Murder at the Falls (10 page)

The maitre d’ showed them to their table, which was in the row farthest away from the stage, in deference to her age and sex, Charlotte suspected. Jason had lingered behind to talk with one of the customers at the bar.

“Is this your first visit to Le Club Parisienne?” Louie asked. He pulled out a chair for Charlotte, and then spread her napkin on her lap, clearly pleased at the novelty of serving someone he sensed was a lady of the old school.

“Yes,” Tom replied, “Has the club been here long?”

“Sixty-five years. Le Club Parisienne was once famous. Frank Sinatra used to sing here, Tony Bennett. They both sang here when they were starting out—Sinatra was a Hoboken boy, you know—but they kept coming back, even after they became famous. Ed McNamara. You would be too young to remember Ed McNamara,” he said to Tom. He turned to Charlotte: “But maybe the lady would.”

“Of course I remember Ed McNamara,” she said. “The Singing Cop.”

“See?” he said with a broad smile. “He was from Paterson. The great American contralto, Madame Schumann-Heink, who lived here, discovered him. She brought him to the attention of Enrico Caruso, who took him on as a pupil. He was the only pupil Caruso ever had.”

“Is that so?” said Tom, making the obligatory comment.

“Those were the good old days,” the maitre d’ continued. “The movie premieres at the Fabian: the klieg lights, the hoopla, the stars. All the stars came to Paterson back then: Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Gary Cooper, Linc Crawford, Charlotte Graham …”

“Charlotte Graham,” interjected Tom with a devilish grin. “She was my favorite. I wonder what she’s doing these days?”

“My favorite too,” said the maitre d’. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Those legs, ooh la la.”

At that moment, Charlotte was using one of them to kick Tom.

“She’s still working,” Louie continued. “I saw her in a TV movie not long ago. She looked great. Unfortunately, Paterson doesn’t attract that kind of talent anymore,” he added with a rueful smile. “Now we have”—he cast a sidelong glance at the stage, and rolled his eyes—“a different kind of attraction.”

As a holdover from the old days, Louie clearly didn’t approve.

“Your waiter will be with you in a moment to take your order,” he announced with a little bow. Then he departed to fuss over another customer.

The waiter arrived momentarily: a young man in a white apron that reached almost to the ground, in the style of waiters in French brasseries.

Jason arrived right behind him, taking the seat next to Charlotte, which faced the stage. “We’d like a bowl of olives,” Jason told the young man. “And I’d like to buy my guests a drink. What will you have?” he asked.

After they had given the waiter their orders, Tom turned to Jason. “I guess you’re a regular here,” he said.

“I’m here every day, or close to it. This place is my muse, the way the Falls View was Randy’s.” He pointed at the easel that stood at one side of the stage. “Now that I think about it, they both appeal to a sense of fantasy: a go-go bar to a fantasy about sex; a diner to a fantasy about security.”

“We saw your paintings at the Ivanhoe, but I confess that I didn’t really look at them that closely,” said Charlotte. They had left her with a Moulin Rouge impression, reminding her of Toulouse-Lautrec’s cancan dancers. “We were really there just to talk with Diana. Are you a photorealist too?”

“You didn’t look? Tsk. Tsk.” He shook his head in mock disapproval. “A realist, but not a photorealist. In the great tradition of American realists like Edward Hopper and George Bellows.” He raised a hand in demurral. “Not that I put myself in the same league.”

After rotating her breasts at a dizzying speed to a musical finale that sounded like an accordion rendition of the “Flight of the Bumblebee,” Miss Quetzalcoatl retreated backstage. Louie, who also served as master of ceremonies, announced a break before the next act.

“Would you like to see the painting I’m working on now?” Jason asked. “Now’s a good time. Before Mariette comes on.”

Charlotte and Tom said that they would.

He led them over to his easel, on which a large canvas was propped. In the foreground were the dark, looming silhouettes of the customers. In the rear, bathed in a warm, rosy glow, was the dancer with the rhinestone choker and the enormous bonnet, wearing several layers of black crinolines and little else.

The painting was executed competently enough, but Charlotte was more taken with the way in which the rich texture had transformed the down-at-the-heels atmosphere of this seedy go-go bar into something warm and filled with promise.

“I’m calling it ‘La Vie en Rose,’” Jason said.

