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 in Muncie, 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 at Ball State, right in Muncie. “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 to New York. “You can’t make a career in the theater in Muncie,” he told me. “Or anywhere in the state, for that matter. You have to go to New York or California. 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 to Muncie. 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.”

In New 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 on Second Avenue and had taken part in a staged reading of Very Good Friends in the West Village. 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. She said it wasn’t a very good play and her part was small anyway. She said we should wait until she was in something decent.”

They had last heard from her in late June. She had sounded fine. She’d said something about possibly getting out of the city for the summer, but she hadn’t gone into detail. When a couple of weeks passed without word from her, they called her and kept getting her answering machine.

“She was hardly ever home. She said her room was tiny and dark and depressing, so she didn’t spend much time in it. When I saw it the other day I could understand why. I didn’t actually see her room, I just saw the building and the front hall, but I could understand. People pay high prices in New York to live in places that anywhere else would be torn down.”

Because she was rarely in, they did not ordinarily call her. Instead, they had a system. She would call every second or third Sunday, placing a person-to-person call for herself. They would tell the operator that Paula Hoeldtke was not at home, and then they would call her back station-to-station.

“It wasn’t really cheating them,” he said, “because it cost the same as if she called us station-to-station, but this way it was on our phone bill instead of hers. And as a result she wasn’t in a hurry to get off the phone, so actually the telephone company came out ahead, too.”

But she didn’t call, nor did she respond to the messages on her machine. Toward the end of July, Hoeldtke and his wife and the youngest daughter gassed up one of the Subarus and took a trip, driving up into the Dakotas to spend a week riding horses at a ranch and seeing the Badlands and Mount Rushmore. It was mid-August when they got back, and when they tried Paula they didn’t get her machine. Instead they got a recording informing them that her phone had been temporarily disconnected.

“If she went away for the summer,” he said, “she might have had the phone turned off to save money. But would she go away without letting anybody know? It wasn’t like her. She might do something on the spur of the moment, but she would get in touch with you and let you know about it. She was responsible.”

But not too responsible. You couldn’t set your watch by her. Sometimes, during the three years since she’d graduated from Ball State, she’d gone more than two or three weeks between phone calls. So it was possible she’d gone somewhere during the summer and had been too preoccupied to get in touch. It was possible she’d tried to call while her parents were mounted on horses, or hiking along trails in Wind Cave National Park.

“Ten days ago was her mother’s birthday,” Warren Hoeldtke said. “And she didn’t call.”

“And that was something she wouldn’t have missed?”

“Never. She wouldn’t have forgotten and she wouldn’t have missed calling. And if she did miss she would have called the next day.”

He hadn’t known what to do. He called the police in New York and got nowhere, predictably enough. He went to the Muncie office of a national detective agency. An investigator from their New York office visited her last known residence and established that she was no longer living there. If he cared to give them a substantial retainer, they would be glad to pursue the matter.

“I thought, what did they do for my money? Go to the place where she lived and find out she wasn’t there? I could do that myself. So I got on a plane and came here.”

He’d gone to the rooming house where Paula had lived. She had moved out sometime in early July, leaving no forwarding address. The telephone company had refused to tell him anything beyond what he already knew, that the telephone in question had been disconnected. He’d gone to the restaurant where she’d worked and found out that she’d left that job back in April.

“She may even had told us that,” he said. “She must have worked six or seven places since she got to New York, and I don’t know if she mentioned every time she changed jobs. She would leave because the tips weren’t good, or she didn’t get along with somebody, or because they wouldn’t let her take off when she had an audition. So she could have left the last job and gone to work somewhere else without telling us, or she could have told us and it didn’t register.”

He couldn’t think what else to do on his own, so he’d gone to the police. There he was told that in the first place it wasn’t really a police matter, that she had evidently moved without informing her parents and that, as an adult, she had every legal right to do so. They told him, too, that he had waited too long, that she had disappeared almost three months ago and whatever trail she’d left was a cold one by now.

If he wanted to pursue the matter further, the police officer told him, he’d be well advised to engage a private investigator. Department regulations prohibited his recommending a particular investigator. However, the officer said, it was probably all right for him to say what he himself would do if he happened to find himself in Mr. Hoeldtke’s circumstances. There was a fellow named Scudder, an ex-cop as a matter of fact, and one who happened to reside in the very neighborhood where Mr. Hoeldtke’s daughter had been living, and—

“Who was the cop?”

