“No. He got in his truck and took off for parts unknown. Lorraine was stranded here. She didn’t even have her pocket-book. She’d left it on the front seat of the truck. All she had was a plate of lasagna and a cup of coffee.”
“What did she do?”
“Nick, the owner, took pity on her. Put her up at his house. She waited for her husband to come back, but he never did. She tried to track him down, with no success. So she went to work for Nick. She figured she didn’t have anything to go back to Dubuque for.”
“How did you find all this out?” asked Voorhees.
It was a question Charlotte didn’t need to ask. Tom was always finding out things like this. Complete strangers would tell him their, life stories. He said it was simple: he just asked.
“Lorraine and I had a long talk one day. She’s been working here now for seventeen years.” He added: “Every diner has a story.”
“And Tom can tell you four hundred and eleven of them,” said Charlotte. “Show the lieutenant your diner log book,” she urged him.
Tom obliged by pulling out a small notebook, and handing it to Voorhees.
“Four hundred and fourteen,” he corrected. “These are my field notes. I write the information down in here: the name; the location; the specialty; the former names, if any; the date that I visited; and whether it was operating, defunct, for sale, or what. Then I put the data in my computer. It’s an obsession,” he confessed. “I like to think of myself as a normal person, but in reality”—he grinned good-naturedly—“I’m a sickie.”
“If a week goes by in which Tom hasn’t visited a diner, he starts getting separation anxiety,” said Charlotte, “which is expressed in the form of an overwhelming craving for tube steaks and french fries.”
“Speaking of which …” said Tom, looking up at the waitress.
She was a middle-aged woman with long, dyed-black hair; black penciled-on eyebrows; and a smile as warm and sweet as a slice of hot apple pie. Her husband must have been a real cad to have left her.
“Hello, Tom,” she said. “Nice to see you again.” She took her order pad out of her apron pocket. “What can I get for you?”
They gave her their orders—three beers (the Sunrise was fortunate in being a diner with a liquor license) and three roast chicken dinners, and then returned to the conversation about diners.
“Right now I’m suffering from another diner-related malady,” Tom said. “A case of diner-envy. I confess to having a deep desire to possess the C & E. It’s a fantasy of mine to live in a diner.”
“What do you mean! You’re already halfway there,” said Charlotte. She explained to Voorhees how the kitchen table in Tom’s apartment was a diner booth, complete with a wallbox and a large EAT sign in red, white, and yellow neon mounted on the wall above it.
Voorhees, who had been leafing through Tom’s log book, proceeded to read an entry: “‘The Orange Diner. Main Street, West Orange.’ Hey, I know that diner. It’s a nice little place.” He went on: “I must admit that I have a soft spot for diners myself. I spend a lot of time on the road with my daughter. We eat in diners whenever we can.”
“Aha,” said Tom. “Another closet diner freak. They’re all over the place. I had a suspicion that you might be a fellow traveler when I saw your interest in Randy’s postcard collection. Here’s my stock question,” he said. “I ask it of everyone who admits to a weakness for diners. What specifically is it about diners that you love?”
“Well, they’re cheap and the food’s usually pretty good. But that’s not entirely it.” Voorhees thought for a moment, and then said: “The food, the service, the sense of comfort. But most of all it’s this.” He ran his big hand over a place where a tear in the upholstery had been patched, and then over a spot in the Formica tabletop where the pattern had been worn away.
“The sense of humanity,” said Tom.
“Yeah, I guess that’s it,” he said. “These worn places make me think of all the people who’ve been here before me: the warmth, the laughs, the confidences.” He thought for a minute. “A diner booth is like an old shoe or an easy chair: it has a sense of history.”
“Well-said,” pronounced Tom as Lorraine delivered their beers. Picking up his mug, he hoisted it in a toast: “To diners everywhere!”
After they had drunk to diners and their devotees, Voorhees asked Charlotte to fill him in on the Lumkins.
