Murder at the Falls (20 page)

“If you were to ask me,” Morris continued, “I would tell you that this is the self-portrait of a man who craves anonymity. Yet it is also the self-portrait of an artist who led the most public of lives. Evie and I have been to Don’s studio at the Gryphon Mill many times. There were always people around; he was never alone. That kind of life can be death to an artist’s creativity.”

Charlotte nodded, beginning to sense what he was getting at.

“Plus there was the fact that he was locked into his style. How is an artist to break away from a style that has become an artistic dead end for him when the paintings that he produces in that style sell for a million dollars before he’s even set brush to canvas?”

“Tell her your theory, dear,” Evelyn prompted.

“I think he faked his suicide in order to start over artistically, just as an author takes on a pseudonym. He often told us that he was happiest before he became a big success, when he still had the latitude to experiment.”

“I see what you’re saying,” Charlotte commented, “and I would agree if what he’s done as Ed Verre represented a new direction. But as far as I can see, he’s just gone back to his earlier subject matter—diners—and is painting them in the same way as his cityscapes.”

“Yes,” Morris said. He raised a knuckle to his chin and gazed out the window, which overlooked an air shaft. “That puzzles me too. If shedding the trappings of success was the reason for the new identity, I don’t understand why he hasn’t taken off in a new direction.”

“Maybe he hasn’t gotten around to it yet,” Evelyn offered. “Maybe he’s going over the old ground one last time. After all, he’s only been Ed Verre for what … nine months?”

“Maybe,” Morris agreed. Then he looked at Charlotte. “I suppose we’ll be competing with Jack Lundstrom now for the works of Ed Verre. Not that we mind,” he added, looking at Evelyn for confirmation. “We were lucky to have the field to ourselves as long as we did.”

Of course, Charlotte thought. As far as the Finders were concerned, she would have had a reason for her visit, and her being Jack’s representative would make the most sense to them. She saw no reason for telling them otherwise.

“Not necessarily,” she said.

She arrived home at about four, and went right to her library. She wanted to sit down and have a nice little think, to say nothing of a nice little drink. After fixing herself a Manhattan, she flopped down on the oversized sofa, and put her feet up. Vivian’s tape recorder was still sitting there, but it had lost its threatening aura. She now had more important things to think about than her memories of the past. Specifically, what had happened on the night of Randy’s murder. She now had two new important pieces of information. The first was that Arthur Lumkin had returned to the diner after making his call to Australia, which meant that he could have tied Randy up and thrown him in the river. He had been to the diner at least once before when Randy had found him hiding in his car. And if he and Xantha had sometimes dropped in at the mill, as Diana said they had, he had probably been to the diner more than once. The diner was the hangout for Paterson’s art community, and although it was hardly the kind of restaurant usually frequented by someone like Lumkin—Lutèce would be more his style—there was nowhere else in the neighborhood to get a cup of coffee unless you wanted to try a Spanish
cantina
. He might already have known that the soiled aprons were kept in the enclosure out back, or he might have seen John putting them out when he drove around. In any case, his presence at the diner later that night qualified him for a slot at the top of the list of suspects.

The second new piece of information had to do with why Randy had gone off the deep end, which may or may not have had anything to do with his murder. She suspected that he had recognized that it was Spiegel who did the painting of the Falls View. If Morris had, why shouldn’t he? As Spiegel’s assistant, he had been intimately acquainted with his work. She thought back to the scene at the gallery. Had Randy’s comments, “I see them” and “This time I’m certain I see them,” referred to Spiegel’s initials? Which led to the next question: what was it about the prospect of Spiegel’s being alive that had been so frightening? Could it have been losing the paintings that Spiegel had given him? If Spiegel was alive, he could retract the gift agreement. But the prospect of losing the paintings didn’t seem to warrant Randy’s extreme reaction, or his sense of paranoia. Maybe the reaction had just been a cocaine-inspired fear of ghosts. Then again, maybe the painting really had been done by Verre, who had reproduced Spiegel’s technique and concealed Spiegel’s initials for some obscure reason of his own.

