Murder at the Falls (3 page)

After he had introduced himself—his name was Randall Goslau—he invited them to sit down in an empty booth near the door—the only empty booth, as a matter of fact. The place was packed.

Once they had taken their seats, Tom introduced Charlotte, thus launching a tiresome discussion in which Randy paraded his knowledge of movie trivia. She could never understand people who wasted their mental energy on such pursuits. If you were going to memorize something, why not poetry? Not these stupid dates and titles, which even she could no longer remember.

He was quite an ugly man, she thought as he spoke: a pale, bloated face pockmarked by old acne scars, gray eyes that were too small, teeth that were too big, and a big nose that was florid with veins. But his intense manner of speaking and small, compact physique exuded a sense of energy that redeemed, at least in part, the unattractiveness of his appearance.

A former commercial artist, he had turned to painting diners as a second career, and become an overnight success. His diner “portraits,” executed in painstaking detail from photographs projected directly onto the canvas, were in big demand at the chic Soho galleries that favored the photorealist style. Or so he claimed. He wasn’t exactly short on ego.

“Would you like to hear some tunes?” he asked, producing a handful of quarters, which he fed into the wallbox. “They have a great jukebox here, everything from the Andrews Sisters to Springsteen. Not just fifties songs like a lot of classic diners. Not that I don’t like fifties songs, but to have just that is to make the place into a museum, you know what I mean?”

Not bothering to wait for a reply, he flipped through the selections at lighting speed, and then punched a bunch of buttons, seemingly at random.

“How did you come by your interest in diners, Mr. Goslau?” asked Charlotte as the mellow voice of Tony Bennett surged out of the speakers. It didn’t seem like the kind of music that someone like Randy would have picked, and she wondered if he had even looked at the buttons.

“Not in the same way as most diner enthusiasts, freaks, nuts, maniacs—whatever you want to call us.” He elaborated: “Most enthusiasts get hooked on diners in high school. The first thing they want to do when they get their driver’s license is to drive to the nearest diner for a cup of coffee. Wouldn’t you say that’s true, Tom?”

“It was for me. In my case, Pal’s, on Route 17 in Mahwah.”

“I know it well,” said Randy, nodding his head. “In my case, my passion for diners goes back to my earliest youth. You might even say that I was nurtured at the breast of the American diner. My mother died when I was three. My father was a traveling salesman—scientific equipment. After my mother died, I always went with him on trips. We stayed in cheap motels and we ate at diners—his territory was the Northeast. Sometimes he would leave me at one of his favorite eating places while he was making his calls. I came to look on diners as my home away from home and waitresses as surrogate mothers. For me, the diner stood for comfort, warmth, dependability. Then my father remarried and my diner days were over.

He looked up at the waitress, who stood at their table snapping gum. One hand held her notepad, the other rested impatiently on her hip. “It’s still impossible for me to look at a diner waitress and not feel a warm rush of filial affection. “Isn’t that right, Patty?”

The waitress stopped chewing her gum. “Filial?” she said, her lips curling in a mock sneer. “Give me a break, Randy.” Then she smiled, a warm, jolly smile, and resumed chomping.

“Where’s the kid?” asked Randy.

“With Grandma,” said Patty. “Getting spoiled to death.”

Like Randy, she was not an attractive person. In fact, she looked a little like him, except for being dark where he was fair, and for her eyes, which weren’t small, but big warm puddles of brown above which her thin, comma-shaped eyebrows were suspended in a perennial expression of amusement.

“Tell him I said Hi,” said Randy.

“Sure,” she said. “What can I get for you folks today?” she asked, pencil poised over her order pad.

Randy gestured for Tom and Charlotte to order first.

“We’ll both have two all the way with beer and fries,” said Tom. He stroked his mustache with the smug self-satisfaction of one who has just made himself understood in a foreign language.

“Well done,” said Randy in appreciation of Tom’s ordering skills. “I’ll have the meat loaf special,” he said.

“What prompted you to switch from commercial art to diner portraits?” asked Charlotte once the waitress had left.

“It was a who, not a what. Specifically, Don Spiegel, the photorealist painter. At least, that’s what other people called him. He hated being called that. Do you know his work?”

“I do,” said Charlotte. Though lacking any formal schooling in art, she had a natural appreciation that had been nurtured by frequent visits to museums and galleries and encouraged by Jack, who was a collector of paintings and sculptures.

