Out on the Cutting Edge (15 page)

"And why doesn't she come back for it when she realizes it's missing?"

"Because she's in Greenland," he said, "and it's cheaper to buy a new machine than to get on a plane."

"I don't know, Joe."

"I don't know either, but I'll tell you this, it makes as much sense as looking at a phone and an answering machine and two sheets and a blanket and trying to make a kidnapping case out of it."

"Don't forget the bedspread."

"Yeah, right. Maybe she moved somewhere that she couldn't use the linen. What was it, a single bed?"

"Larger than that, somewhere between a single and a double. I think they call it a three-quarter."

"So she moved in with some slick dude with a king-size water bed and a twelve-inch cock, and what does she need with some old sheets and pillowcases? What does she even need with a phone, as far as that goes, if she's gonna be spending all her time on her back with her knees up?"

"I think somebody moved her out," I said. "I think somebody took her keys and let himself into her room and packed up all her things and slipped out of there with them. I think--"

"Anybody see a stranger leave the building with a couple of suitcases?"

"They don't even know each other, so how would they spot a stranger?"

"Did anybody see anybody toting some bags around that time?"

"It's too long ago, you know that. I asked the question of people on the same floor with her, but how can you remember a commonplace event that might have taken place two months ago?"

"That's the whole point, Matt. If anybody left a trail, it's ice-cold by now." He picked up a Lucite photo cube, turned it in his hands and looked at a picture of two children and a dog, all three beaming at the camera. "Go on with your script," he said. "Somebody moves her stuff out. He leaves the linen because he doesn't know it's hers. Why does he leave the answering machine?"

"So anybody who calls her won't know she's gone."

"Then why doesn't he leave everything, and even the landlady won't know she's gone?"

"Because eventually the landlady will figure out that she's not coming back, and the matter might get reported to the police. Cleaning out the room tidies a potential loose end. Leaving the answering machine buys a little time, gives the illusion she's still there to anybody at a distance, and makes it impossible to know exactly when she moved.

She paid her rent on the sixth and her room was found to be vacant ten days later, so that's the best I can narrow down the time of her disappearance, and that's because he left the machine on."

"How do you figure that?"

"Her parents called a couple of times and left messages. If the machine hadn't picked up they would have kept calling until they reached her, and when they didn't reach her no matter what time they called, they would have been alarmed, they would have thought something happened to her. In all likelihood her father would have come to see you two months earlier than he did."

"Yeah, I see what you mean."

"And it wouldn't have been a cold trail then."

"I'm still not sure it would have been a police matter."

"Maybe, maybe not. But if he'd hired somebody private back in the middle of July--"

"You'd have had an easier time of it. No argument." He thought for a moment. "Say she left the machine behind herself, not by accident but because she had a reason."

"What reason?"

"She moved out but she doesn't want somebody to know she's gone. Her parents, say, or somebody else she's trying to duck."

"She'd just keep the room. Pay the rent and live elsewhere."

"All right, say she wants to move out and skip town but she wants to be able to get her calls. She could--"

"She couldn't get her calls from a distance."

"Sure she could. They've got this gizmo, you just call your machine from any touch-tone phone and punch in a code and the machine plays back your messages."

"Not all machines have the remote-pickup feature. Hers didn't."

"How do you know that? Oh, right, you saw the machine, it's still in the room." He splayed his fingers.

"Look, what's the point going over this again and again? You were a cop long enough, Matt. Put yourself in my position."

"I'm just saying that--"

"Put yourself in my fucking position, will you? You're sitting at this desk and a guy comes in with a story about bed linen and a telephone answering machine. There's no evidence that a crime has been committed, the missing person is a mentally competent adult, and nobody's seen her for over two months.

Now what am I supposed to do?"

I didn't say anything.

"What would you do? In my position."

"What you're doing."

"Of course you would."

"Suppose it was the mayor's daughter."

"The mayor doesn't have a daughter. The mayor never had a hard-on in his life, so how could he have a daughter?" He pushed his chair back. "Of course it's a different matter if it's the mayor's daughter.

Then we put a hundred men on it and work around the clock until something breaks. Which doesn't mean something necessarily does, not after all this time and with so little to go on. Look, what's the big fear here? Not that she went to Disney World and the Ferris wheel got stuck with her at the top of it. What are you and her parents really afraid of?"

"That she's dead."

"And maybe she is. People die all the time in this city. If she's alive she'll call home sooner or later, when the money runs out or her head clears up, whatever it takes. If she's dead there's nothing anybody can do for her, you or me or anybody else."

"I suppose you're right."

"Of course I'm right. Your problem is you get like a dog with a bone. Call the father, tell him there's nothing to run with, he should have called you two months ago."

"Right, make him feel guilty."

"Well, you could find a better way to put it. Jesus, you already gave it more than most people would and took it as far as it would go.

You even dug up some decent clues, the phone calls and everything, the answering machine. The trouble is they're not attached to anything. You pull them and they come off in your hand."

"I know."

"So let go of it. You don't want to put in any more hours or you wind up working for chump change."

I started to say something but his phone rang. He talked for a few minutes. When he hung up he said,

"What did we do for crime before we had cocaine?"

"We made do."

"Did we? I guess we must have."

I walked around for a few hours. Around one-thirty it started raining lightly. Almost immediately the umbrella sellers turned up on the streetcorners. You'd have thought they had existed previously in spore form, springing miraculously to life when a drop of water touched them.

I didn't buy an umbrella. It wasn't raining hard enough to make it worthwhile. I went into a bookstore and killed some time without buying anything, and when I left the rain still didn't amount to much more than a fine mist.