Looking at the tape recorder sitting on the coffee table, Charlotte was suddenly reminded of the Broadway play,
Angel Street
, in which she had starred in the early forties. It had later been made into a movie,
Gaslight
, starring Ingrid Bergman. The fact that she’d had to turn down the movie role because she’d been committed to another project was one of the major disappointments of her career. Apart from starring in the role she’d made famous on Broadway, she had missed her only chance to have played opposite Charles Boyer. It was probably a good thing; chances were that she would have fallen for him, and he’d been happily married. She bemoaned the dearth of sophisticated stars like Boyer in today’s movies. By comparison, today’s heroes struck her as overgrown sixteen-year-olds. But all that was beside the point. The point was that in
Gaslight
, the husband tries to drive the wife slowly mad. Had somebody—Spiegel or Verre,—been trying to do the same to Randy? And if so, why? Taking a long swig of her drink, she resolved not to think about it anymore for the moment. To do so was like trying to tell what was glass and what was reflection in one of Spiegel’s paintings. From studying the Spiegels on Jack’s walls, she had learned that in order to do this it was necessary to fix on a single point and determine whether it was reality or illusion, and then extrapolate from there. Even then, you often got it all wrong and had to start over again.

The same was true in a murder investigation. You had to take one point and follow it up. You couldn’t allow yourself to be thrown off track by chasing after every lead. Since she had no idea how to pursue the Arthur Lumkin lead, she decided to follow up on the Verre lead instead. In order to tell if he was reality or illusion, she would have to compare his likeness directly to Spiegel’s. And for that, she needed a photograph of Spiegel. His self-portrait told her little: a vague reflection showing a man of average height and weight with dark hair. How should she go about getting a picture? she asked herself, and decided to start by checking with Tom. Now that he was back, she wanted to fill him in anyway. With his connections at the New York newspapers, he might be able to dig up a photo. There must have been a photo with Spiegel’s obituary. For that matter, it might be handy to get copies of the obituaries, too. The next step would be to pay a visit to Spiegel’s ex-wife, Louise. She might also be able to provide a photo, and Charlotte wanted to talk with her anyway. Maybe Louise could give her a better sense of what this man of glass was all about.

10

Back from his trip and eager to get in on the investigation, Tom picked Charlotte up at ten the next morning. He had suggested that she use him as an entrée to Louise Spiegel. When Charlotte had called Louise to make the appointment, she’d said that Tom was interested in doing an article about her ex-husband. Tom’s journalistic pursuits came in handy as excuses for asking people questions that they might not ordinarily want to answer. As they headed out to Paterson in the Buick, eliciting admiring glances from passing motorists, Charlotte filled Tom in on what she had discovered, namely that Lumkin had returned to the diner on the night that Randy was killed, and that Verre and Spiegel were probably one and the same.

At the mere mention of the words “new identity,” Tom launched into a long discourse on the methods for creating one, starting with taking the name of a dead baby from a gravestone, the old grade B movie trick. Tom’s experience in writing about true crime had left him with extensive knowledge of such arcane matters.

“Wild man Plummer,” said Charlotte, as Tom, having expounded on the various ways of obtaining a phony birth certificate, moved on to the subject of altering one’s fingerprints with acid …

He laughed.

In Mack Sennett days, every Keystone Kops story conference had had its wild man, an average Joe who was hired to sit at the conference table and toss out words at random—monkey, ambulance, chopsticks. The idea was to get the juices of creativity flowing among the writers. The Mack Sennett wild man was a Hollywood legend. That Tom was Charlotte’s wild man was their private joke.

“No, seriously,” Tom said. “The United States is the world’s easiest country in which to forge a new identity. You know why?” Pulling out his wallet, he flipped it open to his driver’s license. “This little document here. Which is used all over the country as a means of identification, but was never intended for that purpose.”

They had gotten off at the exit for the historic district, and were now waiting at the stoplight in front of the museum.

“By the way, where are we going?” Tom asked.

“The Manor District, on the east side,” she replied. She was studying the map that lay open on her lap. “Turn right here.”

They were just turning onto Market Street when a cluster of people on the sidewalk in front of the Ivanhoe Gallery caught Charlotte’s eye. A banner hanging from the building read, in gold letters on a purple ground: “Fine Arts Auction Today.”

