Murder at the Falls (28 page)

She checked her watch. Nine here, eight in Minneapolis. He probably wouldn’t be home. He was usually out every night of the week at some civic or charitable function. She had to grant Jack that, he was energetic. In fact, that had been part of her attraction to him: that of one energetic person to another, particularly at their age, when those who weren’t already incapacitated by ill health tended to spend their time sizing up retirement villages and making arrangements for family trusts.

But he
was
home, according to the well-spoken woman who answered the phone. Charlotte couldn’t help but picture her in terms of the upscale grandmothers on commercials for the telephone company, with wavy silver hair and a pink ultrasuede suit.

In a moment it was Jack himself on the phone.

“Hello, Jack,” she said. “It’s Charlotte.” She realized that her heart was pounding as she waited for him to reply.

It was a long wait. At last he said, rather sharply: “Hello, Charlotte. And then: “What prompts you to call?”

She supposed some part of him was still angry with her for leaving Minneapolis. It must have been terribly humiliating for him to have her beat such a hasty retreat after having just been presented to Minneapolis society. (Such as it was, she thought cynically.)

“Nothing personal, Jack,” she reassured him. “I’m calling on art business. I have a favor to ask of you. Marsha told me about your experience with the Lipschitz sculpture. I’m working with the police on a case now that has similar elements.”

“Still interfering in police work?” he teased.

“It seems to find me,” she replied, then went on to explain the details of the case and to tell him of her suspicion that someone other than Jason or Diana was involved. “The FBI is looking for a collector to lure them out,” she said.

“Like me, for instance?” he asked.

“Like you, for instance. You’re perfect. You already own some of Spiegel’s paintings, you’re far enough removed from New York to be above suspicion as a plant, and you’ve got the smarts and sophistication to pull something like this off.”

“Do I get to wear a wire?” he joked.

“Oh, Jack,” she said.

He went on to ask some questions of a more serious nature, but there was never any doubt in Charlotte’s mind that he would do it. That was another of Jack’s appeals: he was a good sport.

“Sure,” he finally said. “When do we begin?”

“How soon can you get out here?”

“Tomorrow.”

The funeral for John Andriopoulis was the next morning. Charlotte had skipped the visiting hours the previous evening at the funeral home, but had decided to attend the funeral. She was going to pick Jack up later that afternoon at Newark Airport anyway, and she might as well pay her last respects. She drove out from the city in the pouring rain, and arrived at the church a little early, which she was glad of, since it gave her time to check out the architecture. She had never been to a Greek Orthodox church before, and she was charmed by the interior—all rose and apricot and robin’s egg blue, accented by gold leaf, like a Fabergé egg. By comparison with the severity of the Congregational church in which she had been raised, a church whose architecture reflected a masculine sense of order and intellect, the architecture of St. George’s was delightfully feminine and emotional.

At her Yankee father’s insistence, Charlotte had been raised a Congregationalist—the denomination of the Puritans. But her mother, of French extraction, had been raised a Catholic, and although she became a Protestant when she married Wilcox Graham, she had still practiced her faith, albeit covertly and intermittently, during the years that Charlotte was growing up. Charlotte remembered her mother swearing her and her sister to secrecy after ducking into a Catholic church for a Mass. After her mother and father had divorced, her mother was no longer obliged to worship in secret, but she no longer felt welcome in a church that condemned divorce, either. Charlotte herself had become an Episcopalian when she married her first husband, and she looked on that denomination as a happy compromise between the two religious strains of her childhood. But she must have absorbed some of her mother’s Catholic sentiment, because she preferred her services high, and felt quite at home in the Catholic church. As far as the trappings of religiosity went, the Greek Orthodox church seemed to carry Catholicism one step further.

The funeral service itself was very much like a Catholic service, with some significant variations, one being that the bearded priest, wearing a black vestment, met the casket at the door and led it up the aisle to the altar. He carried a censer, which he waved over the casket, the clouds of incense symbolizing the rise of the departed’s soul to the firmament of heaven. The other departure from the Catholic service was the fact that the coffin was opened once it reached the altar, giving the bereaved a final chance to pay their respects. And pay their respects they did, most of the mourners being from “the other side,” as Patty called the old country, and not so Americanized that they were shy about making a spectacle of their grief. They sobbed and wailed and carried on over the casket, which was draped with flowers and decorated with a gilded icon of a sad-eyed St. George, the patron saint of the church, slaying a fire-spitting dragon. When Charlotte’s opportunity came, she also went up to view the deceased. In death, John’s face was a study in misery, the deep, longitudinal grooves that were carved in his cheeks a testament to a lifetime of hard work, and to the shadow that had been cast on his good name.

