Out on the Cutting Edge

3

I spent an hour or so that night going door-to-door in the rooming house, starting at the top floor and working my way down. A majority of the tenants were out. I spoke with half a dozen tenants and didn’t learn anything. Only one of the persons I talked to recognized Paula’s picture, and she hadn’t even realized Paula had moved out.

I called it quits after a while and stopped at the manager’s door on my way out. She was watching Jeopardy, and she kept me waiting until the commercial. “That’s a good program,” she said, turning the sound off. “They get smart people to be on that show. You have to have a quick mind.”

I asked which room had been Paula’s.

“She was in number twelve. I think.” She looked it up. “Yes, twelve. That’s up one flight.”

“I don’t suppose it’s still vacant.”

She laughed. “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t have any vacancies? I don’t think it was more than a day before I rented it. Let me see. The Price girl took that room on the eighteenth of July. When did I say Paula moved out?”

“We’re not sure, but it was the sixteenth when you found out she was gone.”

“Well, there you are. Vacant the sixteenth, rented the eighteenth. Probably rented the seventeenth, and she moved in the following day. My vacancies don’t last any time to speak of. I’ve got a waiting list right now with half a dozen names on it.”

“You say the new tenant’s name is Price?”

“Georgia Price. She’s a dancer. A lot of them are dancers the past year or so.”

“I think I’ll see if she’s in.” I gave her one of the photos. “If you think of anything,” I said, “my number’s on the back.”

She said, “That’s Paula. It’s a good likeness. Your name is Scudder? Here, just a minute, you can have one of my cards.”

Florence Edderling, her business card said. Rooms to Let.

“People call me Flo,” she said. “Or Florence, it doesn’t matter.”

Georgia Price wasn’t in, and I’d knocked on enough doors for the day. I bought a sandwich at a deli and ate it on the way to my meeting.

The next morning I took Warren Hoeldtke’s check to the bank and drew out some cash, including a hundred in singles. I kept a supply of them loose in my right front trouser pocket.

You couldn’t go anywhere without being asked for money. Sometimes I shook them off. Sometimes I reached into my pocket and handed over a dollar.

Some years back I had quit the police force and left my wife and sons and moved into my hotel. It was around that time that I started tithing, giving a tenth of whatever income I received to whatever house of worship I happened to visit next. I had taken to hanging out in churches a lot. I don’t know what I was looking for there and I can’t say whether or not I found it, but it seemed somehow appropriate for me to pay out ten percent of my earnings for whatever it gave me.

After I sobered up I went on tithing for a while, but it no longer felt right and I stopped. That didn’t feel right either. My first impulse was to give the money to AA, but AA didn’t want donations. They pass the hat to cover expenses, but a dollar a meeting is about as much as they want from you.

So I’d started giving the money away to the people who were coming out on the streets and asking for it. I didn’t seem to be comfortable keeping it for myself, and I hadn’t yet thought of a better thing to do with it.

I’m sure some of the people spent my handouts on drink and drugs, and why not? You spend your money on what you need the most. At first I found myself trying to screen the beggars, but I didn’t do that for long. On the one hand it seemed presumptuous of me, and at the same time it felt too much like work, a form of instant detection. When I gave the money to churches I hadn’t bothered to find out what they were doing with it, or whether or not I approved. I’d been willing then for my largesse to purchase Cadillacs for monsignors. Why shouldn’t I be as willing now to underwrite Porsches for crack dealers?

While I was in a giving mood, I walked over to Midtown North and handed fifty dollars to Detective Joseph Durkin.

I’d called ahead, so he was in the squadroom waiting for me. It had been a year or more since I’d seen him but he looked the same. He’d put on a couple of pounds, no more than he could carry. The booze was starting to show up in his face, but that’s no reason to quit. Who ever stopped drinking because of a few broken blood vessels, a little bloom in the cheeks?

He said, “I wondered if that Honda dealer’d get hold of you. He had a German name but I don’t remember it.”

“Hoeldtke. And it’s Subarus, not Hondas.”

“That’s a real important distinction, Matt. How’re you doing, anyway?”

“Not bad.”

“You look good. Clean living, right?”

“That’s my secret.”

“Early hours? Plenty of fiber in your diet?”