“After the Edith Piaf song?” asked Charlotte.

Jason nodded. “The life through rose-colored glasses,” he said, translating the title. “Do you like it?”

“Very much,” she replied. “Who would have expected to find a little slice of Montmartre in downtown Paterson?”

“Paterson is a very interesting place. You can find a little slice of just about anything here. I know that’s what they say about New York too. But in New York, it’s more diffuse: New York must have hundreds of go-go bars with pretentions, but Paterson has only one. Do you know the poem
Paterson
?”

Charlotte and Tom shook their heads, again.

“There’s a line in that poem that captures the special feeling of Paterson.” He proceeded to recite the line: “‘The mystery of streets and back rooms—wiping the nose on sleeves, come here to dream …’”

It was the same line that Diana had quoted.

“How did you get into painting go-go bars?” asked Charlotte as they threaded their way back to their table, where their drinks were waiting: a beer for Tom, a Manhattan for Charlotte, and a Pernod for Jason. There was also a small bowl filled with Spanish olives.

“By painting the girls, literally. When I was starting out years ago, I worked at a topless bar called Mickey’s Paint Factory, where the girls’ breasts were painted with cartoon figures: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck. I was the one who painted them.” He chuckled at the memory. “I needed a job, and they needed an artist.” He paused to take a packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. They were unfiltered French Gauloises.

Charlotte noticed that the blue of the packet exactly matched the blue of his eyes. Which may have been the idea.

“Anyway, that’s when I first got into the scene. After that, I’d hang out in topless bars sometimes. Then, when I took my studio here, I discovered this place. I’ve been coming here ever since. Look at this”—he fingered the fringe of the red-silk moire lamp on their table—“you could be in Paris.”

The waiter reappeared with menus, which he set in front of them, along with a basket of fresh French bread, which smelled delicious.

“The dancers here are different too,” said Jason. He broke a piece of bread off for himself, and passed the basket. “Most of them date from the days of burlesque. They can remember when dancing was an art form. They make an effort; they aren’t here just to push drinks.”

Charlotte hadn’t noticed that the last performance was particularly artful, but she supposed the feathered headdress counted for something.

“Take Mariette, the dancer who’s the subject of my current series. She teaches exotic dancing at an adult school. She takes what she does very seriously.” He took a sip of the yellow-colored aperitif. “Anyway, you didn’t want to know about me; you wanted to know about Randy. What can I tell you?”

For a few minutes, they chatted about Randy—the same sort of information that Diana had given them, and then the conversation drifted, or rather, was directed by Tom, to the murder.

“A lot of people didn’t like Randy,” Jason said. “They were turned off by his ego. But I discounted that as coming from the lonely, scared little boy inside. And, like a little boy, he could be very loyal and loving. I don’t understand why anyone would kill him. Even to those who didn’t like him, he was just a minor annoyance. On the order of a hangnail or a mosquito bite.”

“Diana told us that you considered him your friend,” said Charlotte. “But she also said that even you were losing patience with him.”

“Yeah, I was. He kept borrowing money and never paid it back. It wasn’t that he didn’t have it—he had a lot more than I do—but he was so strung out that he couldn’t keep his finances straight. Once I found a six-month-old check for twenty-eight thousand dollars lying around his studio. Finally it got to the point where I told him I wasn’t going to loan him money anymore.”

“What about Bernice Spiegel?” asked Charlotte. “Would you say that he was only a minor annoyance to her.”

“Most of all to Bernice. Bernice is about to inherit sixty million dollars. Not only will she be sitting pretty financially, but she can also look forward to lifetime employment in the job she loves: the keeper of the eternal flame at the grave of Donald Edgar Spiegel. It’s hard to imagine that she’d jeopardize all that by having a pest like Randy thrown in the drink.”

Then Tom asked him about Randy’s behavior in recent months.

“Very strange,” said Jason as he lit a cigarette. “I attributed it to the drugs. Or else he was just plain losing his mind.”

The fragrance of the rich tobacco drifted across the table. It smelled almost as good as the bread, and Charlotte had to fight down the urge to bum a cigarette. Though she didn’t smoke much—she had cut back to half a pack a day years ago—she was now trying to quit completely.

“Diana said you saw him freak out on a couple of occasions.”

