Murder at the Falls

by Stefanie Matteson

  Heading back to the lobby, she inquired about a pay phone, and was directed to a phone booth in the parking lot. After dialing information to get the number—as usual, there was no phone book—she called Patty.

  Yes, her father had just been released on bail, she said. But he wasn’t at the diner right now. He’d taken a little walk. She thought he was probably headed up to the observation bridge. “I told him about you,” she added.

  From the museum, Charlotte walked up Spruce Street to the Falls. At the head of Spruce Street, she entered the gate in a wire mesh fence, and followed a gravel path across the grounds of the hydroelectric plant that powered the city’s street lamps. The path led to a caged-in footbridge over the intake reservoir for the hydro plant, and then across a grassy knoll overlooking the Falls basin. Crossing the grassy area, she found herself standing at the edge of the precipice, with only a few scrub trees growing in the crevices of the cliff face between her and the swirling water seventy-seven feet below. The sheer, coal-black basalt wall of the opposite side of the chasm was facing her, and the hulking brick structure of the hydroelectric plant, from whose turbines the spent waters emerged far below, was tucked into the cliff to her right. At her feet were the rusted remains of a wire mesh fence. Like the antique-reproduction street lamps whose globes had been put out, and the cast-iron park benches whose wooden-slatted seats had been smashed, the fence was another civic improvement that had fallen victim to urban blight.

  From here, Charlotte could see the observation bridge spanning the gorge behind the trees to her left, and beyond the bridge, the white cascade of the Falls thundering into the chasm. There would be no rainbows today: the sky was overcast, and it looked like rain. A lone man was standing on the bridge, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the Falls. Turning, Charlotte headed back across the grass and rejoined the path, which passed through the grove of trees before emerging onto the bridge.

  As Charlotte approached, John acknowledged her arrival with a nod, and then resumed his study of the Falls. Charlotte quietly joined him at the railing. The view was directly into the cleft of the inverted V of the chasm. The Falls poured over the wall of the chasm to her left. This was the first time she had seen the Falls up close, or at least the first time in forty-odd years, and they were as impressive as she remembered. Above, a quiet lake, and then, the heavy water cascading into the narrow opening, and reverberating with a roar that reminded her of the sound of the traffic on the George Washington Bridge at rush hour. Confined by the narrow canyon, the spray had nowhere to go but upward, and swirled around them like the smoke from a burning building, coating their clothing with a fine mist, and filling the air with the swampy smell of river water. From this close, the sense wasn’t of grandeur or beauty, but of raw power. Below, the water surged and eddied around the sharp rocks before making its way down the rock-studded chute and emerging from the mouth of the gorge to quietly meander on downstream.

  In responding to Patty’s call for help, Charlotte felt a little like that water: plunging boldly over the precipice, heedless of the sharp rocks below that could cut her to bits, the currents that could drag her under, the whirlpools that could spin her senseless. But she knew that plunging over the precipice was what she had to do in order to reach that quiet place where the gorge released its contents into the order and quiet of the river below.

  The man standing next to her was a different man from the big, warm-hearted energetic presence whom she had met less than a week before. He seemed diminished not only in spirit, but in size. He hadn’t shaved, and the silver-gray stubble on his chin matched the waxen pallor of his cheeks. Deep furrows of misery were etched into his forehead, and his eyes were ringed with red. A shining orb of brightness had collapsed into a black hole of despair.

  For a while, she stood there as John smoked, his left arm with its “Helen” tattoo bringing the cigarette rhythmically up to his lips, and then back down again. Then he spoke: “Is this the first time you’ve been here?” he asked. He had to speak loudly to be heard above the roar.

  “In forty years,” she replied, yelling.

  “Do you know about Omanni?”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s the Indian name for the Great Spirit of the Falls. When the water’s low, he’s easy to make out.” He pointed to a rock formation that jutted out from between the dense sheets of water. “That’s his profile.” Then he pointed to a goldfinch on the top. “The bird’s on his head.” His finger traced a line downward. “Below are his nose, mouth, and chin.”

  As Charlotte stared at the mass of rugged rock, Omanni’s profile suddenly took shape. “Oh, I see him now,” she said, delighted. He had a bold forehead, and an open mouth, with a trailing mustache of vivid green weeds. His arms were crossed firmly across his chest, giving the impression that he presided with magisterial authority over the thundering waters.

  “The Indians used to make sacrifices to him,” he said.

  “Is that what you were thinking of doing?” asked Charlotte.

  “No.” He smiled wanly, for an instant the old John. “But maybe I should. I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

  “Maybe I can help you,” she said. “But first I need to know the facts. Lieutenant Voorhees said that you disappeared for about forty-five minutes that night. Between eleven and eleven forty-five. I’d like to know first, why you left, and second, where you went.”

  “I came here. To have a smoke. I often come here to have a smoke. I was still upset about Nick selling the Falls View. I wanted to think about my future. Besides, I didn’t have anything to do until we reopened at twelve. Carlos was going to clean up.”

  “Why didn’t you just go home?” she asked.

  “I didn’t want Helen to see how upset I was. Now that I have bigger things to worry about, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal”—he sighed, a deep, weary sigh—“but at the time it seemed like the end of my life.”

