Out on the Cutting Edge

"I know."

"We wanted to come for the play, her mother and I. Not the reading, that was just actors standing on the stage and reading lines from a script, it didn't sound very appealing, although we would have come if Paula had wanted it. But she didn't even want us to come to the play. She said it wasn't a very good play and her part was small anyway. She said we should wait until she was in something decent."

They had last heard from her in late June. She had sounded fine. She'd said something about possibly getting out of the city for the summer, but she hadn't gone into detail. When a couple of weeks passed without word from her, they called her and kept getting her answering machine.

"She was hardly ever home. She said her room was tiny and dark and depressing, so she didn't spend much time in it. When I saw it the other day I could understand why. I didn't actually see her room, I just saw the building and the front hall, but I could understand. People pay high prices in New York to live in places that anywhere else would be torn down."

Because she was rarely in, they did not ordinarily call her. Instead, they had a system. She would call every second or third Sunday, placing a person-to-person call for herself. They would tell the operator that Paula Hoeldtke was not at home, and then they would call her back station-to-station.

"It wasn't really cheating them," he said, "because it cost the same as if she called us station-to-station, but this way it was on our phone bill instead of hers. And as a result she wasn't in a hurry to get off the phone, so actually the telephone company came out ahead, too."

But she didn't call, nor did she respond to the messages on her machine. Toward the end of July, Hoeldtke and his wife and the youngest daughter gassed up one of the Subarus and took a trip, driving up into the Dakotas to spend a week riding horses at a ranch and seeing the Badlands and Mount Rushmore. It was mid-August when they got back, and when they tried Paula they didn't get her machine. Instead they got a recording informing them that her phone had been temporarily disconnected.

"If she went away for the summer," he said, "she might have had the phone turned off to save money. But would she go away without letting anybody know? It wasn't like her. She might do something on the spur of the moment, but she would get in touch with you and let you know about it. She was responsible."

But not too responsible. You couldn't set your watch by her. Sometimes, during the three years since she'd graduated from Ball State, she'd gone more than two or three weeks between phone calls. So it was possible she'd gone somewhere during the summer and had been too preoccupied to get in touch. It was possible she'd tried to call while her parents were mounted on horses, or hiking along trails in Wind Cave National Park.

"Ten days ago was her mother's birthday," Warren Hoeldtke said. "And she didn't call."

"And that was something she wouldn't have missed?"

"Never. She wouldn't have forgotten and she wouldn't have missed calling. And if she did miss she would have called the next day."

He hadn't known what to do. He called the police in New York and got nowhere, predictably enough. He went to the Muncie office of a national detective agency. An investigator from their New York office visited her last known residence and established that she was no longer living there. If he cared to give them a substantial retainer, they would be glad to pursue the matter.

"I thought, what did they do for my money? Go to the place where she lived and find out she wasn't there? I could do that myself. So I got on a plane and came here."

He'd gone to the rooming house where Paula had lived. She had moved out sometime in early July, leaving no forwarding address. The telephone company had refused to tell him anything beyond what he already knew, that the telephone in question had been disconnected. He'd gone to the restaurant where she'd worked and found out that she'd left that job back in April.

"She may even had told us that," he said. "She must have worked six or seven places since she got to New York, and I don't know if she mentioned every time she changed jobs. She would leave because the tips weren't good, or she didn't get along with somebody, or because they wouldn't let her take off when she had an audition. So she could have left the last job and gone to work somewhere else without telling us, or she could have told us and it didn't register."

He couldn't think what else to do on his own, so he'd gone to the police. There he was told that in the first place it wasn't really a police matter, that she had evidently moved without informing her parents and that, as an adult, she had every legal right to do so. They told him, too, that he had waited too long, that she had disappeared almost three months ago and whatever trail she'd left was a cold one by now.

If he wanted to pursue the matter further, the police officer told him, he'd be well advised to engage a private investigator. Department regulations prohibited his recommending a particular investigator. However, the officer said, it was probably all right for him to say what he himself would do if he happened to find himself in Mr. Hoeldtke's circumstances. There was a fellow named Scudder, an ex-cop as a matter of fact, and one who happened to reside in the very neighborhood where Mr. Hoeldtke's daughter had been living, and-

"Who was the cop?"

"His name's Durkin."

"Joe Durkin," I said. "That was very decent of him."

"I liked him."

"Yes, he's all right," I said. We were in a coffee shop on Fifty-seventh, a few doors down from my hotel. The lunch hour had ended before we got there, so they were letting us sit over coffee. I'd had a refill. Hoeldtke still had his first cup in front of him.

