she—” how to put this delicately? “—headed for the Keys?”

He shook his head. “Not Lila.”

“So what do you think happened?” I asked.

He squeezed his hands together, cracking some knuckles. “I think someone took her.”

“And why do you think that?”

“I think that, Mr. Mickity, because when I woke up I found this on my doorstep.” He reached into a jacket pocket, pulled out a velvet-covered jewelry box, and placed it on my desk. I had a feeling there was more in it than jewelry.

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.”

“Neither am I — nevertheless, I am spending the time. I am answering your questions to the best of my ability. I do not know where Lila is. That question I cannot answer. But if you have others, by all means ask them. I may not satisfy you, but it will not be because I am unwilling to cooperate.”

“What do you think happened to your sister?”

Leon raised his shoulders and let them fall. “I don’t know.”

“I said what do you think happened. You don’t know what you think?”

“I think she is fine.”

“Why?”

“Because she is always fine.”

“But she’s missing.”

“She has been missing before.”

“When?”

Jerome shrugged again. “Now and again.”

“When?”

“When she was a teenager, Lila would disappear for days at a time. She would go off without telling anyone where she was going. Then, a week later, she would return and tell us all about it: I went to the Hague! I went to Bourbon Street for Mardi Gras! Vanishing is nothing new for Lila.”

“When was the last time she took off like that?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Would Rachel?”

“She might.”

I stood up, put my hat back on, and walked myself to the door. Dubois followed me with his eyes only. “I am sorry that I can be of no more help,” he said.

“No, you’re not,” I said. “Don’t lie. You don’t do it well.”

“You have a great deal of hostility, Mr. Mickity. Why is that?”

I opened the door and walked out. The door didn’t swing shut on its own — it wasn’t that kind of door — and I didn’t pull it closed behind me. I looked back and saw Dubois still sitting on the couch, his arms stretched wide along the top, his glass dangling from one hand.

I walked. He could close the door himself, or he could let the flies in, I didn’t care.

Rachel Dubois looked a lot like her sister, or at least like the photo of her sister Culhane had shown me. The same color hair, though Rachel’s was cut short, and the same long, old-money face. Pretty, but offputting to a guy like me, and I’d have thought to a guy like Culhane as well. I couldn’t imagine Culhane planting a kiss on lips like those with lips like his.

Rachel was a little friendlier than her brother had been. She took my hat and hung it on a brass peg, and then she took my coat and passed it to a tall man in a suit that hung on him like a shroud. She didn’t introduce us, and he didn’t make eye contact. I asked about him when we sat down.

“Oh, that’s Maren,” Rachel said, taking a second to dredge the man’s name out of memory. “He’s our valet. We couldn’t function without him.”

“We?”

“My husband and I.”

I looked around. The walls were covered with portraits, but the only man in any of them was Dr. Jerome. “Your husband live here with you?”

Rachel smiled. “Certainly. But he never paints himself.”

“Your husband is a painter?”

Color rose to her cheeks. “No. My husband paints.” By which she meant, A painter is someone who paints for a living. My husband doesn’t do anything for a living.

“What does he do when he’s not painting?” I asked.

“What does anyone do? What do you do when you’re not...” The blush returned as she remembered that she was speaking with a member of the working class. “I suppose he reads. He chairs committees. He spends time with me.”

“Does he spend any time with your sister?”

“Some.”

“Does he spend time with Leon Culhane?”

“No.”

“Will he, once they are married?”

A little shudder passed through Rachel’s shoulders. “Lila will always be welcome here.”

If she ever turns up, I thought. “Will Leon?”

“Excuse me?”

“Will Leon always be welcome here, too?”

“I will not bar my door to any member of my family, by blood or by marriage. But he will not be welcome. I’m sorry, Mr. Mickity. I imagine it sounds awful to you. I simply do not feel comfortable with that man.”

It didn’t sound awful to me at all. I’d have been surprised if she had felt comfortable with him.

“Lila is a headstrong child,” she said, in an almost maternal tone. “She will have her way, whether the rest of us like it or not. She will marry that man — there is no way around it now — and she will suffer.”

“Suffer? How?”

“Men like that make people suffer,” she said. “That’s their role in life. Don’t think it doesn’t extend to their families.”

I thought of Dahlia Stampada, who ran away with a pug-nosed sweet-talker whose sole redeeming feature was that he didn’t beat her up the way Carmine did. When he found out that Carmine was on his trail, he had shot her in the head and left her in a swimming pool. But at least he hadn’t beat her up.