“Sometimes I go to the park and gnaw the bark right off a tree.”

“Me too. I just can’t help myself.” He reached up a hand and smoothed his hair back. It was dark brown, close to black, and it hadn’t needed smoothing; it lay flat against his scalp the way he’d combed it. “It’s good to see you, you know that?”

“Good to see you, Joe.”

We shook hands. I had palmed a ten and two twenties, and they moved from my hand to his during the handshake. His hand disappeared from view and came up empty. He said, “I gather you did yourself a little good with him.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I took some money from him and I’ll knock on some doors. I don’t know what good it’s going to do.”

“You put his mind at rest, that’s all. At least he’s doing all he can, you know? And you won’t soak him.”

“No.”

“I took a picture from him and had them run it at the morgue. They had a couple of unidentified white females since June, but she doesn’t match up to any of ’em.”

“I figured you’d done that.”

“Yeah, well, that’s all I did. It’s not police business.”

“I know.”

“Which is why I referred him to you.”

“I know, and I appreciate it.”

“My pleasure. You got any sense of it yet?”

“It’s a little early. One thing, she moved out. Packed everything and took off.”

“Well, that’s good,” he said. “Makes it a little more likely she’s alive.”

“I know, but there are things that don’t make sense. You said you checked the morgue. What about hospitals?”

“You thinking coma?”

“It could be.”

“When’d they hear from her last, sometime in June? That’s a long time to be in a coma.”

“Sometimes they’re out for years.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

“And she paid her rent the last time on the sixth of July. So what’s that, two months and a few days.”

“Still a long time.”

“Not for the person in the coma. It’s like the wink of an eye.”

He looked at me. He had pale gray eyes that don’t show you much, but they showed a little grudging amusement now. “ ‘The wink of an eye,’ “ he said. “First she checks out of her rooming house, then she checks into a hospital.”

“All it takes is a coincidence,” I said. “She moves, and in the course of the move or a day or two later she has an accident. No ID, some public-spirited citizen snags her purse while she’s unconscious, and she’s Jane Doe in a ward somewhere. She didn’t call her parents and tell them she was moving because the accident happened first. I’m not saying it happened, just that it could have.”

“I suppose. You checking hospitals?”

“I thought I could walk over to the ones in the neighborhood. Roosevelt, St. Clare’s.”

“Of course the accident could have happened anywhere.”

“I know.”

“If she moved, she could have moved anywhere, so she could be in any hospital anywhere in the city.”

“I was thinking that myself.”

He gave me a look. “I suppose you’ve got some extra pictures. Oh, that’s handy, with your number on the back. I suppose you wouldn’t mind if I sent these around for you, asked them all to check their Jane Does.”

“That would be very helpful,” I said.

“I bet it would. You expect a lot for the price of a coat.”

A coat, in police parlance, is a hundred dollars. A hat is twenty-five. A pound is five. The terms took hold years ago, when clothing was cheaper than it is now, and British currency pegged higher. I said, “You’d better look closer. All you got was a couple of hats.”

“Jesus,” he said. “You’re a cheap bastard, anybody ever tell you that?”

She wasn’t in a hospital, not in the five boroughs, at any rate. I hadn’t expected she would be, but it was the kind of thing that had to be checked.

While I was learning this through Durkin’s channels, I was walking down other streets on my own. Over the next several days I made a few more visits to Florence Edderling’s rooming house, where I knocked on more doors and talked to more tenants when I found them in. There were men as well as women in the building, old people as well as young ones, New Yorkers as well as out-of-towners, but the bulk of Ms. Edderling’s roomers were like Paula Hoeldtke — young women, relatively new in the city, long on hope and short on cash.

Few of them knew Paula by name, although most of them recognized her picture, or thought they did. Like her, they spent most of their time away from the rooming house, and when they were in their rooms they were alone, with their doors closed. “I thought this would be like those forties movies,” one girl told me, “with a wisecracking landlady and kids gathering in the parlor to talk about boyfriends and auditions and do each other’s hair. Well, there used to be a parlor, but they partitioned it years ago and made two rooms out of it and rented them out. There are people I nod to and smile at, but I don’t really know a single person in this building. I used to see this girl — Paula? But I never knew her name, and I didn’t even know she’d moved out.”

