Murder at the Falls (21 page)

“Diana was selling it for two thousand,” said Tom as the gavel came down. “You got a deal.”

Charlotte was pleased. As Diana had said, magical things were always happening in Paterson.

They stayed for a couple of more lots, and then left. A few minutes later, they were heading through downtown Paterson, top down and radio blasting. If it had been salsa on the radio instead of sixties rock and roll, they would have fit right in. The mood of the city was buoyant: it was a glorious day, and the sidewalks were crowded with shoppers. Though downtown Paterson must once have looked like that of any other older American city, the influx of Latino immigrants had given the aging district the atmosphere of a South American open-air market. Much of the merchandise was displayed on the sidewalks. Huge bottles of pig’s ears and knuckles, sweatshirts emblazoned with photographs of Malcolm X, plaster statuettes of the Virgin Mary: it was all to be found on the sidewalks of downtown Paterson. Driving through the hustle and bustle, they continued on for a few more blocks, and suddenly found themselves in a neighborhood of perfectly groomed lawns and charming houses that was separated from the urban blight by only a stoplight and an invisible line that somehow managed to keep the inner city at bay.

The address they were looking for was on Park Avenue, and they found it, fittingly enough, overlooking a beautiful park. The house was quite large, and in the English cottage style, one of the most charming on a street lined with pretentious English Tudors and Spanish colonials.

Louise was just emerging from a carriage house at the back as they pulled into the driveway. “I like your car,” she said.

She was a tall, slightly plump woman with long, rangy limbs. In general type, she resembled Bernice, they were both large women with full faces, but where Bernice’s features were sharply drawn, Louise’s were soft. She must have been beautiful once, in an earthy kind of way. Charlotte could easily imagine how she must have looked in the sixties. Her long, full black hair; round, tanned, full-cheeked face; and rich, caramel-colored eyes were made to go with peasant blouses and Mother Hubbard skirts. But the face was now lined and careworn and the long black hair, now streaked with silver, looked out of place on a woman her age, even tied back in a ponytail.

“Thank you,” Tom replied. After slamming the door shut, he ran a loving hand over the polished surface of the front fender. “She’s my pride and joy.”

Louise joined them at the car. “Forgive my appearance,” she said. She wore a soiled white apron over a pair of sweat pants and an oversized man’s pin-striped oxford-cloth shirt. “I’ve been working. I’m a ceramic artist.” Then she held out her hand. “Louise Spiegel,” she said.

Once introductions had been dispensed with, along with the Charlotte-Graham-the-movie-star explanations that always went along with them, Louise led them toward her studio in the carriage house. Her recent works were displayed on shelves just inside the door: a dish of hard candies, a linzertorte, and a tray of cupcakes—all glitteringly, appetizingly real.

Charlotte immediately recognized them as being by the same artist as her recently acquired purchase. “I just bought your ‘Lemon Meringue’ at the Ivanhoe auction,” she said. “I didn’t realize that you were also Louise Spiegel. I’m delighted to meet you.”

“You did!” said Louise, clearly pleased. “I’m glad you like my work. Diana’s done well for me. I’m going to be sorry to see her leave. I’ll never be a Don Spiegel,” she went on, referring to the ostensible reason for their visit, “but I like what I do.”

Charlotte was surprised at her self-deprecatory tone, but it offered insight into the problems with the marriage: a woman who lived in the shadow of her husband. Of course she would never be a Don Spiegel, but she could be a Louise Sicca and seemed to be doing very well at it.

“I think you’re being overly modest,” she said. “I find your work fascinating, though I couldn’t begin to tell you why.” She touched a finger to the raspberry filling of the linzertorte; it was hard and cool. “What is it?” she asked. “That your eyes tell you one thing and your sense of touch another?”

“Yes. In art critic parlance, it’s the conflict between the visual and the tactile clues. Or between expectation and reality. The result is a disturbance in your sense of reality. There’s a lot of mystery in it; it’s like a magic trick. That’s why I like to call it material illusionism.”

“I just thought of why I like your work so much,” said Charlotte.

“Why’s that?”