“Don died last year,” Randy continued. “Maybe you read about it. Anyway, I had always painted, but abstract expressionist stuff: you know, angry blobs of paint thrown at the canvas—the derogatory term is vomit art. I thought I was another Jackson Pollack. But it was crap—juvenile, derivative. I had quit my job as a commercial artist to paint, but I was having a tough time making it financially. I could have gone back to work at my old job, but that would have been admitting defeat.” Reaching into the pocket of his jacket, he plucked out a pack of cigarettes. As he lit up, he craned his neck to get a better view of the parking lot.

“Are you waiting for someone?” asked Tom.

“Oh,” he said, surprised at Tom’s inquiry. Then he shook his head. “Naw.” Sucking greedily at his cigarette, he continued: “Then somebody told me that Don Spiegel was looking for an assistant. So I applied, and got the job. I worked for him for ten years, doing anything he needed: stretching canvases, mixing paints, balancing his checkbook, doing his grocery shopping. When he found out how crazy I was about diners, he suggested that I paint them, and that was that.” He paused for a minute, and then abruptly switched subjects: “I had my first hot Texas wiener here when I was seven,” he said. “Do you know the story of the hot Texas wiener?”

“No, tell us,” said Tom.”

“Well, one would naturally assume that the idea for the hot Texas wiener came from a Texan, or, at the very least, was imported from Texas, but that assumption would be wrong. The idea was actually invented by a Greek named Stavros Andriopoulis during the Depression to attract customers to his hot dog cart.”

Removing a reporter’s notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket, Tom started making notes.

“Andriopoulis made it the specialty of the Falls View when he bought the diner in 1939, and it became the standard lunch fare for the mill hands from the surrounding silk mills. The idea has spread to other diners, usually by former Falls View employees, but it’s never gone much beyond Paterson. I’ve been conducting my own little research project on the geographical distribution of the hot Texas wiener. My conclusion is that the Falls View is at the epicenter of the hot Texas wiener phenomenon.”

“There may be others, but the Falls View has the best sauce—the original sauce,” came a deep voice from behind Charlotte.

She turned around. It belonged to the man sitting in the booth behind her, who proceeded to get up and come over to join them. He must have been six foot four, with hunched-over shoulders and a starched white apron that was spread across his considerable midsection like a sail before the wind.

“Hello, John,” said Randy. “Just coming on?”

He nodded. “I’m on the graveyard shift,” he said.

“I’d like you to meet John Andriopoulis.” Randy said to Charlotte and Tom. “John is the nephew of the originator of the hot Texas wiener.” He nodded toward his companions. “I was just telling them the story.”

“I heard,” the big man interjected with a smile.

“And the owner, with his brother, Nick, of the Falls View.”

“As the saying goes, you take two Greeks and you’ve got a diner,” said Andriopoulis. After wiping his beefy hand on his apron, he extended it to Charlotte. “I started out here as a potato peeler when I was ten, and moved up to coleslaw cutter when I was thirteen. My brother, Nick, and I took over from my Uncle Steve when I was twenty-one. Nick’s the money person—he works behind the scenes. I’m the people person. I work up front.”

“Up front is right. John’s the grill man,” said Randy.

The thought struck Charlotte that grill men were always tall, and she concluded that it must be the result of a process of self-selection: a short man would feel the heat in his face all the time. Grill men also tended to have bad posture, and gave the impression of having four arms, though only two were in evidence here, one of them bearing a tattoo on the forearm in the form of a heart pierced by an arrow carrying the name “Helen.”

“This is Charlotte Graham, whom you may recognize from the movies.”

Andriopoulis stared at her through his thick-lensed glasses. Then a wide smile spread over his genial face, which didn’t look especially Greek. “Very pleased to meet you, Miss Graham,” he said, pumping her hand. “I’m a fan of yours from way back. In fact, I remember when you came to Paterson with Lou Costello to sell war bonds at the Fabian. I was about ten, and it was the thrill of my young life.”

“That was the last time I was here,” Charlotte said.

“Well, I hope the interval between this visit and your next will be shorter. I’m honored to have you as my guest at the Falls View,” he added with proprietary pride. “Is there anything you need?”

“I’m taking care of them, Dad,” said the waitress, who had reappeared with five mugs of birch beer, three in one hand and two in the other.

