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.
"I knocked on her door and she didn't answer, and then on my way back downstairs I knocked again, and she still wasn't home. The next morning, that would have been Thursday the sixteenth, I banged on her door again, and when there was no answer I used my passkey." She frowned. "Now why would I do that? She was usually in mornings but not always, and she wasn't but three days late with the rent. Oh, I remember! There was mail for her that hadn't been picked up in a few days, letters I'd seen a couple times over, and between that and the rent being late- anyway, I opened the door."
"What did you find?"
"Not what I was afraid of finding. You hate to open a door that way, you know. You're a cop, I don't have to tell you that, do I? People who live alone in furnished rooms, and you open their doors scared of what you might find. Not this time, thank God. Her place was empty."
"Completely empty?"
"No, come to think of it. She left the bed linen. Tenants have to supply their own linen. I used to furnish it, but I changed the policy, oh, I'd say fifteen years ago. Her sheets and blankets and pillowcase were still on the bed. But there were no clothes in the closet, nothing in the drawers, no food in the refrigerator. No question but that she'd moved out, she was gone."
"I wonder why she left the linen."
"Maybe she was moving someplace where they supplied it. Maybe she was leaving town and only had room to carry so much. Maybe she plain forgot it. When you pack up to leave a motel room you don't take the sheets and blankets, not unless you're a thief, and this is sort of like living in a hotel. I've had them leave linen behind before. Lord, that's not the only thing I've had them leave behind."
She left that hanging there, but I let it lie. I said, "You said she was a waitress."
"Well, that's how she earned her living. She was an actress, or fixing to be one. Most of my people are trying to get into show business. My younger people. I've got a few older folks been with me for years and years, living on pensions and government checks. I've got one woman doesn't pay me but seventeen dollars and thirty cents a week, if you can believe that, and she's got one of the best rooms in the house. And I have to climb five flights of stairs to collect her rent, and I'll tell you, there are some Wednesday mornings when it doesn't seem worth the effort."
"Do you know where Paula was working just before she left?"