Murder at the Falls (25 page)

“It was to me, too. The biggest surprise of my life. I still can’t fathom it. It’s hard for me to get my head around any amount that exceeds a day’s worth of tips. At this point, it’s actually Randy’s postcard collection that I’m most excited about.”

“You had no idea?” asked Charlotte.

“Not the slightest. It was like winning the lottery. But with some unpleasant complications.” She glanced over at her father, who looked like Gene Krupa, so fast were his arms flying around, flipping hamburgers, scrambling eggs, heaping up mounds of home fries.

As they watched, his arms seemed to slow down, as if the speed of a film were being decelerated. Then they fell to his sides, and he crumpled to the floor. Then Helen screamed. “Oh my God! John’s having a heart attack.”

“Daddy!” cried Patty, rushing to his side.

Charlotte and Tom were right behind, as were a dozen other diner patrons. John lay on his side between the grill and the counter. The arm with the tattoo lay outstretched on the floor. Helen was crouched down next to him.

Charlotte didn’t have to be a doctor to know that it didn’t look good. John’s skin was gray, and he wasn’t breathing.

Patty took charge. “Carlos, call the ambulance!” she shouted to one of the cooks in the back. Then she crouched down next to her mother, and said: “Tom and Joe, help me turn him over on his back.”

He was a heavy man, and it took Tom and two others to turn him over. Once he was on his back, Patty removed his glasses, which had been smashed in the fall, checked for a pulse, and then started CPR. She was cool and calm—she knew what she was doing—but her trembling lower lip revealed her fear.

“Don’t die, Daddy,” she chanted as she pressed, arms straight and elbows locked, against her father’s sternum. It was a mantra that she repeated in time to the pumping action: “Don’t die, Daddy. Don’t die, Daddy. Don’t die, Daddy.”

They never did get around to seeing Voorhees. After John’s heart attack they didn’t feel like going back to the detective bureau. And after the stunt Voorhees had pulled about Randy’s will, they weren’t especially eager to rush right down there, anyway. Besides, Tom was about to depart on a promotion tour for his most recent book. After driving him to the airport, Charlotte dropped his car off at his garage, then had a light dinner at a café in his neighborhood and took a cab home. All she wanted to do was mix herself a drink, put her feet up, and think things over. Which is exactly what she did.

As she sipped her drink and munched potato chips, she reviewed the suspects in her mind. At this point, the front-runner was Arthur Lumkin. He had the strongest motive: jealousy. He had been on the scene, and he could have spotted the laundry bin when he drove around the back. Moreover, he might have followed Randy home in the expectation that Xantha would be meeting him there. Then there was Spiegel. Another strong motive, revenge; a good knowledge of the diner; and, unfortunately, an alibi—maybe. Hopefully Voorhees would let her know what he found when he checked it out. Then there was John. Though she hated to think ill of someone who at that very moment was fighting for his life, the news that Patty was Randy’s heir cast a new light on him as a suspect. The diner was his life. He had worked there three hundred and sixty-odd days a year for fifty years. His occasional days off were spent—where else?—the diner. The prospect of losing it must have seemed worse than death; he had said as much himself. And though in most people’s minds it was usually passions such as jealousy or revenge that provided the motive for murder, Charlotte knew that in actual fact it was more often just plain greed. In this case, not so much greed as the desire to preserve a business that represented a lifetime of hard work and devotion. John had admitted to being on the observation bridge that night. He could very well have seen Randy walking down the street—seen him, and maybe followed him home.

Then there was a host of other suspects, starting with Bernice Spiegel: greed again, as well as the desire to preserve her brother’s reputation. With Randy out of the way, the palimony issue would be eliminated. There was also the possibility that she could have claimed the missing paintings for Spiegel’s estate. The estate lawyers had told Patty that the paintings would go to her, but maybe they were wrong. Next was Louise Sicca: same motive as above, but diluted. Unlike Bernice, she didn’t care about her husband’s name. Nor did she appear to care about his money. Bernice and Louise were the major suspects on the “B” list. There were also two minor suspects. The first was Patty, who might have killed Randy for the same motive as her father. The second was Mary Catherine Koreman. For her, Randy’s death not only eliminated an expensive middleman, it also opened up new business opportunities in the form of shaking down other galleries for the Lumkins’ business.

