Murder at the Falls (5 page)

They entered through enormous wooden doors, through which the newly manufactured locomotives had once passed, and were immediately greeted by the sight of a diner standing in the center of the grand space of the museum floor—not a miniature diner or a replica, but a real diner: the White Manna.

“Look at this!” said Tom with delight as they entered.

It was a small diner, of the kind with no booths, described by diner enthusiasts according to the number of stools, as in “a twelve-stooler.” But it was real and it was functioning, judging from the illuminated neon sign and the enticing aroma of fresh coffee.

The White Manna, Tom explained, had stood at the Somerville Traffic Circle in Somerville, New Jersey, for nearly fifty years before being replaced by a modern Mediterranean-style dinerant (another axiom of dinerdom was that every New Jersey traffic circle has its own diner). “I thought this White Manna had gone to diner heaven,” he said. “I listed it in my Obituaries column three years ago.”

Tom explained that the White Manna was one of four mini-diners that had been built for the 1939 World’s Fair, of which only one was still operating, in Hackensack. The White Mannas had originated the mini-hamburger that had later been made famous by the White Castle chain.

The young woman sitting at the reception desk rose to greet them.

“Hello, my name’s Tom Plummer,” Tom said, extending his hand. “I publish
Diner Monthly
.” He held up the stack of magazines that were cradled in his other arm. “Is it okay if I leave some of these here?” He didn’t introduce Charlotte, knowing her preference for anonymity.

“Sure,” said the young woman, returning Tom’s handshake. “I’m Diana Nelson. I run the Ivanhoe Art Gallery. I’m also the curator of this exhibit. I’m very familiar with your magazine. That’s how we located the White Manna, as a matter of fact. Through a classified ad in
Diner Monthly
.”

“I remember: ‘Wanted: small “dinette” diner to restore.’ Why didn’t you let me know you had resurrected it?” he asked, miffed.

“We didn’t want to publicize it in advance because we weren’t entirely sure we could bring it off. In fact, it was touch-and-go until the last minute. It took a lot of work: restoring it—that alone took seven months; getting the proper permits; getting it in here.”

“How
did
you get it in here?” asked Charlotte.

“Just.” She pointed to the opposite wall, which was lined by a row of huge double doors. “Those doors are fifteen feet high by twelve feet wide—they were meant to accommodate locomotives—and we had measured carefully, but we weren’t sure until the day we moved it in that it would actually fit.”

“What would you have done if it hadn’t?” asked Tom.

“Our fallback plan was to set it up in the parking lot, but we really wanted it to be part of the exhibit. What do you think?” she asked.

“Terrific. But here’s the real question: Are you serving the little hamburgers with the chopped onions? Because to serve anything else at a White Manna would be decidedly less than authentic.”

“Not only are we serving them, we brought back the same short-order cook, Swifty, who served them up in Somerville for forty-six years. He came out of retirement especially for the exhibit. Grinds all the meat himself.”

“Well done,” said Tom, who looked as if he’d gone to diner heaven.

“Why don’t you try a couple?” Diana urged.

“Not right now. I just finished a dinner of hot Texas wieners and fries at the Falls View. But give me a few minutes to digest. Then I’ll be more than happy to sample some of Swifty’s famous burgers.”

Charlotte envied Tom his digestive system, which seemed to be able to process countless cups of coffee and endless quantities of fried food without any problem; it would definitely be more than a few minutes for her.

“Here are the programs,” said Diana, handing them out. “The exhibit starts on your right and goes counterclockwise around the diner,” she said, gesturing toward the exhibition hall, which was already filled with a respectable showing of people.

After Tom had deposited his magazines, they armed themselves with wine and cheese and set off to look at the exhibit. It turned out to be more fascinating than Charlotte would ever have expected. The first section dealt with diner history, including how diners had been made and assembled at the Paterson Vehicle Company. The next dealt with diner memorabilia, and included displays of everything from Hamilton Beach milkshake blenders to vintage jukebox speakers to what people in the antique trade called “ephemera”: things like menus, matchbook covers, and postcards.

But the focus of the exhibit was the paintings of New Jersey diners, which were done in the photorealist style that had become popular in the 1970s as a reaction to the domination of abstract expressionism.

