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

“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.