Out on the Cutting Edge

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 onLispenard Street , which is in TriBeCa, just south ofCanal 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 theEastVillage . 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 onLispenard 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?