Out on the Cutting Edge

5

The good weather held all weekend. Saturday I went to a ball game. The Mets and the Yankees had both had a shot at it. The Mets were still leading their division, in spite of the fact that nobody was hitting. The Yankees had slipped to six or seven out and it didn’t look as though they were going to turn it around. That weekend the Mets were in Houston for three games with the Astros. The Yankees were coming to the end of a home stand, hosting the Mariners, and I got to see Mattingly win it with a double down the line in the eleventh.

Coming home, I stayed on past my stop and rode down to the Village. I had dinner at an Italian place on Thompson Street, caught a meeting, made an early night of it.

Sunday I went over to Jim Faber’s apartment and watched the Mets on the cable sports channel. Gooden held the Astros to three scratch hits through eight innings, but the Mets couldn’t get any runs across for him, and Johnson pulled him in the top of the ninth for a pinch hitter, Mazzilli, who promptly flied out to deep short. “I think that was a mistake,” Jim said softly, and in the bottom of the ninth the Houston second baseman walked, stole second, and scored on a sharp single through the middle.

We ate at a Chinese restaurant Jim had been wanting to try, then went to a meeting at Roosevelt Hospital. The speaker was a shy woman with an expressionless face and a voice that didn’t carry past the first two rows. We were in the back and it was impossible to hear a word. I gave up trying and let my mind wander. I started thinking about the game and wound up thinking about Jan Keane and how she’d enjoyed going to ball games even though she had only a vague notion of what they were doing out there on the field. She told me once that she liked the perfect geometry of the game.

I took her to the fights once but she hadn’t cared for that. She said she found it all exhausting to watch. But she loved hockey. She had never seen a match until we went together, and she wound up liking it far more than I do.

I was glad when the meeting ended, and I went straight home afterward. I didn’t feel like being around people.

Monday morning I earned a couple of dollars. A woman who’d sobered up at St. Paul’s had moved in a few months ago with a fellow in Rego Park. He’d been sober at the time, but he’d slipped around for years, drifting in and out of the program, and he picked up a drink again shortly after they set up housekeeping. It took six or eight weeks and one good beating for her to realize that she’d made a mistake and that she didn’t have to go on taking it, and she’d moved back to the city.

But she’d left some things at the apartment and she was afraid to go back there by herself. She asked what I would charge to ride shotgun.

I told her she didn’t have to pay me. “No, I think I should,” she said. “This isn’t just an AA favor. He’s a violent son of a bitch when he drinks, and I don’t want to go out there without someone who’s professionally qualified to deal with that sort of thing. I can afford to pay you and I’ll be more comfortable doing it that way.”

She arranged for a cabbie named Jack Odegaard to run us out and back. I knew him from meetings, but I hadn’t known his last name until I read it on the hack license posted over the glove box.

Her name was Rosalind Klein. The boyfriend’s name was Vince Broglio, and he wasn’t a terribly violent son of a bitch that afternoon. He mostly just sat around chuckling ironically to himself and sucking on a longneck Stroh’s while Roz packed up a couple of suitcases and a brace of shopping bags. He was watching game shows on TV, using the remote control to hop back and forth between the channels. The whole apartment was littered with boxes of half-eaten pizza from Domino’s and those little white cartons of takeout food from Chinese restaurants. And empty beer and whiskey bottles. And overflowing ashtrays, and empty cigarette packs wadded up and tossed into corners.

At one point he said, “You my replacement? The new boyfriend?”

“Just along for the ride.”

He laughed at that. “Aren’t we all? Along for the ride, I mean.”

A few minutes later, without taking his eyes off the Sony, he said, “Women.”

“Well,” I said.

“If they didn’t have pussies there’d be a bounty on ’em.” I didn’t say anything, and he glanced my way, looking to read my expression. “Now that,” he said, “might be construed to be a sexist remark.” He had a little trouble getting his tongue around construed; and he got interested in the word and let go of his original train of thought. “Construed,” he said. “I gotta get construed, blewed and tattooed. My whole problem, see, is I got misconstrued once. How’s that for a problem?”

“It’s a pretty good one.”

“Let me tell you something,” he said. “She’s the one with a problem.”