  “Did you leave before or after Randy?”

  “After,” he said. “At least, I think it was after. I went out the back. But I hadn’t noticed him the last time I had been out front, which was only a couple of minutes before that. He had been sitting at the counter all night.”

  “But you didn’t see him on your way up here?”

  He shook his head.

  “When you came up here, what route did you take? What I mean is, did you cross the street in front of the diner, or did you wait until you got to the head of the street to cross?”

  “In front of the diner. That’s the way I always go. Cross in front of the diner, and then walk up the other side. Habit, I guess. Since I live across the street, I cross there a dozen times a day.”

  If John had crossed to the other side of the street, the chances were that he hadn’t seen Randy lying in the canebrake, if indeed that was where he had been. But there was also the possibility that John was lying.

  “I didn’t see Randy, but I did see something unusual,” John continued. “I doubt if it means anything, but it struck me at the time as kind of odd.”

  “I’m listening,” she prompted.

  “I was putting the soiled aprons out …”

  “I was just about to ask you when you put the aprons out.”

  “I’m glad someone believes I did put them out. I put them out just before I left to come up here, a little before eleven. I always put them out on Sunday nights. Anyway, I was putting them out when a car drove around the building.”

  “Do you remember what kind of car it was?”

  “A gray Mercedes, New York plates. I remember because it’s not often that cars drive all the way around. It’s a tight squeeze, and most people turn around in the parking lot. Then, as I was going out again—I had gone back to get a jacket—it came around again.”

  “Did you get a look at the driver?”

  “Not then. But as I was heading across the street, I saw the car come around for a third time. This time, the driver parked and went inside. I thought he
must have been looking for someone. He was an older man, tall, distinguished-looking, dressed in a suit and tie.”

  Arthur Lumkin, Charlotte thought. Come back to spy on Xantha. “Do you think you could identify him from a photograph?”

  “I think so,” he said. He looked over at her, his face for the first time showing a spark of hope. “Do you know who it was?”

  “Let’s just say that I’m very glad that you told me about this,” she said. The last thing she wanted to be accused of was giving away privileged information. “Did you tell Voorhees about it?”

  He nodded. “He didn’t seem interested,” he added with a shrug.

  Charlotte was disgusted with Voorhees. Here was a clear lead that he hadn’t even bothered to follow up. She suspected that he just wanted to close the case as quickly as possible, and move to Florida. “Could the driver have seen you putting out the aprons?”

  “Yes. Easily. There’s a fenced enclosure there, to keep the raccoons out of the garbage, but you can see through it. We usually keep the gate locked to keep people out—you’d be amazed at who’ll come wandering in—but I had left it open because I was coming back.”

  “In other words, someone could have entered the enclosure while you were up here, and taken two of the aprons.”

  John nodded.

  9

  Charlotte gazed out at the profile of Omanni. As she studied the sheets of water that hung like plaits of hair on either side of his face, she went over the facts in her mind. Voorhees had theorized that Randy had passed out at the east end of the parking lot, and had been dragged through the canebrake to the river. If the driver of the Mercedes had been Arthur Lumkin, and it seemed clear from John’s description that it was, he might have seen Randy lying unconscious on his swing around the parking lot, come back for the aprons after John had left, tied Randy up, and thrown him in. Motive, means, and opportunity. There was also the matter of precedent, namely Victor Louria. Though the party guests would have been leaving, the end of the parking lot was far enough away from the building that Lumkin’s activities would probably not have attracted notice. Also, he would only have had to drag the body a few feet into the bamboo not to risk being noticed at all. The stuff grew as high as a Kansas cornfield in July. But there were a couple of problems with this theory. The first was that Voorhees didn’t know for sure that Randy’s body had been tossed in the river at that spot. He only knew that the medical examiner had found bits of bamboo in the apron strings and in the backs of Randy’s sneakers. Any of the party guests could have wandered into the canebrake to throw up, and any of them could have flattened the path to the river bank, perhaps to throw up some more. Second was the fact that somebody had been harassing Randy—somebody other than Arthur Lumkin, who, according to what Patty had said, was just an innocent neurotic with a mother fixation.

  Turning back to John, she said, “Now I want to ask you what you remember about the events of another evening, an evening last spring. But first I’ll backtrack a little.” After explaining about Randy’s history of paranoia and about his reaction to Verre’s painting, she said, “The date on the calendar on the diner wall in the painting was April seventeenth. Does that date mean anything to you?”

  John shrugged. “It’s over a year ago.”

  Reaching into her bag, she pulled out the catalog from the Koreman show and opened it to the page with the reproduction of “Falls View Diner on a Rainy Spring Night.” Then she pulled out the photocopy of “Falls View Diner with Banana Cream Pie.” She spread them out against the railing of the bridge. “Here are two other views of the same scene,” she said. “Do they help your memory at all?”

  John looked at them, and then exclaimed: “Yes. I remember that night now! That was the night the diner guy, Kenny Meeker, gave the concert in the parking lot.” He pointed to “Falls View Diner with Banana Cream Pie.” This scene is later on that night. That’s Meeker eating the pie. Then he pointed to the van in “Falls View Diner on a Rainy Spring Night.” “And this is his van in the parking lot.”

