“Did he find anything?”
Patty shook her head. “But that didn’t convince Randy. He still thought the place was bugged. He said there were so many ways of bugging that it was impossible to have swept for them all.”
“When did all this start?”
“Right after he freaked out at the Koreman show. Maybe you heard about it. It was just like what happened the other night. That’s also when the good weeks stopped. From there on out, there were only bad weeks.”
“Then it wasn’t the drugs that induced his reaction at the Koreman show; it was whatever happened at the show that induced the drug use.”
Patty nodded. “The rescue squad took him to Bellevue. The diagnosis was cocaine-induced paranoia. But, as I said, up until then, he hadn’t been doing that much coke.” She took another swig of coffee, and then went on. “To continue on the subject of his bizarre behavior: he thought he was being followed. He would enter and leave his studio through a back entrance. He changed the locks on his doors every other day. He thought his food was poisoned. He talked constantly about being surrounded by informants, about not being able to trust anyone. Every stranger walking down the street was a tail; every car that slowed down was an unmarked vehicle that had been sent to spy on him. He said that I was the only one he could trust, and that the diner was the only place where he felt safe. He was talking about going to Australia to get away, as you know from the incident at the museum.”
Charlotte now remembered how he insisted on sitting facing the door at the diner, and how he kept looking out the window.
“Everyone attributed the paranoia to the drugs. Even Randy himself sometimes. He had a little saying he used to recite: ‘Snort coke, get paranoid, drink to mellow out, fall down.’ Which was about how it happened that night. The worse his paranoia got, the more drugs he took. It was a vicious cycle. He said he felt like one of those lab rats who keeps pushing the lever to get more cocaine, despite the fact that it’s getting zapped each time by an electric shock. It was getting very scary. It finally got so bad that he started talking about checking himself into Straight and Narrow.…”
“Straight and Narrow?”
“It’s a drug rehab clinic—on the corner of Straight Street and Narrow Street. What a name, huh? It’s one of Paterson’s claims to fame—it’s in Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Would you believe that the Salvation Army’s alcohol rehab clinic overlooks Temperance Island? Paterson is a quirky place. Anyway, he was talking about checking himself into Straight and Narrow, but it was just a joke. He never would have gone to Straight and Narrow—it’s for hard-core junkies. He had actually been looking into a private clinic—Don had even offered to pay for it—but he never followed through. Okay, get to the point, Patty,” she said to herself. “The point is that I believe that Randy’s paranoia wasn’t all drug-induced. I believe that there really was somebody out to get him.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I was a party to some of it.”
“Some of what?”
“The harassment Randy claimed to have been experiencing. One of the things that he raved about was the telephone calls he said he’d get all night long. Whoever it was would call and hang up, call and hang up. He couldn’t sleep. He changed his number, but the calls kept coming. Then he switched to an unlisted number. That didn’t work either. I thought the phone thing was one of his paranoid delusions, until he had his phone disconnected. Then he started getting the calls here.” She nodded again at the pay phone. “It would happen whenever he was at the diner. The caller, who was a man, would ask for Randy, but when Randy answered, he would hang up. No sooner would Randy get back to his seat—by the way, he always sat facing the door.…”
“I noticed that,” said Charlotte.
“No sooner would he get back to his seat than the phone would ring again. It got so we didn’t answer the phone when he was here. The ringing drove the other customers crazy. Then there were the bumping incidents. Randy would complain that these Hispanic kids were always bumping into him on the street. He thought they were doing it deliberately. Again, I thought it was his imagination. But then one day we went to the market on lower Main Street. We were walking back when this young Hispanic kid comes up to Randy, and knocks him over. Not accidentally, deliberately. The grocery bags went flying. Randy said it was the same kid who had done it before.”
“Did he have any idea who was harassing him?”
She nodded. “He had the calls traced. But he wouldn’t tell me who it was. He said that if that person found out I knew, he might come after me too. He wanted to protect me.” She stopped to look up at a woman who had come over to their booth. “Oh hi, Mom,” she said.
Patty’s mother was still pretty in spite of her age, which must have been around sixty. She had a round face with a wide smile that was filled with warmth, and lovely hazel eyes now reddened from weeping. She looked more Irish than Greek, and may very well have been.
“Hello,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Helen Andriopoulis. My daughter says that maybe you can help us.” She looked down at Patty with love, and sadness. “My husband didn’t think much of Randy Goslau, as Patty may have told you, but he never would have killed him.”
Charlotte now recognized her as the woman who was usually behind the cash register. “I know,” said Charlotte. “I’ll do my best.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Mrs. Andriopoulis asked. “Do you need anything?”
“No, Ma,” Patty said. “We’re fine. We’ll be finished here in a few minutes.” Once her mother had returned to her post, Patty went on. “As Mom said, Daddy didn’t approve of Randy—the drugs and all. He said he was just another stray that I had picked up. I have this weakness for stray animals.…” She nodded at the dog pen that adjoined the house across the street.
Charlotte turned around to look at the enclosure, in which she could see several dogs. “How many do you have?” she asked.
“At the moment, eleven cats and four dogs.”
