Murder at the Falls

by Stefanie Matteson

  “Charlotte Graham,” interjected Tom with a devilish grin. “She was my favorite. I wonder what she’s doing these days?”

  “My favorite too,” said the maitre d’. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Those legs, ooh la la.”

  At that moment, Charlotte was using one of them to kick Tom.

  “She’s still working,” Louie continued. “I saw her in a TV movie not long ago. She looked great. Unfortunately, Paterson doesn’t attract that kind of talent anymore,” he added with a rueful smile. “Now we have”—he cast a sidelong glance at the stage, and rolled his eyes—“a different kind of attraction.”

  As a holdover from the old days, Louie clearly didn’t approve.

  “Your waiter will be with you in a moment to take your order,” he announced with a little bow. Then he departed to fuss over another customer.

  The waiter arrived momentarily: a young man in a white apron that reached almost to the ground, in the style of waiters in French brasseries.

  Jason arrived right behind him, taking the seat next to Charlotte, which faced the stage. “We’d like a bowl of olives,” Jason told the young man. “And I’d like to buy my guests a drink. What will you have?” he asked.

  After they had given the waiter their orders, Tom turned to Jason. “I guess you’re a regular here,” he said.

  “I’m here every day, or close to it. This place is my muse, the way the Falls View was Randy’s.” He pointed at the easel that stood at one side of the stage. “Now that I think about it, they both appeal to a sense of fantasy: a go-go bar to a fantasy about sex; a diner to a fantasy about security.”

  “We saw your paintings at the Ivanhoe, but I confess that I didn’t really look at them that closely,” said Charlotte. They had left her with a Moulin Rouge impression, reminding her of Toulouse-Lautrec’s cancan dancers. “We were really there just to talk with Diana. Are you a photorealist too?”

  “You didn’t look? Tsk. Tsk.” He shook his head in mock disapproval. “A realist, but not a photorealist. In the great tradition of American realists like Edward Hopper and George Bellows.” He raised a hand in demurral. “Not that I put myself in the same league.”

  After rotating her breasts at a dizzying speed to a musical finale that sounded like an accordion rendition of the “Flight of the Bumblebee,” Miss Quetzalcoatl retreated backstage. Louie, who also served as master of ceremonies, announced a break before the next act.

  “Would you like to see the painting I’m working on now?” Jason asked. “Now’s a good time. Before Mariette comes on.”

  Charlotte and Tom said that they would.

  He led them over to his easel, on which a large canvas was propped. In the foreground were the dark, looming silhouettes of the customers. In the rear, bathed in a warm, rosy glow, was the dancer with the rhinestone choker and the enormous bonnet, wearing several layers of black crinolines and little else.

  The painting was executed competently enough, but Charlotte was more taken with the way in which the rich texture had transformed the down-at-the-heels atmosphere of this seedy go-go bar into something warm and filled with promise.

  “I’m calling it ‘La Vie en Rose,’” Jason said.

  “After the Edith Piaf song?” asked Charlotte.

  Jason nodded. “The life through rose-colored glasses,” he said, translating the title. “Do you like it?”

  “Very much,” she replied. “Who would have expected to find a little slice of Montmartre in downtown Paterson?”

  “Paterson is a very interesting place. You can find a little slice of just about anything here. I know that’s what they say about New York too. But in New York, it’s more diffuse: New York must have hundreds of go-go bars with pretentions, but Paterson has only one. Do you know the poem Paterson?”

  Charlotte and Tom shook their heads, again.

  “There’s a line in that poem that captures the special feeling of Paterson.” He proceeded to recite the line: “‘The mystery of streets and back rooms—wiping the nose on sleeves, come here to dream …’”

  It was the same line that Diana had quoted.

  “How did you get into painting go-go bars?” asked Charlotte as they threaded their way back to their table, where their drinks were waiting: a beer for Tom, a Manhattan for Charlotte, and a Pernod for Jason. There was also a small bowl filled with Spanish olives.