One morning I went over to the Actors Equity office, where I managed to establish that Paula Hoeldtke hadn’t been a member of that organization. The young man who checked the listings asked me if she’d been a member of AFTRA or SAG; when I said I didn’t know, he was nice enough to call the two unions for me. Neither of them had her name on their rolls.

“Unless she used another name,” he said. “Her name’s not utterly impossible, in fact it looks good in print, but it’s the sort of name a great many people would mispronounce, or at least be uncertain about. Do you suppose she went and changed it to Paula Holden or something manageable like that?”

“She didn’t say anything about it to her parents.”

“It’s not always the sort of thing you rush to report to your parents, especially if they have a strong attachment to their name. As parents often do.”

“I suppose you’re right. But she used her own name in the two shows she was in.”

“May I see that?” He took the playbills from me. “Oh, now this might be helpful. Yes, here we are, Paula Hoeldtke. Am I pronouncing it correctly?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Actually I can’t think how else you would pronounce it, but one feels uncertain. She could have just spelled it differently, H-O-L-T-K-Y. But that wouldn’t look right, would it? Let’s see. ‘Paula Hoeldtke majored in theater arts at Ball State University’—oh, the poor darling—‘where she appeared in The Flowering Peach and Gregory’s Garden.’ The Flowering Peach is Odets, but what the hell do you suppose Gregory’s Garden might be? Student work, that would be my guess. And that is all they’re going to tell us about Paula Hoeldtke. What is this, anyway? Another Part of Town, what a curious choice for a showcase. She played Molly. I barely remember the play, but I don’t think that’s a principal role.”

“She told her parents she had a small part.”

“I don’t think she exaggerated. Was there anyone in this? Hmmm. ‘Axel Godine appears with the permission of Actors Equity.’ I don’t know who he is, but I can furnish you with his phone number. He played Oliver, so he’s probably well up in years, but you never know in a showcase, the casting sometimes tends to be imaginative. Does she like older men?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s this? Very Good Friends. Not a bad title, and where did they do it? At the Cherry Lane? I wonder why I never heard of it. Oh, it was a staged reading, it only had one performance. Not a bad title, Very Good Friends, a little suggestive but hardly naughty. Oh, Gerald Cameron wrote it. He’s quite good. I wonder how she happened to be in this.”

“Is it unusual?”

“Well, sort of. You wouldn’t have open auditions for this sort of thing, I wouldn’t think. You see, the playwright very likely wanted to get a sense of how his work would play, so he or the designated director got hold of some suitable actors and had them walk through it onstage, possibly in front of prospective backers, possibly not. Some staged readings these days are fairly elaborate, with extensive rehearsals and a fair amount of movement onstage. In others the actors just sit in chairs as if they were doing a radio play. And who directed this? Oh, we’re in luck.”

“Someone you know?”

“Indeed,” he said. He looked up a number, picked up a phone and dialed it. He said, “David Quantrill, please. David? Aaron Stallworth. How are you? Oh, really? Yes, well I heard about that.” He covered the mouthpiece and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “David, guess what I’ve got in my hand. No, on second thought don’t bother. It’s a playbill for a staged reading of Very Good Friends. Did that ever get past the staged reading stage, as it were? I see. Yes, I see. I hadn’t heard. Oh, that’s too bad.” His face clouded, and he listened in silence for a moment. Then he said, “David, why I’m calling is there’s a fellow with me now who’s trying to find one of the actors from the reading. Her name’s Paula Hoeldtke and it says here that she read Marcy. Yes. Can you tell me how you happened to use her? I see. Well, look, do you suppose my friend could come and have a word with you? He’ll have some questions to ask. It seems our Paula has vanished from the face of the earth and her parents are predictably frantic. Would that be all right? Good, I’ll send him right over. No, I don’t think so. Shall I ask him? Oh, I see. Thank you, David.”

He put the phone down, pressed the tips of two fingers against the center of his forehead, as if trying to suppress a headache. With his eyes lowered he said, “The play hasn’t been performed because Gerald Cameron wanted to revise it after the reading, and he hasn’t been able to do so because he’s been ill.” He looked at me. “Very ill.”

“I see.”