As she returned to her seat, Charlotte was surprised to see Voorhees among the mourners. In his light blue sports jacket, he stood out on the sea of black like a bell buoy on a dark ocean. She wondered why he was there. Was it strictly a professional interest, to see who had associated with the suspected murderer? Or was it because he felt remorse at having arrested the wrong man? The sight of him brought her thoughts back to the case. What should she do now? The inner voice that answered gave her the same reply that it had the last time: go back to Square One. Initially, she had interpreted Square One to mean the discovery of the body, but maybe, she thought now, she should go back to before that, to when the victim was still alive. It seemed to her that the life of the victim, as well as those of the major suspects, centered around the Gryphon Mill, but she had visited the mill only briefly, and then she had been distracted by Bernice’s hysteria over the missing paintings. Now that Spiegel was at the top of her “A” list, she wanted to go back again, to get a feel for how he and Randy had lived.

The priest was now leading the casket back down the aisle. Patty’s uncles, in black suits, served as the pallbearers. The women, in black veils, followed behind: Helen, Patty’s sister, and Patty with little Johnny. Seeing these people only intensfied Charlotte’s drive to find out who had killed Randy. The idea that an innocent man might have gone to his grave without being exonerated was bad enough, let alone the thought that the family might be left to suffer the disgrace of a deed he did not commit.

After the ceremony, she tracked Voorhees down in the clutch of mourners that had gathered in front of the church. He was standing under an umbrella at the side of the entrance portico, under which the mourners had taken shelter from the pouring rain.

“We meet again,” he said, moving the umbrella over to accommodate her. They were about the same height.

She smiled faintly. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about this man. He had the predatory air of the perennial skirt-chaser, but there was also something sad and vulnerable about him that elicited her sympathies. Maybe that was the idea, she thought cynically, having fallen for that with husband number three.

“I’d like to go back to the mill to take another look around,” she said, getting right to the point. Subtlety had never been her strong suit. “Do you think I could arrange to do that now?” She had debated whether to tell Voorhees about the Amigo, and decided not to, for the moment.

“Are you going to the cemetery?” he asked.

She shook her head: “I have to pick Jack up at the airport at two, and I won’t have time to do both. Are you?”

“Yes.” He checked his watch. “Martinez should be at the Bureau. I’ll tell you what. I’ll call him on the radio and tell him that you’re on your way. He can meet you there.”

“Thank you very much,” she said. He hadn’t asked what she was looking for, which was just as well, since she didn’t know.

“Don’t touch anything,” he warned her.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” she replied.

14

The police cruiser was waiting outside the door of the mill when she pulled up ten minutes later. The rain had stopped, but the sun shone only dimly through thin clouds that raced toward the northwest. The National Weather Service was now predicting that the hurricane would hit Cape Hatteras with winds of ninety miles an hour sometime early that afternoon. A state of emergency had been declared for North Carolina. If the storm didn’t head out to sea or veer inland, it would strike New York sometime around ten that night. Charlotte parked across the street, and joined Martinez on the sidewalk. After a perfunctory hello, he unlocked the door, and she followed him in. The building was one big room: a former dye factory. It was Paterson’s dye factories that had established it as the world’s silk capital, Tom had told her after her earlier visit to the mill. The water of the Passaic had a quality that made for particularly brilliant colors. The dyes had been mixed on the two long platforms that comprised the second story, and poured down through a gap in the middle into mixing vats on the first floor.

Passing quickly through the studio, Charlotte and Martinez headed toward the living quarters at the back. These were in a two-story addition, the downstairs housing a combination living room, kitchen, and dining room—the scene of the busy social life at the mill (she was reminded of Spiegel’s paintings of this room, representing the states of Innocence and Experience)—and the upstairs housing Randy’s studio apartment. Charlotte assumed that the police had searched Randy’s apartment, but she wondered just how thoroughly they had gone over the downstairs, which was presumably where both Randy and Spiegel had spent most of their time.

