Murder at the Falls (17 page)

“I think she was a little horrified by Randy’s behavior. I suspect she had thought up until then that he only did party coke. It looked to me as if she was avoiding him, but it could have been the other way around: he was snuggling up pretty close to his bottle of Jack Daniels.”

“Wouldn’t she have heard about his drug use?”

“Probably. But we believe what we want to, don’t we? He was always on his best behavior with her. She never saw him coked up to the eyeballs the way I have. Ranting about the powerful telescopes that could pierce the walls of his studio, and the little white snakes that were crawling all over the floor.”

“Were there other episodes as bad as that night?”

“The time at the Montclair Art Museum was worse. That was the only other time I’ve seen him with the coke bugs. That’s what they call them: the coke bugs. A tactile delusion, the doctor told me. Randy described it as feeling as if he had broken out in an unbearable case of poison ivy. This time they stopped, thank God.”

“What about the other time?”

“He scratched himself until his skin was raw. It took weeks to heal—he had these ugly scabs all over his arms and legs. He ended up in the hospital that time, and the previous time too.”

“Were he and Xantha going to get married?”

“Ah, you saw the piece in the
Post
.”

Charlotte nodded.

“That’s all I know. I looked for a ring on Xantha’s finger at the party that night. There was one there—with a green stone—but I couldn’t say whether it had been there before or not.”

“What about the painting at the show?” asked Charlotte. “Did you notice anything about it that might have set Randy off?”

“No. But I didn’t look at it that closely. I had just walked in when it happened. I just wanted to get him out of there as quickly as possible. Thank God Diana thought up the tickets thing.”

“It was by an artist named Ed Verre. Does that name ring any bells?”

“Not a one,” said Patty.

The meeting at the other end of the diner appeared to be breaking up, and they watched as three of the men departed.

“My uncles. They’re probably going down to the courthouse. Some of the others are from the church: St. George Greek Orthodox. My father’s on the parish council. But most of them are relatives. They’re here because of family honor.” She said the word in Greek: “
Philotimo
. It’s a big deal with Greeks.”

“Do you speak Greek?” asked Charlotte.

“Unfortunately, yes,” she said, making a face.

“Why unfortunately?”

“Sixteen years of after-school Greek lessons. Other kids got to run and play, I got to study Greek. Talk about boring.” She smiled. “I’m only going to make Johnny go for ten years.”

Charlotte glanced over at the conclave of Greeks. “Do you think they’re going to be able to come up with the bail money?”

“I think so,” said Patty. “If they don’t, this arrest is going to kill my father. It may end up killing him anyway.”

After meeting with Patty, Charlotte headed out to the Montclair Art Museum. She was probably chasing a chimera, but she wanted to look at the painting that had caused the second episode of cocaine-induced paranoia. If it
was
true that someone was after Randy, the clue to that person’s identity must lie with Verre’s diner paintings. Only the paintings had induced a sense of fear so overwhelming that it had caused Randy temporarily to lose his mind.

She had no trouble finding Montclair, which was only about twenty minutes from Paterson—a gracious suburb with big old houses and beautiful tree-lined streets. The museum was located on one of these streets in a Beaux Arts-style building set in a small park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in miniature. Her inquiry of a guard led her to the museum’s library, in a two-story colonial house adjacent to the park, where a helpful librarian, after a few minutes of rummaging around, produced a slide from among the clutter of bookshelves and filing cabinets in the house’s former dining room.

“Ordinarily you’d have to look at this through a viewer, but we have the projector set up today,” said the librarian, a cheerful middle-aged woman with an Eastern European accent. “Come this way.”

Charlotte followed her into a reading room in what had formerly been the living room, where a projection screen had been set up in front of the fireplace.

“This painting is from this year’s show on Emerging New Jersey Artists,” she said as she slid the slide into the carousel and then turned on the projector. “We hold it every year to highlight new artists who we think are particularly worthy of recognition. There we are,” she said, as the slide appeared on the screen. “Is this the one you were interested in?”

