'All it takes is a coincidence,' I said. 'She moves, and in the course of the move or a day or two later she has an accident. No ID, some public-spirited citizen snags her purse while she's unconscious, and she's Jane Doe in a ward somewhere. She didn't call her parents and tell them she was moving because the accident happened first. I'm not saying it happened, just that it could have.'
'I suppose. You checking hospitals?'
'I thought I could walk over to the ones in the neighborhood.
Roosevelt, St. Clare's.'
'Of course the accident could have happened anywhere.'
'I know.'
'If she moved, she could have moved anywhere, so she could be in any hospital anywhere in the city.'
'I was thinking that myself.'
He gave me a look. 'I suppose you've got some extra pictures. Oh, that's handy, with your number on the back. I suppose you wouldn't mind if I sent these around for you, asked them all to check their Jane Does.'
'That would be very helpful,' I said.
'I bet it would. You expect a lot for the price of a coat.'
A coat, in police parlance, is a hundred dollars. A hat is twenty-five. A pound is five. The terms took hold years ago, when clothing was cheaper than it is now, and British currency pegged higher.
I said,
'You'd better look closer. All you got was a couple of hats.'
'Jesus,' he said. 'You're a cheap bastard, anybody ever tell you that?'
* * *
She wasn't in a hospital, not in the five boroughs, at any rate. I hadn't expected she would be, but it was the kind of thing that had to be checked.
While I was learning this through Durkin's channels, I was walking down other streets on my own. Over the next several days I made a few more visits to Florence Edderling's rooming house, where I knocked on more doors and talked to more tenants when I found them in. There were men as well as women in the building, old people as well as young ones, New Yorkers as well as out-of-towners, but the bulk of Ms. Edderling's roomers were like Paula Hoeldtke— young women, relatively new in the city, long on hope and short on cash.
Few of them knew Paula by name, although most of them recognized her picture, or thought they did.
Like her, they spent most of their time away from the rooming house, and when they were in their rooms they were alone, with their doors closed. 'I thought this would be like those forties movies,' one girl told me, 'with a wisecracking landlady and kids gathering in the parlor to talk about boyfriends and auditions and do each other's hair.
Well, there used to be a parlor, but they partitioned it years ago and made two rooms out of it and rented them out. There are people I nod to and smile at, but I don't really know a single person in this building. I used to see this girl— Paula? But I never knew her name, and I didn't even know she'd moved out.'
One morning I went over to the Actors Equity office, where I managed to establish that Paula Hoeldtke hadn't been a member of that organization. The young man who checked the listings asked me if she'd been a member of AFTRA or SAG; when I said I didn't know, he was nice enough to call the two unions for me. Neither of them had her name on their rolls.
'Unless she used another name,' he said. 'Her name's not utterly impossible, in fact it looks good in print, but it's the sort of name a great many people would mispronounce, or at least be uncertain about.
Do you suppose she went and changed it to Paula Holden or something manageable like that?'
'She didn't say anything about it to her parents.'
'It's not always the sort of thing you rush to report to your parents, especially if they have a strong attachment to their name. As parents often do.'
'I suppose you're right. But she used her own name in the two shows she was in.'
'May I see that?' He took the playbills from me. 'Oh, now this might be helpful. Yes, here we are, Paula Hoeldtke. Am I pronouncing it correctly?'
'Yes.'
'Good. Actually I can't think how else you would pronounce it, but one feels uncertain. She could have just spelled it differently, H-O-L-T-K-Y. But that wouldn't look right, would it? Let's see. 'Paula Hoeldtke majored in theater arts atBallStateUniversity '— oh, the poor darling— 'where she appeared in The Flowering Peach and Gregory's Garden.' The Flowering Peach is Odets, but what the hell do you suppose Gregory's Garden might be? Student work, that would be my guess. And that is all they're going to tell us about Paula Hoeldtke. What is this, anyway? Another Part of Town, what a curious choice for a showcase. She played Molly. I barely remember the play, but I don't think that's a principal role.'
'She told her parents she had a small part.'
'I don't think she exaggerated. Was there anyone in this? Hmmm.
'Axel Godine appears with the permission of Actors Equity.' I don't know who he is, but I can furnish you with his phone number. He played Oliver, so he's probably well up in years, but you never know in a showcase, the casting sometimes tends to be imaginative. Does she like older men?'
'I don't know.'
'What's this? Very Good Friends. Not a bad title, and where did they do it? At theCherry Lane ? I wonder why I never heard of it. Oh, it was a staged reading, it only had one performance. Not a bad title, Very Good Friends, a
