Murder at the Falls (7 page)

Tom’s fellow campaigner in this crusade was Charlotte’s personal secretary, Vivian Smith, who had made it her mission to keep a portable tape recorder within Charlotte’s reach at all times in case she should suddenly be overcome by the need to record a particular memory. So far, Vivian’s ploy hadn’t worked: the mere sight of a tape recorder was enough to send Charlotte out the door and hurtling across the countryside.

One of the half dozen or so recorders that Vivian had purchased and scattered around the house was now resting on Charlotte’s bedside table, where it had been for the last several weeks. Never one to give into defeat, Vivian had set up this morning’s tableau—breakfast tray with flower vase and silver tea service, scrapbooks from Charlotte’s early career on the side—in hopes that it would inspire her to take the first step.

Cradling the telephone against her ear, Charlotte removed the breakfast tray to the bedside table, and rearranged her pillows so that she could sit up straight against the headboard.

It was definitely murder, Voorhees said. Toxicology had found large amounts of cocaine in Randy’s organs, but the cocaine wasn’t what had killed him. He had still been alive when he was dumped in the river. Probably unconscious—it was hard to say whether he’d come to or not—but definitely still alive. The medical examiner had found microscopic algae in his organs, which meant that he’d still been breathing when he was thrown in the water.

With her free hand, Charlotte closed the scrapbook on her lap, and moved it over to the other bedside table. “What about the possibility of suicide?”

“It would have been impossible for him to have tied himself up in that way,” said the deep voice on the other end of the line. Voorhees explained: “That wasn’t a sheet he was wrapped up in; it was aprons.”

“Aprons!” she exclaimed.

“Two of them. Long, white, restaurant-type aprons. The first was worn in the usual way, except that the belt was used to bind the upper legs together. The other was worn upside down, with neckband wrapped around the feet and the belt tied around the upper arms.”

Charlotte shuddered at the thought of awakening from a drug-induced stupor to find oneself floating in a river, unable to move one’s arms or legs. “Do you have a time of death?” she asked.

“Between twelve and two
A.M
. on Sunday, September ninth.”

“The night of the opening reception.”

“Right. Which makes you and Plummer among the last people to have seen Goslau alive. And which is why I’d like you both to come down to headquarters. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

“Certainly. When would you like us to come?”

“Plummer said he could come right away.” (Not too eager, Charlotte thought.) “He also said he thought you could probably come with him, but he suggested I check with you. How does that sound?”

Charlotte thought for a millisecond. Apart from reliving her life, which she had no desire to do, she didn’t have anything planned for that day. A little shopping and a few errands, but they could wait.

“Sounds fine,” she said as she stuck her tongue out at the tape recorder.

They were to meet Voorhees at police headquarters, which was located not far from the historic district, in a new public safety complex. “You can’t miss it,” Voorhees had said. Well, they could, and they did. But getting lost had its advantages in that it gave them a better sense of the city. The first thing to strike Charlotte was that it hadn’t changed since she’d last been there. The nearly complete absence of modern buildings meant that the gracious turn-of-the-century landmarks had not been eclipsed by modern glass and steel towers. With the exception of the church spires and the smokestacks, the highest structures were the public ones. The aura of importance vested in these buildings by their physical dominance gave the city a sense of order that was missing from many cities—American cities, that is; European cities seemed to do better at preserving some kind of architectural sense. Charlotte marveled at the wonderful old architecture as they drove by (in several cases, more than once): the elegant Beaux Arts City Hall, with its shining white clock tower; the neoclassical county courthouse, with its cool, gray dome; the old Flemish-style post office, now a court building, with its stepped red brick gables. Even the old Fabian Theatre, where she had sold war bonds, was still there, though it was now divided into five movie theaters. What had happened to the marvelous vaulted lobby with its showpiece chandelier? she wondered. And, although many of the historic mills had been abandoned, a surprising number were still in operation, the signs above their entrances proclaiming that they made shirts or silk thread or machine parts. Between the mills, the quiet streets were lined with squat clapboard four-family houses of the type that used to be called cheeseboxes when cheese still came in boxes. Children played on the streets while mothers watched from the stoops or from the open first-story windows. Though the ethnic identity of the inhabitants might have changed—they were now Spanish, Portuguese, and even Lebanese and Syrian instead of Irish, Italian, and German—the ambiance remained the same. It was a city in which people still lived within walking distance of where they worked. It was a city of neighborhoods.

