I went over and laid on the bed and looked at the patterns the water stains had made on ceiling and wall. What were they doing in town, anyway?
The person in the next room decided to take a shower. The wall behind me roared and thrummed with water.
I turned on the news. Dan Rather looked as psychotic as ever, just about ready, at last it seemed, to pick up a gun and shoot everybody on the set of Nightly News. All the time smiling that Norman Bates grin of his.
When I woke up, it was dark. M.A.S.H. was on. I’d clickered the volume down to 0 so it was a silent movie.
I knew exactly what I wanted to do, given the fact that Nora and Vic were following me around.
I got up, washed my face with a washcloth that smelled musty, went over to the phone and dialed Des Moines information.
I was surprised that Richard Tolliver had a listed number.
I called it. A maid answered. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tolliver has gone out for dinner.”
“I see. Would you ask him to call me later tonight?”
A suspicious hesitation. “May I ask what this is about?”
“Family matter. His family.”
“I see.” Pause again. “Do you know Mr. Tolliver?”
“No, I don’t, ma’am.”
“I see. All right, give me your telephone number, then.”
I gave her the number. “Room 115.”
“Room?”
“It’s a motel.”
“I see.” Prim disapproval. I’m sure she had a picture of me naked and rolling around on the bed with five or six equally naked ladies, all of us wearing tattoos and lamp shades.
“It’s important,” I said.
“I’ll see that he gets the message, sir. That’s all I can do.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Click.
I went in and washed up and changed into a blue button-down shirt that the cleaners had starched to razor-sharpness, dark slacks, dark ribbed cotton socks, the ones with the gold toes just as in my college days, and a red windbreaker in honor of James Dean. Sometime this year he’d be having a birthday. It seemed the least I could do.
I went over and peeked out the window. The Caddy was gone. It probably wasn’t much fun, killing time while the guy you were following caught a nap in his shabby little motel room.
I checked my watch.
Still had an hour to go before dinner.
I decided to make myself useful.
8
I drove to within a block of the McNally house, took my little black bag from the backseat and then worked my way down an alley so that I could watch the place from a relatively safe position.
Lights shone. I figured I would have to come back later, or even possibly tomorrow.
But then the downstairs lights clicked off.
Eve McNally came out the back door, moving quickly down the narrow walk next to clotheslines still hung with white sheets that smelled clean in the starry dusk.
I crouched behind the garbage cans and peeked through a dusty garage window.
She got into a new Ford sedan, worked the garage door gizmo, and then drove away.
I heard her tires crunch gravel as they headed west toward the mouth of the alley.
A few minutes later, I stood in her small but well-organized kitchen that smelled pleasantly of spices.
And stared into the sweet earnest face of her dog Sara. A little growl rattled in her throat and twice she let out a bark but when I got down on my haunches and put my hand out, she trotted over and I started petting her head. I almost hated to take advantage of her good nature this way. For the rest of the time, Sara followed me around, tail wagging.
The first floor was a living room, large bath, sewing room and the kitchen. Upstairs were three good-sized bedrooms, a room with a worn couch and an old Philco black-and-white portable 17" TV and a bookcase that leaned dangerously leftward. It was filled with battered paperbacks running to romance novels, which I’ve always considered to be science fiction for women. My otherwise-educated, beautiful and most-sophisticated wife had read them. I found her taste just as baffling as she found mine for private-detective novels. “They’re just as much make-believe as my romance novels are,” she’d always said. And she was probably right.
Nothing is what I found. Nothing at all useful, not in any way, nothing that told me why Eve McNally looked so depressed and anxious this afternoon, or burst into tears as soon as she’d closed the door behind me.
The woman had real problems but what were they?
I decided to try the basement, a large, dark, dusty room that would have made Bela Lugosi feel right at home.
The washer and drier were almost comically white and comically new against the backdrop of cobwebs and cracked plaster and rat droppings and empty battered coal bin of this basement.
There were several cardboard boxes filled with cobwebby mason jars of homemade preserves. I lifted each jar and looked under it. Nothing.
Thanks to all the dust in the air, my allergies kicked in. I spent a few minutes sneezing, blowing my nose and coughing hard enough to give myself a vague headache. I groped in my pocket for the antihistamine tablets I always carry, my allergies being what they are and all, and after taking two, and giving my flashlight a little nudge so that its waning batteries temporarily fed more juice to the bulb, I went back to my search.
There were drawers to be looked into, boxes to be opened and inspected, and an old metal desk that probably dated back to the forties to be gone through.
It was in the desk — bottom-right drawer if you really care — that I found the small white box, and in the small white box that I found the finger.
At first I thought it was fake. I have a nephew who is at that age when whoopee cushions and joy buzzers bedazzle the young mind. He once showed me a finger like this. As now, I started when I saw it. The difference was, it took me only a half-second to realize that Jamie’s was a fraud. This one, however, was real. Fake ones don’t come with cuts and bruises and the long red nail fiercely broken. Before this finger had been chopped off just below the lower joint, the woman to whom it belonged had put up a violent struggle.
The finger felt obscene in my hand, cold and inhuman.
I shone my light into the box and found the note. I used the edge of my handkerchief to extract the note — there might well be fingerprints on it — and set it down on the desk.
Neatly typed in the center was:
This is what happens to your daughter if I don’t get those tapes back. And if you go to the police, I’ll kill her.
There was no signature.
I replaced note and finger in box, put box back in desk, and was just turning toward the stairs when I heard a wooden step creak.
I shone my light up there.
Her eyes glowed like a cat’s.
Eve McNally, she was. And she held a carbine. And it was pointed directly at me.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said.
“Trying to help you.”
“Right,” she said. “Trying to help me.”
“I found the finger.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and I don’t care. I just want you out of my house.”
She told me much more in that last sentence than she meant to.