Murder at the Falls (18 page)

“The Indians used to make sacrifices to him,” he said.

“Is that what you were thinking of doing?” asked Charlotte.

“No.” He smiled wanly, for an instant the old John. “But maybe I should. I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

“Maybe I can help you,” she said. “But first I need to know the facts. Lieutenant Voorhees said that you disappeared for about forty-five minutes that night. Between eleven and eleven forty-five. I’d like to know first, why you left, and second, where you went.”

“I came here. To have a smoke. I often come here to have a smoke. I was still upset about Nick selling the Falls View. I wanted to think about my future. Besides, I didn’t have anything to do until we reopened at twelve. Carlos was going to clean up.”

“Why didn’t you just go home?” she asked.

“I didn’t want Helen to see how upset I was. Now that I have bigger things to worry about, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal”—he sighed, a deep, weary sigh—“but at the time it seemed like the end of my life.”

“Did you leave before or after Randy?”

“After,” he said. “At least, I think it was after. I went out the back. But I hadn’t noticed him the last time I had been out front, which was only a couple of minutes before that. He had been sitting at the counter all night.”

“But you didn’t see him on your way up here?”

He shook his head.

“When you came up here, what route did you take? What I mean is, did you cross the street in front of the diner, or did you wait until you got to the head of the street to cross?”

“In front of the diner. That’s the way I always go. Cross in front of the diner, and then walk up the other side. Habit, I guess. Since I live across the street, I cross there a dozen times a day.”

If John had crossed to the other side of the street, the chances were that he hadn’t seen Randy lying in the canebrake, if indeed that was where he had been. But there was also the possibility that John was lying.

“I didn’t see Randy, but I did see something unusual,” John continued. “I doubt if it means anything, but it struck me at the time as kind of odd.”

“I’m listening,” she prompted.

“I was putting the soiled aprons out …”

“I was just about to ask you when you put the aprons out.”

“I’m glad someone believes I
did
put them out. I put them out just before I left to come up here, a little before eleven. I always put them out on Sunday nights. Anyway, I was putting them out when a car drove around the building.”

“Do you remember what kind of car it was?”

“A gray Mercedes, New York plates. I remember because it’s not often that cars drive all the way around. It’s a tight squeeze, and most people turn around in the parking lot. Then, as I was going out again—I had gone back to get a jacket—it came around again.”

“Did you get a look at the driver?”

“Not then. But as I was heading across the street, I saw the car come around for a third time. This time, the driver parked and went inside. I thought he must have been looking for someone. He was an older man, tall, distinguished-looking, dressed in a suit and tie.”

Arthur Lumkin, Charlotte thought. Come back to spy on Xantha. “Do you think you could identify him from a photograph?”

“I think so,” he said. He looked over at her, his face for the first time showing a spark of hope. “Do you know who it was?”

“Let’s just say that I’m very glad that you told me about this,” she said. The last thing she wanted to be accused of was giving away privileged information. “Did you tell Voorhees about it?”

He nodded. “He didn’t seem interested,” he added with a shrug.

Charlotte was disgusted with Voorhees. Here was a clear lead that he hadn’t even bothered to follow up. She suspected that he just wanted to close the case as quickly as possible, and move to Florida. “Could the driver have seen you putting out the aprons?”

“Yes. Easily. There’s a fenced enclosure there, to keep the raccoons out of the garbage, but you can see through it. We usually keep the gate locked to keep people out—you’d be amazed at who’ll come wandering in—but I had left it open because I was coming back.”

“In other words, someone could have entered the enclosure while you were up here, and taken two of the aprons.”

John nodded.