“Okay, Graham, interpret,” ordered Tom as they approached the first group of paintings, which was by Randy’s mentor, Donald Spiegel. Rather than reading the catalogs at art shows, Tom preferred Charlotte’s capsule summaries.

“Donald Spiegel, generally considered to be the founder of the photorealist school of painting.”

“Why didn’t he like the label?” he asked.

“A lot of the photorealists work from photographs by projecting slides directly onto the canvas. Spiegel doesn’t, or rather, didn’t. He added and subtracted things. He also manipulated perspective to create a certain effect. Look at the parking lot in this one.”

The parking lot in the first painting, which was of the Bendix Diner in Hasbrouck Heights, seemed to be tilted toward the viewer, the unnatural angle making it look as if the diner were being served up to the viewer on a platter.

“These paintings are from his early period. Though he was the first to paint diners, he later went on to other things.” She eyed Tom: “I guess he figured, Who’s going to achieve immortality by painting diners?”

“Hey,” Tom warned, jumping to the bait, “I’d be careful about denigrating the subject matter if I were you. There are some people who consider diners as noble a subject as ballerinas. What did he go on to?”

“Urban landscapes, mostly. He started with New York, and then moved on to European cities. His paintings command enormous prices: a million and more. Jack has a couple of them.”

Tom whistled.

Charlotte continued: “I don’t have much of a taste for photorealism myself, but I always thought Spiegel’s paintings were extraordinary. All those layers of reflection force you to ask what’s real. Is it the image behind the glass, the image reflected in the glass, or is it the glass itself?”

“Well said,” came a voice from behind.

Charlotte turned around. The voice belonged to Randy, who was accompanied by a tall, distinguished-looking man and his younger wife, whose hot-pink hair was sculpted into spikes that stood straight up on her head as if she had stuck her finger into an electric socket.

“Hello,” said Randy, “I’d like you to meet some friends of mine. “This is Arthur Lumkin and his wife, Xantha Price. This is the writer, Tom Plummer, who’s thinking about buying one of my paintings, and the actress, Charlotte Graham, who I think needs no other introduction.”

“Hello, Arthur,” said Charlotte, standing on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek, and then bending down to kiss the petite Xantha.

“Then you know each other!” said Randy.

“Only for about ten years,” said Charlotte.

Arthur and Xantha Lumkin were probably the country’s most prominent collectors of contemporary art, and had the distinction of being listed right before Charlotte’s fourth husband, Jack Lundstrom, in the “
ARTnews
200,” the magazine’s annual listing of the world’s most important art collectors.

Until he met Xantha, a British fashion designer and author of steamy romance novels (and whose name before she changed it had been Geraldine), Arthur had been just another rich investment banker whose idea of a fun evening was studying corporate balance sheets. Xantha’s passion for contemporary art had introduced him to an exciting new world in which collectors with deep pockets were courted by artists, dealers, and museums.

Now the darlings of Nouvelle Society, the Lumkins could probably have wallpapered a bathroom with party-page photos and listings in the gossip columns. The fact that his wife called the shots didn’t seem to disturb this shy, genteel man in the least, so happy was he to have acquired a purpose in life other than the dull pursuit of money. Nor did he seem disturbed by her outrageous get-ups and her rumored dalliances with aspiring young artists.

“Tell me,” said Arthur now. “How is Jack?”

“I hear he’s fine,” Charlotte replied. “From his daughter, Marsha, with whom I still keep in touch. I really don’t see him that often anymore.” In fact, she didn’t see him at all.

Jack Lundstrom had been the most recent in her life-long history of making mistakes when it came to men. She had thought a successful businessman like Jack wouldn’t be threatened by being Mr. Charlotte Graham, which in fact had been the case. The problem was worse: he had wanted a wife. As the widower of a traditional wife, he was accustomed to someone who would accompany him on his business trips, decorate his houses, and host his dinner parties. He had stopped short of asking her to take his suits to the cleaners, but not by much. Worst of all, he had wanted her to live with him in Minneapolis, where his company was headquartered, and where she found, much to her dismay, that he was well-known as a civic leader.

