Out on the Cutting Edge

"Anonymity, but it doesn't matter now. Being dead means never having to remain anonymous. Eddie started coming to meetings about a year ago. He'd stayed completely sober for the past seven months."

"How about you?"

"Three years, two months, and eleven days."

"You keep track to the day?"

"No, of course not. But I know my anniversary date, and it's not hard to figure the rest out."

"And people celebrate anniversaries?"

"Most people make it a point to speak at a meeting on their anniversary, or within a few days of it. At some groups they give you a cake."

"A cake?"

"Like a birthday cake. They present it to you, and everybody has some after the meeting. Except for the ones on diets."

"It sounds-"

"Mickey Mouse."

"I wasn't going to say that."

"Well, you could. It does. In some groups they give you a little bronze medallion with the number of years in roman numerals on one side and the serenity prayer on the other."

"The serenity prayer?"

" 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.' "

"Oh, I've heard that. I didn't know it was an AA prayer."

"Well, I don't think we have exclusive title to it."

"What did you get? A cake or a medallion?"

"Neither. Just a round of applause and a lot of people telling me to remember it's still a day at a time. I guess that's why I belong to that group. No-frills sobriety."

" 'Cause you're just a no-frills kind of guy."

"You bet."

When the check came she offered to split it. I said I'd get it, and she didn't put up a fight. Outside, it had turned a little colder. She took my hand when we crossed the street, and went on holding it after we reached the curb.

When we got to her building she asked me if I wanted to come in for a few minutes. I said I thought I'd go straight home, that I wanted to get an early start the next morning.

In the vestibule she fitted her key in the lock, then turned to me. We kissed. There was no alcohol on her breath this time.

Walking home, I kept catching myself whistling. It's not something I'm much given to.

I gave out dollar bills to everyone who asked.

I woke up the next morning with a sour taste in my mouth. I brushed my teeth and went out for breakfast. I had to force myself to eat, and the coffee had a metallic taste to it.

Maybe it was arsenic poisoning, I thought. Maybe there had been shreds of green wallpaper in last night's salad.

My second cup of coffee didn't taste any better than the first, but I drank it anyhow and read the News along with it. The Mets had won, with a new kid just up from Tidewater going four-for-four. The Yankees won, too, on a home run by Claudell Washington in the ninth inning. In football, the Giants had just lost the best linebacker in the game for the next thirty days; something illicit had turned up in his urine, and he was suspended.

There had been a drive-by shooting at a streetcorner in Harlem which the paper had characterized as much frequented by drug dealers, and two homeless persons had fought on a platform of the East Side IRT, one hurling the other into the path of an oncoming train, with predictable results. In Brooklyn, a man in Brighton Beach had been arrested for the murder of his former wife and her three children by a previous marriage.

There was nothing about Eddie Dunphy. There wouldn't be, unless it was a very slow day for news.

After breakfast I set out to walk off some of the loginess and lethargy. It was overcast, and the weather forecast called for a forty percent chance of rain. I'm not sure just what that's supposed to mean. Don't blame us if it rains,they seem to be saying, and don't blame us if it doesn't.

I didn't pay much attention to where I was going. I wound up in Central Park, and when I found an empty bench I sat on it. Across from me and a little to the right, a woman in a thrift-shop overcoat was feeding pigeons from a sack of bread crumbs. The birds were all over her and the bench and the surrounding pavement. There must have been two hundred of them.

They say you just exacerbate a problem by feeding pigeons, but I was in no position to tell her to stop. Not as long as I went on handing out dollar bills to panhandlers.

She ran out of bread crumbs, finally, and the birds left, and so did she. I stayed where I was and thought about Eddie Dunphy and Paula Hoeldtke. Then I thought about Willa Rossiter, and I realized why I'd awakened feeling lousy.

I hadn't had time to react to Eddie's death. I'd been with Willa instead, and when I might have been sad for him I was instead exhilarated and excited by whatever was growing between us. And the same thing was true, in a less dramatic way, with Paula. I'd gotten as far as some conflicting data relating to her telephone, and then I'd put everything on hold so that I could have a romantic encounter.

There wasn't necessarily anything wrong with that. But Eddie and Paula had been stowed somewhere under the heading of Unfinished Business, and if I didn't deal with them I was going to keep having a sour taste in my mouth, and my coffee was going to have a metallic aftertaste.

I got up and got out of there. Near the entrance at Columbus Circle a wild-eyed man in denim cutoffs asked me for money. I shook him off and kept walking.

