She locked eyes with Voorhees.
He took a drag from his cigarette, and then stubbed it out in the red metal ashtray. “I don’t think we’ll wait until he gets to the airport to pick him up,” he said as he gulped down the rest of his coffee.
“Are you leaving, Daddy?” asked Demi.
Voorhees leaned over to speak with his daughter: “I have to go to work now. I’ll give Jenny’s mother a call and ask her to pick you up here. Sorry I won’t be able to be there for you, sweetie.”
“That’s all right, Dad,” she said with a smile.
Patty nodded at her son, who was playing with some toy trucks in the last booth. “She can keep an eye on Johnny for me until her ride comes.” She looked across the table at Demi. “Would you like that?”
Demi nodded. “I’d like it,” she said.
“Thank you,” Voorhees said to Patty. After wishing his daughter good luck, he kissed her goodbye, and then stood up to go.
Standing up herself, Patty scanned the detective’s face anxiously. “Then it was important,” she said.
“Yes, it was important,” he said.
“Wait, Marty,” said Patty, laying a hand on his arm. “I just want to tell you something. We got the autopsy report back. Daddy’s coronary arteries were blocked, even the ones from the bypass surgery. He would have died anyway.”
Voorhees looked at her with relief.
“But that doesn’t mean that he should have gone to the grave without his good name,” she added. “I want his name cleared.”
“I hear you,” said Voorhees. “Philotimo.”
“Philotimo,” said Patty.
Leaving her car in the parking lot, Charlotte joined Voorhees in the police cruiser. She hadn’t asked if she could tag along; she had just done it, and he hadn’t objected. If it weren’t for her, he would never have known that the aprons were a present from Jason. He could hardly deny her the fruits of her own efforts. As they headed down Spruce Street, Voorhees radioed the dispatcher and instructed him to have Martinez ask Demi’s friend’s mother to pick her up at the diner. As Charlotte was listening to this exchange, she spotted a thin man with a ponytail approaching the gate in the wire-mesh fence at the beginning of the path leading to the grounds of the hydroelectric plant. As the car passed, she turned around for another look, and saw him enter.
“I think I just saw him!” she said.
“Saw who?”
“Jason Armentrout. Or somebody who looks like him. He just went in the gate to the grounds of the hydro plant.”
Voorhees swung the car over to the side of the road, and parked. After radioing for a backup, he leaned over and removed a set of handcuffs and a gun from the glove compartment. Charlotte had no idea what kind of gun it was, but it looked menacing: it wasn’t your everyday .38 calibre service revolver. He tucked the gun into a shoulder harness, and slipped the handcuffs into his jacket pocket. “I want you to stay out of the way. Do you understand?” he said.
“Yessir,” she replied emphatically as they got out of the car.
By contrast with its desultory appearance of the preceding weeks, the raceway that paralleled the road now deserved its name: the water was over-flowing the dam behind the old gatehouse, and rushing downhill, barely contained by the retaining walls. Charlotte thought of all the debris—the shopping carts and old umbrellas and broken washing machines—that would be washed out into the river.
“Another couple of inches and the water would be over the top,” she said as she joined Voorhees on his side of the car.
“I’ve seen it that way,” said Voorhees. “I’ve seen it flowing right over the road: four or five feet deep.”
The Falls also looked much different. Instead of individual sheets of water separated by rock outcroppings, it was now a solid white cascade, nearly three hundred feet long. The roar was deafening, like the sound of an express train passing by within a few feet, and the spray billowed high into the air. They could smell the swampy odor from across the street.
“Let’s go,” said Voorhees. He adjusted his shoulder harness and they set off.
The gravel lot just inside the gate of the hydroelectric plant was empty. But once they reached the footbridge spanning the intake reservoir, they saw Jason. He was heading toward a woman who was standing on the observation bridge, taking pictures. Charlotte recognized her from her short-cropped black hair and long, elegant neck.
As Diana lowered the camera to rewind the film, she spotted Jason, and, with a wave and a smile, turned to join him.