“His name’s Durkin.”

“Joe Durkin,” I said. “That was very decent of him.”

“I liked him.”

“Yes, he’s all right,” I said. We were in a coffee shop on Fifty-seventh, a few doors down from my hotel. The lunch hour had ended before we got there, so they were letting us sit over coffee. I’d had a refill. Hoeldtke still had his first cup in front of him.

“Mr. Hoeldtke,” I said, “I’m not sure I’m the man you want.”

“Durkin said—”

“I know what he said. The thing is, you can probably get better coverage from the people you used earlier, the ones with the Muncie office. They can put several operatives on the case and they can canvass a good deal more comprehensively than I can.”

“Are you saying they can do a better job?”

I thought about it. “No,” I said, “but they may be able to give the appearance. For one thing, they’ll furnish you with detailed reports telling you exactly what they did and who they talked to and what they found out. They’ll itemize their expenses and bill you very precisely for the hours they spend on the case.” I took a sip of coffee, set the cup down in its saucer. I leaned forward and said, “Mr. Hoeldtke, I’m a pretty decent detective, but I’m completely unofficial. You need a license to operate as a private investigator in this state and I don’t have one. I’ve never felt like going through the hassle of applying for one. I don’t itemize expenses or keep track of my hours, and I don’t provide detailed reports. I don’t have an office, either, which is why we’re meeting here over coffee. All I’ve really got is whatever instincts and abilities I’ve developed over the years, and I’m not sure that’s what you want to employ.”

“Durkin didn’t tell me you were unlicensed.”

“Well, he could have. It’s not a secret.”

“Why do you suppose he recommended you?”

I must have been having an attack of scruples. Or maybe I didn’t much want the job. “Partly because he expects me to give him a referral fee,” I said.

Hoeldtke’s face clouded. “He didn’t mention that either,” he said.

“I’m not surprised.”

“That’s not ethical,” he said. “Is it?”

“No, but it wasn’t really ethical for him to recommend anyone in the first place. And, to give him his due, he wouldn’t have steered you to me unless he thought I was the right person for you to hire. He probably thinks I’ll give you good value and a straight deal.”

“And will you?”

I nodded. “And part of a straight deal is to tell you in front that you’re very likely wasting your money.”

“Because—”

“Because she’ll probably either turn up on her own or she won’t turn up at all.”

He was silent for a moment, considering the implications of what I’d just said. Neither of us had yet mentioned the possibility that his daughter was dead, and it looked as though it was going to go unmentioned, but that didn’t mean it was all that easy to avoid thinking about it.

He said, “How much money would I be wasting?”

“Suppose you let me have a thousand dollars.”

“Would that be an advance or a retainer or what?”

“I don’t know what you’d want to call it,” I said. “I don’t have a day rate and I don’t keep track of my hours. I just go out there and do what seems to make sense. There are a batch of basic steps to take for openers, and I’ll go through them first, although I don’t really expect them to lead anywhere. Then there are a few other things I can do, and we’ll see if they get us anyplace or not. When it seems to me that your thousand bucks is used up I’ll ask you for more money, and you can decide whether or not you want to pay it.”

He had to laugh. “Not a very businesslike approach,” he said.

“I know it. I’m afraid I’m not a very businesslike person.”

“In a curious way, that inspires confidence. The thousand dollars—I assume your expenses would be additional.”

I shook my head. “I don’t anticipate a lot in the way of expenses, and I’d rather pay them myself than have to account for them.”

“Would you want to run some newspaper ads? I’d thought of doing that myself, either a listing in the personals or an ad with her photo and the offer of a reward. Of course that wouldn’t come out of your thousand dollars. It would probably cost that much or more by itself, to do any kind of extensive advertising.”

I advised against it. “She’s too old to get her picture on a milk carton,” I said, “and I’m not sure ads in the papers are a good idea. You just draw the hustlers and the reward-hunters that way, and they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

“I keep thinking that she might have amnesia. If she saw her photograph in the newspaper, or if someone else saw it—”

“Well, it’s a possibility,” I said. “But let’s hold it in reserve for the time being.”

* * *

In the end, he gave me a check for a thousand dollars and a couple of pictures and what information he had—her last address, the names of several restaurants where she’d worked. He let me keep the two playbills, assuring me that they had plenty of copies of both. I copied down his address in Muncie and his phone numbers at home and at the auto showroom. “Call anytime at all,” he said.

