Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge

“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.”

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.