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

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?