9

Charlotte gazed out at the profile of Omanni. As she studied the sheets of water that hung like plaits of hair on either side of his face, she went over the facts in her mind. Voorhees had theorized that Randy had passed out at the east end of the parking lot, and had been dragged through the canebrake to the river. If the driver of the Mercedes had been Arthur Lumkin, and it seemed clear from John’s description that it was, he might have seen Randy lying unconscious on his swing around the parking lot, come back for the aprons after John had left, tied Randy up, and thrown him in. Motive, means, and opportunity. There was also the matter of precedent, namely Victor Louria. Though the party guests would have been leaving, the end of the parking lot was far enough away from the building that Lumkin’s activities would probably not have attracted notice. Also, he would only have had to drag the body a few feet into the bamboo not to risk being noticed at all. The stuff grew as high as a Kansas cornfield in July. But there were a couple of problems with this theory. The first was that Voorhees didn’t know for sure that Randy’s body had been tossed in the river at that spot. He only knew that the medical examiner had found bits of bamboo in the apron strings and in the backs of Randy’s sneakers. Any of the party guests could have wandered into the canebrake to throw up, and any of them could have flattened the path to the river bank, perhaps to throw up some more. Second was the fact that somebody had been harassing Randy—somebody other than Arthur Lumkin, who, according to what Patty had said, was just an innocent neurotic with a mother fixation.

Turning back to John, she said, “Now I want to ask you what you remember about the events of another evening, an evening last spring. But first I’ll backtrack a little.” After explaining about Randy’s history of paranoia and about his reaction to Verre’s painting, she said, “The date on the calendar on the diner wall in the painting was April seventeenth. Does that date mean anything to you?”

John shrugged. “It’s over a year ago.”

Reaching into her bag, she pulled out the catalog from the Koreman show and opened it to the page with the reproduction of “Falls View Diner on a Rainy Spring Night.” Then she pulled out the photocopy of “Falls View Diner with Banana Cream Pie.” She spread them out against the railing of the bridge. “Here are two other views of the same scene,” she said. “Do they help your memory at all?”

John looked at them, and then exclaimed: “Yes. I remember that night now! That was the night the diner guy, Kenny Meeker, gave the concert in the parking lot.” He pointed to “Falls View Diner with Banana Cream Pie.” This scene is later on that night. That’s Meeker eating the pie. Then he pointed to the van in “Falls View Diner on a Rainy Spring Night.” “And this is his van in the parking lot.”

“And these people?” Charlotte asked, pointing to the two men sitting on the stools in the background of “Banana Cream Pie.”

“That’s Randy Goslau on the left and Don Spiegel on the right.”

Now we’re getting somewhere
, Charlotte thought. “Have you any recollection of what they were talking about?” Her heart was pounding: she felt like a daredevil about to go over the lip of the Falls.

“Yes, I do,” he said quietly. “They were arguing about an article in an art magazine. Spiegel wanted Goslau to send a statement to the magazine, retracting what he—Goslau—had said about him. Spiegel had just come from a party in New York where everyone was talking about this article. He was pretty incensed.”

Charlotte now remembered seeing a magazine on the counter in the close-up of the same scene in the museum show. “What was Randy’s reaction?”

John thought for a minute, and then said: “I guess you’d have to call it belligerent. He was pretty doped up. He was talking fast, waving his arms around. He kept bragging about what a great artist he was, but of course he always did that … That was also the night that Spiegel committed suicide.”

“What!” Charlotte exclaimed.

John continued: “He jumped. Either from over there”—he waved at the cliff at the edge of the Falls—“or from the bridge here.” Taking a final drag on his cigarette, he tossed it over the railing.

Charlotte watched it go down. It seemed to fall in slow motion, being turned this way and that by the air currents created by the Falls. Once it hit the water, it spun violently around like laundry in a spin cycle before finally being swallowed up. “Why?” she asked simply.

“No one knew. He didn’t appear to have any reason, but …” Andriopoulis shrugged as if to say,
Who knows why people do the things they do?
“Goslau said it was because he couldn’t stand the shame of having it come out that it was really he who did his paintings.”

Above the Falls, a mother mallard paddled around in the lake-like expanse of water, her six tiny ducklings following behind. As she looked out at them, Charlotte asked herself:
How would Verre have known about what went on at the diner that night, and why would he have wanted to paint it
—
not once, but three times
? Suddenly she gasped as the last duckling was sucked into the current and pulled over the edge of the Falls. It landed a few seconds later in a pool surrounded by sharp rocks, and disappeared under the surface of the water. A moment later, it popped back up, and was carried downstream by the current.

