Out on the Cutting Edge

She drank her buttermilk, took up her napkin and dabbed at her lips. I told her Ginny had said that Paula had seemed vulnerable.

"They're all vulnerable," she said.

* * *

I called Paula's acting classmates, saw some of them face to face, spoke with others on the phone. I worked my way through Kelly Greer's list, and at the same time I kept knocking on doors at Flo Edderling's rooming house, crossing off names on my list of uninterviewed tenants.

I went, as my client had previously gone, to the restaurant that was Paula's last known place of employment. It was called the Druid's Castle, and it was an English pub-style place on West Forty-sixth. They had dishes like shepherd's pie on the menu, and something called toad-in-the-hole. The manager confirmed that she'd left in the spring. "She was all right," he said. "I forget why she quit, but we parted on good terms. I'd hire her again." There was a waitress who remembered Paula as "a good kid but sort of spacey, like she didn't really have her mind on what she was doing." I walked in and out of a lot of restaurants in the Forties and Fifties, and two of them did turn out to be places where Paula had worked prior to her stint at the Druid's Castle. This was information that might have been useful if I'd planned on writing her biography, but it didn't tell me much about where she'd gone in mid-July.

In a bar at Ninth and Fifty-second, a place called Paris Green, the manager allowed that she looked familiar but said she'd never worked there. The bartender, a lanky fellow with a beard like an oriole's nest, asked if he could see her picture. "She never worked here," he said, "but she used to come in here. Not in the past couple of months, though."

"In the spring?"

"Had to be since April because that's when I started here. What was her name again?"

"Paula."

He tapped the photo. "I don't remember the name, but this is her. I must have seen her in here five, six times. Late. She came in late. We close at two, and it was generally close to that when she came in. Past midnight, anyway."

"Was she alone?"

"Couldn't have been or I would have hit on her." He grinned. "Or at least volleyed, you know? She was with a guy, but was it the same guy every time? I think so but I couldn't swear to it. You have to remember that I never gave her a thought since the last time I saw her, and that's got to be two months ago."

"She was last seen the first week in July."

"That sounds about right, give or take a week or two. Last time I saw her she was drinking salty dogs, they were both drinking salty dogs."

"What did she usually drink?"

"Different things. Margaritas, vodka sours, maybe not that exactly but you get the general idea. Girl drinks. But he was a whiskey drinker and for a change he ordered up a saline canine, and what does that tell me?"

"It was hot out."

"On the nose, my dear Watson." He grinned again. "Either I'd make a good detective or you'd make a good bartender, because we both got the same place with that one. Can I buy you a drink on the strength of that?"

"Make it a Coke."

He drew a beer for himself and a Coke for me. He took a small sip of his and asked what had happened to Paula. I said she'd disappeared.

"People'll do that," he said.

I worked with him for ten minutes or so, and by the time I was through I had a description of Paula's escort. My height, maybe a little taller. Around thirty. Dark hair, no beard or moustache. A casual dresser, a sort of outdoors type.

"Like retrieving lost data from a computer," he said, marveling at the process. "I'm remembering things I never even knew I knew. The only thing that bothers me is the thought that I might be making some of this up without meaning to, just to be obliging."

"Sometimes that happens," I admitted.

"Anyway, the description I gave you would fit half the men in the neighborhood. If he was even from the neighborhood, which I doubt."

"You only saw him the five or six times he was with her."

He nodded. "Add that to the hour they came in, I'd say he picked her up after work or she picked him up after work, or maybe they both worked at the same place."

"And stopped here for a quick one."

"More than one."

"Was she a heavy hitter?"

"He was. She sipped, but she didn't dawdle. Her drinks didn't just evaporate. She didn't show the booze, though. Neither did he. More evidence they worked someplace, and started their drinking here rather than finished it."

He extended the photo. I told him to keep it. "And if you think of anything-"

"I'll call the number."

Dribs and drabs, bits and pieces. By the time I told my story at Fresh Start I'd spent over a week looking for Paula Hoeldtke, and I'd probably given her father a thousand dollars' worth of time and shoe leather, even if I couldn't point to a thousand dollars' worth of results.

I'd talked to dozens of people and I had pages and pages of notes. I'd given out half of the hundred photos I'd had made up.

What had I learned? I couldn't account for her movements after she'd disappeared from her rooming house in the middle of July. I couldn't turn up any evidence of employment subsequent to the waitress job she'd left in April. And the picture I was beginning to develop was a good deal less sharply focused than the one I was handing out all over the neighborhood.

She was an actress, or wanted to be one, but she'd barely worked at all and had evidently stopped going to classes. She'd been in a man's company at a local drinking establishment, late in the evening, perhaps half a dozen times in all. She'd been a loner, but she hadn't spent much time in her room. Where did she go by her lonesome? Did she walk in the park? Did she talk to the pigeons?