“Yeah. The first time was last January at a show at the Koreman Gallery. He started twitching all over. It reminded me of the way a horse twitches its skin to shake loose a horse fly. The men in the white coats ended up taking him away to Bellevue. The diagnosis was cocaine-induced paranoia.”

“Why paranoia?” asked Tom as he popped an olive into his mouth.

“Because he kept talking about someone from the past coming back to get him. The second time was also at a show. At the Montclair Art Museum. The same thing: the heebie-jeebies, the fear that someone was after him. He’d been talking about going into rehab, but …” He shrugged, and took a long puff on his cigarette.

“Do you know what it was exactly that set off the attack? Did he see something, or someone perhaps?” Charlotte asked.

Jason shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said. “The paintings? But why would anything in a painting cause someone to react like that? Believe me, I’ve thought about it. Especially since I found out that he’d been murdered.”

“What do you mean?”

“That maybe someone
was
out to get him.”

As Jason had informed them, the food was delicious. Charlotte and Tom both chose the breaded veal cutlet, which could have matched that served at any top-notch French bistro (and which was light years away from hot Texas wieners). But Jason’s judgment when it came to the entertainment was not on as firm a footing. The Magnificent Mariette, as she was billed, did a Folies-Bergère act that consisted of a lot of high kicking while wearing only a black G-string and a black garter belt attached to black stockings under her voluminous black crinolines. It was tame enough stuff (the notorious crotch shots of Busby Berkeley, the premier Hollywood musical director of the thirties, had been only slightly less titillating) but it was hardly high art, despite Mariette’s qualifications as an adult-school authority on exotic dancing.

Charlotte emerged into the bright glare of early afternoon convinced that Jason’s fascination for the Bohemian subculture of Paris during la Belle Epoque belonged in the same psychological niche as Randy’s for classic diners of the nineteen thirties and forties, and wondering if Jason’s father had been a salesman who left him in go-go bars while he called on customers.

“Well, that was interesting,” said Tom with a little smirk as they paused on the sidewalk outside the building to study the photographs. “‘Straight from Paris,’” he read. “‘The Magnificent Mariette.’ I wonder what Diana thinks of Jason’s little hobby?”

“So you caught that too: the Pernod and the olives.”

“And the quote from William Carlos Williams,” added Tom.

“I think it’s pretty safe to conclude they’re an item.” She looked over at him. “Which is too bad for you.”

“It’s true, she’s my type,” he said. Then he smiled. “But there’s always Yolanda.” He checked his watch. “It’s going on two. What do you want to do now? Go back to see Voorhees, or head back to the city?”

“I’d like to see him, but not to tell him what we’ve found out. He already knows about Bernice, and I don’t want to tell him what Jason just told us about Randy going berserk at the other art shows until we check it out. But I would like to see him: to see what he can tell
us
.”

“You mean, to find out what ‘exactly zip,’ is.”

Charlotte nodded.

“Maybe we should call first to see if he’s in.” Tom went back inside to call, and returned a moment later: “He says to meet him at the Gryphon Mill. He’s on his way over there now.” Then he added, nodding toward the inside: “If you thought Yolanda was a hoot, you should see the one who’s on now.”

Charlotte looked at the publicity still. “It must be Chantal,” she said. “‘Straight from the jungles of East Africa.’”

“Of the leopard headdress and clawed mittens,” said Tom. “And the tail with the pompon,” he added. “She looks like the Cowardly Lion in drag.”

“I’m so sorry I’m going to miss her act.”

Except for being only two stories instead of three or four, the Gryphon was a typical Paterson mill: a red brick structure pierced with rows of enormous windows that had allowed mill workers to take advantage of the natural light and ventilation. Except for the relief sculpture of the gryphon, a creature with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion, over the front door, the building was devoid of ornament. But the love, understanding, and skill of the craftsmen who had built it had resulted in a structure with great eloquence.

After parking once again in the lot across the street, which was meant for overflow parking for visitors to the Falls, they crossed the street and waited for Voorhees out in front.

He pulled up a minute later in an unmarked police car, followed by a police cruiser driven by an officer whom Voorhees introduced a few minutes later as his assistant, Bill Martinez. He was a young man in his early twenties with a pleasant face and a small William Powell-type mustache.