“Yes,” Charlotte replied.

The painting, titled “Falls View Diner with Banana Cream Pie,” was a frontal view of a window of the diner, which was wet and fogged-over from the rain. On the opposite side of the window, a man with a ginger-colored beard sat at a booth eating a slice of banana cream pie. Behind him, two other men sat at the counter, watching John work the grill.

Again, Charlotte had the feeling that the artist had painted the diner on a specific night, in this case, a cold, misty night. It was almost as if he had had his nose pressed right up against the window.

As she studied the painting, she suddenly realized the connection among the three paintings. They were all of the identical scene! The painting in the Koreman show had been a long shot: the exterior of the diner, with the people too far away to be recognizable. This was a medium shot: the people could be seen in more detail, but the menu board, for instance, still wasn’t readable. And the painting in the Paterson Museum show was a close-up.

The artist had been zooming in, and what he was zooming in on, she now realized, was the two men at the counter.

In this painting, she could tell little about them: the figures were blurred by the fog and distorted by the rain. One had dark hair and wore a navy blue jacket, the other had lighter hair, and wore a light-colored sweater. As in the other two paintings, they sat a stool’s distance away from one another.

The painting in the Paterson museum show had been clearer, but she couldn’t remember any of the details. She had only looked at it for an instant before being distracted by Randy.

“Would you like to see our file on the artist?” asked the librarian.

“Yes, I would,” she said.

The librarian returned in a moment with a manila folder. “There’s not much,” she said, handing Charlotte the file. “He must be young.”

But he wasn’t young, Charlotte found, as she studied the contents. His résumé stated that he was born in Peoria in 1938, which would make him fifty-one, and educated at the University of Illinois. His address was 24 Mill Street, the same address that Mary Catherine had given her, and his gallery was the Koreman. His only previous exhibit was at the Koreman.

The librarian, who had disappeared, now returned with a catalog in her hand. “I found something else,” she said.

It turned out to be the catalog from the Koreman show, which told Charlotte nothing more than what she already knew. She would definitely have to track down Verre. Had he known Randy? she wondered. And if so, what was their relationship? Could Verre have been the person who was harassing him? But first she would have to take another look at the painting in the Paterson museum show.

When the librarian returned, Charlotte asked her to make a copy of a reproduction of “Falls View Diner with Banana Cream Pie” from an article about the show in the file.

She left a moment later with a color Xerox copy, marveling at the wonders of modern technology.

The return trip was much shorter, so eager was she to see the painting. She was now convinced that it held the clue to Randy’s murder. “Every diner has a story,” Tom was always saying. She now realized that Verre had been telling one of the Falls View’s stories, and that she had to find out what that story was. At the museum, she parked the car, and fairly ran into the building. After paying her entrance fee, pausing only to reflect that a dollar fifty was a lot less than she paid in New York, she turned left past the White Manna toward the gallery area. And there it was: as clear as day. If she hadn’t been distracted by Randy’s bizarre behavior that night, she probably would have noticed it then.

One of the two men sitting at the counter was Randy.

Though you couldn’t see his face—the view was from the rear—it was unmistakably him: the same short; well-built physique; the same long, blond hair tied back in a ponytail; the same black high-top sneakers. Now her question was, Who was the other man? She looked again at the calendar, which was last year’s. It was from the Passiac Valley Water Commission, and featured a photograph of the Great Falls wreathed in ice. If the crossing off had been kept up to date, the date was April seventeenth. On reflection, she decided that there were just two people who might know who the other person was. The first was the bearded man eating the banana cream pie in the painting from the Montclair show. And since she didn’t know who he was, she would have to go with the second: the grill man, John Andriopoulis.

Heading back to the lobby, she inquired about a pay phone, and was directed to a phone booth in the parking lot. After dialing information to get the number—as usual, there was no phone book—she called Patty.

Yes, her father had just been released on bail, she said. But he wasn’t at the diner right now. He’d taken a little walk. She thought he was probably headed up to the observation bridge. “I told him about you,” she added.

