Out on the Cutting Edge by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page A

at least half knew it, and what's more I don't think it broke her heart.
    That's another thing, besides the talent you have to have the desire.
    You have to want it desperately, and I don't think she did." She thought for a moment. "She wanted something, though."
    "What?"
    "I don't know. I'm not sure she knew. Money? Fame? That's what draws a lot of them, especially on the West Coast. They think acting's a way to get rich. It's about the least likely way I can think of."
    "Is that what Paula wanted? Money and fame?"
    "Or glamour. Or excitement, adventure. Really, how well did I know her? She started coming to my classes last fall and she kept coming around for five months or so. And she wasn't religious about it.
    Sometimes she didn't show up. That's common enough, they have work or an audition or something that comes up."
    "When did she quit?"
    "She never quit formally, she just ceased to appear. I looked it up.
    Her last class was in February."
    She had names and phone numbers for a dozen men and women who had studied with her at the same time as Paula. She couldn't remember if Paula had had a boyfriend, or if anyone had ever picked her up after class. She didn't know if Paula had been especially friendly with any of her classmates. I copied down all the names and numbers except for Virginia Sutcliffe, to whom I'd already spoken.
    "Ginny Sutcliffe said Paula did an improvisational scene at a bus stop," I said.
    "Did she? I use that situation a lot. I can't honestly say I recall how Paula did with it."
    "According to Ginny, she had an awkward, tentative quality."
    She smiled, but there was no joy in it. " 'An awkward, tentative quality,' " she said. "No kidding. Every year a thousand ingenues descend uponNew York , awkward and tentative as all hell, hoping their coltish exuberance will melt the heart of a nation. Sometimes I want to go down to Port Authority and meet the buses and tell them all to go home."
    She drank her buttermilk, took up her napkin and dabbed at her lips. I told her Ginny had said that Paula had seemed vulnerable.
    "They're all vulnerable," she said.
    * * *
    I called Paula's acting classmates, saw some of them face to face, spoke with others on the phone. I worked my way through Kelly Greer's list, and at the same time I kept knocking on doors at Flo Edderling's rooming house, crossing off names on my list of uninterviewed tenants.
    I went, as my client had previously gone, to the restaurant that was Paula's last known place of employment. It was called the Druid's Castle, and it was an English pub-style place on West Forty-sixth.
    They had dishes like shepherd's pie on the menu, and something called toad-in-the-hole. The manager confirmed that she'd left in the spring. "She was all right," he said. "I forget why she quit, but we parted on good terms. I'd hire her again." There was a waitress who remembered Paula as "a good kid but sort of spacey, like she didn't really have her mind on what she was doing." I walked in and out of a lot of restaurants in the Forties and Fifties, and two of them did turn out to be places where Paula had worked prior to her stint at the Druid's Castle. This was information that might have been useful if I'd planned on writing her biography, but it didn't tell me much about where she'd gone in mid-July.
    In a bar at Ninth and Fifty-second, a place calledParis Green, the manager allowed that she looked familiar but said she'd never worked there. The bartender, a lanky fellow with a beard like an oriole's nest, asked if he could see her picture. "She never worked here," he said, "but she used to come in here.
    Not in the past couple of months, though."
    "In the spring?"
    "Had to be since April because that's when I started here. What was her name again?"
    "Paula."
    He tapped the photo. "I don't remember the name, but this is her. I must have seen her in here five, six times. Late. She came in late. We close at two, and it was generally close to that when she came in. Past