I told him I probably wouldn’t call until I had something concrete to report. When I did, he’d hear from me.

He paid for our coffees and left a dollar for the waitress. At the door he said, “I feel good about this. I think I’ve taken the right step. You come across as honest and straightforward, and I appreciate that.”

Outside, a three-card-monte dealer was working to a small crowd, telling the people to keep their eyes on the red card, keeping his own eye out for cops.

“I’ve read about that game,” Hoeldtke said.

“It’s not a game,” I told him. “It’s a short con, a swindle. The player never wins.”

“That’s what I’ve read. Yet people keep playing.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s hard to figure.”

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?”

“I don’t even know that she was working. If she told me I don’t remember, and I doubt she told me. I don’t get too close to them, you know. I’ll pass the time of day, but that’s about all. Because, you know, they come and they go. My old folks are with me until the Lord calls them home, but my young people are in and out of here, in and out. They get discouraged and go home, or they save up some money and get a regular apartment, or they get married or move in with someone, whatever they do.”

“How long was Paula here?”

“Three years, or the next thing to it. She moved in just three years ago this week, and I know because I looked it up when her father was here. Of course she moved out two months ago, so she wasn’t here the whole three years. Even so, she was with me longer than most. I’ve got a few have been with me longer than that, besides my rent-controlled old people, I mean. But not many.”

“Tell me something about her.”

“Tell you what?”

“I don’t know. Who were her friends? What did she do with her time? You’re an observant woman, you must have noticed things.”

“I’m observant, yes, but sometimes I turn a blind eye. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“I have fifty-four rooms I rent out, and some of the rooms are larger and two girls will share one. I have, I think it’s sixty-six tenants at the moment. All I ask is are they quiet, are they decent, do they pay the rent on time. I don’t ask how they earn their money.”

“Was Paula turning tricks?”

“I have no reason to think that she was. But I couldn’t swear on a Bible that she wasn’t. I’ll say this, I’d bet there’s at least four of my tenants earning money that way, and likely more than that, and the thing is I don’t know who they are. If a woman gets up and goes out to work, I don’t know if she’s carrying plates in a restaurant or doing something else in a massage parlor or whatever they call it this year. My tenants can’t have guests to their rooms. That’s my business. What they do off the premises is their business.”

“You never met any of her friends?”

“She never brought anyone home. It wasn’t allowed. I’m not stupid, I know people will sneak someone in now and then, but I discourage it enough that no one tries it on a regular basis. If she was friendly with any of the girls in the building, or any of the young men, for that matter, well, I wouldn’t know about it.”

“She didn’t leave you a forwarding address.”

“No. I never heard a word from her after the last time she paid her rent.”

“What did you do with her mail?”

“Gave it back to the postman. Gone, no forwarding. She didn’t get much mail. A phone bill, the usual junk mail that everybody gets.”

“You got along all right with her?”

“I would say so. She was quiet, she was well-spoken, she was clean. She paid her rent. She was late a few times over the three years.” She paged through the ledger. “Here she paid two weeks at once. And here she missed for almost a month, and then she paid an extra fifty dollars a week until she was even with me. I’ll let tenants do that if they’ve been with me for a while and I know they’re good for it. And if they don’t make a habit of it. You have to carry people some of the time, because everybody has bad times now and then.”

“Why do you suppose she left without saying anything to you?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“No idea?”

“They’ll do that, you know. Just up and disappear, steal out the door with their suitcases in the middle of the night. But they’ll generally do that when they’re a week or so late with the rent, and she was the next thing to paid up. In fact she may have been completely paid up, because I don’t know for sure when she left. At the most she was two days late, but for all I know she paid on the Monday and moved out a day later, because there was ten days that I didn’t lay eyes on her between the last time she paid rent and the day I used my passkey.”

“It seems odd she would leave without a word.”

“Well, maybe it was late when she left and she didn’t want to disturb me. Or maybe it was a decent hour but I wasn’t home. I’m out at the movies every chance I get, you know. There’s nothing I like better than going to the movies in the middle of a weekday afternoon, when the theater’s next to empty and there’s just you and the picture. I was thinking about getting myself a VCR. I could see any movie I wanted any time of the day, and it doesn’t cost but two or three dollars to rent one. But it’s not the same, watching on your own set in your own room, and on a bitty TV screen. It’s like the difference between praying at home and in church.”