In considering Bernice, Louise, and Mary Catherine as suspects, Charlotte wondered briefly if a woman would have been capable of wrapping Randy’s body up in the aprons and tossing it into the raceway, and concluded that it would not only have been possible, but easy. Though he was muscular, Randy had been a small man—he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and forty. Bernice, Louise, and Mary Catherine were all large women, reasonably fit and in good health. Bernice and Louise probably outweighed Randy by twenty or thirty pounds, and Mary Catherine by a good deal more. Charlotte remembered noticing how muscular Louise’s forearms were, probably from pounding clay. And though Patty was petite, she would also have strong arms. Carrying trays laden with heavy Buffalo-ware was no easy feat.

She reached for another handful of potato chips, but the bowl was empty.

She was getting up for a refill when the phone rang. It was her stepdaughter, Marsha Rogers, nee Lundstrom. Though Charlotte no longer kept in touch with Jack, she did with his daughter. She and Marsha had similar interests, chief among them their interest in art, and Marsha often accompanied Charlotte to museum and gallery shows. Now that Marsha was married—she had married a paleontologist whom she’d met on a trip she and Charlotte had taken to China—she didn’t spend as much time in New York, and they no longer palled around as much as they once had. But they did stay in touch.

Marsha was calling now to say hello. She had spent the earlier part of the summer on a dig in China, as she had for the past four years. The fact that her husband had discovered dinosaur fossils in China was a happy circumstance for a wife who happened to be a scholar of Tang dynasty poetry, While he dug for fossils, she translated antique manuscripts.

“How is your father?” asked Charlotte. She winced inwardly at the mention of a topic she would rather not have discussed, but which she felt compelled to bring up out of a sense of politesse that was probably overblown.

“At the moment, I’d have to say that he’s steaming mad.”

“Over what?” asked Charlotte, hoping it wasn’t her.

“A Lipschitz,” Marsha replied, referring to the sculptor whose abstract pieces had helped define cubism. “A small mother and child. He bought it a few years ago at a Madison Avenue Gallery.”

“The one that was on the pedestal in the living room?”

“That’s the one. Anyway, as you probably know, he was quite attached to it. The other night he gave a party, and one of the guests identified the piece as having been stolen from a warehouse in Hastings-on-Hudson where Lipschitz’s sculptures are stored.

“How did this person know?”

“He was an art critic who had not only written a book on Lipschitz, but had also drawn up the
catalogue raisonné
of his works. He knew precisely which works had been stolen from the warehouse.”

“Didn’t the gallery Jack bought it from supply a provenance?” asked Charlotte. It was unusual for the kind of prestigious uptown galleries that Jack patronized to be anything less than on the up and up.

“Yes, they did. That’s the interesting part. This is what the thieves had done: they had placed the piece in a house sale, not an everyday house sale, but a house sale at a mansion up on the Hudson—the kind of place that would have fine art, but not great art, if you know what I mean. They didn’t identify it as a Lipschitz, of course. Then they bought it back for a fraction of its real worth. Now they had a receipt for an abstract sculpture of a mother and child purchased for five thousand, or whatever. They then offered the piece to Sotheby’s. Sotheby’s questioned the receipt, but the thieves had the catalog from the house sale to back it up. Sotheby’s auctioned it off as a Lipschitz—it had been signed by the artist—and the Madison Avenue Gallery bought it.”

Something about Marsha’s story was sending signals to an alarm at the back of Charlotte’s brain, but she didn’t know what it was. “I hope the gallery is going to reimburse Jack,” she said.

“Oh yes. He’s not out any money, but he is out the sculpture.”

As Marsha went on about Jack trying to buy the sculpture back from the Lipschitz estate, which owned the sculptures in the warehouse, the alarm in Charlotte’s brain suddenly went off. She remembered where she had seen the painting of the diner that Tom had bid on at the Ivanhoe Gallery auction. “Excuse me,” she said. “I don’t mean to be rude. But you might have just helped me solve a very important problem. Would you mind if I called you back in a little while? I have to make a phone call.”