“For a person with a weakness for strays, that’s not bad.”
“It’s been worse. The pen’s been full at times. Thank goodness I don’t have to bear the expense of feeding them. They eat the leftovers from here. That’s my parents’ house,” she explained. “Johnny and I live upstairs in the apartment where my grandmother used to live before she died. My mom and dad live downstairs with my younger sister.” She shrugged. “It’s convenient.”
Charlotte looked out at the house, which had imitation brick siding on the lower story, aluminum siding on the upper story, and identical picture windows up and down. It was sandwiched between a recycling warehouse for glass, cans, and paper, whose raw materials stood around in heaps on the lot, and a “Monumental Works,” whose gravestones were displayed out front.
“I try to find homes for the animals, and I do pretty well at it. I put the signs up here. If the customers are interested, they can just walk across the street and take a look.”
Charlotte had noticed one of these signs when she came in: “Loving golden retriever needs a home. For information, see Patty.”
“Anyway, I tell Daddy that I got it from him. If I have a weakness for stray animals, it’s because he has a weakness for stray humans. Any wino on the west side knows he can get a handout from John Andriopoulis.” She nodded at a bum who was sitting at the counter. “Like Roger Barry. He comes in every morning at ten. You could set your clock by him. Where were we?” she asked.
“On who it was. Could it have been Arthur Lumkin?” Patty shook her head emphatically. “No. I thought that too. But Randy said it was someone else.”
“He had been spying on Xantha and Randy.”
“Randy knew about that. Arthur wasn’t subtle about it. Randy told me that he and Xantha made a little game out of spotting him. They called him Waldo, after that kids’ book Where’s Waldo?, where you have to find this geeky guy named Waldo among the people in the crowd. It’s a favorite of Johnny’s. Randy used to lo
ok at it with him. Once Randy found Arthur’s car out in the parking lot. It looked like it was empty, but when Randy opened the door, there was Arthur crouched down on the floor. Randy told me that Xantha had discussed Arthur’s spying with their marriage counselor, who said that his behavior was due to his inability to face his mother’s rejection of him.” She shrugged. “The counselor told Xantha that he only did it because he wanted to be a part of her life. Isn’t that pathetic? A rich, important man like him. All he ever wanted out of life, he told Xantha, was to make her happy. I wish I could find a man whose only mission in life was to make me happy.”
“Was he here that night?”
“Only briefly. He and Xantha came in separate cars. He had to leave early to take care of some kind of telephone business in Sydney before the Australian stock market closed. I overheard him talking about it with one of the guests. Xantha stayed until about eleven.”
“I wonder why she didn’t go home with Randy.”
“I think she was a little horrified by Randy’s behavior. I suspect she had thought up until then that he only did party coke. It looked to me as if she was avoiding him, but it could have been the other way around: he was snuggling up pretty close to his bottle of Jack Daniels.”
“Wouldn’t she have heard about his drug use?”
“Probably. But we believe what we want to, don’t we? He was always on his best behavior with her. She never saw him coked up to the eyeballs the way I have. Ranting about the powerful telescopes that could pierce the walls of his studio, and the little white snakes that were crawling all over the floor.”
“Were there other episodes as bad as that night?”
“The time at the Montclair Art Museum was worse. That was the only other time I’ve seen him with the coke bugs. That’s what they call them: the coke bugs. A tactile delusion, the doctor told me. Randy described it as feeling as if he had broken out in an unbearable case of poison ivy. This time they stopped, thank God.”
“What about the other time?”
“He scratched himself until his skin was raw. It took weeks to heal—he had these ugly scabs all over his arms and legs. He ended up in the hospital that time, and the previous time too.”
“Were he and Xantha going to get married?”
“Ah, you saw the piece in the Post.”
Charlotte nodded.
“That’s all I know. I looked for a ring on Xantha’s finger at the party that night. There was one there—with a green stone—but I couldn’t say whether it had been there before or not.”
“What about the painting at the show?” asked Charlotte. “Did you notice anything about it that might have set Randy off?”
“No. But I didn’t look at it that closely. I had just walked in when it happened. I just wanted to get him out of there as quickly as possible. Thank God Diana thought up the tickets thing.”
“It was by an artist named Ed Verre. Does that name ring any bells?”
“Not a one,” said Patty.
The meeting at the other end of the diner appeared to be breaking up, and they watched as three of the men departed.
“My uncles. They’re probably going down to the courthouse. Some of the others are from the church: St. George Greek Orthodox. My father’s on the parish council. But most of them are relatives. They’re here because of family honor.” She said the word in Greek: “Philotimo. It’s a big deal with Greeks.”
“Do you speak Greek?” asked Charlotte.
“Unfortunately, yes,” she said, making a face.
“Why unfortunately?”
“Sixteen years of after-school Greek lessons. Other kids got to run and play, I got to study Greek. Talk about boring.” She smiled. “I’m only going to make Johnny go for ten years.”
Charlotte glanced over at the conclave of Greeks. “Do you think they’re going to be able to come up with the bail money?”
“I think so,” said Patty. “If they don’t, this arrest is going to kill my father. It may end up killing him anyway.”
