Read Out on the Cutting Edge for Free Online

I'll knock on some doors. I don't know what good it's going to do."
    "You put his mind at rest, that's all. At least he's doing all he can, you know? And you won't soak him."
    "No."
    "I took a picture from him and had them run it at the morgue. They had a couple of unidentified white females since June, but she doesn't match up to any of 'em."
    "I figured you'd done that."
    "Yeah, well, that's all I did. It's not police business."
    "I know."
    "Which is why I referred him to you."
    "I know, and I appreciate it."
    "My pleasure. You got any sense of it yet?"
    "It's a little early. One thing, she moved out. Packed everything and took off."
    "Well, that's good," he said. "Makes it a little more likely she's alive."
    "I know, but there are things that don't make sense. You said you checked the morgue. What about hospitals?"
    "You thinking coma?"
    "It could be."
    "When'd they hear from her last, sometime in June? That's a long time to be in a coma."
    "Sometimes they're out for years."
    "Yeah, that's true."
    "And she paid her rent the last time on the sixth of July. So what's that, two months and a few days."
    "Still a long time."
    "Not for the person in the coma. It's like the wink of an eye."
    He looked at me. He had pale gray eyes that don't show you much, but they showed a little grudging amusement now. " 'The wink of an eye,' " he said. "First she checks out of her rooming house, then she checks into a hospital."
    "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