Charlotte and Tom had just been discussing them in the car. She now repeated what she had just told him. “They’ve been married for ten or twelve years. He was married once before, she twice. Her real name is Geraldine; she only became Xantha shortly before she married Arthur.”
“The name’s sort of a wash, isn’t it?” said Tom. “Whatever she gained by becoming a Xantha she lost when she became a Lumkin.”
Charlotte smiled, and then continued: “Xantha changed Arthur’s life. Before he met her, he was a millionaire without a purpose in life.”
“A millionaire without a purpose in life,” Voorhees repeated. “I really feel for the guy, you know what I mean?”
“He had been interested in buying art,” Charlotte went on, “but he didn’t know how to go about it. What to buy, who to buy it from, how much to pay. Xantha opened up a new world to him. She was a collector of contemporary art. Have you ever seen a picture of her?”
Voorhees shook his head as he sipped the head off his beer.
“Hot-pink spiked hair; dramatic eye makeup; four-inch heels; low-cut dresses that show off her décolletage.”
“Not exactly the shy and retiring type.”
“But the perfect match for a shy, insecure millionaire. I’ll tell you a story I once heard about Arthur. This took place before he married Xantha. He himself told it to a friend of mine. He wanted to buy some paintings, so he had his driver take him to a well-known gallery. But once he got there, he couldn’t get out of the car. He was too insecure. He didn’t know how to behave, what questions to ask. He was afraid of looking stupid, or being cheated, or—worst of all—being snubbed. After sitting in the car for half an hour, he finally ordered the driver to take him home. Xantha changed all that for him. Meeting her gave him a mission in life other than making money.”
“Meeting him gave her a mission, too: spending it,” said Tom.
“Right. And since there was a lot of it, they quickly became well-known collectors. Their collection, in turn, gave them social prominence. Suddenly Arthur was being asked to serve on the boards of high-powered cultural organizations, and Xantha was being asked to chair their fund-raising functions.”
Tom elaborated: “Not just the downtown stuff that she had been doing before she married Lumkin—Ethiopian relief, and that sort of thing. We’re talking status institutions, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney.” He turned back to Charlotte. “Now we get to the interesting part.”
“What’s the interesting part?” asked Voorhees.
“Her lovers,” Charlotte replied. “The price that Arthur paid for Xantha’s lighting up his dreary existence was to put up with a succession of young lovers, most of them artists, of which it appears Randy was the most recent.”
“And did he put up with them?”
“To all appearances, yes. The charade was that these young men served as escorts for Xantha when Arthur was occupied at board meetings or corporate functions. But the scuttlebutt was that, apart from the fact that he loved Xantha, he didn’t want to risk a costly divorce. He had a reputation for being, if not tightfisted, then mindful of his money. And his divorce from his first wife had cost him sixteen million, or something like that. Now …” she went on, “we get to the very interesting part, which is the death of Xantha’s last lover, a young Brazilian artist by the name of Louria—Victor, I think. The rumor was that his death wasn’t an accident.”
“What happened to him?” asked Voorhees.
“He fell, or jumped, or was pushed out of the fourteenth-floor window of a midtown apartment that was the Manhattan pied-à-terre
of a friend, a Brazilian socialite. He landed on the roof of a delivery truck, wearing only red jockey undershorts and a gold chain with a gold cross. His death was written off as suicide, but there was no note.”
“I remember that case now,” Voorhees said. “His pants and T-shirt had been neatly folded up on a chair just inside the window.”
“That’s why the police called it a suicide. Suicides often do things like that, but not murderers. In any case, Arthur Lumkin wasn’t sorry to see him dead. He chartered a jet to ship the coffin back to Rio. It cost him a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, which he was said to have described as ‘well worth the money.’”
“What do you think?” asked Voorhees.
“I think Louria threw himself out of the window. He was said to have been distraught because Xantha had dumped him for someone else. Randy, maybe. Which is not to say that his death might not have put some ideas in Arthur’s head about convenient methods of disposing of his wife’s lovers.”
