Out on the Cutting Edge

After he left I took one of the photos to a copy shop and had them run off a hundred wallet-size prints. I went back to my hotel room, where I had a rubber stamp with my name and number. I stamped each of the photos on the back.

Paula Hoeldtke's last known address was a dingy red brick rooming house on Fifty-fourth Street a few doors east of Ninth Avenue. It was a little after five when I headed over there, and the streets were full of office workers on their way home. There was a bank of doorbells in the entrance hall, over fifty of them, and a single bell marked manager off to the side. Before I rang it I checked the tags on the other bells. Paula Hoeldtke's name wasn't listed.

The manager was a tall woman, rail thin, with a face that tapered from a broad forehead to a narrow chin. She was wearing a floral print housedress and carrying a lit cigarette. She took a moment to look me over. Then she said, "Sorry, I got nothing vacant at the moment. You might want to check back with me in a few weeks if you don't find anything."

"How much are your rooms when you do have something?"

"One-twenty a week, but some of the nicer ones run a little higher. That includes your electric. There's supposed to be no cooking, but you could have a one-ring hotplate and it'd be all right. Each room has a bitty refrigerator. They're small, but they'll keep your milk from spoiling."

"I drink my coffee black."

"Then maybe you don't need the fridge, but it doesn't matter too much, since I got no vacancies and don't expect any soon."

"Did Paula Hoeldtke have a hotplate?"

"She was a waitress, so I guess she took her meals where she worked. You know, my first thought when I saw you was you were a cop, but then for some reason I changed my mind. I had a cop here a couple weeks ago, and then the other day a man came around, said he was her father. Nice-looking man, had that bright red hair just starting to go gray. What happened to Paula?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out."

"You want to come inside? I told the first cop all I knew, and I went over everything for her father, but I suppose you got your own questions to ask. That's always the way, isn't it?"

I followed her inside and down a long hallway. A table at the foot of the stairs was heaped with envelopes. "That's where they pick up their mail," she said. "Instead of sorting it and putting it into fifty-four individual mailboxes, the mailman just drops the whole stack on the table there. Believe it or not, it's safer that way. Other places have mailboxes in the vestibules, and the junkies break into them all the time, looking for welfare checks. Right this way, I'm the last door on the left."

Her room was small but impressively neat. There was a captain's bed made up as a sofa, a straight-backed wooden chair and an armchair, a small maple drop-front desk, a painted chest of drawers with a television set on top of it. The floor was covered with brick-patterned linoleum, most of that covered in turn by an oval braided rug.

I sat on one of the chairs while she opened the desk and paged through the rental ledger. She said, "Here we are. The last day I saw her was when she paid her rent for the last time, and that was the sixth of July. That was a Monday, that's when rents are due, and she paid $135 on the due date. She had a nice room, just one flight up and larger than some of them. Then the following week I didn't see her on the Monday, and on Wednesday I went looking for her. I'll do that, on Wednesdays I go knocking on doors when people haven't come up with the rent. I don't go and evict anybody for being two days late, but I go around and ask for the money, because I've got some that would never pay if I didn't come asking for it.

"I knocked on her door and she didn't answer, and then on my way back downstairs I knocked again, and she still wasn't home. The next morning, that would have been Thursday the sixteenth, I banged on her door again, and when there was no answer I used my passkey." She frowned. "Now why would I do that? She was usually in mornings but not always, and she wasn't but three days late with the rent. Oh, I remember! There was mail for her that hadn't been picked up in a few days, letters I'd seen a couple times over, and between that and the rent being late- anyway, I opened the door."

"What did you find?"

"Not what I was afraid of finding. You hate to open a door that way, you know. You're a cop, I don't have to tell you that, do I? People who live alone in furnished rooms, and you open their doors scared of what you might find. Not this time, thank God. Her place was empty."

"Completely empty?"

"No, come to think of it. She left the bed linen. Tenants have to supply their own linen. I used to furnish it, but I changed the policy, oh, I'd say fifteen years ago. Her sheets and blankets and pillowcase were still on the bed. But there were no clothes in the closet, nothing in the drawers, no food in the refrigerator. No question but that she'd moved out, she was gone."

"I wonder why she left the linen."

"Maybe she was moving someplace where they supplied it. Maybe she was leaving town and only had room to carry so much. Maybe she plain forgot it. When you pack up to leave a motel room you don't take the sheets and blankets, not unless you're a thief, and this is sort of like living in a hotel. I've had them leave linen behind before. Lord, that's not the only thing I've had them leave behind."

She left that hanging there, but I let it lie. I said, "You said she was a waitress."