“My daughter, Patricia. This is Charlotte Graham, the movie star.”

After giving her father a peck on the cheek, Patty nodded perfunctorily at them, and slid three of the mugs onto the table. Then she headed off to deliver the other two to the next booth.

John shrugged. “She’s busy,” he explained.

“I’d also like you to meet Tom Plummer,” said Randy. “Tom’s doing a book on diners. He’s here to talk with me about the cover.”

Tom passed John a copy of the latest edition of
Diner Monthly
. “I also put out this publication. I’d like to do a write-up on the Falls View, both for
Diner Monthly
and for the book. Do you have a few minutes to answer some questions? I hate to interrupt your dinner.”

“No problem,” Andriopoulis replied. After grabbing his plate of meat loaf and his mug of birch beer from the adjoining booth, he slid his big frame onto the seat next to Randy. “At your service.”

Charlotte noticed that he smelled faintly of grease.

Tom picked up his notebook and pencil. “A 1939 Silk City?”

“Yep. Tag number 3911.” Getting up again, he shuffled over to the menu board above the counter, which he slid aside to reveal a metal tag that was fastened to the wall. “Everyone wants to see this,” he said. “The original tag.” He pointed to the entrance. “There’s another one over the door.”

As a result of hanging around with Tom, Charlotte knew that most diners bore tags giving the name of the manufacturer, in this case, the Paterson Vehicle Company, and a serial number, which in this case identified the Falls View as the eleventh diner manufactured in 1939.

“Always open?” asked Tom.

“Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I don’t even have a key. I don’t even think there
is
a key.”

“Seating?”

“Fifteen at the counter; thirty-two in the booths.”

“Original exterior?”

“Nearly original. We’ve had some work done on the stainless. The interior’s original except for the upholstery. We have to replace that every four or five years. We just did it again so it would look shipshape for the advertising people.” He paused to take a bite of his meat loaf. “Have you seen the ad for Di-Tabs on TV? Where the guy complains about eating too much?”

“Yeah!” said Tom. “Was that filmed here?”

“That and about a hundred and twelve other commercials. This is a regular little gold mine. They’ve filmed commercials here for everything from credit cards to lottery tickets to soda. Plus we get free samples. In addition to what they pay us, that is. The best was the ad for Pepsi—they gave us three hundred free cases of Pepsi for that one.”

“The art directors probably like the Falls View because it’s the quintessential American diner,” said Tom.

“I’d like to think it’s that, but actually I think it’s the location. We’re only twenty minutes from the Lincoln Tunnel. I doubt we’d have them beating down our door if we were in Pittsburgh.” He shoveled in some more meat loaf and then went on: “We have this long-standing argument, my brother Nick and I. Nick wants to sell the diner—”

Charlotte saw the look of alarm in Tom’s eyes as he mentally listed the Falls View in the Diner Alert column.

“—and replace it with a restaurant. He has big ideas: a maitre d’, tablecloths, flower vases. He says we could charge twelve ninety-five instead of six ninety-five for shrimp scampi. But then we wouldn’t have the advertising revenue, and I doubt we’d even make as much from the customers. I’ll tell you a story.” He gestured with his fork. “Eight, maybe ten years ago, we decided to substitute instant mashed potatoes for real. It was cheaper: you don’t have to pay somebody to do all that peeling and mashing. ‘The customers won’t know the difference,’ Nick said. Well, I check the plates when they come back. To see what people eat, what they don’t eat. The plates started coming back with the potatoes uneaten.” He thrust his face toward Tom, and asked: “You would notice the difference, wouldn’t you?”

Tom nodded.

Andriopoulis pointed a finger at his enormous chest. “I would notice the difference. Why wouldn’t the customers notice the difference? And I’ll tell you, it wouldn’t have been long before they started going somewhere else, somewhere where they had better potatoes. We switched back. Value—that’s what keeps the customers coming back. Yeah, we could charge more for shrimp scampi. But what kind of business would we do?” He waved the tattooed forearm at his surroundings. “Now the place is filled, or damn close to it, eighteen hours a day. There’s no way the Saturday-night-out crowd is going to make up for that. I’ll tell you something else. People who come to a diner don’t even want shrimp scampi. We have it on the menu, but …” He waved a hand in dismissal. “What they want is good mashed potatoes, good coleslaw, good meat loaf, good rice pudding.”