Jack Odegaard drove us back to the city, and he and I helped Roz get her stuff into her apartment. Before the move she’d lived on Fifty-seventh a few doors from Eighth Avenue. Now she was in a high-rise at Seventieth and West End. “I had a big one-bedroom,” she said, “and now I’m in a studio, and my rent’s more than double what it used to be. I ought to have my head examined for letting go of my old place. But I was moving into a beautiful two-bedroom in Rego Park. You saw the apartment, if you can imagine what it looked like before the shit hit the fan. And if you’re going to commit to a relationship you have to show some faith in it, don’t you?”

She gave Jack fifty bucks for the trip and paid me a hundred for my hazardous duty. She could afford it, just as she could handle the higher rent; she made good money working in the news department of one of the TV networks. I don’t know what exactly she did there, but I gather she did it well.

I thought I might see Eddie at St. Paul’s that night but he wasn’t there. Afterward I walked down to Paris Green to talk to the bartender who’d recognized Paula Hoeldtke’s picture. I thought he might have remembered something, but he hadn’t.

The next morning I called the telephone company and was told that Paula Hoeldtke’s phone had been disconnected. I was trying to find out when this had happened and for what reason, but I had to go through channels before I could find somebody who was authorized to tell me. The service had been terminated at the customer’s request, a woman told me, and then asked me to hold the line for a moment. She returned to inform me further that there was an outstanding final balance in the customer’s favor. I asked how that could be; had she overpaid the final bill?

“She never received her final statement,” the woman told me. “She evidently didn’t leave a forwarding address. She had put down a deposit prior to installation, and the final bill came to less than the funds on deposit. In fact—”

“Yes?”

“According to the computer, she hadn’t paid anything since May. But her charges were low, so she still hadn’t exceeded the amount of deposit.”

“I see.”

“If she’ll supply us with her current address, we can forward the balance due to her. She may not want to be bothered, it only comes to four dollars and thirty-seven cents.”

I told her that was probably low on Paula’s list of priorities. “There’s one other thing you could help me with,” I said. “Could you tell me the exact date when she requested termination of service?”

“Just a moment,” she said, and I waited. “That was July twentieth,” she said.

That sounded wrong, and I checked my notebook to make sure. I was right — Paula had paid rent for the last time on the sixth, Florence Edderling had entered the room and found it empty on the fifteenth, and Georgia Price moved in on the eighteenth. That meant Paula would have waited a minimum of five days after quitting the premises before calling to have her telephone cut off. If she waited that long, why call at all? And, if she was going to call, why not provide a forwarding address?

“That doesn’t square with my figures,” I said. “Is it possible that she requested termination earlier and it took a few days before the order was carried out?”

“That’s not how it works. When we receive a disconnect order, we put it through right away. We don’t have to send somebody out to disconnect, you know. We do it electronically from a distance.”

“That’s strange. She’d already vacated the premises.”

“Just a minute. Let me punch it up on the screen again and see what it says.” I didn’t have a long wait. “According to this,” she said, “the phone was still in service until we received instructions to disconnect on 7/20. Of course there’s always the possibility of computer error.”

I had a cup of coffee and read through my notebook. Then I put through a collect call to Warren Hoeldtke at his auto showroom. I said, “I’ve run into a minor inconsistency here. I don’t think it amounts to anything, but I want to check it out. What I’d like to get from you is the date of your last telephone call to Paula.”

“Let me see. It was sometime in late June, and—”

“No, that was the last time you talked with her. But you called her several times after that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, and we were ultimately advised that the service had been disconnected.”

“But first there were some calls where you reached her answering machine. I want to know when the last one of those went through.”

“I see,” he said. “Gee. I’m afraid I haven’t got that kind of memory. It was toward the end of July when we took our trip, and right after we got back we called and learned the phone was disconnected, so that would have been the middle of last month. I think I told you all that.”

“Yes.”

“But as for our last call when we got the machine, that would have been before we left for the Black Hills, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you the date.”

“You’ve probably got a record.”

“Oh?”

“Do you keep your phone bills?”

“Of course. My accountant would have a fit if I didn’t. Oh, I see. I was thinking there would be no record of a call if we didn’t get through to her, but of course if the machine answered it would be a complete call. So it would be on our statement.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t have the paid bills here, I’m afraid. My wife will know right where they are, though. Do you have my home phone number?” I said I did. “Let me call her first,” he said, “so she’ll have everything at hand when you call.”