  “By painting the girls, literally. When I was starting out years ago, I worked at a topless bar called Mickey’s Paint Factory, where the girls’ breasts were painted with cartoon figures: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck. I was the one who painted them.” He chuckled at the memory. “I needed a job, and they needed an artist.” He paused to take a packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. They were unfiltered French Gauloises.

  Charlotte noticed that the blue of the packet exactly matched the blue of his eyes. Which may have been the idea.

  “Anyway, that’s when I first got into the scene. After that, I’d hang out in topless bars sometimes. Then, when I took my studio here, I discovered this place. I’ve been coming here ever since. Look at this”—he fingered the fringe of the red-silk moire lamp on their table—“you could be in Paris.”

  The waiter reappeared with menus, which he set in front of them, along with a basket of fresh French bread, which smelled delicious.

  “The dancers here are different too,” said Jason. He broke a piece of bread off for himself, and passed the basket. “Most of them date from the days of burlesque. They can remember when dancing was an art form. They make an effort; they aren’t here just to push drinks.”

  Charlotte hadn’t noticed that the last performance was particularly artful, but she supposed the feathered headdress counted for something.

  “Take Mariette, the dancer who’s the subject of my current series. She teaches exotic dancing at an adult school. She takes what she does very seriously.” He took a sip of the yellow-colored aperitif. “Anyway, you didn’t want to know about me; you wanted to know about Randy. What can I tell you?”

  For a few minutes, they chatted about Randy—the same sort of information that Diana had given them, and then the conversation drifted, or rather, was directed by Tom, to the murder.

  “A lot of people didn’t like Randy,” Jason said. “They were turned off by his ego. But I discounted that as coming from the lonely, scared little boy inside. And, like a little boy, he could be very loyal and loving. I don’t understand why anyone would kill him. Even to those who didn’t like him, he was just a minor annoyance. On the order of a hangnail or a mosquito bite.”

  “Diana told us that you considered him your friend,” said Charlotte. “But she also said that even you were losing patience with him.”

  “Yeah, I was. He kept borrowing money and never paid it back. It wasn’t that he didn’t have it—he had a lot more than I do—but he was so strung out that he couldn’t keep his finances straight. Once I found a six-month-old check for twenty-eight thousand dollars lying around his studio. Finally it got to the point where I told him I wasn’t going to loan him money anymore.”

  “What about Bernice Spiegel?” asked Charlotte. “Would you say that he was only a minor annoyance to her.”

  “Most of all to Bernice. Bernice is about to inherit sixty million dollars. Not only will she be sitting pretty financially, but she can also look forward to lifetime employment in the job she loves: the keeper of the eternal flame at the grave of Donald Edgar Spiegel. It’s hard to imagine that she’d jeopardize all that by having a pest like Randy thrown in the drink.”

  Then Tom asked him about Randy’s behavior in recent months.

  “Very strange,” said Jason as he lit a cigarette. “I attributed it to the drugs. Or else he was just plain losing his mind.”

  The fragrance of the rich tobacco drifted across the table. It smelled almost as good as the bread, and Charlotte had to fight down the urge to bum a cigarette. Though she didn’t smoke much—she had cut back to half a pack a day years ago—she
was now trying to quit completely.

  “Diana said you saw him freak out on a couple of occasions.”

  “Yeah. The first time was last January at a show at the Koreman Gallery. He started twitching all over. It reminded me of the way a horse twitches its skin to shake loose a horse fly. The men in the white coats ended up taking him away to Bellevue. The diagnosis was cocaine-induced paranoia.”

  “Why paranoia?” asked Tom as he popped an olive into his mouth.

  “Because he kept talking about someone from the past coming back to get him. The second time was also at a show. At the Montclair Art Museum. The same thing: the heebie-jeebies, the fear that someone was after him. He’d been talking about going into rehab, but …” He shrugged, and took a long puff on his cigarette.

  “Do you know what it was exactly that set off the attack? Did he see something, or someone perhaps?” Charlotte asked.