I remembered Carmine’s expression when I told him that Dahlia was dead: no regret, no anger, just a sort of facial shrug. Dead was better than missing, since missing you can do with another man but dead you do alone.

And Leon had gotten my name from Carmine Stampada.

“You’re right,” I said. Rachel’s eyes opened a little wider at that, as though she felt a sudden need to reappraise me. “Leon Culhane is not the kind of man I’d want my sister marrying.”

“That’s very frank of you.”

I shrugged. “I’m always honest. In my business, it doesn’t pay to be a liar.”

“If you feel that way about Culhane, why are you working for him?”

“I don’t have a sister,” I said. “I have nothing to worry about.”

Rachel led me upstairs via a thickly carpeted staircase that made no sound at all when we climbed it. I think it was the first time in my life that I had climbed stairs that didn’t creak.

The hallway was hung with more of Rachel’s husband’s paintings. The style was bland and conservative, the way you would have expected it to be. Horseriding foxhunters. Landscapes in the Everglades. Storm clouds over the Cape. At least the horses looked like horses and the clouds looked like clouds.

Rachel opened a door at the end of the hall and took me into a room furnished with a bed, a writing desk, a telephone, and a large dresser. The room was bigger than my office. “This is where Lila stays when she’s here.”

“When was she here last?”

“In June.”

“How often did she normally come?”

“About once a month.”

“Don’t you think it’s odd that you haven’t seen her in three months?”

“Yes, I do. But a great deal has been odd since she started seeing Culhane. This is the least of it.”

“Oh? What else?”

“Phone calls during which she sounded as though she was about to break into tears, but wouldn’t admit that anything was wrong. Letters we would get from her that said things like, ‘Darling, Leon and I are so wonderfully happy together!’ She was trying to put on a good face, but she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. I could tell she was unhappy.”

“Why did she stay? Was she afraid of leaving him?”

“Wouldn’t you be? She probably was. But really it didn’t matter. You see, she’s taken her stand with us, and she’d sooner go through all sorts of unhappiness with him than admit she was wrong. She’ll go through with the marriage now no matter how wrong she knows it is, because she told us she would.”

“Except that now she’s missing,” I said.

Rachel didn’t say anything for a second. “Yes, except for that.”

“Do you know where your sister is?”

“No.” It sounded like the truth, unfortunately.

“Your brother said that Lila has disappeared before, when she was younger. She went to New Orleans, he said.”

“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?”

“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.

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?

“I did. Cover to cover. Didn’t get all the fine points, I admit, but the generalities sank in very nicely, thank you. Do you think I could come in?”

He stepped back from the door. “Suit yourself.”

I suited myself and shut the door behind me. Jerome retreated to the couch. He did not offer me a drink this time. Maybe something in my eyes told him not to.

“Has Lila come back?” he said.

“I think I’ve found her.”

“Really?” Jerome drummed his fingers on the back of the couch. “Delightful. I’m very glad to hear it. Please ask her to telephone sometime and tell me all about where she has been.”

I shook my head. “Why bother? I told you you’re a terrible liar.”

“What am I lying about?”

“What are you lying about? Mister, if you told me your name, I’d want to see a birth certificate to confirm it.”

Jerome extended a finger toward the door. “On second thought, no, you can’t come in. Get out of my house.”

“What, and skip my lecture?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Case study: Jerome D.,” I said. “Here we have a respected doctor from a more than respectable family. He didn’t marry into money the way one sister did, but he went to a prestigious medical school and he has plenty to keep himself fed and clothed.”

“Get out of my house.”

“Jerome and his two sisters received the best of everything and, what’s more, they had identical upbringings. So how could it have happened that while two of the siblings turned out as might have been predicted one went so horribly wrong?”

“If you don’t get out this second, I’m calling the police.” He grabbed the phone.

“Put the phone down,” I said. His face went pale. I raised my gun to chest level. “I have six bullets in here, and I only need one. I’d go to jail, but so what? I’ve been there before.”

Jerome’s hand, suddenly a bloodless white, was still clenched around the receiver. We could both hear the dial tone’s purr.

“Put the phone down. Or do you want to bet on whether I could miss six times at this range?”

He put the phone down.

“Now sit down.”

He sat down.