I stopped at my hotel, checked at the desk. No messages, and the only mail was an offer of a credit card. "You have already been approved!" the copy blared. Somehow I doubted this.

I went upstairs and called Warren Hoeldtke. I had my notebook at hand, and I gave him a quick rundown on what lines of investigation I'd pursued and what little I'd managed to determine. "I've put in a lot of hours," I said, "but I don't think I'm much closer to her than I was when I started. I don't feel as though I've accomplished anything."

"Do you want more money?"

"No. I wouldn't know how to go about earning it."

"What do you think has happened to her? I realize you don't have any hard knowledge, but don't you have some sense of what went on?"

"Only a vague one, and I don't know how much weight to attach to it. I think she got mixed up with somebody who appeared exciting and turned out to be dangerous."

"Do you think--"

He didn't want to say it, and I couldn't blame him. "She may be alive," I said. "Maybe she's out of the country. Maybe she's mixed up in something illegal. That might explain why she hasn't been able to get in touch with you."

"It's hard to imagine Paula involved with criminals."

"Maybe it just looked like an adventure to her."

"I suppose that's possible." He sighed. "You don't leave much room for hope."

"No, but I wouldn't say you have grounds for despair yet, either.

I'm afraid all you can do is wait."

"That's all I've done from the beginning. It's... hard."

"I'm sure it must be."

"Well," he said. "I want to thank you for your efforts, and for being straight with me. I'll be happy to send you more money if you think there's any point at all in putting in more time."

"No," I said. "I'll probably put in a few more days on this anyway, just on the chance that something'll loosen up. In which case you'll hear from me."

"I didn't want to take any more money from him," I told Willa.

"The original thousand had put me under more obligation than I wanted to be. If I accepted any more of his money I'd have his daughter around my neck for the rest of my life."

"But you're doing more work. Why shouldn't you get paid for it?"

"I got paid already, and what did I give him in return?"

"You did the work."

"Did I? In high school physics they taught us how to measure work. The formula was force times distance. Take an object that weighs twenty pounds, move it six feet, and you've done a hundred and twenty foot-pounds worth of work."

"Foot-pounds?"

"That was the unit of measurement. But if you stood and pushed against a wall all day and didn't budge it, you hadn't performed any work. Because you'd moved the wall a distance of zero, so it didn't matter how much the wall weighed, the product was zero. Warren Hoeldtke paid me a thousand dollars and all I did was push a wall."

"You moved it a little."

"Not enough to matter."

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "When Edison was working on the light bulb, somebody said he must be discouraged because he wasn't making any progress. Edison said he'd made great progress, because now he knew twenty thousand materials that you couldn't use for a filament."

"Edison had a better attitude than I have."

"And a good thing, too, or we'd all be in the dark."

We were in the dark, and seemed none the worse for it. We were in her bedroom, stretched out on her bed, a Reba McIntyre tape playing in the kitchen. Through the bedroom window you could hear the sounds of a quarrel in the building behind hers, loud voices arguing a point in Spanish.

I hadn't intended to drop in on her. I'd gone out walking after my call to Hoeldtke. I was passing a florist and had the impulse to send her flowers, and after he'd written up the order I found out he couldn't deliver until the following day. So I'd delivered them myself.

She put the flowers in water and we sat in the kitchen with them on the table between us. She made coffee. It was instant, but it was a fresh jar of a premium brand and no killjoy had taken the caffeine out of it.

And then, without needing to discuss the matter, we'd moved to the bedroom. Reba McIntyre had been singing when we entered the bedroom and she was still hard at it, but we had heard some of the songs more than once. The tape reversed automatically, and would play over and over if you let it.

After a while she said, "Are you hungry? I could cook something."

"If you feel like it."

"Shall I tell you a secret? I never feel like it. I'm not a great cook, and you've seen the kitchen."

"We could go out."

"It's pouring. Don't you hear it in the airshaft?"

"It was raining very lightly earlier. What my Irish aunt used to call a soft day."

"Well, it turned hard, from the sound of it. Suppose I order Chinese? They don't care what the weather's like, they hop on their kamikaze bicycles and ride through hailstorms if they have to. 'Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night shall keep you from your moo goo gai pan.' Except I don't want moo goo gai pan. I want-- would you like to know what I want?"

"Sure."

"I want sesame noodles and pork fried rice and chicken with cashews and shrimp with four flavors. How does that sound?"

"Like enough food for an army."

"I bet we eat all of it. Oh."

"What's the matter?"

"Are you going to have time? It's twenty to eight, and by the time they deliver and we eat it'll be time for your meeting."

"I don't have to go tonight."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive. I have a question, though. What's shrimp with four flavors?"

"You've never had shrimp with four flavors?"

"No."

"Oh, my dear," she said. "Are you ever in for a treat."

We ate at the tin-topped table in the kitchen. I tried to move the flowers to give us more room but she wouldn't let me. "I want them where I can see them," she said. "There's plenty of room."

She had gone shopping that morning, and besides coffee she'd stocked up on fruit juice and soft drinks.

I had a Coke. She got out a bottle of Beck's for herself, but before she opened it she made sure it wouldn't bother me.

"Of course not," I said.

"Because nothing goes with Chinese food like beer. Matt, is it all right to say that?"

"What, that beer goes well with Chinese food? Well, it may be a controversial statement, and I suppose there are some wine growers somewhere who'd give you an argument, but so what?"

"I wasn't sure."

"Open your beer," I said. "And sit down and eat."

Everything was delicious, and the shrimp dish was the treat she'd promised. They'd included disposable chopsticks with our order and she used a pair. I had never learned to handle them and stuck with a fork.