Murder at the Falls (6 page)

“I live in one, a 1931 Worcester lunch wagon with Haitian mahoghany paneling. I use another, a 1942 Tierney, for a studio and gallery. The other two—a Swingles and an O’Mahoney—are still being restored.”

“I’d like to do a write-up on your collection,” said Tom.

“You’re welcome to come out anytime.”

“What about the Short Stop?” he asked.

“I’ve turned the Short Stop into a guest cottage,” Randy replied. “That way my guests get the idea that I don’t want them to stay around too long,” he joked. “If they do, I just turn on the neon.” He raised his hands, opening and closing his fingers in a flashing motion.

They all laughed at the image of guests being reminded that they had overstayed their welcome by a flashing neon sign saying “Short Stop.”

“As I recall, the Short Stop is a Paramount, circa 1948,” said Tom.

“Good guess,” said Randy, “Nineteen forty-seven, to be precise.”

“Then you have an example of at least one diner from most of the major manufacturers from the golden age …”

“I don’t have a Silk City.”

“There are a lot of them around,” said Tom. “If you’re interested in finding one, you could put an ad in
Diner Monthly
.”

“I don’t need to,” Randy said. “I know which one I want.

“Which one is that, love?” teased Xantha.

They had moved on to the paintings of the third painter in the show, Ed Verre. If Spiegel’s paintings could be summed up as intellectual and Randy’s as sentimental, then Verre’s would be documentary. In fact, it was a testament to the inaccuracy of such labels that these three painters had ever been lumped together under the rubric of photorealism.

Unlike Spiegel’s and Randy’s paintings, neither of which showed people, Verre’s painting not only included identifiable people—John was clearly recognizable from his height and his hunched-over shoulders—but even the specials for the day. The title was “Falls View Diner at Two
A.M.
”

Though there was nothing specific to convey the idea of two in the morning, the painter had nevertheless captured the loneliness of the early morning hours. It was something about the harsh white light and the way the two men at the counter were huddled over their coffee cups, a stool apart—alone, yet together. The presence of the customers added an intriguing narrative element. One had the sense of specific people on a specific night, waiting for something to happen. There was a 1988 calender hanging next to the poster of the Acropolis with the dates crossed off. The date was a year ago last spring.

Randy and Xantha had lingered behind, discussing his paintings. Now they joined the rest of the group in front of the Verre painting.

“It’s very good, don’t you think, love?” Xantha said to her husband. “But not as good as Randy’s work, of course.”

As the group’s attention shifted to Randy, something very strange happened. Charlotte had the distinct impression that he was disintegrating before her eyes. She could almost see him breaking up into a thousand little glistening shards, like the glass of a shattered windshield.

In reality, his skin was twitching, causing his hands to scramble frantically all over his body as if he were trying to stop it. His head was swiveling from side to side in wide-eyed terror. Charlotte had often heard the phrase “made my skin crawl”; now she knew exactly what it meant.

As she watched him, it dawned on her this was a drug reaction, and that his appealing aura of energy had been drug-induced. Turned up by several degrees—or rather, all the way—it was no longer very pretty.

“I think I know what he had to go back to his studio for,” Tom whispered.

“What is it, love?” asked a concerned Xantha. She hovered next to Randy like a protective fairy, her magenta-rimmed eyes wide with alarm.

“I see them,” he said, staring at the painting. “This time I’m certain I see them.” Then he moaned, a low moan, like an animal in pain, and stuck his right arm out stiffly at the painting. “They’re under the counter.” Beads of sweat had popped out on his temples. “Don’t you see them?”

“
What
do you see, love?”

By this time, Randy’s behavior had attracted the attention of the other guests, who stood around in silence, plastic wineglasses in hand, staring discreetly out of the corners of their eyes.

“What’s happening?” asked Diana, appearing at Charlotte’s side.

“Randy’s going off the deep end again,” came the bored, cynical voice of the woman behind her. “Somebody had better go get Patty.”

Suddenly Randy shouted: “I’ve got to get out of here.” Then he lifted his forearms, as if he was trying to shield his face from attack, and backed slowly away. “Where can I go?” he cried out. Then his knees buckled and he crumpled to the floor, sobbing.

As the guests stood around trying to figure what to do—it had all happened so fast—a woman appeared at Randy’s side. Charlotte recognized her as Patty Andriopoulis. She had shed her black polyester waitress’s uniform for a simple black cocktail dress.