“Everyone’s dying. Have you noticed? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to do this. David lives in Chelsea, let me write down the address for you. I assumed you’d rather ask him questions yourself than have me try to function as an intermediary. He wanted to know if you were gay. I told him I didn’t think so.”

“I’m not.”

“I suppose he only asked out of habit. After all, what difference could it make? Nobody does anything anymore. And it’s not as though you have to ask who’s gay and who isn’t. All you have to do is wait a few years and see who’s still alive.” He looked at me. “Have you been reading about the seals?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know,” he said. “The seals.” He pressed his elbows against his ribs, clapped his hands together like flippers, and tilted his head to mime a seal balancing a ball on its nose. “In the North Sea, and all along the European coastline. The seals are dying and nobody knows why. Oh, they’ve isolated a virus, but it’s been around for ages, it’s the one that causes distemper in dogs, and it’s not as though some rott-weiler’s been racing around biting seals. The best guess seems to be that it’s pollution. The North Sea is badly polluted, and they think this has weakened the immune systems of the seals, leaving them with no defense against whatever virus comes along. Do you know what I think?”

“What?”

“The earth has AIDS. We’re all whirling merrily through the void on a dying planet, and gay people are just doing their usual number, being shamelessly trendy as always. Right out in front on the cutting edge of death.”

David Quantrill had a loft on the ninth floor of a converted industrial building on West Twenty-second Street. It consisted of one enormous high-ceilinged room, the wide board floor painted a glossy white, the walls matte black and sparsely hung with vivid abstract oils. The furniture was white wicker, and there wasn’t a great deal of it.

Quantrill was in his forties, pudgy and mostly bald. What hair remained he wore long, curling over his collar. He fussed with a briar pipe and tried to remember something about Paula Hoeldtke.

“You have to remember that it was almost a year ago,” he said, “and I never laid eyes or ears on her before or since. Now how did she wind up in Friends? Somebody knew her, but who?”

It took him a few minutes to prod the memory loose. He had cast another actress as Marcy, a woman named Virginia Sutcliffe. “Then Ginny called me, very last minute, to say she’d just gotten a call to do two weeks in Seesaw in some goddam place. Baltimore? It doesn’t matter. Anyway, much as she loved me, et cetera, et cetera. She said there was a girl in a class with her who she swore was just right for Marcy. I said I’d see her, and she came down and read for me, and she was all right.” He picked up the photograph. “She’s pretty, isn’t she, but there’s nothing genuinely arresting about her face. Or her stage presence, but she was adequate, and I didn’t have the time to chase around the kingdom with a glass slipper, searching for Cinderella. I knew I wouldn’t be using her in the actual production. I’d cast Ginny for that, if she turned out to have the right chemistry with the rest of the cast, and assuming I’d forgiven her by then for deserting me and traipsing off to Baltimore.”

I asked how I could reach Ginny. He had a number for her, and when it didn’t answer he called her service and learned that she was in Los Angeles. He called her agent, got a number for her in California, and called it. He chatted with her for a moment or two, then put me on.

“I barely remember Paula,” she said. “I knew her from class, and I just had the thought that she’d be right for Marcy. She has this awkward, tentative quality. Do you know Paula?” I said I didn’t. “And you probably don’t know the play, so you wouldn’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I never saw her after that, so I didn’t even know David had used her.”

“You were in an acting class with her?”

“That’s right. And I didn’t really know her. It was an improv workshop led by Kelly Greer, two hours every Thursday afternoon in a second-floor studio on upper Broadway. She did a scene, two people waiting for a bus, that I thought was pretty good.”

“Was she close to anyone in the class? Did she have a boyfriend?”

“I really don’t know any of that. I can’t remember ever having an actual conversation with her.”

“Did you see her after you got back from Baltimore?”

“Baltimore?”

“I thought you went there for two weeks to be in a play, and that was why you couldn’t do the reading.”

“Oh, Seesaw,” she said. “That wasn’t two weeks in Baltimore, it was a week in Louisville and a week in Memphis. At least I got to see Graceland. After that I went home to Michigan for Christmas, and when I got back to New York I fell into three weeks of work in a soap, which was a godsend, but it took care of my Thursday afternoons. By the time I was free again there was an opening in one of Ed Kovens’s classes, and I’d been wanting to study with him for a long time, and I decided I’d rather do that than more improv work. So I never did see Paula again. Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“It’s possible. You said her teacher was Kelly Greer?”

