Out on the Cutting Edge (9 page)

Coming home, I stayed on past my stop and rode down to the Village. I had dinner at an Italian place onThompson 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 theHouston 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 atRooseveltHospital

. 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 atSt. Paul 's had moved in a few months ago with a fellow inRegoPark . 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 fromEighth Avenue . Now she was in a high-rise at Seventieth andWest 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 inRegoPark . 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 atSt. 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 theDakotas 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 onWest 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?"