Murder at the Falls (29 page)

As Martinez looked on, she carefully refolded the aprons, and put them back, being careful not to touch the spots where the murderer might have left fingerprints. Then she told Martinez that she wanted to take another look outside. She wanted to get a sense of where the murderer might have come across Randy’s unconscious body.

“Sure,” he replied, adding, “Do you think the killer used the aprons from here?” It was the first observation she had heard him utter, so thoroughly had he been cowed by Voorhees.

“I think it’s a good bet,” she said.

After turning out the lights, they headed back out. Standing on the sidewalk in front, Charlotte studied the building. To the right was an alley leading to a loading dock at the rear. To the left was the alley between the mill and the mill superintendent’s house, and to the left of that was the raceway where the body had been found. The alley on the right was a dead end. The wall of the loading bay abutted the wall of the adjoining building. But the other alley was a different story. On the left, it was bordered first by the yard of the mill superintendent’s house, and then by the side of the house itself. On the right, it was bordered by the side of the mill where the entrance to Randy’s apartment was.

She guessed that Randy had passed out near the entrance to this alley. She pictured the murderer coming across the body, and tying it up. But how would he have gotten it to the raceway? He could have dragged it out to the street and thrown it over the bridge, but he would have risked being seen. Then she thought of the fence. Was there a gate in it? she wondered.

As she stood there thinking, Martinez paced. At one point, he picked up an empty bottle of Courvoisier from the alley, and showed it to her. “The winos are drinking pretty classy stuff these days,” he said, suddenly talkative. Then he threw it into a garbage can, one of a row of four of five, and wandered toward the back of the mill superintendent’s house.

Following him, Charlotte emerged at the patio, a beautifully landscaped city garden, complete with a built-in fireplace and stone benches. It was bordered by a stockade fence that shut out the urban blight: the garbage-strewn lot next door, the crack house to the rear, and the parking lot for the giant mill in back of that.

Starting at the back of the mill superintendent’s house, she followed the fence, looking for a gate. At the end of the patio she found it, concealed in the wet ivy like a secret door: a padlocked gate. Holding the ivy aside, she nodded at the padlock. “Do you suppose we have a key to this lock?” she asked.

Wordlessly, Martinez examined the lock, then picked out a key from the ring he held in his hand, and opened the gate.

The gate swung open onto the bank of the raceway, which was overgrown with bamboo. A path led to an old set of brownstone steps at the edge of the raceway. Standing at the top, Charlotte looked down at the murky water; she was less than twenty feet from the spot where Randy’s body had been found.

The distance from the entrance of the alley to this point was probably less than fifty feet. The murderer would have had to drag the body down the alley, across the patio, and through the bamboo for a distance of eight or ten feet to the top of the stairs. From there, he could easily have rolled it down the steps and into the raceway.

It was a straight run—not even a need for a curb out.

It was no mystery to Charlotte why the police had missed the gate; if she hadn’t been looking closely, she would have missed it herself. And it was concealed on the other side by the thicket of bamboo, as were the steps themselves, which explained why she hadn’t noticed them when she and Tom had scouted the path on the other side. What
was
something of a mystery was why the police hadn’t noticed that the bamboo had been trampled when they had canvassed the area after the discovery of Randy’s body. Though it since would have grown back, the murderer would have had to flatten at least a few canes when he threw Randy in. If he was on an Amigo, he would have flattened a good deal more than that. On second thought, it wasn’t a mystery at all. The police had found the flattened path through the bamboo at the diner first. It was the old Occam’s razor story: the danger of formulating a theory and sticking to it, rather than keeping an open mind. If some poor soul hadn’t tossed his cookies in the bamboo on that fateful night (the Di-Tabs ad popped into her mind; the nameless partygoer could have used some), they never would have been misled by the whole diner issue.

These were the thoughts that passed through Charlotte’s mind as she drove up to the diner. She had left Martinez with instructions to report what they had found to Voorhees, and then taken off. There was something else she wanted to check before she left to pick up Jack. The diner parking lot was uncharacteristically empty for eleven o’clock, which was the start of the noontime rush. She found out why when she approached the door. A black-bordered sign read: “Closed due to a death in the family.” Beneath that was another sign urging readers to open their hearts and their homes by adopting Poochie, a four-year-old Chihuahua-mix female: “Very friendly, good with cats.” At the bottom was written: “See Patty, the waitress.”

