'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.'
I spent an hour or so that night going door-to-door in the rooming house, starting at the top floor and working my way down. A majority of the tenants were out. I spoke with half a dozen tenants and didn't learn anything. Only one of the persons I talked to recognized Paula's picture, and she hadn't even realized Paula had moved out.
I called it quits after a while and stopped at the manager's door on my way out. She was watching Jeopardy, and she kept me waiting until the commercial. 'That's a good program,' she said, turning the sound off. 'They get smart people to be on that show. You have to have a quick mind.'
I asked which room had been Paula's.
'She was in number twelve. I think.' She looked it up. 'Yes, twelve. That's up one flight.'
'I don't suppose it's still vacant.'
She laughed. 'Didn't I tell you I didn't have any vacancies? I don't think it was more than a day before I rented it. Let me see. The Price girl took that room on the eighteenth of July. When did I say Paula moved out?'
'We're not sure, but it was the sixteenth when you found out she was gone.'
'Well, there you are. Vacant the sixteenth, rented the eighteenth.
Probably rented the seventeenth, and she moved in the following day.
My vacancies don't last any time to speak of. I've got a waiting list right now with half a dozen names on it.'
'You say the new tenant's name is Price?'
'Georgia Price. She's a dancer. A lot of them are dancers the past year or so.'
'I think I'll see if she's in.' I gave her one of the photos. 'If you think of anything,' I said, 'my number's on the back.'
She said, 'That's Paula. It's a good likeness. Your name is Scudder? Here, just a minute, you can have one of my cards.'
Florence Edderling, her business card said. Rooms to Let.
'People call me Flo,' she said. 'OrFlorence , it doesn't matter.'
Georgia Price wasn't in, and I'd knocked on enough doors for the day. I bought a sandwich at a deli and
ate it on the way to my meeting.
The next morning I took Warren Hoeldtke's check to the bank and drew out some cash, including a hundred in singles. I kept a supply of them loose in my right front trouser pocket.
You couldn't go anywhere without being asked for money.
Sometimes I shook them off. Sometimes I reached into my pocket and handed over a dollar.
Some years back I had quit the police force and left my wife and sons and moved into my hotel. It was around that time that I started tithing, giving a tenth of whatever income I received to whatever house of worship I happened to visit next. I had taken to hanging out in churches a lot. I don't know what I was looking for there and I can't say whether or not I found it, but it seemed somehow appropriate for me to pay out ten percent of my earnings for whatever it gave me.
After I sobered up I went on tithing for a while, but it no longer felt right and I stopped. That didn't feel right either. My first impulse was to give the money to AA, but AA didn't want donations. They pass the hat to cover expenses, but a dollar a meeting is about as much as they want from you.