The other thing that struck her was the city’s sense of being fortified against the outside world, like a frontier garrison. Unlike most eastern cities, it lacked a river or ocean port. Its
raison d’être
was the Falls, not its access to the wider world. The closed-in feeling that came from the absence of a port was reinforced by the fact that the city was bounded on three sides by the great arc of the meandering river, which insulated it from the surrounding suburbs like a castle moat, and on the fourth by the craggy summit of Garrett Rock, which loomed over it like an ancient watchtower.

It was a city encapsulated not only in time, but in space; a city living in its own cozy little world, and pulsing to a primordial rhythm that had been established long before the beat of commerce was added to the score: the rhythm of the heavy waters of the river plunging into the narrow gorge and crashing onto the sharp-edged rocks below.

At last they found the public safety complex. It was a giant concrete fortress that took up several blocks, the exception to Charlotte’s observation that Paterson had no modern buildings. Voorhees was right. How could they have missed it? A cop at a reception desk directed them to the Criminal Investigation Division on the second floor, where Voorhees met them at another reception desk and escorted them into an office cubicle. After inviting them to sit down on a couple of the folding chairs that were ranged against one wall (he must not have wanted the people he interrogated to sit too close, Charlotte thought), Voorhees took a seat in the swivel chair behind his desk and leaned back with his hands folded over his paunch. A blow-up of a photograph of a girl poised on the end of a diving board hung on the wall behind his desk, the only decoration in an otherwise sterile office.

“Someone you know?” asked Charlotte, nodding at the photograph. It had obviously been taken at a competition of some kind; the background was a crowded grandstand.

Voorhees swiveled his chair around to face the photo. “My daughter. She’s a diver. She’s also my second job. Every weekend there’s another meet. The plane fares alone are enough to break me, to say nothing of the coach and the motels. I was spending so much time in Fort Lauderdale that I finally bought a condominium there. It was cheaper than paying for accommodations, and I figure I’ll be able to retire there in a few years.”

“She’s very pretty,” said Charlotte.

“Yes, she is,” he agreed with quiet pride. He shrugged. “What are you going to do? She loves it, and she’s good at it too.” He swiveled the chair back around to face them. “Okay, tell me what happened that night.” He nodded at Tom. “Plummer first.”

Tom recounted their meeting with Randy, and their visit to the museum. In response to Voorhees’ instructions not to leave out any details, he included their meeting the Lumkins and Morris Finder, and mentioned Charlotte’s connection with them through Jack Lundstrom. He concluded with Randy’s attack of paranoia, if that’s what it was.

“Well, as the old saying goes,” said Voorhees when Tom had finished, “‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that somebody isn’t out to get you.’” He turned to Charlotte: “Do you have anything to add, Miss Graham?”

“Only that it was the painting—it was a painting of the Falls View Diner by the artist Ed Verre—that seemed to have set him off.”

Removing his hands from his belly, Voorhees leaned forward and toyed with his pen. “The police department is at a disadvantage in this case. The artists’ community here is a tight little group. If the victim had been a numbers runner or a drug dealer, we’d have informants to help us out—to tell us who wanted him dead. But we don’t have informants in the artists’ community, and”—he waved the pen in the direction of the bank of desks where the rank and file of detectives sat—“not being highly cultured types ourselves, this leaves us in something of a bind. A bind that you might be able to help us out of.”

“By becoming your informants?” asked Tom.

“Something like that, yes. Goslau’s death might have been a random thing. He might have been thrown in the river by a crackhead for no reason at all. That sort of thing is always happening around here. But then again, maybe it had something to do with the artists’ community. And a little birdie tells me that finding out whether or not it did might be right up your alley.” He leaned back and smiled. He had a wide mouth, and teeth that were stained from smoking. But it was a pleasant smile.