Voorhees laid a restraining hand on Charlotte’s arm, and they stayed where they were, concealed behind the wire fencing that enclosed the footbridge.
For a moment, Jason and Diana talked. Then they started heading back out toward the road. As they reached the knoll at the edge of the chasm, Jason seemed to be bumping Diana with his shoulder. At first, Charlotte thought it was accidental. But then she realized it was deliberate. Diana must have too, because she turned to confront Jason, her face confused and angry. Seconds later, he had her in an elbow lock and was pushing her toward the precipice.
“He’s going to push her over!” Charlotte exclaimed.
“Fuck!” said Voorhees.
As Charlotte and Voorhees raced toward the couple from one direction, a motorized wheelchair was racing toward them from the other. It was Spiegel: a knight in shining armor on his motorized charger, with a camera around his neck. He must have been taking pictures on the other side of the chasm. With one hand, he squeezed the lever that propelled the vehicle forward, and with the other, he brandished a crutch as if it were a jousting lance.
Charlotte and Voorhees were running, but it was Spiegel who reached Jason first. He slammed into him with the Amigo, and then tried to hit him over the head with the crutch. Releasing Diana, Jason turned to Spiegel, and wrenched the crutch out of his grip. Then he pulled out a gun and hit Spiegel over the back of the head with the butt. When Jason looked up, he was staring Voorhees in the face.
“Drop the gun,” ordered Voorhees. He stood in a combat stance, with his legs spread apart and both hands gripping the handle of his revolver.
Jason complied.
Voorhees instructed Diana to move around to where Charlotte was standing, and then gestured to Jason with his gun. “Now, step away from in front of the wheelchair,” he ordered. Removing one hand from his gun, he reached into his pocket for the handcuffs.
What happened next took only a few seconds, but each fraction of that time was engraved in Charlotte’s memory as if it had lasted a hundred times as long. As Jason stepped away from in front of the Amigo, removing the barrier to its forward motion, the Amigo resumed its course. Spiegel’s white head, now stained with blood where he’d been hit with the butt of the gun, was bent over the handlebars, and his hand was still squeezing the lever!
As they watched in horror, the Amigo raced toward the edge like a runaway horse. Turning away from Jason, Voorhees fired at the Amigo’s motor, hoping to knock it out. But the Amigo raced on. For a second, it looked as if it might get hung up on the downed fencing at the edge of the precipice. It strained futilely, rocking to and fro with the effort of bucking the impediment to its forward course.
Then, just as Voorhees got off a second shot, it lurched forward, and disappeared into the swirling spray that boiled up from below. Diana screamed, but the sound was drowned by the roar of the Falls.
As Voorhees turned his attention back to Jason, Charlotte rushed over to the edge and peered over. There was nothing to be seen except the broken branches of the scrub trees that had found a root-hold in the wall of the cliff, and the foaming chartreuse waters below.
Acta est fabula, she thought. It was one of Tom’s Latin phrases: the drama has been acted out.
Charlotte returned to Paterson the next day at Voorhees’ invitation. He felt that he owed her a final accounting, he said. She had been excluded from the police’s interrogation of Jason. Protocol, Voorhees had said, and she had unders
tood. Her involvement was unofficial, and, she was sure, would not have been welcomed by the higher-ups, had they known about it, which she doubted they did. Voorhees was shrewd enough not to have talked about it, and Martinez was shrewd enough not to talk, period.
She would miss Paterson, she thought as the highway skirted Garrett Mountain. The city lay spread out to her right, encircled by the protective ring of the Passaic River: a rich tapestry of red-brick factories and mills that glowed with a warm, rosy patina in the late September sun, the church steeples and smokestacks reaching for the sky like the bell towers of a Tuscan hill town. It was a particularly human town, where old Italian ladies sold bouquets of black-eyed Susans, and the local eatery gave free meals to the homeless. More like a small town than a city, a small town where everybody knew everybody else, and where everybody knew somebody who had worked in the mills, or somebody who still did.