  “And these people?” Charlotte asked, pointing to the two men sitting on the stools in the background of “Banana Cream Pie.”

  “That’s Randy Goslau on the left and Don Spiegel on the right.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere, Charlotte thought. “Have you any recollection of what they were talking about?” Her heart was pounding: she felt like a daredevil about to go over the lip of the Falls.

  “Yes, I do,” he said quietly. “They were arguing about an article in an art magazine. Spiegel wanted Goslau to send a statement to the magazine, retracting what he—Goslau—had said about him. Spiegel had just come from a party in New York where everyone was talking about this article. He was pretty incensed.”

  Charlotte now remembered seeing a magazine on the counter in the close-up of the same scene in the museum show. “What was Randy’s reaction?”

  John thought for a minute, and then said: “I guess you’d have to call it belligerent. He was pretty doped up. He was talking fast, waving his arms around. He kept bragging about what a great artist he was, but of course he always did that … That was also the night that Spiegel committed suicide.”

  “What!” Charlotte exclaimed.

  John continued: “He jumped. Either from over there”—he waved at the cliff at the edge of the Falls—“or from the bridge here.” Taking a final drag on his cigarette, he tossed it over the railing.

  Charlotte watched it go down. It seemed to fall in slow motion, being turned this way and that by the air currents created by the Falls. Once it hit the water, it spun violently around like laundry in a spin cycle before finally being swallowed up. “Why?” she asked simply.

  “No one knew. He didn’t appear to have any reason, but …” Andriopoulis shrugged as if to say, Who knows why people do the things they do? “Goslau said it was because he couldn’t stand the shame of having it come out that it was really he who did his paintings.”

  Above the Falls, a mother mallard paddled around in the lake-like expanse of water, her six tiny ducklings following behind. As she looked out at them, Charlotte asked herself: How would Verre have known about what went on at the diner that night, and why would he have wanted to paint it—not once, but three times? Suddenly she gasped as the last duckling was sucked into the current and pulled over the edge of the Falls. It landed a few seconds later in a pool surrounded by sharp rocks, and disappeared under the surface of the water. A moment later, it popped back up, and was carried downstream by the current.

  John had seen the incident too. “What’s she going to do now?” he asked, referring to the mother mallard.

  As they watched in fascination, the mother flew down to the duckling at the foot of the Falls and then back up to the rest of her brood. She repeated this several times, clearly confused and upset. Then, one by one, she nudged the others over the edge. Each disappeared under the water, only to pop back up again a moment later. When they had all made it safely over, the mother joined them at the debouchure of the gorge, and they paddled downstream happily together.

  “Whew,” said Charlotte, once all the ducklings were reunited with Mama. She realized that she had been holding her breath.

  “And I thought I was in a predicament,” John said. “She ought to go down in the history books right next to Leapin’ Sam Patch.”

  “Who’s he?” asked Charlotte.

  “One of Paterson’s historic figures. An Irish mill hand who took a dare to climb a tree and jump into the gorge. He landed right down there.” He pointed to the same pool where the ducklings had landed. “It’s the only place where you can land and survive. Anywhere else, he would have been smashed on the rocks. The drop speed is sixty-three miles per hour; somebody on the rescue squad once figured it out.”

  Charlotte stared down at the quiet little pool of yellow-brown stillness surrounded by the sharp-edged rocks and swirling waters.

  “He went on to make a living at it. People would pay to see him jump
. From Paterson, he went on to other falls. He was said to be the only person ever to have jumped into the Niagara River without a flotation device and survive. But he finally pressed his luck too far: he jumped off a cliff at a falls up around Rochester somewhere and never came up. They didn’t recover his body until the next spring. It turned up in Lake Ontario, frozen in a block of ice.”

  Charlotte shuddered at the image.

  “When I was a kid, we used to sing a jingle about him.” He paused a minute to recall the words, and then proceeded to recite them:

  Poor Sam Patch—a man once world renownded,

  Much loved the water, and by it was drownded,

  He sought for fame, and as he reached to pluck it,

  He lost his balance, then kicked the bucket.

  Charlotte was still staring at the pool of water, and wondering what it must have been like to land. Suddenly, she asked: “How do we know that Don Spiegel committed suicide?”

  “He left a note in his typewriter. Also, there was the body. It came up four months later, right over there.” He turned to point to the stretch of river behind them where it widened before emerging from the gorge. After pausing to light another cigarette, he continued: “I watched them haul it out. What was left of it. The head was almost gone; he must have landed head-first on a rock. There wasn’t much skin left, either. Bodies decompose pretty rapidly in warm water, and it had been an unusually hot summer.”

  “How did they know it was Spiegel’s, then—from the dental records?”

  “No, the teeth were missing: some had been knocked out, the rest had fallen out when the soft tissue decomposed. They couldn’t identify the body from fingerprints, either. They’d been nibbled away by fish. From what I understand, they identified it through the bones. Don’t ask me how.”

  Not very accurately, she suspected. “How old was he?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Between forty-five and fifty, I’d guess.”