"Mr. Hoeldtke," I said, "I'm not sure I'm the man you want."

"Durkin said-"

"I know what he said. The thing is, you can probably get better coverage from the people you used earlier, the ones with the Muncie office. They can put several operatives on the case and they can canvass a good deal more comprehensively than I can."

"Are you saying they can do a better job?"

I thought about it. "No," I said, "but they may be able to give the appearance. For one thing, they'll furnish you with detailed reports telling you exactly what they did and who they talked to and what they found out. They'll itemize their expenses and bill you very precisely for the hours they spend on the case." I took a sip of coffee, set the cup down in its saucer. I leaned forward and said, "Mr. Hoeldtke, I'm a pretty decent detective, but I'm completely unofficial. You need a license to operate as a private investigator in this state and I don't have one. I've never felt like going through the hassle of applying for one. I don't itemize expenses or keep track of my hours, and I don't provide detailed reports. I don't have an office, either, which is why we're meeting here over coffee. All I've really got is whatever instincts and abilities I've developed over the years, and I'm not sure that's what you want to employ."

"Durkin didn't tell me you were unlicensed."

"Well, he could have. It's not a secret."

"Why do you suppose he recommended you?"

I must have been having an attack of scruples. Or maybe I didn't much want the job. "Partly because he expects me to give him a referral fee," I said.

Hoeldtke's face clouded. "He didn't mention that either," he said.

"I'm not surprised."

"That's not ethical," he said. "Is it?"

"No, but it wasn't really ethical for him to recommend anyone in the first place. And, to give him his due, he wouldn't have steered you to me unless he thought I was the right person for you to hire. He probably thinks I'll give you good value and a straight deal."

"And will you?"

I nodded. "And part of a straight deal is to tell you in front that you're very likely wasting your money."

"Because-"

"Because she'll probably either turn up on her own or she won't turn up at all."

He was silent for a moment, considering the implications of what I'd just said. Neither of us had yet mentioned the possibility that his daughter was dead, and it looked as though it was going to go unmentioned, but that didn't mean it was all that easy to avoid thinking about it.

He said, "How much money would I be wasting?"

"Suppose you let me have a thousand dollars."

"Would that be an advance or a retainer or what?"

"I don't know what you'd want to call it," I said. "I don't have a day rate and I don't keep track of my hours. I just go out there and do what seems to make sense. There are a batch of basic steps to take for openers, and I'll go through them first, although I don't really expect them to lead anywhere. Then there are a few other things I can do, and we'll see if they get us anyplace or not. When it seems to me that your thousand bucks is used up I'll ask you for more money, and you can decide whether or not you want to pay it."

He had to laugh. "Not a very businesslike approach," he said.

"I know it. I'm afraid I'm not a very businesslike person."

"In a curious way, that inspires confidence. The thousand dollars- I assume your expenses would be additional."

I shook my head. "I don't anticipate a lot in the way of expenses, and I'd rather pay them myself than have to account for them."

"Would you want to run some newspaper ads? I'd thought of doing that myself, either a listing in the personals or an ad with her photo and the offer of a reward. Of course that wouldn't come out of your thousand dollars. It would probably cost that much or more by itself, to do any kind of extensive advertising."

I advised against it. "She's too old to get her picture on a milk carton," I said, "and I'm not sure ads in the papers are a good idea. You just draw the hustlers and the reward-hunters that way, and they're more trouble than they're worth."

"I keep thinking that she might have amnesia. If she saw her photograph in the newspaper, or if someone else saw it-"

"Well, it's a possibility," I said. "But let's hold it in reserve for the time being."

* * *

In the end, he gave me a check for a thousand dollars and a couple of pictures and what information he had- her last address, the names of several restaurants where she'd worked. He let me keep the two playbills, assuring me that they had plenty of copies of both. I copied down his address in Muncie and his phone numbers at home and at the auto showroom. "Call anytime at all," he said.

I told him I probably wouldn't call until I had something concrete to report. When I did, he'd hear from me.

He paid for our coffees and left a dollar for the waitress. At the door he said, "I feel good about this. I think I've taken the right step. You come across as honest and straightforward, and I appreciate that."

Outside, a three-card-monte dealer was working to a small crowd, telling the people to keep their eyes on the red card, keeping his own eye out for cops.

"I've read about that game," Hoeldtke said.

"It's not a game," I told him. "It's a short con, a swindle. The player never wins."

"That's what I've read. Yet people keep playing."

"I know," I said. "It's hard to figure."