Though it didn’t take long for either of them to recognize that they’d made a mistake (in Charlotte’s case, the first charity dance at a local hospital), they had limped along pitifully for several years trying to redefine their relationship on the basis of some kind of long-distance friendship. He had finally stopped calling her when he came to New York (after her first encounter, she had never gone back to Minneapolis), and their relationship simply petered out. She had heard from Marsha that he was now courting another woman, the widow of a fellow member of Minneapolis Old Guard.

“What brings you here?” she asked them, thus rescuing Arthur from his obvious discomfort at having asked an awkward question.

“I’ll show you,” said Randy. He led the the way to the next group of paintings, which were his, and nodded at the label affixed to the wall next to the first one, which read: “‘Falls View Diner’, by Randall Goslau. From the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur W. Lumkin.”

Like Spiegel’s, the painting was exact down to the finest detail: the quilting in the stainless steel, the pattern in the Formica tabletops. But unlike Spiegel, whose palette ran to grays and browns, Randy leaned toward colors that looked faded with age.

“Where are the people?” asked Tom.

“I take them out. I call it the neutron-bomb school of painting.” He laughed, a high-pitched, nervous cackle. “They detract from the diner. I also take out the electric lines, the adjoining buildings, the automobiles. Just the diner, pure and simple.”

“It reminds me of an old postcard,” said Tom.

“That’s a very astute observation,” Randy commented. “I’ve been collecting postcards of diners all my life; I have over five hundred.”

The painting had a folk-artish kind of appeal, and Charlotte could readily see why a diner lover would pay thirty thousand for one. But it lacked intellectual depth. It was like a Norman Rockwell: a sentimental portrait of a favorite subject.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a greeting from a short, balding man with a warm smile. “Why, Morris!” she said. “What a delightful surprise! I didn’t expect to run into anyone I knew here, much less three people.”

Morris Finder was another collector of contemporary art, but of a different stripe from the Lumkins. A lifelong employee of the Social Security Administration, he had amassed an astonishing art collection on a salary that was probably less than what Arthur Lumkin made in a day. His fellow collectors joked that his name stood for his ability to “find” new talent before it was generally recognized by the art world. Charlotte liked him and his wife, Evelyn, who worked as a secretary for a brokerage house, enormously. They were simple, unassuming people whose lives were governed by one overriding passion: their love of art.

“What brings you here, Morris?” asked Xantha, after Charlotte had introduced him to Tom and Randy. He was already well-known to the Lumkins.

Xantha’s question stemmed from more than just polite curiosity, for Morris’s quiet pronouncements regarding the talents of up-and-coming young artists were closely heeded by more affluent but less discriminating collectors like the Lumkins. Like those of many others, the value of the Lumkins’ collection had soared as a result of their following Morris Finder’s leads.

“I came to see Ed Verre’s paintings. Do you know his work?”

“No, I’m afraid we don’t,” replied Xantha in her cute Cockney accent.

She was wearing a low-cut garment—a playdress, a sunsuit, a romper?—of hot-pink taffeta to match her hair, with a tightly laced bodice that uplifted her ample bosom, and ballooning shorts that buttoned just above the knee. The style might have been called punk bordello.

“But I might ask the same question of you,” Morris responded.

“We’re here to see Randy’s paintings. Arthur and I just love his work. How many of your paintings do we now have, love?” she asked. “Eight, is it?” As she spoke, she grabbed Randy’s hand in an intimate gesture that led Charlotte to wonder if he was the latest of her young protégés.

“Nine,” he said, “If you count the Short Stop.”

“Oh yes, the Short Stop. The Short Stop, of which we have a painting, is the latest addition to Randy’s collection of diners,” Xantha explained. “He bought it last January. Saved it from the wrecking ball.”

“The Short Stop that used to be in Belleville?” asked Tom.

Randy nodded. “I have a collection of diners at my camp out in western Jersey. Five of them, now. When I see a diner for sale, I can’t resist buying it. I’m afraid that if I don’t, it’s going to disappear. I think of it as my contribution to historic preservation.”

Intrigued by the idea of a collection of diners, Charlotte asked, “What do you do with them?”