But the lights were on and she could see activity in the kitchen. Dirgelike Greek bouzouki music was coming over the sound system. It looked as if the kitchen help were getting ready for a memorial dinner. A lavish display of food had been set out on the counter. It reminded her of a Greek cruise-ship buffet.

Trying the door, she found it open (she remembered what John had said about there not being a key), and she went in.

Upon seeing her, Carlos, one of the short-order cooks, came out of the kitchen, and informed her that the diner was closed.

“I’m looking for Patty,” she said.

“She hasn’t come back from the cemetery yet,” he replied.

Charlotte had forgotten how long graveside services often took.

“We’re getting ready for the funeral dinner,” he explained. “But she’s supposed to be coming back early to help.” His glance shifted to the Andriopoulis house across the street, where a small red car was just pulling into the driveway. “In fact, here she is now.”

Patty emerged, and headed across the street. As she approached, Carlos held the door for her. When she removed her black hat, Charlotte could see that her eyes were red from weeping. The clownish eyebrows looked out of place on her grief-stricken face.

“Miss Graham!” she said as she entered, surprised to see her.

“I just dropped by to ask a question,” Charlotte explained. “It will only take a minute. The question is: did Randy ever ask you where your aprons come from? I found some aprons in the kitchen at the mill with the same laundry mark as those that are used here.”

“I do recall him asking about our laundry service,” she said. “Now that you mention it, I remember that he wore a dinerstyle apron when he cooked at the mill. I never saw the laundry mark.…”

“Thanks.”

For a moment, Patty pondered the significance of Charlotte’s question, and then said: “If you found aprons at the mill, it might mean that the aprons wrapped around the body didn’t come from here.”

“Exactly,” Charlotte said.

As Charlotte drove to the airport, the news station on her car radio reported that Clyde had hit Cape Hatteras, causing millions of dollars worth of damage to the barrier islands, and was heading up the coast at a rate of fifty miles per hour. It was expected to strike later that night, bringing high winds and torrential rains. Though it was the south shore of Long Island that was expected to bear the brunt of the storm, residents of the greater New York area were being advised that the hurricane watch had been upgraded to a hurricane warning, and that they should take the proper precautions. Though it was the coastal areas that would be hardest hit, even inland residents were being advised to secure objects like garden chairs and garbage cans that might be dashed into a window by the wind. As she drove, Charlotte noticed that some homeowners were going to the extreme of taping their picture windows with masking tape. She wondered briefly if she should take in her trash cans and patio furniture, and then decided not to worry about it. In Charlotte’s experience, hurricanes in the New York area were usually a non-event, at least for city-dwellers. The last real hurricane she could remember was the one in 1938, which had picked up her family’s summer cottage on Long Island Sound and slid it a hundred yards down the beach. That was before hurricanes had names. Then there were a couple in the fifties that had been pretty severe: Carol and Hazel in 1954 and Diane a year or two later. But beyond those four, the hurricanes that had struck the area had been little more than severe rainstorms. Which wasn’t to say they they weren’t due for a bad one.

Though there was no evidence of the storm yet, the sky had turned an eerie yellow color, and the air had a sticky heaviness that was unusual for this time of year. The news announcer was predicting that the airports would be closed at around eight. It looked as if Jack’s plane would get in just under the wire.

Jack was among the first off the plane. He always flew first class, not out of snobbery, but because the larger seats accommodated his size more comfortably. He was a big man: six foot four and well over two hundred pounds. That had been part of his attraction for Charlotte. Being no pint-size person herself, she had always gone for big men. All of her husbands had been well over six feet. She felt a pang of—what was it?—longing, she supposed, when she first saw him. There was something about him that was so comforting: his size, his geniality, his Midwestern honesty. He was square in the best sense of the word, dependable, with no surprises—like a big old easy chair that you could sink right down into. But then she caught herself.
Uh-uh
, she admonished herself,
you’ve tried that already, and it didn’t work
. Jack was also like a dessert that looks tempting until you remember that you don’t like it. She was reminded of what John had said about diner desserts that don’t live up to their delectable appearances. If she had to put Jack in terms of a dessert, it would be a tapioca pudding. Or maybe, to give him a little more class, a blancmange. Your expectation was that it would have that same comforting creaminess that it had had in your childhood, but instead it turned out to be utterly tasteless.