“While you’re at it, tell her I’ll be calling collect. I’m at a pay phone.”

“That’s no problem. In fact, I have a better idea. Give me the number of the pay phone and she can call you.”

I was calling from a phone on the street and I didn’t want to relinquish possession of it. After he rang off I stood there still holding the receiver to my ear so that I would look as though I were using the phone. I allowed a little time for Hoeldtke to reach his wife and another few minutes for her to thumb through her file of paid phone bills. Then, still holding the receiver to my ear, I hung one hand on the hook so she’d be able to get through to me when she called. A couple of times someone would linger a few yards away, waiting to use the phone when I got off it. Each time I turned and said apologetically that I expected to be a while.

The phone rang, though not before I’d begun to tire of my little exercise in street theater. I said hello, and a confident female voice said, “Hello, this is Betty Hoeldtke, and I’m calling for Matthew Scudder.” I identified myself and she said that her husband had told her what I was trying to determine. “I have the July statement in front of me,” she said. “It shows three calls to Paula. Two of them were two-minute calls and one was three minutes. I was just now trying to imagine how it could have taken three minutes to leave a message asking her to call us, but of course first we would have had to listen to her message, wouldn’t we? Although I sometimes think the phone company’s computers bill you for more minutes than you actually stay on the phone.”

“What were the dates of the calls, Mrs. Hoeldtke?”

“July fifth, July twelfth, and July seventeenth. And I looked up the June calls, and the last time we spoke with Paula was June the nineteenth. That’s on our statement because she would call us and we would call her back.”

“Your husband told me about the code you used.”

“I feel a little funny about it, although we weren’t really cheating the phone company out of anything. But it always seems—”

“Mrs. Hoeldtke, what was the date of the last call to Paula?”

“July seventeenth. She usually called on a Sunday, and July fifth when we first called and got the machine was a Sunday, and then the twelfth was a week later, and the seventeenth, let me see — twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen, Sunday Monday, Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday Friday — the seventeenth would have been a Friday, and—”

“You reached her answering machine on the seventeenth of July.”

“We must have, because that was the three-minute conversation. I probably left a longer message than usual to tell her that we were leaving for the Dakotas the middle of next week, and to please call us before we left.”

“Let me make some notes,” I said, and jotted down what she’d told me in my notebook. Something didn’t add up. All it very likely meant was that somebody’s records were wrong, but I would spend as much time as I had to ironing out the inconsistency, like a bank teller working three hours overtime to search out a ten-cent discrepancy.

“Mr. Scudder? What happened to Paula?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Hoeldtke.”

“I’ve had the most awful feeling. I keep having the thought that she’s—” The pause stretched. “Dead,” she said.

“There’s no evidence of that.”

“Is there any evidence that she’s alive?”

“She seems to have packed up and left her room under her own power. That’s a favorable sign. If she’d left her clothes in the closet I’d be less optimistic.”

“Yes, of course. I see what you mean.”

“But I can’t get much sense of where she may have gone, or what her life might have been like during the last few months she lived on West Fifty-fourth Street. Did she give any indication of what she was doing? Did she mention a boyfriend?”

I asked other questions in that vein. I couldn’t draw anything much out of Betty Hoeldtke. After a while I said, “Mrs. Hoeldtke, one of my problems is I know what your daughter looks like but I don’t know who she is. What did she dream about? Who were her friends? What did she do with her time?”

“With any of my other children that would be a much easier question to answer. Paula was a dreamer, but I don’t know what it was that she dreamed. In high school she was the most normal and average child you could imagine, but I think that was just because she wasn’t ready yet to let her own light shine. She was hiding who she was, and maybe from herself as well.” She sighed. “She had the usual high school romances, nothing very serious. Then at Ball State I don’t think she had a real boyfriend after Scott was killed. She kept—”

I interrupted to ask who Scott was and what had happened to him. He was her boyfriend and unofficial fiancé during her sophomore year, and he’d lost control of his motorcycle on a curve.

“He was killed instantly,” she remembered. “I think something changed in Paula when that happened. She had boys she was friendly with after that, but that was when she got really interested in theater and the boys were friends of hers from the theater department. I don’t think there was much question of romance. The ones she spent the most time with, my sense was that they weren’t interested in romance with girls.”

“I see.”