“Case study: Lila D.,” I continued. “A thankless little renegade from adolescence on. Ran away on pappa’s charge card while Jerome and Rachel were behaving the way proper young adults should. Ran away to New York City and almost got herself raped. Took up with a Mafia thug. Lost her blueblood virginity to a man almost twice her age whose profession is making people beg for him to stop. Had the temerity to fall in love with this man and to be suckered by his sly impersonation of a normal human being. Wouldn’t be talked out of it for love or money — and you probably tried both. What could account for this? How could one third of the same seed that bred you turn out so... so... dare I say, crazy?”

Sweat was pooling around the collar to Jerome’s robe. His hands were at his sides. His eyes were riveted on my gun.

“I know what happened, Jerome. It isn’t that hard to figure out.

“You tried to reason with her. You suggested she seek help. You tried to make her aware of the obvious insanity of her plan. How could a sane woman dream of marrying Leon Culhane? But she wouldn’t budge. She insisted that she loved him.

“So you invited her down here for the weekend, and when she arrived, you did what any good psychiatrist would do, if only — how did you put it?” I opened the book and found the page I was looking for. “ ‘If only proven therapeutic methods had never to answer to the sobbing, pitiful wail we call conscience, then psychiatry would no longer be a hobbled science. It is as though we asked a surgeon, prior to his making the initial incision, to pause to consider whether he would want himself similarly cut open. Steps must be taken; the ill must be cured; nothing should stand in the way.’ ”

I closed the book.

“Where is she? Where have you locked up your sister, doctor?”

“You are wrong.” He spoke in a whisper.

“Don’t make me search this place, or you won’t recognize it when I’m—”

“She is not here,” he whispered. “Search if you like.”

“Then where? Did you stick her in one of the hospitals you consult with?” I aimed the gun at his legs. “I’m no Leon Culhane, but I think I can figure out how he gets people to tell him things before they die. I might make a mistake, and hurt you more than I’d like to, but what can I say? I’m not an expert. Talk. You’ve got three seconds.”

He didn’t even wait for me to count to two. His head dropped, and I thought I saw tears well up in his eyes. I know I heard them in his voice.

“Your analysis was admirable,” he said. “You would make a good psychiatrist. But I am afraid your conclusion is incorrect. Yes, it was quite clear that Lila was afflicted. Unfortunately, in this case her madness threatened not only herself, but her sister and myself as well. It threatened the good name of my family. It threatened my professional reputation. Can you imagine what effect it would have on my standing in the community to have it known that my younger sister is insane? Even if I were treating her for it?” His voice was a ragged wail. “Never mind insanity — can you imagine what it would have meant for a Dubois to marry a gangster?”

Jerome rose slowly from the couch and extended his arms toward me, as though he expected me to slap a pair of handcuffs on him. “I didn’t abduct her. She came of her own free will. But she wouldn’t listen to reason. There was no other choice. I couldn’t risk incarcerating her. So I killed her.”

“Oh, please don’t say that.” Now I was the one whispering.

“I did,” Jerome said. “I forced myself to overcome my internalized inhibitions. I had to.”

“You poor man,” I whispered.

I closed the door behind me this time.

Leon Culhane arrived at my office a little after eleven. I had my radio on. When he came in, I turned it down low. I didn’t turn it off. Somehow I didn’t want mine to be the only voice in the room.

I hauled out the foil-wrapped finger and showed him the printout Scott had given me. The finger belonged to Liana Hanover, daughter of Anthony and Sheila. According to police records, the Hanovers had reported their daughter missing two weeks earlier. According to the newspaper articles I’d found in the library, the parents had had no contact from the kidnappers.

Except that they had — the kidnappers had just left their grisly package on the wrong doorstep by mistake. And had they left a note with it, one that blew away in the morning wind? Who knows?

I told Leon that I would be sending the finger to Arthur Chase and that I would leave his name out of it.

Leon listened to this impassively. It was not Lila’s finger; this was good. But maybe in my voice he could hear that this was the last of the good news, because he showed no relief.

I told him.

I told him the whole story, I showed him Jerome’s book, I explained what had been going through Jerome’s head. Culhane stared me in the eyes through every word of it, showing no sign of anger, grief, or pain.

After a while I ran out of things to say.

“Job well done, Mr. Mickity,” he said. “You earned your money.” He turned to leave.

I stopped him at the door with a hand at the small of his back. I felt him recoil at my touch. “Please,” I said, looking up into his enormous eyes, “don’t hurt him too much.”

“I couldn’t possibly hurt him too much,” he said.