“That’s right. Kelly’s number’s in my Rolodex, which is on my desk in New York, so that’s no help to you. But I’m sure it’s in the book. Kelly Greer, G-R-E-E-R.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to find him.”

“Her. I’d be surprised if Paula’s still studying with her. You don’t usually stay in the same improv workshop forever, it’s usually a few months and out, but maybe Kelly will be able to tell you something. I hope Paula’s all right.”

“So do I.”

“I can picture her now, groping her way through that scene. She seemed — what’s the word I want? Vulnerable.”

Kelly Greer was an energetic little gnome of a woman. She had a mop of gray curls and enormous brown eyes. I found her in the book and reached her at her apartment. Instead of inviting me up she arranged to meet me in a dairy restaurant on Broadway in the low Eighties.

We sat at a table in front. I had a bagel and coffee. She ate an order of kasha varnishkes and drank two tall glasses of buttermilk.

She remembered Paula.

“She wasn’t going anyplace,” she said. “I think she knew it, which put her ahead of most of them.”

“She wasn’t any good?”

“She was all right. Most of them are all right. Oh, some of them are hopeless, but most of the ones who get this far have a certain amount of ability. They’re not bad. They may even be good, they may even be fine. That’s not good enough.”

“What else do you need?”

“You need to be terrific. We like to think it’s a matter of getting the right breaks, or being generally lucky. Or knowing the right people, or sleeping with the right people. But that’s not really what does it. The people who succeed are superb. It’s not enough to have some talent. You have to be positively bursting with it. You have to light up the stage or the screen or the tube. You have to glow.”

“And Paula didn’t.”

“No, and I think she knew it, or at least half knew it, and what’s more I don’t think it broke her heart. That’s another thing, besides the talent you have to have the desire. You have to want it desperately, and I don’t think she did.” She thought for a moment. “She wanted something, though.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure she knew. Money? Fame? That’s what draws a lot of them, especially on the West Coast. They think acting’s a way to get rich. It’s about the least likely way I can think of.”

“Is that what Paula wanted? Money and fame?”

“Or glamour. Or excitement, adventure. Really, how well did I know her? She started coming to my classes last fall and she kept coming around for five months or so. And she wasn’t religious about it. Sometimes she didn’t show up. That’s common enough, they have work or an audition or something that comes up.”

“When did she quit?”

“She never quit formally, she just ceased to appear. I looked it up. Her last class was in February.”

She had names and phone numbers for a dozen men and women who had studied with her at the same time as Paula. She couldn’t remember if Paula had had a boyfriend, or if anyone had ever picked her up after class. She didn’t know if Paula had been especially friendly with any of her classmates. I copied down all the names and numbers except for Virginia Sutcliffe, to whom I’d already spoken.

“Ginny Sutcliffe said Paula did an improvisational scene at a bus stop,” I said.

“Did she? I use that situation a lot. I can’t honestly say I recall how Paula did with it.”

“According to Ginny, she had an awkward, tentative quality.”

She smiled, but there was no joy in it. “ ‘An awkward, tentative quality,’ “ she said. “No kidding. Every year a thousand ingenues descend upon New York, awkward and tentative as all hell, hoping their coltish exuberance will melt the heart of a nation. Sometimes I want to go down to Port Authority and meet the buses and tell them all to go home.”

She drank her buttermilk, took up her napkin and dabbed at her lips. I told her Ginny had said that Paula had seemed vulnerable.

“They’re all vulnerable,” she said.

* * *

I called Paula’s acting classmates, saw some of them face to face, spoke with others on the phone. I worked my way through Kelly Greer’s list, and at the same time I kept knocking on doors at Flo Edderling’s rooming house, crossing off names on my list of uninterviewed tenants.