It was no surprise that the place had been a hangout for artists, Charlotte thought as they entered the living area. It had great comfort and charm. At one end was the kind of kitchen that real estate agents referred to as a “cook’s” kitchen, with a marble-topped island above which hung a collection of polished copper pots and pans, and around which were ranged half-a-dozen bar stools.

Martinez had found the light switch, and when he flipped it on, the room was flooded with light from the overhead track lighting.

To the left of the island was a long dining table which appeared to be made out of a single slab of wood, and which was surrounded by chrome-and-leather chairs, and topped by a centerpiece of ceramic fruit. Charlotte wondered if it was Louise’s. At the opposite end was a living area with a U-shaped modular sofa of soft, fawn-colored leather, and a large glass coffee table. The floors were strewn with kilim rugs and the walls hung with a collection of folk art paintings. The choice of paintings was an odd one for a photorealist, Charlotte thought, but perhaps Spiegel had wanted to look at something different when he was relaxing.

Beyond the sofa, a wall of French doors opened onto the flagstone patio behind the mill superintendent’s house. There was a wrought-iron table shaded by an umbrella, and a couple of chaise longues. The patio was planted with flowers and shaded by the old sycamores that lined the bank of the raceway on the opposite side of the stockade fence.

“Looks like it should be in a magazine, don’t it?” said Martinez.

“Yes, it does,” she agreed.

She decided that she would search this room first, and then Spiegel’s studio. After that, she would take a look at the mill superintendent’s house, and finally at Randy’s studio.

“What are you looking for?” asked Martinez as Charlotte returned to the kitchen and started going through the cabinets.

“I’m not really sure,” she said.

The cabinets were filled with gourmet gadgets of every description. There was a pasta maker, an espresso machine, an ice-cream maker—you name it. Someone had been a gourmet cook, and since Louise hadn’t lived here in years, she concluded it must have been Randy. Diana had said he did all the cooking.

“It was Randy who was the cook?” she asked, just to check.

“Yeah,” Martinez replied. “Spiegel never cooked.”

Just looking at the contents of the cupboard made Charlotte want to be a guest at the party. There were several different sets of china with glassware and tablecloths to match, wonderful ceramic casserole dishes. Even the dish towels were of the finest quality, she noticed as she went through a drawer stacked with crisply ironed linens.

It was then that she saw it: a large S in a circle, stamped in blue ink on a piece of heavy white cotton duck that had been shoved to the back of a drawer of dish towels. For a moment, she couldn’t believe her eyes. It was the logo of the Supreme Linen Service, and it was stamped on an apron.

Reaching into the drawer, she pulled it out. Beneath it was another one. And then another. Three folded, crisply starched, white restaurant aprons, each bearing the same blue logo.

Martinez, who had wandered over to the living area to look at the paintings, had now come back: “The aprons!” he said.

“Yes,” she replied. “The aprons.”

Charlotte had thought at first that Randy had been thrown in the river by the diner. Then she had thought he’d been thrown in the raceway that ran past the Ivanhoe Mill. Now she suspected that he had been thrown in right here. As she pictured it, the scenario went like this: Randy passes out on the way back from the diner, somewhere near the mill. The murderer stumbles upon him, and takes advantage of the opportunity to kill him. There was also the possibility that the murderer encountered the unconscious man in his studio—had an appointment with him, perhaps. But the first possibility struck her as the more likely. As to the murderer’s identity, only two of the suspects had access to the mill: Don Spiegel, who could have come across Randy on his way back from the Question Mark, and his sister. Possibly three, if Arthur Lumkin had gotten hold of a set of keys through Xantha. He must have gotten in at some point to do his floor plan. Seeking something with which to tie the victim up, the murderer then goes into the kitchen, and finds the aprons in a drawer. Quite by accident, perhaps. Maybe he was looking for rope or twine. Or maybe not by accident. The use of aprons with the same laundry stamp as those used at the diner might have been a deliberate ploy to create confusion. (Would Arthur Lumkin have known that the diner’s aprons had the same stamp? she wondered. She doubted it. Ditto for Bernice, who didn’t strike her as the diner type.) After wrapping the body up, the murderer then drags it (here the aprons would come in handy) or carries it to the edge of the raceway, and dumps it in, probably within only a couple of dozen feet of where it was found.