Murder at the Falls

by Stefanie Matteson

  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 swi
m.” 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.

  Tom’s fellow campaigner in this crusade was Charlotte’s personal secretary, Vivian Smith, who had made it her mission to keep a portable tape recorder within Charlotte’s reach at all times in case she should suddenly be overcome by the need to record a particular memory. So far, Vivian’s ploy hadn’t worked: the mere sight of a tape recorder was enough to send Charlotte out the door and hurtling across the countryside.

  One of the half dozen or so recorders that Vivian had purchased and scattered around the house was now resting on Charlotte’s bedside table, where it had been for the last several weeks. Never one to give into defeat, Vivian had set up this morning’s tableau—breakfast tray with flower vase and silver tea service, scrapbooks from Charlotte’s early career on the side—in hopes that it would inspire her to take the first step.

  Cradling the telephone against her ear, Charlotte removed the breakfast tray to the bedside table, and rearranged her pillows so that she could sit up straight against the headboard.

  It was definitely murder, Voorhees said. Toxicology had found large amounts of cocaine in Randy’s organs, but the cocaine wasn’t what had killed him. He had still been alive when he was dumped in the river. Probably unconscious—it was hard to say whether he’d come to or not—but definitely still alive. The medical examiner had found microscopic algae in his organs, which meant that he’d still been breathing when he was thrown in the water.

  With her free hand, Charlotte closed the scrapbook on her lap, and moved it over to the other bedside table. “What about the possibility of suicide?”

  “It would have been impossible for him to have tied himself up in that way,” said the deep voice on the other end of the line. Voorhees explained: “That wasn’t a sheet he was wrapped up in; it was aprons.”

  “Aprons!” she exclaimed.

  “Two of them. Long, white, restaurant-type aprons. The first was worn in the usual way, except that the belt was used to bind the upper legs together. The other was worn upside down, with neckband wrapped around the feet and the belt tied around the upper arms.”

  Charlotte shuddered at the thought of awakening from a drug-induced stupor to find oneself floating in a river, unable to move one’s arms or legs. “Do you have a time of death?” she asked.

  “Between twelve and two A.M. on Sunday, September ninth.”

  “The night of the opening reception.”

  “Right. Which makes you and Plummer among the last people to have seen Goslau alive. And which is why I’d like you both to come down to headquarters. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “Certainly. When would you like us to come?”

  “Plummer said he could come right away.” (Not too eager, Charlotte thought.) “He also said he thought you could probably come with him, but he suggested I check with you. How does that sound?”

  Charlotte thought for a millisecond. Apart from reliving her life, which she had no desire to do, she didn’t have anything planned for that day. A little shopping and a few errands, but they could wait.

  “Sounds fine,” she said as she stuck her tongue out at the tape recorder.

  They were to meet Voorhees at police headquarters, which was located not far from the historic district, in a new public safety complex. “You can’t miss it,” Voorhees had said. Well, they could, and they did. But getting lost had its advantages in that it gave them a better sense of the city. The first thing to strike Charlotte was that it hadn’t changed since she’d last been there. The nearly complete absence of modern buildings meant that the gracious turn-of-the-century landmarks had not been eclipsed by modern glass and steel towers. With the exception of the church spires and the smokestacks, the highest structures were the public ones. The aura of importance vested in these buildings by their physical dominance gave the city a sense of order that was missing from many cities—American cities, that is; European cities seemed to do better at preserving some kind of architectural sense. Charlotte marveled at the wonderful old architecture as they drove by (in several cases, more than once): the elegant Beaux Arts City Hall, with its shining white clock tower; the neoclassical county courthouse, with its cool, gray dome; the old Flemish-style post office, now a court building, with its stepped red brick gables. Even the old Fabian Theatre, where she had sold war bonds, was still there, though it was now divided into five movie theaters. What had happened to the marvelous vaulted lobby with its showpiece chandelier? she wondered. And, although many of the historic mills had been abandoned, a surprising number were still in operation, the signs above their entrances proclaiming that they made shirts or silk thread or machine parts. Between the mills, the quiet streets were lined with squat clapboard four-family houses of the type that used to be called cheeseboxes when cheese still came in boxes. Children played on the streets while mothers watched from the stoops or from the open first-story windows. Though the ethnic identity of the inhabitants might have changed—they were now Spanish, Portuguese, and even Lebanese and Syrian instead of Irish, Italian, and German—the ambiance remained the same. It was a city in which people still lived within walking distance of where they worked. It was a city of neighborhoods.