“Was Lumkin at the post-opening party?” asked Tom.
“I don’t know,” Voorhees replied. “But Martinez should have the list of guests by now. Diana Nelson was going to drop it off today.”
“I would imagine that he was,” said Charlotte. “He and Xantha had loaned some paintings from their collection to the museum for the exhibit. It would have been customary to invite them.”
Their roast chicken dinners had arrived, and they started to eat. As Tom had said, the food was very good: fresh mashed potatoes, delicious homemade giblet gravy, green beans that hadn’t been boiled to death. One of the virtues of a good diner was the ability to do simple food very well.
As they ate, they discussed aspects of the case. If Arthur Lumkin had killed Randy because he knew Xantha’s relationship with him was more than just a fling, he must have been aware of her set-up at the Short Stop. Which meant that he must have been out there. Which in turn meant that the neighbors might have seen him.
“Do you know where we can get a photo of Lumkin?” Voorhees asked. “Without going directly to him, I mean. A magazine, or something?”
Charlotte thought for a minute. “Yes. I think I have one at home. His picture was in this year’s ‘ARTnews 200,’ the list of the two hundred most prominent art collectors. I remember the picture because my husband was complaining that Arthur rated a picture and he didn’t.”
“Do you still have it around?”
“I think so. If not, I could get it at the library. His photo also appears in business magazines from time to time.”
“Okay,” said Voorhees. For a minute, he stared out at the ball field, which glowed with the golden hues of late summer. “Here’s what we’ll do. Provided that you’re still willing to take part in this investigation, that is.”
They nodded.
“Miss Graham will get us a couple of copies of a photograph of Lumkin.” He looked inquiringly at Charlotte, who nodded again. “Meanwhile, I’ll find out what kind of car he drives. Are you free tomorrow?”
Charlotte said she was, but Tom had an appointment he couldn’t break: a talk on true-crime writing at a college of criminal justice.
Voorhees continued: “If it’s okay with you, Miss Graham, I’d like you to come back out here tomorrow with Martinez and show the picture around: the neighbors, the convenience store, and so on. You can do the talking: people are more likely to open up to a woman. Martinez will let you know about Lumkin’s car.”
“I would guess that he has a driver,” said Charlotte.
“Good. That would make him more conspicuous. We’ll also find out if there’s a caretaker. I assume there is. Martinez will get you the name and address. Check out the same thing with him. Meanwhile, I’ll make the rounds of the historic district.”
Charlotte thought that she had the best chance of coming up with something. It would have been brazen in the extreme for Xantha to have moved in with Randy at the mill. But to set up a love nest at his isolated country place was another story.
Voorhees continued: “Ask about strangers in the neighborhood, too. If Goslau did move the paintings out here, someone might have stolen them.”
Charlotte nodded. She had almost forgotten about the paintings.
“This is great coffee,” said Voorhees. “I always judge a diner by its coffee. That, and the number of calendars: if there are old ones hanging on the wall, it means that they’re too busy to change them.”
“There you go,” said Tom. “Not only an enthusiast, but a connoisseur.”
Charlotte had no trouble finding the issue of ARTnews with the photo of Arthur Lumkin. It was in a stack of old magazines in her library. He was posing, in black tie, with Xantha, who was wearing one of her outrageous get-ups and smiling widely for the paparazzi. She had Vivian make some copies for her the next morning at the local copy shop. The copies weren’t great, but Lumkin was distinctive enough, with his bald pate, horn-rimmed glasses, and long, aquiline nose, that anyone who had seen him would recognize him from the photo. As she ate her breakfast, she pondered what to do with her day. She and Martinez weren’t scheduled to go out to the camp until three, which left her morning free. There were a lot of things she should be doing—sitting down with Vivian to answer her mail, looking at scripts (having just completed a movie, she had to start thinking about what she was going to do next), or getting down to work on her memoirs. One of Vivian’s damned tape recorders was now sitting on the kitchen counter right next to the toaster, where she couldn’t miss it. Why was it that she couldn’t bring herself to get started on this? she wondered. Was it perhaps the number of her marriages? She had always thought of herself as a conventional person who would marry for life, and the fact that she’d been married four times was something of an embarrassment to her. But she’d been living with that for years. It was something else. And then it dawned on her what was at the bottom of the unsettled feeling that had been plaguing her. It was the unfinished chapter in her life, namely, her relationship with Jack. They had been separated now for more than a year—really separated, as opposed to the charade they had been keeping up for a couple of years prior to that. She knew what had to be done: one of them had to file for divorce. She also knew why she didn’t want to be the one to do it. It would be an admission that she had failed once again. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” the poet had said, and she supposed that she still nurtured a faint hope that something of her marriage could be salvaged, despite Marsha’s news that Jack now had someone else.