My first thought the next morning was that I'd been too abrupt with my mystery caller. He wasn't much, but what else did I have?

Over breakfast, I reminded myself that I hadn't really expected to come up with anything. Paula Hoeldtke had dropped out of actressing and waitressing. Then she'd dropped out of Florence Edderling's house and out of her role as her parents' daughter. By now she was probably settled into some new life, and she'd surface when she wanted to. Or she was dead, in which case there wasn't a whole lot I could do for her.

I thought I'd go to a movie, but instead I wound up spending the day talking to theatrical agents, asking the same old questions, passing out pictures. None of them recognized the name or the face. "She probably just went to open auditions," one of them told me. "Some of them look for an agent right away, others buy the trades and go to the cattle calls and try to get a few credits so they have something to impress an agent with."

"What's the best way?"

"The best way? Have an uncle in the business, that's the best way."

I got tired of talking to agents and tried the rooming house again. I rang Florence Edderling's bell and she shook her head as she let me in. "I ought to start collecting rent from you," she said. "You spend more time here than some of my tenants."

"I've just got a few more people to see."

"Take all the time you want. Nobody's complained, and if they don't mind I sure don't."

Of the tenants I hadn't yet interviewed, only one was on the premises. She'd lived in the building since May and didn't know Paula Hoeldtke at all. "I wish I could help," she said, "but she doesn't even look familiar to me. My neighbor across the hall said she'd talked to you, that this girl disappeared or something?"

"It looks that way."

She shrugged. "I wish I could help."

When I was first getting sober I started keeping company with a woman named Jan Keane. I'd known her before, but we'd stopped seeing each other when she joined AA and took up again when I started coming to meetings.

She's a sculptor, living and working in a loft on Lispenard Street, which is in TriBeCa, just south of Canal Street. We began spending a fair amount of time together, seeing each other three or four nights a week, occasionally getting together during the day. Sometimes we went to meetings together, but we did other things as well. We'd go out to dinner, or she would cook for me. She liked to go to galleries, in SoHo or the East Village. This was something I'd never done much of, and I discovered I enjoyed it. I'd always been a little self-conscious in situations like that, never knowing what to say when confronted by a painting or a piece of sculpture, and from her I'd learned that it was perfectly acceptable not to say anything at all.

I don't know what went wrong. The relationship escalated slightly, as relationships do, and we reached a point where I was half living on Lispenard Street, with some of my clothes in her closet and my socks and underwear in one of her dresser drawers. We had conversations in which we speculated gingerly on the wisdom of my maintaining my room at the hotel. Wasn't it a waste to pay rent when I was hardly ever there? On the other hand, was it perhaps valuable as a place to meet clients?

There was a point, I suppose, when it was appropriate for me to give up my room and begin paying my share of the expenses at the loft. And there was a point, too, where we might have gone on to talk about commitment and permanence and, I suppose, marriage.

But we didn't do any of this, and, having left it undone, it became impossible for things to remain as they had been. We disengaged gradually, in little fits and starts. Our times together were increasingly marked by moods and silences, and our times apart became more frequent. We decided- I honestly forget who suggested it- that we ought to see other people. We did, and subsequently found that made us that much more uncomfortable with each other. And at last, gently, and with a surprising lack of drama, I returned a couple of books she had lent me and retrieved the last of my clothing, and I took a cab uptown, and that was that.

It had dragged on long enough for the ending to be something of a relief, but even so I felt lonely a lot of the time, and possessed of a sense of loss. I'd felt less at the breakup of my marriage some years previously, but of course I was drinking then, so I didn't really feel anything.

So I went to a lot of meetings, and sometimes I talked about what I was feeling at meetings, and sometimes I kept it to myself. I had tried dating shortly after the breakup, but I didn't seem to have the heart for it. Now I was beginning to think that it might be time for me to start seeing women again, or a woman. I kept having the thought, but I hadn't yet reached the point of acting on it.

All of which put a curious spin on the business of going door-to-door in a West Side rooming house and making conversation with single women. Most of them were a little young for me, but not all of them were. And there is something about the kind of interview I was conducting that facilitates flirtation. I'd learned this when I was a cop, and a married one at that.

Sometimes, asking my endless questions about the elusive Paula Hoeldtke, I would be aware of a strong attraction to the woman I was questioning. Sometimes I sensed, too, that the current ran in both directions, that the attraction was reciprocal. I wrote little mental scripts, moving us toward emotional intimacy, and from the doorway to the bed.

But I could never bring myself to take the next step. I felt out of sync, and by the time I left the rooming house, having talked to six or ten or a dozen people, my mood had darkened and I felt unutterably alone.