After hanging up, she immediately called Voorhees’ home number, which he had given her. He seemed surprised to hear from her, but was willing enough to listen to what she had to say. She could hear the tinkling of ice in a glass; it sounded as if he had spent the evening doing the same thing she had.

First she told him about Randy’s attempt to murder Spiegel, and then about their discovery that Ed Verre was really Don Spiegel. Next she told him about John seeing Arthur Lumkin behind the diner. Finally, she told him about Spiegel’s plan to “gaslight” Randy. She also asked him to check Verre/Spiegel’s alibi, and reminded him to let her know what he had found out. “We only found out today that Patty Andriopoulis was Randy’s heir,” she complained. “It was a crucial bit of information that you just happened to leave out.”

“I did?” he said, all innocence. “I must have forgotten.”

“Well, next time tie a string around your finger,” she snapped. Then she told him about their deduction that Randy’s body must have been thrown in the raceway below the dam at the old gatehouse.

“I would say that you’ve been busy, Miss Graham,” Voorhees said when she had finished. There was an unconcealed note of admiration in his voice.

“Now for the meaty part,” she continued. “I know who stole the paintings. But this time you’re going to be the one who has to wait to find out the details. Would tomorrow at ten be all right?”

“I’ll be there with bells on,” he said.

No sooner had Charlotte hung up the phone than it rang again. This time it was a woman with a heavy accent. Charlotte had trouble understanding the message at first. Then she finally got it: the caller was an Andriopoulis relative calling at Patty’s behest to tell her that John Andriopoulis was dead. He had died in the coronary care unit at St. Joseph’s earlier that evening. The funeral would be held in two days at St. George Greek Orthodox Church. The caller went on to say that the family appreciated Charlotte’s efforts to clear John’s name, and that they hoped she would be able to attend.

Charlotte wasn’t surprised; John had looked like a goner. But she
was
surprised at how sad she felt about the death of a man she hardly knew. A lot of it was her own reading of a life that, to all outward appearances, had been one of unremitting drudgery. But she doubted that he had felt the same way. To him it had probably been a rich life, with close ties to family, church, and community. She felt as if she should go, but she also felt as if she would be doing so under false pretenses. She hadn’t really been trying to clear John’s name—she had just been trying to solve a murder.

Now she wondered if she ever would.

She arrived at Voorhees’ office a little early. Though it was a foggy, rainy day, which usually slowed traffic down, it hadn’t been as bad as she expected. The weather was due to the effects of a hurricane that was churning up the waters off the coast of the Carolinas. The National Weather Service had issued a hurricane watch for the storm, Hurricane Clyde, which was expected to start heading inland soon. She found Voorhees with his feet up on his desk, dictating into a tape recorder. She wondered what he was going to do about the investigation now that the suspect who had been charged with the murder was dead.

“Oh, Miss Graham,” he said, returning his feet to the floor. “Come in.” He nodded at the tape recorder. “I was just dictating some case notes,” he explained. “Please have a seat.” He pointed to a folding chair against the wall.

She nodded at the recorder. “Is there anything in your notes I should know about?” she asked sarcastically as she sat down.

“Touché,” he replied, with a glimmer of a smile. “As a matter of fact, there is.” He picked up a piece of paper and handed it to her. “You might be interested in taking a look at this.”

It was a hand-drawn map of Randy’s camp—actually two maps. The first one showed the general layout with the locations of each of the diners and the connecting pathways; the second one was a detailed floor plan of the Short Stop including everything from bidet to bird bath. The second map included a broken line indicating a sight line that ran from a nearby tree to the bed.

“Arthur Lumkin?” she said. As she spoke, she realized that they would never have the chance to show John the photo of Lumkin, and to determine for sure if it was he who had driven around the diner.

Voorhees nodded. “We found it in a desk in his apartment. Quite a place, by the way. A Park Avenue penthouse. Have you been there?”

“A few parties,” she said.

He looked impressed. Charlotte imagined that the Lumkins’ penthouse, with its opulent appointments and fabulous art must have been quite a switch from the tenements and burned-out mills that were the usual venue of Voorhees’ investigations.

“We went in to talk with him last night, after you told us about John’s seeing him at the diner. We had a search warrant. We also found another map—of Goslau’s studio, with the number of steps from one room to the next all spelled out. Did you notice the sight line?”