From the museum, Charlotte walked up Spruce Street to the Falls. At the head of Spruce Street, she entered the gate in a wire mesh fence, and followed a gravel path across the grounds of the hydroelectric plant that powered the city’s street lamps. The path led to a caged-in footbridge over the intake reservoir for the hydro plant, and then across a grassy knoll overlooking the Falls basin. Crossing the grassy area, she found herself standing at the edge of the precipice, with only a few scrub trees growing in the crevices of the cliff face between her and the swirling water seventy-seven feet below. The sheer, coal-black basalt wall of the opposite side of the chasm was facing her, and the hulking brick structure of the hydroelectric plant, from whose turbines the spent waters emerged far below, was tucked into the cliff to her right. At her feet were the rusted remains of a wire mesh fence. Like the antique-reproduction street lamps whose globes had been put out, and the cast-iron park benches whose wooden-slatted seats had been smashed, the fence was another civic improvement that had fallen victim to urban blight.

From here, Charlotte could see the observation bridge spanning the gorge behind the trees to her left, and beyond the bridge, the white cascade of the Falls thundering into the chasm. There would be no rainbows today: the sky was overcast, and it looked like rain. A lone man was standing on the bridge, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the Falls. Turning, Charlotte headed back across the grass and rejoined the path, which passed through the grove of trees before emerging onto the bridge.

As Charlotte approached, John acknowledged her arrival with a nod, and then resumed his study of the Falls. Charlotte quietly joined him at the railing. The view was directly into the cleft of the inverted V of the chasm. The Falls poured over the wall of the chasm to her left. This was the first time she had seen the Falls up close, or at least the first time in forty-odd years, and they were as impressive as she remembered. Above, a quiet lake, and then, the heavy water cascading into the narrow opening, and reverberating with a roar that reminded her of the sound of the traffic on the George Washington Bridge at rush hour. Confined by the narrow canyon, the spray had nowhere to go but upward, and swirled around them like the smoke from a burning building, coating their clothing with a fine mist, and filling the air with the swampy smell of river water. From this close, the sense wasn’t of grandeur or beauty, but of raw power. Below, the water surged and eddied around the sharp rocks before making its way down the rock-studded chute and emerging from the mouth of the gorge to quietly meander on downstream.

In responding to Patty’s call for help, Charlotte felt a little like that water: plunging boldly over the precipice, heedless of the sharp rocks below that could cut her to bits, the currents that could drag her under, the whirlpools that could spin her senseless. But she knew that plunging over the precipice was what she had to do in order to reach that quiet place where the gorge released its contents into the order and quiet of the river below.

The man standing next to her was a different man from the big, warm-hearted energetic presence whom she had met less than a week before. He seemed diminished not only in spirit, but in size. He hadn’t shaved, and the silver-gray stubble on his chin matched the waxen pallor of his cheeks. Deep furrows of misery were etched into his forehead, and his eyes were ringed with red. A shining orb of brightness had collapsed into a black hole of despair.

For a while, she stood there as John smoked, his left arm with its “Helen” tattoo bringing the cigarette rhythmically up to his lips, and then back down again. Then he spoke: “Is this the first time you’ve been here?” he asked. He had to speak loudly to be heard above the roar.

“In forty years,” she replied, yelling.

“Do you know about Omanni?”

She shook her head.

“That’s the Indian name for the Great Spirit of the Falls. When the water’s low, he’s easy to make out.” He pointed to a rock formation that jutted out from between the dense sheets of water. “That’s his profile.” Then he pointed to a goldfinch on the top. “The bird’s on his head.” His finger traced a line downward. “Below are his nose, mouth, and chin.”

As Charlotte stared at the mass of rugged rock, Omanni’s profile suddenly took shape. “Oh, I see him now,” she said, delighted. He had a bold forehead, and an open mouth, with a trailing mustache of vivid green weeds. His arms were crossed firmly across his chest, giving the impression that he presided with magisterial authority over the thundering waters.