I went, as my client had previously gone, to the restaurant that was Paula’s last known place of employment. It was called the Druid’s Castle, and it was an English pub-style place on West Forty-sixth. They had dishes like shepherd’s pie on the menu, and something called toad-in-the-hole. The manager confirmed that she’d left in the spring. “She was all right,” he said. “I forget why she quit, but we parted on good terms. I’d hire her again.” There was a waitress who remembered Paula as “a good kid but sort of spacey, like she didn’t really have her mind on what she was doing.” I walked in and out of a lot of restaurants in the Forties and Fifties, and two of them did turn out to be places where Paula had worked prior to her stint at the Druid’s Castle. This was information that might have been useful if I’d planned on writing her biography, but it didn’t tell me much about where she’d gone in mid-July.

In a bar at Ninth and Fifty-second, a place called Paris Green, the manager allowed that she looked familiar but said she’d never worked there. The bartender, a lanky fellow with a beard like an oriole’s nest, asked if he could see her picture. “She never worked here,” he said, “but she used to come in here. Not in the past couple of months, though.”

“In the spring?”

“Had to be since April because that’s when I started here. What was her name again?”

“Paula.”

He tapped the photo. “I don’t remember the name, but this is her. I must have seen her in here five, six times. Late. She came in late. We close at two, and it was generally close to that when she came in. Past midnight, anyway.”

“Was she alone?”

“Couldn’t have been or I would have hit on her.” He grinned. “Or at least volleyed, you know? She was with a guy, but was it the same guy every time? I think so but I couldn’t swear to it. You have to remember that I never gave her a thought since the last time I saw her, and that’s got to be two months ago.”

“She was last seen the first week in July.”

“That sounds about right, give or take a week or two. Last time I saw her she was drinking salty dogs, they were both drinking salty dogs.”

“What did she usually drink?”

“Different things. Margaritas, vodka sours, maybe not that exactly but you get the general idea. Girl drinks. But he was a whiskey drinker and for a change he ordered up a saline canine, and what does that tell me?”

“It was hot out.”

“On the nose, my dear Watson.” He grinned again. “Either I’d make a good detective or you’d make a good bartender, because we both got the same place with that one. Can I buy you a drink on the strength of that?”

“Make it a Coke.”

He drew a beer for himself and a Coke for me. He took a small sip of his and asked what had happened to Paula. I said she’d disappeared.

“People’ll do that,” he said.

I worked with him for ten minutes or so, and by the time I was through I had a description of Paula’s escort. My height, maybe a little taller. Around thirty. Dark hair, no beard or moustache. A casual dresser, a sort of outdoors type.

“Like retrieving lost data from a computer,” he said, marveling at the process. “I’m remembering things I never even knew I knew. The only thing that bothers me is the thought that I might be making some of this up without meaning to, just to be obliging.”

“Sometimes that happens,” I admitted.

“Anyway, the description I gave you would fit half the men in the neighborhood. If he was even from the neighborhood, which I doubt.”

“You only saw him the five or six times he was with her.”

He nodded. “Add that to the hour they came in, I’d say he picked her up after work or she picked him up after work, or maybe they both worked at the same place.”

“And stopped here for a quick one.”

“More than one.”

“Was she a heavy hitter?”

“He was. She sipped, but she didn’t dawdle. Her drinks didn’t just evaporate. She didn’t show the booze, though. Neither did he. More evidence they worked someplace, and started their drinking here rather than finished it.”

He extended the photo. I told him to keep it. “And if you think of anything—”

“I’ll call the number.”

Dribs and drabs, bits and pieces. By the time I told my story at Fresh Start I’d spent over a week looking for Paula Hoeldtke, and I’d probably given her father a thousand dollars’ worth of time and shoe leather, even if I couldn’t point to a thousand dollars’ worth of results.

I’d talked to dozens of people and I had pages and pages of notes. I’d given out half of the hundred photos I’d had made up.

What had I learned? I couldn’t account for her movements after she’d disappeared from her rooming house in the middle of July. I couldn’t turn up any evidence of employment subsequent to the waitress job she’d left in April. And the picture I was beginning to develop was a good deal less sharply focused than the one I was handing out all over the neighborhood.

She was an actress, or wanted to be one, but she’d barely worked at all and had evidently stopped going to classes. She’d been in a man’s company at a local drinking establishment, late in the evening, perhaps half a dozen times in all. She’d been a loner, but she hadn’t spent much time in her room. Where did she go by her lonesome? Did she walk in the park? Did she talk to the pigeons?