Lawrence Block - Out on the Cutting Edge

“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 the Dakotas 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 on West 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?”