Hoeldtke Subaru.
Paula was the fourth of the Hoeldtkes' six children. She'd gone to college atBallState , right inMuncie .
'David Letterman went there,' Hoeldtke told me. 'You probably knew that. Of course that was before Paula's time.'
She had majored in theater arts, and immediately after graduation she had come toNew York . 'You can't make a career in the theater inMuncie ,' he told me. 'Or anywhere in the state, for that matter. You have to go toNew York orCalifornia . But I don't know, even if it wasn't that she had the bug to be an actress, I think she would have left. She had that urge to get off on her own. Her two older sisters, they both of them married boys from out of town, and in both cases the husbands decided to move toMuncie
. And her older brother, my son Gordon, he's in the car business with me. And there's a boy and a girl still in school, so who knows for sure what they're going to do, but my guess is they'll stay close. But Paula, she had that wanderlust. I was just glad she stuck around long enough to finish college.'
InNew York she took acting classes, waited tables, lived in the West Fifties, and went on auditions. She had been in a showcase presentation of Another Part of Town at a storefront theater onSecond Avenue and had taken part in a staged reading of Very Good Friends in theWestVillage . He had copies of the playbills and showed them to me, pointing out her name and the little capsule biographies that ran under the heading of 'Who's Who in the Cast.'
'She didn't get paid for this,' he said. 'You don't, you know, when you're starting out. It's so you can perform and people can see you—
agents, casting people, directors. You hear all these salaries, this one getting five million dollars for a picture, but for most of them it's little or nothing for years.'
'I know.'
'We wanted to come for the play, her mother and I. Not the reading, that was just actors standing on the stage and reading lines from a script, it didn't sound very appealing, although we would have come if Paula had wanted it. But she didn't even want us to come to the play.
She said it wasn't a very good play and her part was small anyway. She said we should wait until she was in something decent.'
They had last heard from her in late June. She had sounded fine.
She'd said something about possibly getting out of the city for the summer, but she hadn't gone into detail. When a couple of weeks passed without word from her, they called her and kept getting her answering machine.
'She was hardly ever home. She said her room was tiny and dark and depressing, so she didn't spend much time in it. When I saw it the other day I could understand why. I didn't actually see her room, I just saw the building and the front hall, but I could understand. People pay high prices inNew York to live in places that anywhere else would be torn down.'
Because she was rarely in, they did not ordinarily call her. Instead, they had a system. She would call every second or third Sunday, placing a person-to-person call for herself. They would tell the operator that Paula Hoeldtke was not at home, and then they would call her back station-to-station.
'It wasn't really cheating them,' he said, 'because it cost the same as if she called us station-to-station, but this way it was on our phone bill instead of hers. And as a result she wasn't in a hurry to get off the phone, so actually the telephone company came out ahead, too.'
But she didn't call, nor did she respond to the messages on her machine. Toward the end of July, Hoeldtke and his wife and the youngest daughter gassed up one of the Subarus and took a trip, driving up into the Dakotas to spend a week riding horses at a ranch and seeing the Badlands and Mount Rushmore. It was mid-August when they got back, and when they tried Paula they didn't get her machine. Instead they got a recording informing them that her phone had been temporarily disconnected.
'If she went away for the summer,' he said, 'she might have had the phone turned off to save money.
But would she go away without letting anybody know? It wasn't like her. She might do something on the spur of the moment, but she would get in touch with you and let you know about it. She was responsible.'
But not too responsible. You couldn't set your watch by her.
Sometimes, during the three years since she'd graduated fromBallState , she'd gone more than two or three weeks between phone calls. So it was possible she'd gone somewhere during the summer and had been too preoccupied to get in touch. It was possible she'd tried to call while her parents were mounted on horses, or hiking along trails inWindCaveNational Park .
'Ten days ago was her mother's birthday,' Warren Hoeldtke said.
'And she didn't call.'
'And that was something she wouldn't have missed?'
'Never. She wouldn't have forgotten and she wouldn't have missed calling. And if she did miss she would have called the next day.'
He hadn't known what to do. He called the police inNew York and got nowhere, predictably enough.
He went to theMuncie office of a national detective agency. An investigator from theirNew York office visited her last known residence and established that she was no longer living there. If he cared to give them a substantial retainer, they would be glad to pursue the matter.
'I thought, what did they do for my money? Go to the place where she lived and find out she wasn't there? I could do that myself. So I got on a plane and came here.'
He'd gone to the rooming house where Paula had lived. She had moved out sometime in early July, leaving no forwarding address. The telephone company had refused to tell him anything beyond what he already knew, that the telephone in question had been disconnected.
He'd gone to the restaurant where she'd worked and found out that she'd left that job back in April.