“I worried about her from the day she left for New York. She was the only one who left, you know. All my others stayed nearby. I kept it hidden, I didn’t let on to her, and I don’t think Warren had any idea how I worried. And now that she’s dropped off the face of the earth—”

“She may turn up just as abruptly,” I offered.

“I always thought she went to New York to find herself. Not to be an actress, it never seemed that important to her. But to find herself. And now my fear is that she’s lost.”

I had lunch at a pizza stand on Eighth Avenue. I got a thick square of the Sicilian and shook a lot of crushed red pepper onto it and ate it standing up at the counter, washing it down with a small Coke. It seemed quicker and more predictable than, say, walking down to the Druid’s Castle and finding out for myself what toad-in-the-hole was.

There was a noon meeting Tuesdays at St. Clare’s Hospital, and I remembered that Eddie had mentioned it as one he want to fairly regularly. I got there late but stayed right through to the prayer. He didn’t show up.

I called my hotel to see if there were any messages. Nothing.

I don’t know what made me go looking for him. Cop instinct, maybe. I’d been expecting to see him at St. Paul’s the night before and hadn’t. He could have changed his mind about doing his fifth step with me, or might simply have wanted more time to weigh the idea, and might have stayed away from the meeting to avoid encountering me before he was ready. Or he might have decided he wanted to watch something on television that night, or gone to another meeting, or for a long walk.

Still, he was an alcoholic and he’d been troubled, and those conditions could have inclined him to forget all the fine reasons he knew for staying away from a drink. Even if he’d started drinking, that was no call for me to go after him. The only time to help somebody is when he asks for it. Until then, the best thing I could do for him was leave him alone.

Maybe I was just tired of trying to cut the cold trail of Paula Hoeldtke. Maybe I went looking for Eddie because I figured he’d be easy to find.

Even so, it took some doing. I knew what street he was on but I didn’t know the building, and I didn’t much feel like going door-to-door trying to read the nameplates on doorbells and mailboxes. I checked a phone book to see if he was still listed in spite of his phone having been disconnected. I couldn’t find him.

I called an Information operator and identified myself as a police officer and made up a shield number. That’s a misdemeanor, but I don’t suppose it’s the sort of thing you can go to hell for. I wasn’t asking her to do anything illegal, just trying to get her to do me a favor she’d probably have denied a civilian. I told her I was trying to find a listing a year or two old. It wasn’t in her computer, but she found an old White Pages and looked it up for me.

I’d told her I was looking for an E. Dunphy in the 400 block of West Fifty-first Street. She didn’t have that, but she showed a P. J. Dunphy at 507 West Fifty-first, which could put him three or four doors west of Tenth Avenue. That sounded likely. It had been his mother’s apartment, and he wouldn’t have bothered to change the way the phone was listed.

Number 507 was like its neighbors, an old-law tenement six stories tall. Not all of the bells and mailboxes had nameplates, but there was a slip of white cardboard in the slot next to the bell for 4-C with dunphy hand-lettered on it.

I rang his bell and waited. After a few minutes I rang it again and waited some more.

I rang the bell marked super. When the buzzer sounded in response I pushed the door and let myself into a dim hallway that smelled of mice and cooked cabbage and stagnant air. Down at the end of the hall a door opened and a woman emerged. She was tall, with straight shoulder-length blond hair secured with a rubber band. She wore blue jeans that were starting to go at the knee and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and the top two buttons unbuttoned.

“My name’s Scudder,” I told her. “I’m trying to locate one of your tenants. Edward Dunphy.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Mr. Dunphy’s on the fourth floor. One of the rear apartments. I think it’s 4-C.”

“I tried his bell. There was no answer.”

“Then he’s probably out. Was he expecting you?”

“I was expecting him.”

She looked at me. She’d appeared younger from a distance but at close range you could see that she had to be crowding forty. She carried the years well enough. She had a high broad forehead with a sharply defined widow’s peak, a jawline that was strong but not severe. Good cheekbones, interesting facial planes. I had kept company with a sculptor long enough to think in those terms, and the breakup had been too recent for me to have lost the habit.

She said, “Do you think he’s upstairs? And not answering his bell? Of course it’s possible that it’s out of order. I fix them when the tenants report them, but if you don’t get many visitors you wouldn’t necessarily know that your bell wasn’t functioning. Do you want to go up there and knock on his door?”

“Maybe I’ll do that.”

