Do you want to take it with you? It won't take me a minute to disconnect it.'
'I don't want the machine,' I said. 'I didn't come here to pick up answering machines, or to collect money for calls to Tallahassee.'
'I'm sorry.'
'I want to ask you a few questions about the phone, that's all. And about the machine.'
'Okay.'
'You moved in on the eighteenth and the phone was on until the twentieth. Did Paula get any calls during that time?'
'No.'
'The phone didn't ring?'
'It rang once or twice but it was for me. I called my friend and gave her the number here, and she called
me once or twice over the weekend. That was a local call so it didn't cost anything, or if it did all it cost was a quarter.'
'I don't care if you called Alaska,' I told her. 'If it'll put your mind at rest, the calls you did make didn't cost anybody anything. Paula's deposit came to more than her final bill, so the calls were paid for out of money that would have been refunded to her, and she's not around to claim the refund anyway.'
'I know I'm being silly about this,' she said.
'That's all right. The only calls that came in were for you. How about when you were out? Were there any messages on her machine?'
'Not after I moved in. I know because the last message was from her mother, all about how they were going to be out of town, and that message must have been left a day or two before I moved in. See, as soon as I figured out it was her phone and not one that came with the room, I unplugged the answering machine. Then about a week later I decided she wasn't coming back for it and I might as well use it, because I needed one. When I hooked it up again I played her messages before I set the tape to record.'
'Were there messages besides the ones from her parents?'
'A few.'
'Do you still have them?'
'I erased the tape.'
'Do you remember anything about the other messages?'
'Gee, I don't. There were some that were just hangups. I just played the tape once through trying to figure out how to erase it.'
'What about the other tape, the one that says nobody's home but you can leave a message? Paula must have had one of those on the machine.'
'Sure.'
'Did you erase it?'
'It erases automatically when you record a new message over it.
And I did that so I could leave a message in my own voice when I started using the machine.' She chewed at her lip. 'Was that wrong?'
'No.'
'Would it have been important? It was just the usual thing. 'Hello, this is Paula. I can't talk to you right now but you can leave a message at the sound of the tone.' Or something like that, that's not word-for-word.'
'It's not important,' I said. And it wasn't. I just would have liked a chance to hear her voice.
'I'm surprised you're still on it,' Durkin said. 'What did you do, call Indiana and shake some more dough out of the money tree?'
'No. I probably should, I'm putting in a lot of hours, but I'm not getting much in the way of results. I think her disappearance is a criminal matter.'
'What makes you think so?'
'She never officially moved out. She paid her rent one day, and ten days later her landlady cracked the door and the room was empty.'
'Happens all the time.'
'I know that. The room was empty except for three things.
Whoever cleaned it out left the phone, the answering machine, and the bed linens.'
'And what does that tell you?'
'That somebody else packed the stuff and carried it off. A lot of rooming houses furnish bed linen. This one didn't. Paula Hoeldtke had to supply her own linen, so she would have known to take it with her when she left. Someone else who didn't know might have assumed it was supposed to stay with the room.'
'That's all you've got?'
'No. The answering machine was left behind, and it was hooked up to continue answering the phone and telling people to leave their messages. If she'd left on her own she'd have called and had the phone disconnected.'