  Jason shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said. “The paintings? But why would anything in a painting cause someone to react like that? Believe me, I’ve thought about it. Especially since I found out that he’d been murdered.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That maybe someone was out to get him.”

  As Jason had informed them, the food was delicious. Charlotte and Tom both chose the breaded veal cutlet, which could have matched that served at any top-notch French bistro (and which was light years away from hot Texas wieners). But Jason’s judgment when it came to the entertainment was not on as firm a footing. The Magnificent Mariette, as she was billed, did a Folies-Bergère act that consisted of a lot of high kicking while wearing only a black G-string and a black garter belt attached to black stockings under her voluminous black crinolines. It was tame enough stuff (the notorious crotch shots of Busby Berkeley, the premier Hollywood musical director of the thirties, had been only slightly less titillating) but it was hardly high art, despite Mariette’s qualifications as an adult-school authority on exotic dancing.

  Charlotte emerged into the bright glare of early afternoon convinced that Jason’s fascination for the Bohemian subculture of Paris during la Belle Epoque belonged in the same psychological niche as Randy’s for classic diners of the nineteen thirties and forties, and wondering if Jason’s father had been a salesman who left him in go-go bars while he called on customers.

  “Well, that was interesting,” said Tom with a little smirk as they paused on the sidewalk outside the building to study the photographs. “‘Straight from Paris,’” he read. “‘The Magnificent Mariette.’ I wonder what Diana thinks of Jason’s little hobby?”

  “So you caught that too: the Pernod and the olives.”

  “And the quote from William Carlos Williams,” added Tom.

  “I think it’s pretty safe to conclude they’re an item.” She looked over at him. “Which is too bad for you.”

  “It’s true, she’s my type,” he said. Then he smiled. “But there’s always Yolanda.” He checked his watch. “It’s going on two. What do you want to do now? Go back to see Voorhees, or head back to the city?”

  “I’d like to see him, but not to tell him what we’ve found out. He already knows about Bernice, and I don’t want to tell him what Jason just told us about Randy going berserk at the other art shows until we check it out. But I would like to see him: to see what he can tell us.”

  “You mean, to find out what ‘exactly zip,’ is.”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “Maybe we should call first to see if he’s in.” Tom went back inside to call, and returned a moment later: “He says to meet him at the Gryphon Mill. He’s on his way over there now.” Then he added, nodding toward the inside: “If you thought Yolanda was a hoot, you should see the one who’s on now.”

  Charlotte looked at the publicity still. “It must be Chantal,” she said. “‘Straight from the jungles of East Africa.’”

  “Of the leopard headdress and clawed mittens,” said Tom. “And the tail with the pompon,” he added. “She looks like the Cowardly Lion in drag.”

  “I’m so sorry I’m going to miss her act.”

  Except for being only two stories instead of three or four, the Gryphon was a typical Paterson mill: a red brick structure pierced with rows of enormous windows that had allowed mill workers to take advantage of the natural light and ventilation. Except for the relief sculpture of the gryphon, a creature with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion, over the front door, the building was devoid of ornament. But the love, understanding, and skill of the craftsmen who had built it had resulted in a structure with great eloquence.

  After parking once again in the lot across the street, which was meant for overflow parking for visitors to the Falls, they crossed the street and waited for Voorhees out in front.

  He pulled up a minute later in an unmarked police car, followed by a police cruiser driven by an officer whom Voorhees introduced a few minutes later as his assistant, Bill Martinez. He was a young man in his early twenties with a pleasant face and a small William Powell-type mustache.

  “You’ve been holding out on us,” said Charlotte good-naturedly once the introductions had been dispensed with.

  “Who me?” said Voorhees, a meaty hand spread over his chest.

  “You didn’t tell us a word about the dispute between Randy and Bernice Spiegel,” she said accusingly.

  “I wanted to see what you would find out. What did you find out?”

  Charlotte proceeded to recap what Diana had told them, leaving out their trip to le Club Parisienne. Though she thought Randy’s death might have been linked to his attack of nerves, she doubted that Voorhees did, and she didn’t want her theory dismissed before she’d had a chance to pursue it.