After meeting with Patty, Charlotte headed out to the Montclair Art Museum. She was probably chasing a chimera, but she wanted to look at the painting that had caused the second episode of cocaine-induced paranoia. If it was true that someone was after Randy, the clue to that person’s identity must lie with Verre’s diner paintings. Only the paintings had induced a sense of fear so overwhelming that it had caused Randy temporarily to lose his mind.
She had no trouble finding Montclair, which was only about twenty minutes from Paterson—a gracious suburb with big old houses and beautiful tree-lined streets. The museum was located on one of these streets in a Beaux Arts-style building set in a small park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in miniature. Her inquiry of a guard led her to the museum’s library, in a two-story colonial house adjacent to the park, where a helpful librarian, after a few minutes of rummaging around, produced a slide from among the clutter of bookshelves and filing cabinets in the house’s former dining room.
“Ordinarily you’d have to look at this through a viewer, but we have the projector set up today,” said the librarian, a cheerful middle-aged woman with an Eastern European accent. “Come this way.”
Charlotte followed her into a reading room in what had formerly been the living room, where a projection screen had been set up in front of the fireplace.
“This painting is from this year’s show on Emerging New Jersey Artists,” she said as she slid the slide into the carousel and then turned on the projector. “We hold it every year to highlight new artists who we think are particularly worthy of recognition. There we are,” she said, as the slide appeared on the screen. “Is this the one you were interested in?”
“Yes,” Charlotte replied.
The painting, titled “Falls View Diner with Banana Cream Pie,” was a frontal view of a window of the diner, which was wet and fogged-over from the rain. On the opposite side of the window, a man with a ginger-colored beard sat at a booth eating a slice of banana cream pie. Behind him, two other men sat at the counter, watching John work the grill.
Again, Charlotte had the feeling that the artist had painted the diner on a specific night, in this case, a cold, misty night. It was almost as if he had had his nose pressed right up against the window.
As she studied the painting, she suddenly realized the connection among the three paintings. They were all of the identical scene! The painting in the Koreman show had been a long shot: the exterior of the diner, with the people too far away to be recognizable. This was a medium shot: the people could be seen in more detail, but the menu board, for instance, still wasn’t readable. And the painting in the Paterson Museum show was a close-up.
The artist had been zooming in, and what he was zooming in on, she now realized, was the two men at the counter.
In this painting, she could tell little about them: the figures were blurred by the fog and distorted by the rain. One had dark hair and wore a navy blue jacket, the other had lighter hair, and wore a light-colored sweater. As in the other two paintings, they sat a stool’s distance away from one another.
The painting in the Paterson museum show had been clearer, but she couldn’t remember any of the details. She had only looked at it for an instant before being distracted by Randy.
“Would you like to see our file on the artist?” asked the librarian.
“Yes, I would,” she said.
The librarian returned in a moment with a manila folder. “There’s not much,” she said, handing Charlotte the file. “He must be young.”
But he wasn’t young, Charlotte found, as she studied the contents. His résumé stated that he was born in Peoria in 1938, which would make him fifty-one, and educated at the University of Illinois. His address was 24 Mill Street, the same address that Mary Catherine had given her, and his gallery was the Koreman. His only previous exhibit was at the Koreman.
The librarian, who had disappeared, now returned with a catalog in her hand. “I found something else,” she said.
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It turned out to be the catalog from the Koreman show, which told Charlotte nothing more than what she already knew. She would definitely have to track down Verre. Had he known Randy? she wondered. And if so, what was their relationship? Could Verre have been the person who was harassing him? But first she would have to take another look at the painting in the Paterson museum show.
When the librarian returned, Charlotte asked her to make a copy of a reproduction of “Falls View Diner with Banana Cream Pie” from an article about the show in the file.
She left a moment later with a color Xerox copy, marveling at the wonders of modern technology.
The return trip was much shorter, so eager was she to see the painting. She was now convinced that it held the clue to Randy’s murder. “Every diner has a story,” Tom was always saying. She now realized that Verre had been telling one of the Falls View’s stories, and that she had to find out what that story was. At the museum, she parked the car, and fairly ran into the building. After paying her entrance fee, pausing only to reflect that a dollar fifty was a lot less than she paid in New York, she turned left past the White Manna toward the gallery area. And there it was: as clear as day. If she hadn’t been distracted by Randy’s bizarre behavior that night, she probably would have noticed it then.
One of the two men sitting at the counter was Randy.
Though you couldn’t see his face—the view was from the rear—it was unmistakably him: the same short; well-built physique; the same long, blond hair tied back in a ponytail; the same black high-top sneakers. Now her question was, Who was the other man? She looked again at the calendar, which was last year’s. It was from the Passiac Valley Water Commission, and featured a photograph of the Great Falls wreathed in ice. If the crossing off had been kept up to date, the date was April seventeenth. On reflection, she decided that there were just two people who might know who the other person was. The first was the bearded man eating the banana cream pie in the painting from the Montclair show. And since she didn’t know who he was, she would have to go with the second: the grill man, John Andriopoulis.
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