Once she had gotten off the highway, it took only a few minutes to reach the public safety complex. After parking her car, she walked up to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation on the second floor.
“Did your daughter get to her meet on time?” she asked once she was comfortably settled in Voorhees’ office.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I was sorry I couldn’t make it. She took a first, which means that she qualifies for the nationals.”
“And if she wins in the nationals?”
“She’ll have a shot at the Olympics,” he said. He smiled. “Little did I know what I was letting myself in for when I signed her up for diving lessons all those years ago.”
“Congratulations,” said Charlotte.
“Thanks. We’ll see what happens. After years of training, a little injury could do her in. But meanwhile, she’ll have had a good time. At least I hope she’ll have had a good time.”
“Demetra,” said Charlotte. “That’s a Greek name, isn’t it?”
“You’re asking because I knew the word philotimo?”
Charlotte nodded. “I thought you might be Greek,” she said.
“Not me. I’m from old Paterson stock: Dutch, English, a little Irish. The Irish part worked in the mills. But my wife is Greek, so I know a little of the lingo. I’ve been in the doghouse with her relatives ever since I arrested John. I’m glad I’m going to be able to clear his name. Can I get you some coffee?”
“Thanks” said Charlotte. “Black is fine.”
Voorhees disappeared into the adjoining room, and returned a moment later with two cups of coffee. He handed one to Charlotte, and sat down with the other in his swivel chair. Then he said, “I want to thank you. Without you, I never would have solved this case.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Charlotte.
“It’s true; the key was the aprons. I’m very grateful. I like the fact that I’ll be finishing up my career with a closed case.” He made a gesture of finality with his hands. “Nice and neat.”
At Charlotte’s questioning look, he explained. “I’ve put in for early retirement. We can put in at twenty years. I have another career to manage now.” He nodded at the photo of Demi.
“It sounds as if it’s going to be a full-time job.”
“Close to it,” he said. “My thanks to your husband, too,” he said. “We’re very grateful for his help. Will you be seeing him?”
“I doubt it. He’s about to become my ex-husband,” she added with a rueful smile, “but I do expect to be talking to him.”
“I wish you’d pass along our thanks. I understand,” he added. “I’m going through the same thing myself. My wife and I have been separated for sixteen years. She’s been in a mental institution.”
“Since your daughter was an infant!” said Charlotte.
He nodded. “I never wanted to divorce her—for Demi’s sake. For a long time, I hoped she would get better. And she did sometimes, but then she’d go off again. But”—he shrugged—“there comes a time. Sixteen years is a long time to be lonely.”
Charlotte berated herself for making a judgment about his being a ladies’ man when he was just reaching out for some human warmth. She remembered his wry acknowledgment of her observation that people do strange things in the name of love. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He shrugged again. “We recovered the paintings, by the way.”
“Where were they?”
“The frames were exactly where Spiegel said they would be. In Armentrout’s storage room. The canvases had been rolled up and stored in a vault right here in downtown Paterson. Armentrout told us where they were. He’s angling for a light sentence.”
“Did he confess to the murder?”
“Yes. After the party, he dropped Diana off and then continued on. He was passing the mill when he saw Goslau passed out on the sidewalk. He stopped with the idea of helping him, and then got the idea of throwing him in the raceway.”
“So Diana wasn’t involved.”
“No. She didn’t even know. But she was in on the scheme to sell the paintings. She just thought Jason was taking advantage of a situation in which Goslau was dead.” He took a sip of coffee, and then said: “He used Goslau’s key to get into the mill.”
Charlotte slapped a palm to her forehead: “Of course!” she said. “And here I was wondering whether Randy would have given him one.” She was reminded of Tom’s Latin phrase: “Sometimes even the good Homer dozes.”
Voorhees chuckled. “I can’t say that I was too quick on the uptake on that one myself. Some detectives we are, huh? He couldn’t find any rope—that’s when he remembered giving Randy the aprons.”