  “Now, what do you know that you haven’t told us?” she asked.

  “Only that we think the victim was thrown in the river behind the Falls View. There was a particular kind of vegetation caught in the aprons that he was tied up with and in the backs of his sneakers, which only grows in a few places along the river, one of them being behind the Falls View.” He consulted his notes: “Polygonum cuspidatum, commonly known as Japanese knotweed.”

  Charlotte was familiar with it: a tall weed, reaching a height of eight or ten feet, with hollow, jointed stems, and a pale, greenish-white flower. It was common in New England, where she had grown up. Cultivated by the early settlers, it had become a vicious weed that was practically impossible to eradicate, as she had once discovered. “I know it,” she said. “But we always called it bamboo.”

  “Another name for it is Japanese bamboo,” Voorhees said. “It’s native to Japan. The medical examiner theorized that the victim had been dragged shoulders-first through this bamboo before he was tossed in. We found the probable site this morning: a path from the parking lot to the river bank where the stalks had been laid flat. The intake for the raceway system is only fifty feet down river from there.”

  “Any other evidence at the site?” asked Tom.

  “Only some vomitus at the edge of the parking lot. We figured the victim may have thrown up before he passed out. Unless he’d eaten something really distinctive like blueberry pie, which he didn’t, there’s no way to tell if it was his vomitus. But it’s a good bet that it was his puke and that the place where the bamboo was flattened was where he went in. The nearest place this bamboo stuff grows is three-quarters of a mile up river.”

  “Do we know who else was at the diner?” asked Charlotte.

  “We’re working on that. But suffice it to say that we’ll have no shortage of suspects. The guest list for the post-opening party runs to about twenty-five people. Plus there’s the diner staff.”

  As he spoke, another car drove up and parked behind the police cruiser. A woman got out and headed down the street toward them. She was a middle-aged woman, carefully made-up and with straight black hair in a Cleopatra cut. She wore a simple, expensively cut black suit, and a white silk blouse.

  “Bernice Spiegel,” Voorhees explained. “
She’s why we’re here. She claims that the paintings that her brother gave to Goslau—the ones that were the subject of the legal dispute—have been stolen.” He looked over at his assistant. “Brace yourself, Martinez. I think we’re about to catch some shit.”

  Bernice was walking very fast, with her hands clenched at her sides. Her head, which was square in shape, was thrust forward, and the skin on her forehead was pinched in a frown. Charlotte was reminded of Diana’s reference to a pit bull. Had she been on a leash, she would have broken it.

  “My paintings are missing,” she shrieked as she drew near. “They are worth eight million dollars.” By now, she was face to face with Voorhees. “Did you hear me?” she said, thrusting her face into his and pointing her forefinger at his chest. “Eight million dollars. You were supposed to be guarding them.”

  Now that she was closer, Charlotte recognized her as the woman who had made the remark at the opening about Randy going off the deep end again.

  “If you don’t recover them,” she threatened. “I am going to sue the city of Paterson for every last cent of their value.”

  Taking her gently by the arm, Voorhees steered her to a bench on the brick sidewalk. “Now, Ms. Spiegel,” he said quietly as he took a seat next to her, “Why don’t you tell us all about it?”

  Bernice glared at him.

  “Well, if you’re not going to cooperate, we might as well go home.” He looked up. “What do you say, Martinez? We have better things to do.”

  Martinez made a move toward the car.

  “Okay,” said Bernice. She took a deep breath, and then spoke. “I know that you told me that the studio would be protected, but I was worried about the paintings. All those people going in and out; somebody could so easily have walked off with one of them. So this afternoon I came over …”

  “When was that?” asked Voorhees.

  “Just a little while ago. I asked the police officer who was guarding the door if I could just take a peek. When I looked in, none of the paintings was there.” She clenched her eyes shut for a second, as if reliving the painful experience, and then sighed. “I couldn’t believe it.”