Tapioca pudding! If he only knew what she was thinking, poor thing. Feeling guilty at her cruel thoughts, she welcomed him with a friendly hug.

“Guess what?” he said proudly as they headed off toward the parking lot after picking up his bags. “I called a few dealers after I spoke with you, and I’ve already got a nibble.”

“Really!” she said. “From who?”

“The Koreman Gallery. I called Agent Healey right away, and we set up an appointment for tomorrow morning. You’ve been there with me,” he reminded her. “It’s the big gallery on West Broadway.”

“I remember it well,” she said.

On the ride back to Manhattan, Charlotte filled Jack in on the case, including the role of Mary Catherine Koreman. Though it was unlikely that she or her husband had actually killed Randy—they hadn’t stayed around for the post-opening party—they could have been Jason and Diana’s accomplices. And, although Charlotte hadn’t thought of it before, it was quite likely that Jason, as Randy’s friend, would also have had a key to the mill, which meant that he could have come across the aprons in the kitchen. But despite the involvement of Mary Catherine, Charlotte’s thoughts kept returning to Spiegel. There was one thing about the Spiegel scenario that puzzled her: the aprons again. The aprons would have made it easier to drag the body, but they also would have been difficult to wrap around it. For a paraplegic, rope would have been easier, and Spiegel had lived at the mill; he would have known where to find a length of rope. Whereas the aprons … the aprons had the smell of someone who didn’t know where to look and couldn’t find anything else. Which would have been the case with Jason, she thought as she promoted him from the “B” list to the “A” list.

As she thought some more about Spiegel, another possibility occurred to her, the sheer audacity of which made her heart pound. It was the possibility that Spiegel wasn’t really a paraplegic. If he had created a new identity, why couldn’t he have created a disability as well? Especially if he had really spent some time in a wheelchair. Everything he said could have once been true: the spinal cord injury, the wheelchair as a metaphor for his new life—except that it wasn’t true any longer. She remembered what he had said about his rehabilitation sessions at the Kessler Institute. She didn’t know that much about physical disabilities, but she wondered why someone who was permanently paralyzed would need rehabilitation therapy. Wouldn’t such therapy only benefit someone who had hopes of recovery?

Back home, she and Jack entered into the spirit of the approaching hurricane by mixing themselves some drinks—a Manhattan for her, a martini for him—and settling themselves in front of the television set to await the arrival of Clyde, who was now due to strike at about nine. It had started raining heavily when they hit the Holland Tunnel, and the rain now lashed at the windows. The traffic outside on Forty-ninth Street had dwindled to an occasional cab; motorists were apparently heeding the traffic advisory. Or perhaps the light traffic was due to the fact that offices had been advised to let their employees go early. After some footage of the devastated Outer Banks, the TV news reports shifted to Long Island, where evacuees from the rapidly advancing storm were taking refuge at shelters in schools and churches. The metropolitan airports had closed at four, making Jack’s the last flight in from Minneapolis. Jack had been hopping up to check the reading of the barometer on the library wall regularly: at five, it stood at twenty-nine point four one and falling.

The rattle of the rain against the windows made her living room seem as cozy as a New England farmhouse kitchen during a nor’easter, and Charlotte relished the feeling. It wasn’t often that you could feel cozy at home in New York, and it usually was during heavy snowstorms of which there had been precious few in recent years. When they finished their drinks, they would be going around the corner for a bite to eat at a neighborhood restaurant. Charlotte wondered briefly if it would be closed, but then dismissed the thought. They might have been taping windows in Clifton, but New Yorkers were undaunted by the likes of hurricane warnings, even if they weren’t driving their cars (most of which belonged to out-of-towners anyway). For hors d’oeuvres, she had stuffed some celery sticks (a little brown around the edges, but Jack would never notice) with some cream cheese, and—for a “gourmet” touch—sprinkled them with paprika. It was all she could find in her refrigerator. Not only did she detest cooking, she was bad at it. Jack’s daughter, Marsha, who was an excellent cook, was especially contemptuous of Charlotte’s celery sticks, which she called “one step up from Cheese Whiz on Ritz crackers.” Actually, Cheese Whiz on Ritz crackers was another one of Charlotte’s specialties, though only when she was truly desperate.