'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 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.'
