Murder at the Falls (16 page)

Patty stood waiting for Charlotte just inside the door; a cute little boy with eyes like shiny brown buttons was at her side. She introduced him as her son, Johnny. After setting him up at the quiet end of the counter with a coloring book and a box of crayons, she escorted Charlotte to a nearby booth.

“He’s taking Randy’s death really hard, poor lamb,” she said. “He and Randy were good buddies. So am I, for that matter. I just came back from his funeral. What there was of it. Not many people were there. Can I get you a cup of coffee or something?”

“Sure,” said Charlotte. “But you’re not on duty.”

She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, over which she wore a blue denim jacket with a picture of Mickey Mouse appliquéd in sequins and satin thread on the back. It reminded Charlotte of Jason’s job painting breasts at Mickey’s Paint Factory.

“I’m always on duty,” she said. Getting up, she poured two cups of coffee from a pot on the hot plate behind the counter, and delivered them to the table with the casual efficiency of the experienced waitress. “I brought a plate of Danish too,” she said, setting the plate in front of Charlotte.

“Don’t you want any?” asked Charlotte as she took one.

“No thanks,” she said, resuming her seat. “My stomach is in knots.” As she took a swig of coffee, her eye caught the plaque on the wall above them. “See that?” she said. She read the inscription: “To John Andriopoulis, in appreciation of continued service to the Paterson Fire Department.”

“Is your father a volunteer firefighter?” asked Charlotte.

“No, he serves the rescue squad food and coffee when they’re up the street fishing bodies out of the river, as they often are. The city gives him a plaque, and then they arrest him. Do you believe it?” Tears welled in her big brown eyes, and she blinked them away.

Charlotte handed her a Kleenex, and she blew her nose.

“Okay, down to business,” she said, once she had finished blowing. “I wanted to tell you about Randy. Maybe there’s something in the story that will help Daddy.” She paused, and then began: “Randy is—was—a good friend of mine. The Falls View has been an artists’ hangout, and that’s how we originally met. He became a sort of surrogate father to Johnny, whose real father took off for parts unknown shortly after I told him I was pregnant. Randy used to take him to ball games, or fishing out at his camp—that kind of thing. Despite what everybody is probably saying, Randy used to be a nice guy. I think he saw a lot of himself in Johnny: as a boy, Randy also spent a lot of time in diners.”

“He told me,” said Charlotte.

“I’m giving you this background to make the point that I knew him very well, probably better than anyone else.” Seeing the inquiring look on Charlotte’s face, Patty answered her unspoken question: “No, we weren’t lovers. Nor did I ever expect that of him. He only had sex with people from whom he had something to gain—something more than two hots all the way and a mug of birch beer, that is.” Her attempt at a smile came out more like a grimace.

“That doesn’t sound like such a nice guy to me,” said Charlotte.

“You had to understand Randy. Underneath the braggart was an insecure, love-starved little boy. We shared a lot. Randy was raised in diners, so was I. How could someone like me whose life has been devoted to a diner not like someone who thinks diners are the greatest thing since sliced bread? You should have seen his postcard collection. He had postcards of diners from all over the country. He’d been collecting since he was seven.

“As you probably know, Randy used drugs—cocaine. He already had a habit before Don Spiegel died—they quarreled over it a number of times—but after Don’s suicide it got worse. He’d go on sprees—stay awake for two, three, even four days on end. Wouldn’t shave, get dressed, talk to anyone. Then he’d drink to bring himself down, or take Quaaludes. He had what he called his good weeks and his bad weeks. On his good weeks, he didn’t do anything. That’s why he didn’t think he had a problem. Even with his habit, though, I would still have called him normal. He was prone to exaggerating his own importance in order to pump up his ego, but so are a lot of people.” She paused and said, “Maybe I will have a Danish after all.”

Charlotte passed her the plate.

She picked out a pastry, took a bite, and then put it down. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Then things changed—very suddenly, almost overnight in fact. His behavior became very bizarre.”

“In what way?” asked Charlotte.

