Out on the Cutting Edge

A few minutes later, without taking his eyes off the Sony, he said,

"Women."

"Well," I said.

"If they didn't have pussies there'd be a bounty on 'em." I didn't say anything, and he glanced my way, looking to read my expression. "Now that," he said, "might be construed to be a sexist remark." He had a little trouble getting his tongue around construed; and he got interested in the word and let go of his original train of thought. "Construed," he said. "I gotta get construed, blewed and tattooed. My whole problem, see, is I got misconstrued once. How's that for a problem?"

"It's a pretty good one."

"Let me tell you something," he said. "She's the one with a problem."

Jack Odegaard drove us back to the city, and he and I helped Roz get her stuff into her apartment.

Before the move she'd lived on Fifty-seventh a few doors fromEighth Avenue . Now she was in a high-rise at Seventieth andWest End . "I had a big one-bedroom," she said, "and now I'm in a studio, and my rent's more than double what it used to be. I ought to have my head examined for letting go of my old place. But I was moving into a beautiful two-bedroom inRegoPark . You saw the apartment, if you can imagine what it looked like before the shit hit the fan. And if you're going to commit to a relationship you have to show some faith in it, don't you?"

She gave Jack fifty bucks for the trip and paid me a hundred for my hazardous duty. She could afford it, just as she could handle the higher rent; she made good money working in the news department of one of the TV networks. I don't know what exactly she did there, but I gather she did it well.

I thought I might see Eddie atSt. Paul 's that night but he wasn't there. Afterward I walked down to Paris Green to talk to the bartender who'd recognized Paula Hoeldtke's picture. I thought he might have remembered something, but he hadn't.

The next morning I called the telephone company and was told that Paula Hoeldtke's phone had been disconnected. I was trying to find out when this had happened and for what reason, but I had to go through channels before I could find somebody who was authorized to tell me.

The service had been terminated at the customer's request, a woman told me, and then asked me to hold the line for a moment.

She returned to inform me further that there was an outstanding final balance in the customer's favor. I asked how that could be; had she overpaid the final bill?

"She never received her final statement," the woman told me. "She evidently didn't leave a forwarding address. She had put down a deposit prior to installation, and the final bill came to less than the funds on deposit. In fact—"

"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."