“I suppose he used Randy’s keys to open the gate too.”
Voorhees nodded. “Now, here’s the interesting part: while Armentrout was wrapping Goslau up, he started coming around. Whereupon Armentrout went back inside for the bottle of Courvoisier, and then poured it down Goslau’s gullet.”
“So that bottle hadn’t been consumed by an upscale wino.”
“Nope.” As far as I’m concerned, that bottle of Courvoisier is the difference between taking advantage of a situation—if that’s what you want to call throwing an unconscious cokehead in the drink—and premeditated murder.”
“Motive?”
“Greed, as usual. It’s always greed. Or almost always greed. You were right about his being in financial trouble. The trust fund had run out, and he was in debt up to his eyeballs. He’d been living off Diana, but they had exhausted her resources, too.”
Just then, the phone rang.
“Excuse me,” said Voorhees as he reached to answer it.
A second later he had hung up. “That was the chief of the rescue squad. They’re about to start trying to retrieve Spiegel’s body. They would have done it yesterday, but they thought it would be top dangerous for the divers. Are you interested in going over?”
Charlotte said she was, and they arrived shortly after the rescue squad, which had already lowered a rubber boat over the retaining wall at the Falls overlook. Joining the throng of spectators, they watched the divers search the area where Spiegel had landed.
It was tough work. Though the volume of water was less than the day before, it was still heavy and the divers kept getting dragged downstream by the current, and having to be pulled back.
“How deep is the water there?” asked Charlotte.
“About twenty-five feet. Deep enough so that the current shouldn’t have carried the body very far.”
“Especially if it’s weighted down by a wheelchair.”
Just then, one of the divers popped to the surface and pointed at the spot where he had just come up. The rescue workers in the boat tossed him a grappling hook, and then he dove back down again. It was the same spot that John had pointed out to her, the spot where the body they’d thought was Spiegel’s had come up.
This time, the diver was down for quite a while. He finally came back up and signaled for the men on the boat to start reeling in the winch. They turned for several minutes before the bumper of the Amigo broke the water. Next came the ste
ering mechanism, and finally the seat. Spiegel was still strapped in, his camera still around his neck.
Though the face was bloated from decomposition, there was no mistaking the white hair and the beard. “Guess it’s Spiegel, all right,” said Voorhees, turning away from the upsetting sight. “Let’s go.”
“Nice and neat,” Voorhees had said. But it hadn’t been nice and neat, not by a long shot, Charlotte thought as they left. Two innocent people were dead; almost three. John Andriopoulis would probably have died anyway, but that wasn’t the case for Don Spiegel. She thought of the white, bloated body: how ironic that he had once escaped death at the Falls, only to succumb the second time. It seemed as if it was fated.
But that’s how things often happened. She had heard on the news only that morning about a traffic reporter who had died in a helicopter crash after surviving a similar crash only the week before.
As she looked back, Charlotte noticed the rainbow. It spanned the mouth of the gorge, one end emerging from the mist directly above the spot where they had pulled Spiegel’s body out. As she watched, the yellow-orange band dissolved into the mist, which carried it upward in copper-colored puffs. They reminded her of the puffs of incense that carried the soul of the departed to heaven.
Magical things were always happening in Paterson.
16
Charlotte paid a condolence call on Louise the next day. She had learned from Voorhees that Spiegel and his wife had reconciled before his death. He had been planning to give up his studio apartment in the Essex Mill and move back in with her and Julius.
His intentions became apparent as soon as Charlotte drew up to the house. The stairs leading up to the front door had already been covered over by a newly constructed wheelchair ramp. Charlotte walked up the ramp, and rang the doorbell.
Louise answered, and escorted Charlotte into a paneled living room filled with mission-style furniture that matched the period of the house. She looked well—far better than she had when Charlotte had seen her earlier that week.
“You were right about your husband not being dead,” Charlotte said. “You must have powers of extrasensory perception.”
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