“Look. There’s an art auction at the Ivanhoe.” She checked her watch. “We’re early,” she said. “Our appointment isn’t for forty-five minutes.” They had allowed the usual amount of time, forgetting that the traffic on a Sunday morning would be light.

Tom looked around, saw the sign, and then met Charlotte’s eye. Without a word; he pulled into the museum parking lot. “It’s a wise man who knows when he’s beaten,” he said.

“You mean you can’t say that in Latin?” Charlotte teased.

Tom shot her a dirty look.

Then they got out and headed up the street to the gallery.

A sandwich board on the sidewalk in front of the gallery read “Going Out of Business. Everything Must Go.” Next to the sandwich board stood a rack holding a collection of auction catalogs. Charlotte and Tom each took one.

“Hello again,” said Diana, who stood at the head of the access ramp that covered a section of the steps. She waved a hand at the auctiongoers gathered on the patio below. “I finally decided that I couldn’t make a go of it. A spur of the moment decision.”

“What are you going to do now?” asked Tom.

“I think I’m moving to Paris,” she said with a radiant smile. “I’m selling everything, my inventory as well as the works from my personal collection.”

The Diana of today was a different woman from the Diana of earlier in the week. She looked stunning in a sleeveless dress of red stretch fabric, which she wore with dangling jet earrings that emphasized the slender elegance of her long, white neck.

“Not bad,” said Tom, speaking about more than just Paris.

Diana addressed Charlotte: “If you’re still interested in Louise Sicca’s ‘Lemon Meringue,’ it’s for sale. Most of the ceramic pieces in the show were on consignment from the artist, but that particular one belonged to me.”

“There you go,” said Tom, giving Charlotte an encouraging nudge.

Diana opened the catalog, and then handed it to Charlotte. “Here it is,” she said, pointing to the entry with a fingernail whose polish exactly matched the red of her dress. “Lot Number Fourteen.”

As Diana turned to chat with some new arrivals, Tom and Charlotte descended the steps, and found two empty seats among the folding chairs that had been set up on the patio facing the spillway with its rushing waters. The auction had attracted a good-sized crowd.

No sooner had they taken their seats than Diana mounted the podium. After a few words about her regrets at leaving Paterson, she introduced the auctioneer, who was from a New York gallery. Then she stepped down and took a seat next to Jason Armentrout.

“I guess you were right about the Pernod,” said Tom, directing his gaze to the couple, who were chatting intimately.

“Unfortunately for you.”

“
Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus
,” he said. “Sometimes even the good Homer sleeps, or, you can’t win ’em all.”

“I’m sorry I challenged you,” said Charlotte.

The first lot, called “Pine Barrens,” was an abstract landscape of trees at the edge of a pond. The roots descended into a black pool edged with deep purple, from which a hint of light shined upward. Charlotte loved it, but she was saving her money for “Lemon Meringue.”

The bidding for “Pine Barrens,” which went for fifteen thousand, set the pace. It was fast and high, perhaps because of the New York auctioneer. A charming art nouveau poster of a couple in evening dress went for five thousand, a brooding oil of a mountain for ten.

“Look!” said Charlotte, as Number Four went on the block.

It was a painting of a diner, not as folk-arty as Randy’s or as glitteringly precise as Verre/Spiegel’s, but with a certain charm. Charlotte had the feeling that she’d seen it before, but she couldn’t recall where or when. Paintings of diners were everywhere these days.

“Are you going to bid?” she asked Tom. “The price is low.” The catalog listed it as unsigned and undated, and gave the estimated value as fifteen hundred dollars, reflecting its lack of provenance.

“I think so,” Tom replied, his eyes gleaming with excitement.

As the bidding opened, Tom’s arm flew up. His offer of five hundred was acknowledged by the auctioneer, and the bidding was on. There were a lot of bidders, but as the price went up everyone except Tom and Jason dropped out. Jason finally won the picture for twelve hundred.

“I’m just as glad,” said Tom as the auctioneer’s assistant set the next painting on an easel. “I thought it was going too high.”

When “Lemon Meringue” finally came up for bid, Charlotte was primed. To her surprise, there were few bidders. She supposed that material illusionism had a limited audience. She ended up buying it for seven hundred.