John had seen the incident too. “What’s she going to do now?” he asked, referring to the mother mallard.

As they watched in fascination, the mother flew down to the duckling at the foot of the Falls and then back up to the rest of her brood. She repeated this several times, clearly confused and upset. Then, one by one, she nudged the others over the edge. Each disappeared under the water, only to pop back up again a moment later. When they had all made it safely over, the mother joined them at the debouchure of the gorge, and they paddled downstream happily together.

“Whew,” said Charlotte, once all the ducklings were reunited with Mama. She realized that she had been holding her breath.

“And I thought I was in a predicament,” John said. “She ought to go down in the history books right next to Leapin’ Sam Patch.”

“Who’s he?” asked Charlotte.

“One of Paterson’s historic figures. An Irish mill hand who took a dare to climb a tree and jump into the gorge. He landed right down there.” He pointed to the same pool where the ducklings had landed. “It’s the only place where you can land and survive. Anywhere else, he would have been smashed on the rocks. The drop speed is sixty-three miles per hour; somebody on the rescue squad once figured it out.”

Charlotte stared down at the quiet little pool of yellow-brown stillness surrounded by the sharp-edged rocks and swirling waters.

“He went on to make a living at it. People would pay to see him jump. From Paterson, he went on to other falls. He was said to be the only person ever to have jumped into the Niagara River without a flotation device and survive. But he finally pressed his luck too far: he jumped off a cliff at a falls up around Rochester somewhere and never came up. They didn’t recover his body until the next spring. It turned up in Lake Ontario, frozen in a block of ice.”

Charlotte shuddered at the image.

“When I was a kid, we used to sing a jingle about him.” He paused a minute to recall the words, and then proceeded to recite them:

Poor Sam Patch—a man once world renownded,

Much loved the water, and by it was drownded,

He sought for fame, and as he reached to pluck it,

He lost his balance, then kicked the bucket.

Charlotte was still staring at the pool of water, and wondering what it must have been like to land. Suddenly, she asked: “How do we know that Don Spiegel committed suicide?”

“He left a note in his typewriter. Also, there was the body. It came up four months later, right over there.” He turned to point to the stretch of river behind them where it widened before emerging from the gorge. After pausing to light another cigarette, he continued: “I watched them haul it out. What was left of it. The head was almost gone; he must have landed head-first on a rock. There wasn’t much skin left, either. Bodies decompose pretty rapidly in warm water, and it had been an unusually hot summer.”

“How did they know it was Spiegel’s, then—from the dental records?”

“No, the teeth were missing: some had been knocked out, the rest had fallen out when the soft tissue decomposed. They couldn’t identify the body from fingerprints, either. They’d been nibbled away by fish. From what I understand, they identified it through the bones. Don’t ask me how.”

Not very accurately
, she suspected. “How old was he?”

“I don’t know for sure. Between forty-five and fifty, I’d guess.”

“Height and weight?”

“Five foot ten, a hundred and seventy-five pounds.”

Average
, she thought. “Any distinguishing features?”

He shook his head.

In other words, thought Charlotte as she headed back to her car, the bashed-up, badly decomposed body that the rescue squad had pulled out of the river was the body of a Caucasian male of about Spiegel’s age and height. It might have been any one of the winos or crackheads who made their home in the vacant mills of the historic district. A glimmer of a hypothesis was beginning to form at the back of her brain: that Spiegel had faked his own suicide and then taken on the identity of Ed Verre. Which then led to the question of why he had done so, if indeed he had. First on her agenda was proving that he had. Toward that end, she got back into her car, and headed back to the Montclair Art Museum. (What was it that she had said to herself about driving cross-country and back again?) As a prominent New Jersey artist, Spiegel must have exhibited there at one time or another. Maybe the museum even had some of his paintings in its collection.

“Oh, yes,” said the librarian in response to Charlotte’s request for information. “We have a lot on him.” Getting up from her desk, she disappeared among the stacks.