No. She was definitely not ready to start talking into that damned black box. What she was ready to do was go down to the Koreman Gallery and nose around. She wanted to find out what it was about the photorealist show that had made Randy Goslau go off the deep end.
7
By ten, she was on her way. After retrieving her car from her garage, she drove down to Soho. Miraculously, she found a parking spot right in front of the old cast-iron fronted loft on West Broadway that housed the Koreman Gallery. West Broadway, so-called because it was west of the other Broadway, was the main north-south artery of the artists’ community that Soho had become, and the site of its most prestigious galleries and boutiques. The Koreman Gallery was one of these. With a vast space that could accommodate three shows at once, it was one of Soho’s biggest galleries.
Charlotte had been there before with Jack, and ascended the steps to the door, marked only with a small plaque that read KOREMAN, with the confidence of someone who is familiar with the territory. If you hadn’t known it was there, you would never have noticed it. There were no windows or signs, apart from the inconspicuous plaque on the door. The lack of identifying features was a not-so-subtle form of intimidation typical of art galleries that thought themselves to be better than they were. The message was: we don’t want your business unless you’re already well-enough informed to know who we are.
Voorhees had been right in soliciting her aid. As Arthur Lumkin had discovered, the art community was a closed little world that was o
ften hostile to outsiders, no matter how much money they had.
The receptionist behind the front desk treated her with the usual indifference. It was remarkable to Charlotte that many of these galleries stayed in business, so seemingly unresponsive were they to prospective customers.
“Excuse me,” she said. “My name is Charlotte Graham. I’d like to see Ms. Koreman, please.”
Mary Catherine Koreman was the owner. Though the gallery was technically owned by her and her husband—a quiet man named Robert Fein—it was Mary Catherine who ran the business, with Bob helping out with the framing, hanging, and staging of shows.
The receptionist looked Charlotte over as if she were a bag lady asking for a handout. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked. She wore her hair in what used to be called a crew cut, a style that showed off ears that were pierced in half-a-dozen places.
Charlotte replied that she didn’t.
“I don’t know if she’s in.”
“Could you check please?” said Charlotte icily. Elusive owners were another hallmark of the gallery with pretensions. “Tell her Miss Charlotte Graham is here to see her.”
The receptionist got up resentfully and shuffled off to the back in her jack boots, leaving Charlotte to admire an exhibit of colorfully painted furniture. She returned a minute later, followed by Mary Catherine.
“Miss Graham,” Mary Catherine said with a smile, extending a welcoming hand, “So very nice to see you again. How is your husband? We haven’t seen him in a while.” When she smiled, her protruding front teeth gave her round, dimpled face an endearing chipmunky expression.
She was a heavy woman, whose gray hair was parted in the middle and pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a caftan of hand-woven cotton, and oversized eyeglass frames in a checkerboard pattern that matched the pink and lavender of her dress.
Charlotte had always liked Mary Catherine, and thought her an astute businesswoman, despite the inconspicuous sign and the sullen receptionist. But perhaps that was only the regard of one professional woman for another. “He’s very well, I hear,” she replied. “I don’t see him much anymore.
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