“It reminds me of my profession. This is a piece of clay pretending to be a torte. If you look at it as the role [the linzertorte], it divulges that it isn’t real; and if you look at it as the actor [a piece of clay], it oozes raspberries.”

Louise smiled, and her face lit up. She had good teeth, large and white and even. “I never thought of my sculptures as playing a role before. But that’s certainly what they do.”

“How did you decide on food as a subject?” Charlotte asked.

“I used to do tiny ceramic rooms, complete with furniture,” she replied. “Then one day I did a kitchen, and I got hooked on kitchens, complete with utensils, serving dishes, food. It finally dawned on me that it wasn’t the kitchen so much as the food that I liked doing.”

“After that, it was just food?”

Louise nodded. “Just desserts, now. Please, have a seat,” she said, gesturing to a small living area made up of castoff furniture.

As they took their seats, Louise busied herself in a kitchenette, from which she emerged a few minutes later carrying a tray laden with coffee cups and a linzertorte. “One advantage of using food as your subject is that you get to eat it afterward.”

“It looks almost as good as your artwork, but not quite,” Charlotte said as Louise cut the torte, and transferred the pieces to the plates.

“Now,” Louise said as she passed the pastry and the cups of coffee. “What is it that you wanted to know about Don?”

Tom pulled out a reporter’s notebook. “Maybe you could start with how you met,” he said, not wanting to jump right into it. “I gather you’ve known him longer than anyone else he associated with.”

“I’ve known him … I guess that’s not the right tense, is it?” She started over: “Better to say, I first met him in college—Indiana University. We were both art students there. After college, we went to graduate school together at the Rhode Island School of Design.”

“When were you married?”

“Just after graduate school.” Tears welled in her eyes, and she wiped them away with a clay-stained hand, leaving a streak of gray on her freckled cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I miss him so much. I feel like a piece of me is missing, a leg or an arm or something.” She gazed out the mullioned window at the lawn, which was shaded by tall trees, and bordered by hydrangeas, whose flower heads nodded in the soft September breeze.

“Then you were close, despite the fact that you were divorced,” said Tom.

“We weren’t divorced. We were just separated.” She took a deep breath. “Yes, we were close. He came here every day: to see me, to see Julius. We just couldn’t live together. Or rather, I couldn’t live with him.”

“Why not?” Charlotte asked.

“Have you heard about the mill?”

“A little,” she said.

“It was a zoo. There were people hanging around there twenty-four hours a day. I didn’t leave Don because I didn’t love him, but because I couldn’t stand his life. I felt as if everything revolved around him. I didn’t have any time for myself, for my art, for Julie. Most nights I cooked dinner for a dozen people: artists, musicians, the plumber who came in to fix the faucet—you name it. If they were there, Don made them feel welcome to stay until he went to bed, or even later than that. It wasn’t good for Julie, either; it isn’t good for a child to be exposed to a life like that. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. The constant partying, the endless cooking and cleaning up, the lack of privacy, the way people took advantage of Don …”

“Like Randy?” interjected Charlotte.

“I would rank him as leech number one, yes. Don was so generous to him: helping him along, introducing him to collectors like the Lumkins. And then Randy turns around and stabs him in the back.”

“The
Artnews
article,” said Tom.

She nodded. “It sounds terrible to say, but I’ve often wished that it was Randy who died first. Things were fine before he came along. We had a nice quiet life together, the three of us. Randy introduced Don to that Bohemian life, and Don went along with it. I never really understood the appeal for Don, because he wasn’t an extroverted person. We would have a dozen people for dinner, and he wouldn’t talk to any of them. He just wanted them around, to validate his status as a big-time artist or something.”

She was interrupted by the slamming of the screen door. A boy entered, carrying a knapsack. He was a short, slight boy of thirteen or fourteen, with a triangular face, dark skin and eyes, and an engaging puckish expression.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, coming over to give her a kiss.

Louise introduced Tom and Charlotte. “My son, Julius,” she said. “Mr. Plummer and Miss Graham are doing an article on Daddy.”

“Neat,” said Julius. Then he turned to his mother, and said: “Ma, Terry and Jack are going over to West Side Park to play ball. Jack’s mom is going to drive them. Can I go too?”

Louise said yes and the boy disappeared as quickly as he had come.

