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

midnight, anyway."
    "Was she alone?"
    "Couldn't have been or I would have hit on her." He grinned. "Or at least volleyed, you know? She was with a guy, but was it the same guy every time? I think so but I couldn't swear to it. You have to remember that I never gave her a thought since the last time I saw her, and that's got to be two months ago."
    "She was last seen the first week in July."
    "That sounds about right, give or take a week or two. Last time I saw her she was drinking salty dogs, they were both drinking salty dogs."
    "What did she usually drink?"
    "Different things. Margaritas, vodka sours, maybe not that exactly but you get the general idea. Girl drinks. But he was a whiskey drinker and for a change he ordered up a saline canine, and what does that tell me?"
    "It was hot out."
    "On the nose, my dear Watson." He grinned again. "Either I'd make a good detective or you'd make a good bartender, because we both got the same place with that one. Can I buy you a drink on the strength of that?"
    "Make it a Coke."
    He drew a beer for himself and a Coke for me. He took a small sip of his and asked what had happened to Paula. I said she'd disappeared.
    "People'll do that," he said.
    I worked with him for ten minutes or so, and by the time I was through I had a description of Paula's escort. My height, maybe a little taller. Around thirty. Dark hair, no beard or moustache. A casual dresser, a sort of outdoors type.
    "Like retrieving lost data from a computer," he said, marveling at the process. "I'm remembering things I never even knew I knew. The only thing that bothers me is the thought that I might be making some of this up without meaning to, just to be obliging."
    "Sometimes that happens," I admitted.
    "Anyway, the description I gave you would fit half the men in the neighborhood. If he was even from the neighborhood, which I doubt."
    "You only saw him the five or six times he was with her."
    He nodded. "Add that to the hour they came in, I'd say he picked her up after work or she picked him up after work, or maybe they both worked at the same place."
    "And stopped here for a quick one."
    "More than one."
    "Was she a heavy hitter?"
    "He was. She sipped, but she didn't dawdle. Her drinks didn't just evaporate. She didn't show the booze, though. Neither did he. More evidence they worked someplace, and started their drinking here rather than finished it."
    He extended the photo. I told him to keep it. "And if you think of anything--"
    "I'll call the number."
    Dribs and drabs, bits and pieces. By the time I told my story at Fresh Start I'd spent over a week looking for Paula Hoeldtke, and I'd probably given her father a thousand dollars' worth of time and shoe leather, even if I couldn't point to a thousand dollars' worth of results.
    I'd talked to dozens of people and I had pages and pages of notes.
    I'd given out half of the hundred photos I'd had made up.
    What had I learned? I couldn't account for her movements after she'd disappeared from her rooming house in the middle of July. I couldn't turn up any evidence of employment subsequent to the waitress job she'd left in April. And the picture I was beginning to develop was a good deal less sharply focused than the one I was handing out all over the neighborhood.
    She was an actress, or wanted to be one, but she'd barely worked at all and had evidently stopped going to classes. She'd been in a man's company at a local drinking establishment, late in the evening, perhaps half a dozen times in all. She'd been a loner, but she hadn't spent much time in her room. Where did she go by her lonesome? Did she walk in the park? Did she talk to the pigeons?
    My first thought the next morning was that I'd been too abrupt with my mystery caller. He wasn't much, but what else did I have?
    Over breakfast, I reminded myself that I hadn't really expected to come up with anything. Paula Hoeldtke had dropped out of actressing and waitressing. Then she'd dropped out of Florence Edderling's