Randy looked up at her. “Australia: that’s where I’ll go,” he said, answering his own question. “He won’t be able to find me there.”

“Patty, thank God you’re here,” said Diana. Reaching into her pocketbook, she discreetly handed Patty a long white business envelope. “Here,” she whispered. “Give him this. Tell him it’s his ticket for Australia.”

Patty nodded and grabbed the envelope. “I have your plane ticket right here, Ran,” she said in a soft, soothing voice. “Your flight’s at one
A.M.
” She gently took hold of his arm. “C’mon. Let’s go get a drink. Then we’ll go back to your place and pack your suitcase.”

She gestured for one of the bystanders to help her, and together they pulled Randy up to a standing position. Holding him firmly by one elbow, Patty slowly guided him toward the door.

Randy meekly let her push him along, relief flowing over his pale, sweat-drenched face.

Charlotte and Tom happened to be on the scene when the police recovered Randy’s body three days later.

They had come to Paterson to talk with him about the painting, or rather, Tom had. Charlotte had been planning to take the self-guided walking tour of the historic district, using the map she had picked up at the museum on the evening of the opening. They had just parked in the lot across the street from the Gryphon Mill when a string of four police cars came racing by, gumballs flashing. They were trailed by a rescue squad truck. When the vehicles came to a screeching halt next to a vacant lot fifty feet down the street, Charlotte knew from the gleam in Tom’s eye that there was no way they were going to miss out on whatever it was that was going on. He was hardly one to ignore a police emergency, especially when they were a few minutes early for their appointment anyway.

The vacant lot where the police cars had pulled over was bordered by a raceway, which ran under the street and behind a row of mills on the other side. Joining the cluster of onlookers which had gathered on the bridge over the raceway, they immediately saw the cause of the commotion: it was a body floating in the water. Or rather, a set of shoulders and a head with long, flowing blond hair. The rest of the body had been carried into the culvert, where it had become lodged in the mud. The body looked strangely romantic, Charlotte thought, perhaps because of the long, flowing hair. That and the murky, yellow-green water with its reflections of the overhanging willows; the spikes of blue-flowered pickerel weed and the path that meandered along the grassy bank reminded her of a romantic painting by one of the Pre-Raphaelites (was it Burne-Jones’s painting of Ophelia?) in which a drowned girl floats on her back, her flower-bedecked hair spread out over the surface of the water.

But this corpse wasn’t floating on its back; it was on its stomach, a condition that a pair of fire department rescue workers were now trying to rectify. Wearing rubber fishing boots, they had waded into the shallow water and were prodding the body with a hook affixed to a pole. A third rescue worker stood nearby, steadying a floating stretcher.

But the body wasn’t cooperating. Bloated from decomposition, it was as resistant to their prodding as a waterlogged plank. After a third helper had been called in, they finally succeeded in turning it over.

A low murmur of shock coursed through the gathering of onlookers as they caught sight of the victim’s face, which looked like some horror-movie makeup man’s idea of a ghoul. It was pale and swollen to twice its natural size, and its nose, chin, and lips were studded with little red wounds where chunks of flesh were missing.

“Turtles,” said the man next to them to no one in particular. Though he was dressed in plain clothes, it was clear from the orders he was giving the uniformed police officers that he was the one in charge.

Repulsed by the horrible sight, some of the onlookers moved back, allowing Charlotte her first clear view of the corpse. She knew immediately who it was. There was no mistaking the large, protruding teeth, which, seen through lips that had been drawn back in death, gave the body a rodent-like appearance.

“It’s Randy!” she said with a little gasp as she turned to Tom, who was right behind her. Then she felt her knees begin to buckle.

The plainclothes officer, who was standing at the balustrade next to her, reached out to grab her elbow. “Steady, there,” he said. He waited a moment for the shock to pass, and then asked: “You know this guy?”

She looked again at the corpse. The body had been wrapped, mummy-like, in white fabric—a bedsheet, perhaps—but if she had any doubts, they were put to rest by the clothing that was visible. He was still wearing the red bow tie and the high-top sneakers.

“His name is Randall Goslau,” she said.

The officer holding her elbow was in his mid-fifties, and nearly bald. With his broad shoulders and pot belly, he gave the impression of physical power. Despite his bulk, however, he had a certain grace. She would have guessed him to be a good dancer.

“He’s an artist,” Tom offered. “He lives and works in that mill over there.” He nodded at the building to their right.