  The other thing that struck her was the city’s sense of being fortified against the outside world, like a frontier garrison. Unlike most eastern cities, it lacked a river or ocean port. Its raison d’être was the Falls, not its access to the wider world. The closed-in feeling that came from the absence of a port was reinforced by the fact that the city was bounded on three sides by the great arc of the meandering river, which insulated it from the surrounding suburbs like a castle moat, and on the fourth by the craggy summit of Garrett Rock, which loomed over it like an ancient watchtower.

  It was a city encapsulated not only in time, but in space; a city living in its own cozy little world, and pulsing to a primordial rhythm that had been established long before the beat of commerce was added to the score: the rhythm of the heavy waters of the river plunging into the narrow gorge and crashing onto the sharp-edged rocks below.

  At last they found the public safety complex. It was a giant concrete fortress that took up several blocks, the exception to Charlotte’s observation that Paterson had no modern buildings. Voorhees was right. How could they have missed it? A cop at a reception desk directed them to the Criminal Investigation Division on the second floor, where Voorhees met them at another reception desk and escorted them into an office cubicle. After inviting them to sit down on a couple of the folding chairs that were ranged against one wall (he must not have wanted the people h
e interrogated to sit too close, Charlotte thought), Voorhees took a seat in the swivel chair behind his desk and leaned back with his hands folded over his paunch. A blow-up of a photograph of a girl poised on the end of a diving board hung on the wall behind his desk, the only decoration in an otherwise sterile office.

  “Someone you know?” asked Charlotte, nodding at the photograph. It had obviously been taken at a competition of some kind; the background was a crowded grandstand.

  Voorhees swiveled his chair around to face the photo. “My daughter. She’s a diver. She’s also my second job. Every weekend there’s another meet. The plane fares alone are enough to break me, to say nothing of the coach and the motels. I was spending so much time in Fort Lauderdale that I finally bought a condominium there. It was cheaper than paying for accommodations, and I figure I’ll be able to retire there in a few years.”

  “She’s very pretty,” said Charlotte.

  “Yes, she is,” he agreed with quiet pride. He shrugged. “What are you going to do? She loves it, and she’s good at it too.” He swiveled the chair back around to face them. “Okay, tell me what happened that night.” He nodded at Tom. “Plummer first.”

  Tom recounted their meeting with Randy, and their visit to the museum. In response to Voorhees’ instructions not to leave out any details, he included their meeting the Lumkins and Morris Finder, and mentioned Charlotte’s connection with them through Jack Lundstrom. He concluded with Randy’s attack of paranoia, if that’s what it was.

  “Well, as the old saying goes,” said Voorhees when Tom had finished, “‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that somebody isn’t out to get you.’” He turned to Charlotte: “Do you have anything to add, Miss Graham?”

  “Only that it was the painting—it was a painting of the Falls View Diner by the artist Ed Verre—that seemed to have set him off.”

  Removing his hands from his belly, Voorhees leaned forward and toyed with his pen. “The police department is at a disadvantage in this case. The artists’ community here is a tight little group. If the victim had been a numbers runner or a drug dealer, we’d have informants to help us out—to tell us who wanted him dead. But we don’t have informants in the artists’ community, and”—he waved the pen in the direction of the bank of desks where the rank and file of detectives sat—“not being highly cultured types ourselves, this leaves us in something of a bind. A bind that you might be able to help us out of.”