She'd paid her rent on July 6. On the thirteenth it was due again, but she didn't show up. On the fifteenth Flo Edderling went to collect and she didn't answer the door. On the sixteenth Flo opened the door and the room was empty, nothing left behind but the bed linen. On the seventeenth her parents called and left a message on her machine, and that same day Georgia arranged to rent the just-vacated room, and a day later she took possession. And two days after that, Paula called the phone company and told them to disconnect her phone.

The woman I'd spoken to originally at the phone company was a Ms. Cadillo. We had established a pleasant working relationship the previous day, and now she remembered me right away. "I hate to keep bothering you," I said, "but I'm having a problem reconciling data from a few different sources. I know she called for a disconnect on July twentieth, but what I'd like to do is find out where she called from."

"I'm afraid we wouldn't have that on record," she said, puzzled. "In fact we'd never know that in the first place. As a matter of fact-"

"Yes?"

"I was going to say that my records wouldn't show whether she phoned us to order cessation of service or whether she might have written to us. Almost everyone phones, but she could have written. Some people do, especially if they've enclosed a final payment. But we didn't receive any payment from her at that time."

I'd never even thought that the disconnect order could have been mailed in, and for a moment that seemed to clear everything up. She could have put a note in the mail long before the twentieth; given the state of the postal service, it might still be en route.

But that wouldn't explain her parents' call to her on the seventeenth.

I said, "Isn't there a record kept of all calls made from a given number?"

"There is, but-"

"Could you tell me the date and time of the last call she made? That would be very helpful."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I really can't do that. I'm not able to retrieve that information myself, and it's a violation of policy to do it."

"I suppose I could get a court order," I said, "but I hate to put my client to the trouble and expense, and it would mean wasting everybody's time. If you could see your way clear to helping me out, I'd make sure no one ever knew where it came from."

"I really am sorry. I might bend the rules if I could, but I don't have the codes. If you really do need a record of her local calls, I'm afraid you'd have to have that court order."

I almost missed it. I was in the middle of another sentence when it registered. I said, "Local calls. If she made any toll calls-"

"They'd be on her statement."

"And you can access that?"

"I'm not supposed to." I didn't say anything, giving her a little slack, and she said, "Well, it is a matter of record. Let me see what I can punch up. There are no toll calls at all during the month of July-"

"Well, it was worth a try."

"You didn't let me finish."

"I'm sorry."

"There are no calls at all during July, no toll calls, until the eighteenth. There are two calls on the eighteenth and one on the nineteenth."

"And none on the twentieth?"

"No. Just those three. Would you like the numbers that she called?"

"Yes," I said. "Very much."

There were two numbers. She'd called one both days, one just on the nineteenth. They both had the same area code, 904, and I checked the book and found that was nowhere near Indiana. It was north Florida, including the panhandle.

I found a bank and bought a ten-dollar roll of quarters. I went back to my pay phone and dialed the number she'd called twice. A recording told me how much money to put in, and I did, and a woman answered on the fourth ring. I told her my name was Scudder and that I was trying to get in touch with Paula Hoeldtke.

"I'm afraid you have the wrong number," she said.

"Don't hang up, I'm calling from New York. I believe a woman named Paula Hoeldtke called this number the month before last and I'm trying to trace her movements since then."

There was a pause. Then she said, "Well, I don't rightly see how that can be. This is a private residence and the name you mentioned isn't familiar to me."

"Is this 904-555-1904?"

"It most certainly is not. The number here is- wait a moment, what was that number you just read?"

I repeated it.

"That's my husband's place of business," she said. "That's the number at Prysocki Hardware."

"I'm sorry," I said. I had read the wrong listing from my notebook, the number she'd called only once. "Your number must be 828-9177."

"How did you get that other number?"

"She called both numbers," I said.

"Did she. And what did you say her name was?"

"Paula Hoeldtke."

"And she called this number and the store?"

"My records may be wrong," I said. She was still asking questions when I broke the connection.

I walked to the rooming house on Fifty-fourth Street. Halfway there a kid in jeans with a scraggly goatee asked me for spare change. He had the wasted look of a speed freak. Some of the crack addicts get that look. I gave him all my quarters. "Hey, thanks!" he called after me. "You're beautiful, man."

When Flo came to the door I apologized for bothering her. She said it was no bother. I asked if Georgia Price was in.

"I'm sure I don't know," she said. "Didn't you get to talk to her yet? Though I don't know what help she could be. I couldn't hardly rent her the room before Paula was out of it, so how would she know her?"

"I spoke to her. I'd like to talk to her again."

She gestured toward the staircase. I walked up a flight, stood in front of the door that had been Paula's.

There was music playing within, with an insistent if not infectious beat. I knocked, but I wasn't sure she could hear me over the noise. I went to knock again when the door opened.