“A paranoid way. For instance, he thought his studio was bugged. If you wanted to talk with him, he’d drag you into the bathroom and turn on the faucets. Then he’d sit on the toilet, and keep flushing it while you talked. He thought his phone was tapped. He’d make all his calls from pay phones.” She nodded at the pay phone in the corner. “He spent thousands on motion detectors, TV monitors, you name it.”

Charlotte remembered seeing the TV monitor outside his door.

“Oh, countersurveillance equipment too: gizmos to tell if your apartment is bugged or your phone is tapped. At one point, he even hired a countersurveillance consultant who came in with about a hundred thousand dollars worth of fancy electronic equipment and swept the studio for bugs.”

“Did he find anything?”

Patty shook her head. “But that didn’t convince Randy. He still thought the place was bugged. He said there were so many ways of bugging that it was impossible to have swept for them all.”

“When did all this start?”

“Right after he freaked out at the Koreman show. Maybe you heard about it. It was just like what happened the other night. That’s also when the good weeks stopped. From there on out, there were only bad weeks.”

“Then it wasn’t the drugs that induced his reaction at the Koreman show; it was whatever happened at the show that induced the drug use.”

Patty nodded. “The rescue squad took him to Bellevue. The diagnosis was cocaine-induced paranoia. But, as I said, up until then, he hadn’t been doing that much coke.” She took another swig of coffee, and then went on. “To continue on the subject of his bizarre behavior: he thought he was being followed. He would enter and leave his studio through a back entrance. He changed the locks on his doors every other day. He thought his food was poisoned. He talked constantly about being surrounded by informants, about not being able to trust anyone. Every stranger walking down the street was a tail; every car that slowed down was an unmarked vehicle that had been sent to spy on him. He said that I was the only one he could trust, and that the diner was the only place where he felt safe. He was talking about going to Australia to get away, as you know from the incident at the museum.”

Charlotte now remembered how he insisted on sitting facing the door at the diner, and how he kept looking out the window.

“Everyone attributed the paranoia to the drugs. Even Randy himself sometimes. He had a little saying he used to recite: ‘Snort coke, get paranoid, drink to mellow out, fall down.’ Which was about how it happened that night. The worse his paranoia got, the more drugs he took. It was a vicious cycle. He said he felt like one of those lab rats who keeps pushing the lever to get more cocaine, despite the fact that it’s getting zapped each time by an electric shock. It was getting very scary. It finally got so bad that he started talking about checking himself into Straight and Narrow.…”

“Straight and Narrow?”

“It’s a drug rehab clinic—on the corner of Straight Street and Narrow Street. What a name, huh? It’s one of Paterson’s claims to fame—it’s in
Ripley’s Believe it or Not
. Would you believe that the Salvation Army’s alcohol rehab clinic overlooks Temperance Island? Paterson is a quirky place. Anyway, he was talking about checking himself into Straight and Narrow, but it was just a joke. He never would have gone to Straight and Narrow—it’s for hard-core junkies. He had actually been looking into a private clinic—Don had even offered to pay for it—but he never followed through. Okay, get to the point, Patty,” she said to herself. “The point is that I believe that Randy’s paranoia wasn’t all drug-induced. I believe that there really
was
somebody out to get him.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I was a party to some of it.”

“Some of what?”

“The harassment Randy claimed to have been experiencing. One of the things that he raved about was the telephone calls he said he’d get all night long. Whoever it was would call and hang up, call and hang up. He couldn’t sleep. He changed his number, but the calls kept coming. Then he switched to an unlisted number. That didn’t work either. I thought the phone thing was one of his paranoid delusions, until he had his phone disconnected. Then he started getting the calls here.” She nodded again at the pay phone. “It would happen whenever he was at the diner. The caller, who was a man, would ask for Randy, but when Randy answered, he would hang up. No sooner would Randy get back to his seat—by the way, he always sat facing the door.…”

“I noticed that,” said Charlotte.

“No sooner would he get back to his seat than the phone would ring again. It got so we didn’t answer the phone when he was here. The ringing drove the other customers crazy. Then there were the bumping incidents. Randy would complain that these Hispanic kids were always bumping into him on the street. He thought they were doing it deliberately. Again, I thought it was his imagination. But then one day we went to the market on lower Main Street. We were walking back when this young Hispanic kid comes up to Randy, and knocks him over. Not accidentally, deliberately. The grocery bags went flying. Randy said it was the same kid who had done it before.”