“You’re worried about him,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

“I am, and I couldn’t tell you why.”

She made up her mind quickly. “I have a key,” she said. “Unless he’s changed the lock, or put on an extra one. God knows I would, in a city like this one.”

She returned to her own apartment, came back with a ring of keys, then double-locked her own door and led the way up the stairs. Other smells joined the mouse and cabbage scents in the stairwell. Stale beer, stale urine. Marijuana. Latin cooking.

“If they change the locks, or add new ones,” she said, “I’m supposed to get the key. There’s actually a clause to that effect in the lease, the landlord has the right of access to all apartments. But nobody pays any attention to it, and the owner doesn’t care, and I certainly don’t care. I’ve got a key that’s marked 4-C, but that doesn’t mean it’s likely to open anything.”

“We’ll try it.”

“That’s all we can do.”

“Well, it’s not quite all,” I said. “Sometimes I’m not too bad at opening a lock without the key.”

“Oh, really?” She turned to give me a look. “That must be very useful in your profession. What are you, a locksmith or a burglar?”

“I used to be a cop.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m an ex-cop.”

“No kidding. You told me your name but I lost it.”

I told her again. As we climbed, I learned that her name was Willa Rossiter and that she’d been the building’s superintendent for some twenty months. She received the apartment rent-free in exchange for her services.

“But it doesn’t really cost the landlord anything,” she said, “because he wouldn’t be renting it anyway. There are three empty apartments in the building beside mine. They’re not for rent.”

“You’d think they’d go fast.”

“They’d go in a minute, and they’d bring a thousand a month, crazy as it sounds. But he’d rather warehouse the empty apartments. He wants to turn the building into a co-op, and every untenanted apartment is ultimately a vote on his side, and an apartment he can sell for whatever the traffic will bear.”

“But in the meantime he loses a thousand a month on each vacancy.”

“I guess it’s worth it to him in the long run. If we go co-op, he’ll get a hundred thousand dollars for each of these rabbit warrens. But that’s New York. I don’t think there’s anyplace else in the country where you could get that for the whole building.”

“Anywhere else in the country, the building would be condemned.”

“Not necessarily. It’s a solid building. It’s over a hundred years old, and these old tenements were cheap working-class housing when they went up. They’re not like the brownstones in Park Slope and Clinton Hill that were very grand in their day. Even so, this is a sound structure. And that’s Mr. Dunphy’s door. In the rear on the right.”

She got to his door and knocked on it, a good strong knock. When no answer came she knocked again, louder. We looked at each other, and she shrugged and fitted her key into the lock. She turned it twice around, first to disengage the dead bolt, then to snick back the spring lock.

As soon as she cracked the door I knew what we were going to find. I gripped her shoulder.

“Let me,” I said. “You don’t want to see this.”

“What’s that smell?”

I pushed past her and went to look for the body.

The apartment was a typical tenement railroad flat, with three little rooms lined up in a row. The hall door led into a living room furnished with a matching couch and armchair and a table-model TV. The armchair’s seat was sprung, and the fabric was worn through on its arms, and on the arms of the couch. There was an ashtray on the table that held the television set. It had a couple of butts in it.

The next room was the kitchen. The stove and sink and refrigerator were in a row against the wall, and over the sink was a window looking out on an airshaft. Away from the appliances stood a large old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub. Some of its porcelain exterior had chipped away to reveal black cast iron. A plywood top, painted a glossy off-white, converted the tub into a dining table. There was an empty coffee cup on top of the tub-table, and another dirty ashtray. There were dishes stacked in the sink, and clean ones in a wire strainer on the drainboard.

The last room was the bedroom, and that was where I found Eddie. He was sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, slumped forward. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and nothing else. There was a stack of glossy magazines beside him on the bed, and one in front of him on the linoleum-covered floor, this last open to a double-page spread shot of a young woman with her wrists and ankles bound and ropes wrapped elaborately around her body. Her large breasts were tightly wrapped with lamp cord, or something that looked like it, and her face was contorted in an unconvincing grimace of pain and terror.

There was a rope around Eddie’s neck, a noose fashioned from a length of plastic-coated clothesline. Its other end was fastened to a pipe running the length of the ceiling.

“My God!”

It was Willa, come to see for herself. “What happened?” she demanded. “Jesus God, what happened to him?”

I knew what had happened.