“Where was I? Oh, the mill. It only got worse after I moved out. That was eight years ago. Whenever I called—it didn’t matter what hour of day or night it was—I could hear glasses tinkling and the murmur of conversation in the background. I never knew who was going to answer the phone.”

“Did that life style have anything to do with your husband’s suicide?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea why he killed himself,” she said bluntly. She paused for a moment to collect herself. “It was an act that was totally out of character. There’s not an hour of the day that I don’t wonder if there was something I could have done.”

“Like what?” asked Tom, gently.

“Sometimes I think that I shouldn’t have moved out, that I should have been more firm and kicked the others out.”

“Did the note reveal any motive?”

She shook her head. “It was vague. The ‘I can’t go on’ sort of thing.”

“What about Bernice’s lawsuit?” he asked. “Did you approve?”

“No, I did not,” she responded firmly. “First of all, the paintings are legally Randy’s. Don signed them over to him. Whether Don meant to retract the agreement before he died or not is moot: he hadn’t done so at the time of his death. Second, to take up arms against a sleaze like Randy Goslau is to invite trouble, which is exactly what Bernice got.”

“In the form of the threat to sue for palimony.”

“Yes. Randy’s lawyers made no claim that there was any sexual relationship, but that was the image that the threat was designed to create. Anyone who knew Don knows that it was ridiculous. He liked women. Another reason I moved out was his peccadilloes with the adoring female art students who hung around the mill.”

“Groupies,” said Tom.

“Exactly. I once heard somebody say that artists are the rock stars of the eighties. Which is a good analogy because artists have groupies too.”

“But you stood to benefit from the lawsuit.”

“Only indirectly. It’s actually Julie who will benefit if the paintings are ruled to be part of the estate. Julie gets a percentage. But even if they are, it doesn’t make any difference. We don’t need the money. Don left us well provided for. As I said, he was a generous man, generous to a fault.”

“Are you and Bernice on good terms?”

Louise raised her hand and tilted it from side to side.
“Mezza, mezza,”
she said. “I tried to talk her out of the lawsuit, but it was no go. Stopping her would have been like stopping a rhino in mid-charge.”

Or a pit bull, thought Charlotte, reminded of Diana’s description.

“What about the paintings? Do you have any idea where they are?”

“Not a clue,” she said.

Tom folded up his notebook and put it away in his breast pocket. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been a big help. I’d like to ask one more favor. Do you have a recent picture of your husband?”

Louise shook her head. “Not a recent picture,” she said. Don had a thing about photographs. He was like those primitive people who believe that the camera steals your soul.”

That explained why Tom’s efforts to track down a photo had been fruitless, Charlotte thought. “That seems like an odd attitude for a photorealist,” she said.

“I think he took that attitude
because
he was a photorealist. He was aware of the power of the camera. He used to quote an essay that described the camera as a kind of assassin.”

“I saw his self-portrait,” said Charlotte. “The Finders showed it to me. If the camera was an assassin in that case, it was an assassin who had a hell of a time fixing its subject in its sights.”

Louise smiled. “That’s Don. A reflection in a sheet of plate glass: cool, objective, dispassionate. I lived with him for sixteen years, and I still don’t feel as if I knew him.”

“How about an old photo?” asked Tom. “From before he became a painter.”

“That I have. Our wedding photo from 1965. But I’m reluctant to loan it to you because it’s the only one I have.”

“I understand,” said Tom. “We could take it to a photocopier right now—you could even come with us—and have a copy made.”

“That sounds okay,” she said. “There’s a copy shop a couple of blocks away that’s open on weekends. I’ll get it: it’s in the house.”

She returned a few minutes later with the photo, which pictured Louise just as Charlotte had imagined her, in a long gown of white Indian cotton with a garland of flowers on her brow. Don had the same puckish expression as his son. He wore a Nehru jacket, and his hair was down to his shoulders.

“Definitely a sixties wedding,” said Tom as Louise handed him the photo.

“Definitely. Look at that jacket!” Louise studied the photograph. “The Italians—I’m Italian,” she explained—“have an expression for a person who isn’t really dead: someone who feigns death to get away from someone or something, or to get out of a sticky situation.”