The officer looked over at the red brick mill, one of a line of three or four, and then back at Tom. “How do you know him?”

“I was going to buy one of his paintings. That’s why we came out here today. We had an appointment with him at ten.”

“Too late now,” the officer said, with a glance at the corpse, which was being loaded onto the stretcher. He had taken a pen and notepad out of his pocket. He pointed the end of the pen at Tom. “Lieutenant Marty Voorhees. Criminal Investigation Division. Who are you?” he asked.

“Tom Plummer.”

“Hey, I know you,” he said, pointing the pen at Tom again. “You’re the guy who writes the true-crime books.”

Tom nodded.

“Pleased to meet you,” the detective said.

Tom was the darling of police officers. In his books, the cops were always the heroes, the victim always the wronged party, and the murderer always the villain. Cops were always happy to meet an author who didn’t tell the story from the murderer’s point of view, which so many of them now seemed to do.

After taking down Tom’s name and number, he turned to Charlotte. “And who do we have here?” he said with the brazen look which comes from years of sizing up women in terms of their sexual availability, a habit so ingrained it couldn’t be turned off, even for a seventy-year-old woman.

“Charlotte Graham,” she replied.

The cop suddenly stopped writing, and gave her the once-over again.

“Well, how do I look?” asked Charlotte sharply. She hated being scrutinized like this. She could hear him telling his wife:
she must be seventy, if she’s a day
.

“Pretty damned good for an old warhorse,” he said.

Charlotte had to smile. It was one of her life’s little benisons that she had aged well. Her black hair was worn pulled back into a chignon now rather than in her famous pageboy and she had gained a few pounds, but her skin had held up, partly because it was so pale that she had always taken pains to protect it.

“I read
Murder at the Morosco
, by the way. Not only are you a helluva actress, Miss Graham, you’re also a helluva detective. Now, about our friend here,” he said, nodding down at the corpse. “When did you last see him? Alive, I mean,” he added with a smile that revealed a gap between his front teeth.

Tom explained about the incident at the opening, which the other guests had also attributed to drugs. It had come out afterward that Randy had been a cocaine user, and that his behavior of late was becoming increasingly bizarre.

“How long has he been dead?” Tom asked.

“At least a couple of days by the looks of him,” said the detective. He looked down at the bloated body, which was being removed to the morgue wagon that had just pulled into the vacant lot. “We’ll find out when we get the medical examiner’s report.”

“A homicide?” asked Tom.

Did Charlotte detect a hopeful note in his voice? After all, he had just finished a book, and was scouting around for a new subject.

“Got to be—unless he wrapped himself up in that sheet. Which might very well have been the case. I’ve seen suicides do stranger things.”

“How would he have killed himself?” asked Charlotte.

“Jumped. We get a lot of suicides. The observation bridge is almost as popular as the Golden Gate. But he would have had to jump in above the Falls to end up in the raceway system. The intake valve’s just up river from the Spruce Street Bridge.”

“Why the sheet, then?” asked Charlotte.

“Maybe he wanted to keep himself from changing his mind. With his arms pinned to his sides like that, he wouldn’t have been able to swim.” The burly detective shrugged. “Just speculation.”

“It wouldn’t have been easy to wrap himself up like that,” said Tom.

“You’re right,” said Voorhees. He pointed the end of his pen once again at Tom and Charlotte. “I’ll tell you one thing …”

“What’s that?” asked Tom.

“If it’s a homicide, you’ll be hearing from me.”

4

Voorhees called Charlotte at nine the next morning. She had just finished a leisurely breakfast in bed at her townhouse in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan when the phone rang. She welcomed the interruption. Not long ago, she had signed a contract with a publisher to write her memoirs. Over the years, she had often been approached about doing an autobiography, but she had always resisted. She rarely even gave interviews, so jealously did she guard her privacy. So why write a book? But Tom had finally convinced her that she owed her life story to an adoring public who had supported her for half a century with their loyalty and love. What had finally won her over was his argument that writing her memoirs needn’t necessarily require laying bare her life, nor need it be a boring chronicle of dates. It could simply be a sharing of her wisdom, knowledge, and experiences. Put this way, it didn’t sound quite so daunting. And, as her friends had died, her movies had crumbled into dust, and the studio system disappeared, she had also come to realize that, like the Falls View, she was a slice of the past, with a history that was worth preserving.