“Did your little birdie also tell you that we don’t know anything about the Paterson artists’ community?” asked Charlotte.

“You’d met Goslau. Plummer here was going to buy one of his paintings. Your husband is a well-known art collector, which makes me assume that you know something about art. That’s an entree, which is more than we have.”

“What do you want us to find out?” she asked.

“The gossip. These people must have some theories about why Goslau was killed. I want you to find out what they are. Naturally, I’d like you to be discreet.”

“Just satisfying our natural curiosity,” said Tom.

“Exactly. I’ll fill you in on our progress as we go along. So far we only know that Goslau left the museum with Patty Andriopoulis, as you already know. Did you meet Patty at the Falls View?”

They nodded.

“Everybody who eats at the Falls View gets to know Patty eventually. She took him back there, and gave him a couple of stiff drinks to bring him down. She said he was pretty coked up.”

“Were she and Randy lovers?” asked Tom.

“I don’t think so. I think he was just one of her strays. She tends to take in people the same way she takes in dogs and cats. But that’s the kind of thing I want you to find out. He stayed for a while at the party.…”

“Party?” interrupted Charlotte.

“The museum had hired the diner for it—it was a post-opening thing for the organizers and the artists—and then he left. That was sometime around eleven. He never slept in his bed. Besides that, we know exactly zip.”

They decided to talk with Diana Nelson first. Or rather, Tom decided to talk with Diana Nelson first. As a local art dealer—the only local art dealer, as far as Charlotte could tell—she would have the inside scoop, Tom said. In reality, Charlotte suspected that he had other motives; she had recognized Diana right away as being Tom’s type. He had a weakness for tall, slim brunettes. Diana was a little less dramatic in appearance than his usual type—with her long neck, lovely smile, and wide blue eyes, she had the all-American prettiness of a beauty pageant contestant—but she fit the general mold. In fact, except for the color of her eyes and her hair, which was cut very short, she was almost a dead ringer for Daria Henderson, who had been Tom’s most serious love interest to date. They had met several years ago in Maine in the course of another murder investigation in which Daria had almost become the second victim, and split up last year over nothing, at least in Charlotte’s opinion. But she was hardly one to talk. With four marriages and more affairs than she cared to admit to on her record, she wasn’t in a position to comment on other people’s relationships.

After parking in the museum lot, they walked up to the Ivanhoe Gallery, which was located in an old mill, the Ivanhoe Wheelhouse, at the head of Spruce Street. The Ivanhoe sat at the foot of an escarpment next to the tailrace of the Upper Raceway, which ran along the base of the hill, and into which the spent water from the millwheels had once been discharged. The headrace, which delivered water to the mills through a series of water troughs, ran across the upper part of the hillside. The head and tailraces were linked by a man-made waterfall, or spillway, which fell into a lily-studded pool adjoining the Ivanhoe. From this pool, the Middle Raceway carried the water under Spruce Street to a line of mills on the other side, of which the Gryphon, where Randy had lived, was one.

Given that it was nearly five, they half expected the gallery to be closed, but the wide double doors here still swung open to the warm afternoon. They found Diana inside, talking with a customer about the current show, which featured a Paterson ceramic artist named Louise Sicca.

While they waited for Diana to finish with her customer, they looked at the ceramic sculptures that were displayed on pedestals. The sculptures also had a diner theme, planned no doubt to coordinate with the museum’s show, but the subject was diner food rather than diners themselves. They might have been called photorealism in ceramics: one pedestal displayed a glazed ring cake, complete with cake stand and plastic cover; another displayed a still life of a jar of Heinz ketchup, a napkin holder, and a pair of salt and pepper shakers.

“Here’s your lemon meringue pie,” said Tom, who’d been browsing among the paintings hanging on the brick walls, and had stopped at a ceramic work displayed on one of the pedestals. He gestured for Charlotte to join him. “Look at those peaks!” he said. “Andriopoulis would definitely approve.”