Out on the Cutting Edge

"Answer my question first," he said. "What's the reward?"

"There might be a small reward."

"How small is small?"

"Not enough to get rich on."

"Say a number."

"Maybe a couple of hundred dollars."

"Five hundred dollars?"

The price didn't really matter. He didn't have anything to sell me.

"All right," I agreed. "Five hundred."

"Shit. That's not much."

"I know."

There was a pause. Then he said, briskly, "All right. Here's what you do. You know the corner ofBroadway and Fifty-third Street , the uptown corner on the side towardsEighth Avenue . Meet me there in a half hour. And have the money with you. If you don't bring the bread, don't bother coming."

"I can't get the money at this hour."

"Ain't you got one of those all-night bank cards? Shit. All right, how much you got on you? You can give me some now and the rest tomorrow, but you don't want to stand around, man, because the chick might not be in the same place tomorrow, you dig what I'm saying?"

"More than you know."

"Say what?"

"What's her name?"

"How's that?"

"What's the chick's name?"

"You the one looking for her. Don't you know her damn name?"

"You don't, do you?"

He thought about it. "I know the name she using now," he said. It's the stupidest ones that turn crafty.

"That's probably not the name you know."

"What name's she using?"

"Uh-huh. That's part of what you be buying with your five hundred dollars."

What I'd be buying would be a forearm across the windpipe, possibly a knife between the ribs. The ones who have something for you never start out asking about a reward, and they don't want to meet you on streetcorners. I felt tired enough to hang up on him, but he'd just call back again.

I said, "Shut up for a minute. My client's not authorizing any reward until the girl's recovered. You haven't got anything to sell and there's no way you're going to hustle a buck out of me. I don't want to meet you on a streetcorner, but if I did I wouldn't bring money with me.

I'd bring a gun and a set of cuffs and a backup, and then I'd take you somewhere and work on you until I was sure you didn't know anything.

Then I'd work on you some more because I'd be pissed at you for wasting my time. Is that what you want? You want to meet me on the corner?"

"Motherfucker—"

"No," I said, "you got that wrong. You're the motherfucker."

I hung up on him. "Asshole," I said aloud, to him or to myself, I'm not sure which. Then I took a shower and went to bed.

The girl's name was Paula Hoeldtke and I didn't really expect to find her. I'd tried to tell her father as much but it's hard to tell people what they aren't prepared to hear.

Warren Hoeldtke had a big square jaw and an open face and a lot of wiry carrot-colored hair that was going gray. He had a Subaru dealership inMuncie,Indiana , and I could picture him starring in his own television commercials, pointing at the cars, facing into the camera, telling people they'll get the best possible deal at Hoeldtke Subaru.

Paula was the fourth of the Hoeldtkes' six children. She'd gone to college atBallState , right inMuncie .

"David Letterman went there," Hoeldtke told me. "You probably knew that. Of course that was before Paula's time."

She had majored in theater arts, and immediately after graduation she had come toNew York . "You can't make a career in the theater inMuncie ," he told me. "Or anywhere in the state, for that matter. You have to go toNew York orCalifornia . But I don't know, even if it wasn't that she had the bug to be an actress, I think she would have left. She had that urge to get off on her own. Her two older sisters, they both of them married boys from out of town, and in both cases the husbands decided to move toMuncie

. And her older brother, my son Gordon, he's in the car business with me. And there's a boy and a girl still in school, so who knows for sure what they're going to do, but my guess is they'll stay close. But Paula, she had that wanderlust. I was just glad she stuck around long enough to finish college."

InNew York she took acting classes, waited tables, lived in the West Fifties, and went on auditions. She had been in a showcase presentation of Another Part of Town at a storefront theater onSecond Avenue and had taken part in a staged reading of Very Good Friends in theWestVillage . He had copies of the playbills and showed them to me, pointing out her name and the little capsule biographies that ran under the heading of "Who's Who in the Cast."

"She didn't get paid for this," he said. "You don't, you know, when you're starting out. It's so you can perform and people can see you—

agents, casting people, directors. You hear all these salaries, this one getting five million dollars for a picture, but for most of them it's little or nothing for years."

"I know."

"We wanted to come for the play, her mother and I. Not the reading, that was just actors standing on the stage and reading lines from a script, it didn't sound very appealing, although we would have come if Paula had wanted it. But she didn't even want us to come to the play.