“Did he have any idea who was harassing him?”

She nodded. “He had the calls traced. But he wouldn’t tell me who it was. He said that if that person found out I knew, he might come after me too. He wanted to protect me.” She stopped to look up at a woman who had come over to their booth. “Oh hi, Mom,” she said.

Patty’s mother was still pretty in spite of her age, which must have been around sixty. She had a round face with a wide smile that was filled with warmth, and lovely hazel eyes now reddened from weeping. She looked more Irish than Greek, and may very well have been.

“Hello,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Helen Andriopoulis. My daughter says that maybe you can help us.” She looked down at Patty with love, and sadness. “My husband didn’t think much of Randy Goslau, as Patty may have told you, but he never would have killed him.”

Charlotte now recognized her as the woman who was usually behind the cash register. “I know,” said Charlotte. “I’ll do my best.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Mrs. Andriopoulis asked. “Do you need anything?”

“No, Ma,” Patty said. “We’re fine. We’ll be finished here in a few minutes.” Once her mother had returned to her post, Patty went on. “As Mom said, Daddy didn’t approve of Randy—the drugs and all. He said he was just another stray that I had picked up. I have this weakness for stray animals.…” She nodded at the dog pen that adjoined the house across the street.

Charlotte turned around to look at the enclosure, in which she could see several dogs. “How many do you have?” she asked.

“At the moment, eleven cats and four dogs.”

“For a person with a weakness for strays, that’s not bad.”

“It’s been worse. The pen’s been full at times. Thank goodness I don’t have to bear the expense of feeding them. They eat the leftovers from here. That’s my parents’ house,” she explained. “Johnny and I live upstairs in the apartment where my grandmother used to live before she died. My mom and dad live downstairs with my younger sister.” She shrugged. “It’s convenient.”

Charlotte looked out at the house, which had imitation brick siding on the lower story, aluminum siding on the upper story, and identical picture windows up and down. It was sandwiched between a recycling warehouse for glass, cans, and paper, whose raw materials stood around in heaps on the lot, and a “Monumental Works,” whose gravestones were displayed out front.

“I try to find homes for the animals, and I do pretty well at it. I put the signs up here. If the customers are interested, they can just walk across the street and take a look.”

Charlotte had noticed one of these signs when she came in: “Loving golden retriever needs a home. For information, see Patty.”

“Anyway, I tell Daddy that I got it from him. If I have a weakness for stray animals, it’s because he has a weakness for stray humans. Any wino on the west side knows he can get a handout from John Andriopoulis.” She nodded at a bum who was sitting at the counter. “Like Roger Barry. He comes in every morning at ten. You could set your clock by him. Where were we?” she asked.

“On who it was. Could it have been Arthur Lumkin?” Patty shook her head emphatically. “No. I thought that too. But Randy said it was someone else.”

“He had been spying on Xantha and Randy.”

“Randy knew about that. Arthur wasn’t subtle about it. Randy told me that he and Xantha made a little game out of spotting him. They called him Waldo, after that kids’ book
Where’s Waldo?
, where you have to find this geeky guy named Waldo among the people in the crowd. It’s a favorite of Johnny’s. Randy used to look at it with him. Once Randy found Arthur’s car out in the parking lot. It looked like it was empty, but when Randy opened the door, there was Arthur crouched down on the floor. Randy told me that Xantha had discussed Arthur’s spying with their marriage counselor, who said that his behavior was due to his inability to face his mother’s rejection of him.” She shrugged. “The counselor told Xantha that he only did it because he wanted to be a part of her life. Isn’t that pathetic? A rich, important man like him. All he ever wanted out of life, he told Xantha, was to make her happy. I wish I could find a man whose only mission in life was to make me happy.”

“Was he here that night?”

“Only briefly. He and Xantha came in separate cars. He had to leave early to take care of some kind of telephone business in Sydney before the Australian stock market closed. I overheard him talking about it with one of the guests. Xantha stayed until about eleven.”

“I wonder why she didn’t go home with Randy.”