Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge

I asked which room had been Paula’s.

“She was in number twelve. I think .” She looked it up. “Yes, twelve. That’s up one flight.”

“I don’t suppose it’s still vacant.”

She laughed. “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t have any vacancies? I don’t think it was more than a day before I rented it. Let me see. The Price girl took that room on the eighteenth of July. When did I say Paula moved out?”

“We’re not sure, but it was the sixteenth when you found out she was gone.”

“Well, there you are. Vacant the sixteenth, rented the eighteenth. Probably rented the seventeenth, and she moved in the following day. My vacancies don’t last any time to speak of. I’ve got a waiting list right now with half a dozen names on it.”

“You say the new tenant’s name is Price?”

“Georgia Price. She’s a dancer. A lot of them are dancers the past year or so.”

“I think I’ll see if she’s in.” I gave her one of the photos. “If you think of anything,” I said, “my number’s on the back.”

She said, “That’s Paula. It’s a good likeness. Your name is Scudder? Here, just a minute, you can have one of my cards.”

Florence Edderling, her business card said. Rooms to Let.

“People call me Flo,” she said. “Or Florence, it doesn’t matter.”

Georgia Price wasn’t in, and I’d knocked on enough doors for the day. I bought a sandwich at a deli and ate it on the way to my meeting.

The next morning I took Warren Hoeldtke’s check to the bank and drew out some cash, including a hundred in singles. I kept a supply of them loose in my right front trouser pocket.

You couldn’t go anywhere without being asked for money. Sometimes I shook them off. Sometimes I reached into my pocket and handed over a dollar.

Some years back I had quit the police force and left my wife and sons and moved into my hotel. It was around that time that I started tithing, giving a tenth of whatever income I received to whatever house of worship I happened to visit next. I had taken to hanging out in churches a lot. I don’t know what I was looking for there and I can’t say whether or not I found it, but it seemed somehow appropriate for me to pay out ten percent of my earnings for whatever it gave me.

After I sobered up I went on tithing for a while, but it no longer felt right and I stopped. That didn’t feel right either. My first impulse was to give the money to AA, but AA didn’t want donations. They pass the hat to cover expenses, but a dollar a meeting is about as much as they want from you.

So I’d started giving the money away to the people who were coming out on the streets and asking for it. I didn’t seem to be comfortable keeping it for myself, and I hadn’t yet thought of a better thing to do with it.

I’m sure some of the people spent my handouts on drink and drugs, and why not? You spend your money on what you need the most. At first I found myself trying to screen the beggars, but I didn’t do that for long. On the one hand it seemed presumptuous of me, and at the same time it felt too much like work, a form of instant detection. When I gave the money to churches I hadn’t bothered to find out what they were doing with it, or whether or not I approved. I’d been willing then for my largesse to purchase Cadillacs for monsignors. Why shouldn’t I be as willing now to underwrite Porsches for crack dealers?

While I was in a giving mood, I walked over to Midtown North and handed fifty dollars to Detective Joseph Durkin.

I’d called ahead, so he was in the squadroom waiting for me. It had been a year or more since I’d seen him but he looked the same. He’d put on a couple of pounds, no more than he could carry. The booze was starting to show up in his face, but that’s no reason to quit. Who ever stopped drinking because of a few broken blood vessels, a little bloom in the cheeks?

He said, “I wondered if that Honda dealer’d get hold of you. He had a German name but I don’t remember it.”

“Hoeldtke. And it’s Subarus, not Hondas.”

“That’s a real important distinction, Matt. How’re you doing, anyway?”

“Not bad.”

“You look good. Clean living, right?”

“That’s my secret.”

“Early hours? Plenty of fiber in your diet?”

“Sometimes I go to the park and gnaw the bark right off a tree.”

“Me too. I just can’t help myself.” He reached up a hand and smoothed his hair back. It was dark brown, close to black, and it hadn’t needed smoothing; it lay flat against his scalp the way he’d combed it. “It’s good to see you, you know that?”

“Good to see you, Joe.”

We shook hands. I had palmed a ten and two twenties, and they moved from my hand to his during the handshake. His hand disappeared from view and came up empty. He said, “I gather you did yourself a little good with him.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I took some money from him and I’ll knock on some doors. I don’t know what good it’s going to do.”

“You put his mind at rest, that’s all. At least he’s doing all he can, you know? And you won’t soak him.”

“No.”

“I took a picture from him and had them run it at the morgue. They had a couple of unidentified white females since June, but she doesn’t match up to any of ’em.”

“I figured you’d done that.”

“Yeah, well, that’s all I did. It’s not police business.”

“I know.”

“Which is why I referred him to you.”

“I know, and I appreciate it.”

“My pleasure. You got any sense of it yet?”

“It’s a little early. One thing, she moved out. Packed everything and took off.”

“Well, that’s good,” he said. “Makes it a little more likely she’s alive.”

“I know, but there are things that don’t make sense. You said you checked the morgue. What about hospitals?”

“You thinking coma?”

“It could be.”

“When’d they hear from her last, sometime in June? That’s a long time to be in a coma.”

“Sometimes they’re out for years.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

“And she paid her rent the last time on the sixth of July. So what’s that, two months and a few days.”

“Still a long time.”

“Not for the person in the coma. It’s like the wink of an eye.”

He looked at me. He had pale gray eyes that don’t show you much, but they showed a little grudging amusement now. “ ‘The wink of an eye,’ “ he said. “First she checks out of her rooming house, then she checks into a hospital.”

“All it takes is a coincidence,” I said. “She moves, and in the course of the move or a day or two later she has an accident. No ID, some public-spirited citizen snags her purse while she’s unconscious, and she’s Jane Doe in a ward somewhere. She didn’t call her parents and tell them she was moving because the accident happened first. I’m not saying it happened, just that it could have.”

“I suppose. You checking hospitals?”

“I thought I could walk over to the ones in the neighborhood. Roosevelt, St. Clare’s.”

“Of course the accident could have happened anywhere.”

“I know.”

“If she moved, she could have moved anywhere, so she could be in any hospital anywhere in the city.”

“I was thinking that myself.”

He gave me a look. “I suppose you’ve got some extra pictures. Oh, that’s handy, with your number on the back. I suppose you wouldn’t mind if I sent these around for you, asked them all to check their Jane Does.”

“That would be very helpful,” I said.

“I bet it would. You expect a lot for the price of a coat.”

A coat, in police parlance, is a hundred dollars. A hat is twenty-five. A pound is five. The terms took hold years ago, when clothing was cheaper than it is now, and British currency pegged higher. I said, “You’d better look closer. All you got was a couple of hats.”