"Well, that's how she earned her living. She was an actress, or fixing to be one. Most of my people are trying to get into show business. My younger people. I've got a few older folks been with me for years and years, living on pensions and government checks. I've got one woman doesn't pay me but seventeen dollars and thirty cents a week, if you can believe that, and she's got one of the best rooms in the house. And I have to climb five flights of stairs to collect her rent, and I'll tell you, there are some Wednesday mornings when it doesn't seem worth the effort."

"Do you know where Paula was working just before she left?"

"I don't even know that she was working. If she told me I don't remember, and I doubt she told me. I don't get too close to them, you know. I'll pass the time of day, but that's about all. Because, you know, they come and they go. My old folks are with me until the Lord calls them home, but my young people are in and out of here, in and out. They get discouraged and go home, or they save up some money and get a regular apartment, or they get married or move in with someone, whatever they do."

"How long was Paula here?"

"Three years, or the next thing to it. She moved in just three years ago this week, and I know because I looked it up when her father was here. Of course she moved out two months ago, so she wasn't here the whole three years. Even so, she was with me longer than most. I've got a few have been with me longer than that, besides my rent-controlled old people, I mean. But not many."

"Tell me something about her."

"Tell you what?"

"I don't know. Who were her friends? What did she do with her time? You're an observant woman, you must have noticed things."

"I'm observant, yes, but sometimes I turn a blind eye. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so."

"I have fifty-four rooms I rent out, and some of the rooms are larger and two girls will share one. I have, I think it's sixty-six tenants at the moment. All I ask is are they quiet, are they decent, do they pay the rent on time. I don't ask how they earn their money."

"Was Paula turning tricks?"

"I have no reason to think that she was. But I couldn't swear on a Bible that she wasn't. I'll say this, I'd bet there's at least four of my tenants earning money that way, and likely more than that, and the thing is I don't know who they are. If a woman gets up and goes out to work, I don't know if she's carrying plates in a restaurant or doing something else in a massage parlor or whatever they call it this year. My tenants can't have guests to their rooms. That's my business. What they do off the premises is their business."

"You never met any of her friends?"

"She never brought anyone home. It wasn't allowed. I'm not stupid, I know people will sneak someone in now and then, but I discourage it enough that no one tries it on a regular basis. If she was friendly with any of the girls in the building, or any of the young men, for that matter, well, I wouldn't know about it."

"She didn't leave you a forwarding address."

"No. I never heard a word from her after the last time she paid her rent."

"What did you do with her mail?"

"Gave it back to the postman. Gone, no forwarding. She didn't get much mail. A phone bill, the usual junk mail that everybody gets."

"You got along all right with her?"

"I would say so. She was quiet, she was well-spoken, she was clean. She paid her rent. She was late a few times over the three years." She paged through the ledger. "Here she paid two weeks at once. And here she missed for almost a month, and then she paid an extra fifty dollars a week until she was even with me. I'll let tenants do that if they've been with me for a while and I know they're good for it. And if they don't make a habit of it. You have to carry people some of the time, because everybody has bad times now and then."

"Why do you suppose she left without saying anything to you?"

"I don't know," she said.

"No idea?"

"They'll do that, you know. Just up and disappear, steal out the door with their suitcases in the middle of the night. But they'll generally do that when they're a week or so late with the rent, and she was the next thing to paid up. In fact she may have been completely paid up, because I don't know for sure when she left. At the most she was two days late, but for all I know she paid on the Monday and moved out a day later, because there was ten days that I didn't lay eyes on her between the last time she paid rent and the day I used my passkey."

"It seems odd she would leave without a word."

"Well, maybe it was late when she left and she didn't want to disturb me. Or maybe it was a decent hour but I wasn't home. I'm out at the movies every chance I get, you know. There's nothing I like better than going to the movies in the middle of a weekday afternoon, when the theater's next to empty and there's just you and the picture. I was thinking about getting myself a VCR. I could see any movie I wanted any time of the day, and it doesn't cost but two or three dollars to rent one. But it's not the same, watching on your own set in your own room, and on a bitty TV screen. It's like the difference between praying at home and in church."

I spent an hour or so that night going door-to-door in the rooming house, starting at the top floor and working my way down. A majority of the tenants were out. I spoke with half a dozen tenants and didn't learn anything. Only one of the persons I talked to recognized Paula's picture, and she hadn't even realized Paula had moved out.

I called it quits after a while and stopped at the manager's door on my way out. She was watching Jeopardy, and she kept me waiting until the commercial. "That's a good program," she said, turning the sound off. "They get smart people to be on that show. You have to have a quick mind."

I asked which room had been Paula's.