Murder at the Falls (8 page)

The pie was realistic right down to the beads of moisture that had congealed on the surface of the meringue. Charlotte had never seen anything quite like it.

Having finished with her customer, Diana wandered over.

“This stuff is great,” said Tom. “What do you call it?”

“Well, I would call it
trompe l’oeil
ceramics, but the artist prefers the term material illusionism.”

“It makes you think you’ve never really looked at a pie before,” Tom said.

“That’s the idea,” said Diana with a smile. “The artist’s goal, to quote her, is to reawaken the dormant joys of observation.” She cocked her pretty head and asked: “What can I do for you?”

“We just came in to chat about Randy,” Charlotte said, after introducing herself. “Tom wants to do an article on him. Randy told us a little about himself the other evening, but we wondered if you could fill us in.”

“Would you like to sit outside?” asked Diana. She gestured at the table and chairs on the flagstone patio just beyond the open doors. “Go ahead,” she directed them. “I’ll just get us something to drink.”

Stepping outside, they took seats at the table, which was shaded by a huge old sycamore. The cool rush of the waterfall was delightful on this hot afternoon. The setting reminded Charlotte of one of her favorite places: the vest-pocket park, with its refreshing waterfall, on New York City’s West Forty-fifth street.

“What was this building used for?” Charlotte asked Tom, her authority on the history and lore of Paterson.

“It housed the wheelhouse for the Ivanhoe Papermill Complex. The wheel was there,” he said, pointing to the taller section of the building, “and the egress for the water was down there.” He pointed to an archway at water level.

Leaning back, Charlotte studied the elegant brickwork of the wall looming over them. It was studded with wildflowers that had found niches in the moist nooks and crannies between the old bricks.

Diana reappeared momentarily with a tray on which sat three glasses, a bottle of Pernod, and a small bowl of green olives.

Not only did Charlotte not feel as if she was in the heart of a deteriorating American industrial city, she didn’t feel as if she was in an American city at all. With the Pernod and olives, she could have been sitting at an outdoor café in Cannes or Nice.

“How’s business?” asked Tom after Diana had poured the yellow, anise-flavored aperitif and handed the glasses around.

“In a word, it stinks. Do you see any customers?” she asked, waving an arm at her surroundings. “It’s bad. So bad, in fact, that I may not be in business much longer. At this point, it’s only my income as a curator that’s keeping the wolf from the door. I had big hopes when I came here. I thought I would be the Paula Cooper of the Great Falls Historic District.”

“Who’s Paula Cooper?” asked Tom, popping on olive in his mouth.

“She was the first art dealer to open a gallery in Soho, in 1967. Now there are a hundred and forty of them. She followed the artists, who were lured there by the cheap rents. Back in the seventies, I thought the same thing was going to happen here. There was nowhere to go but up, or so we thought. Paterson had been rated the most depressed city in America. For a while, it looked good: the historic district and all that. There was a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm. They were calling Paterson ‘the Venice of America,’ because of the raceways. What a joke.” She laughed bitterly. “Then it all just fizzled out. The odds were too overwhelming. Not only did the new people not come, the pioneers started leaving. Once they started having children, they moved to the suburbs, where there are safe streets, good schools. I don’t blame them.”

“People talk as if there’s a thriving community here,” said Charlotte.

“We talk a good game. Or maybe it should be called wishful thinking. The much-vaunted renaissance of the historic district is a fraud. I’ve got a crack den across the street.” She pointed to a picturesque little brick building that was perched on the bank of the raceway behind the Gryphon Mill. “I’ve got winos sleeping in my doorway. It seems like another mill goes up in smoke every few weeks.”

“The owners are torching them?”

“They deny it. They say it’s squatters setting fires to keep warm. But most of the fires have been in the summer. Who needs to keep warm in summer? You tell me. The developers bought these mills during the good years, with high hopes of restoring them, and then the economy soured. A lot of them didn’t realize how expensive it is to restore these buildings. There are all sorts of restrictions that go with historic district status. See those windows?” She turned around to nod at the huge windows on the first floor of the gallery. “Each one is a slightly different size, which means a custom replacement, or close to it, for every single one.”

“Sounds like the voice of experience speaking,” said Charlotte.

“You bet,” she said. “Costly experience.” She sipped her drink thoughtfully. “Our last ray of hope was Don Spiegel. He was a Paterson native who had come home to roost. When he renovated the Gryphon Mill we all thought he would pull us back from the edge, and he nearly did. Our white knight; the big-name artist. But then he had the audacity to jump off the bridge and ruin it for us all.”

“The observation bridge over the chasm?” asked Tom.

Diana nodded. “It’s a popular jumping spot; very picturesque. New Jersey’s answer to the Golden Gate.” She looked up toward the bridge as if she were considering jumping herself. “His body didn’t come up for four months. That often happens. The bodies get tangled up in the old construction debris from the hydrolectric plant at the bottom. Being where I am, I have front row seats for the retrieval of corpses. The rescue squad lowers the boat into the river right up there.” She gestured toward the head of the street. “Though I didn’t have the pleasure of being a witness to that one, thank God.”

Charlotte thought of the amount of decomposition that had taken place in Randy’s corpse after just three days, and shuddered at the thought of what Spiegel’s body must have looked like after four months.

“But you wanted to know about Randy. Speaking of drowning victims,” she added with an ironic little laugh. “I used to represent him. When he was starting out. After he became successful, he abandoned me. Moved to the Koreman Gallery, on West Broadway in Soho.”

“That’s where I originally saw his work,” said Tom.

“Tell me, when you were talking with him about buying a painting, did he ever mention giving a commission to the gallery?”

Tom shook his head.

“I didn’t think so. If you keep quiet, he’ll charge you a reduced price, and you’ll both make out, right? Wrong. He would have charged you full freight anyway. He pulled the same stunt with my customers. Cheated me, and cheated them. After all I had done to promote his work. It takes a lot of energy to shape the reputation of a young artist, and he was an unknown when he came to me. Then he decided he didn’t want to be represented by a small-time gallery anymore. Actually, I shouldn’t complain. What he did to me is nothing compared to what he was doing to Mary Catherine Koreman.”

“You mean by cheating her out of her commission?” asked Charlotte.

“No. I mean by shaking her down. Extortion is the word, I believe.”

“Extortion?”

“Randy got a kickback for every painting the Lumkins bought from Koreman. The deal was this: if Mary Catherine didn’t fork over, he would use his influence with Xantha”—she contorted her face in an expression of repugnance—“to get the Lumkins to take their business elsewhere.”

“Where they
were
willing to pay.”

“You’ve got it. If you wanted to sell a painting to the Lumkins, you had to go through Randy. Mary Catherine has probably paid him tens of thousands of dollars over the past few years. I’ll tell you—the only person who ever made out in a deal with Randy Goslau was Randy Goslau.” She shrugged her lovely shoulders, which were set off by a gauzy sleeveless dress. “As you can tell, I’m not exactly brokenhearted that the conniving little creep is dead.”

Recognizing his cue, Tom stepped in: “Who
else
do you think might have wanted to kill him?” he asked with a charming grin.

Diana smiled. “Besides me, you mean? Believe me, if it had been me who killed him, I wouldn’t have just thrown him in the river. I’d have thought of a much more painful way to do him in. Having him keelhauled or drawn and quartered are two means that spring to mind.” She thought about the question for a minute. “Well, there are a lot of suspects. Randy managed to offend just about everyone he knew at one time or another.”

“For example?” prompted Tom.

“Mary Catherine Koreman, for starters. She’ll save a lot of money with Randy out of the picture. By killing him off, she would be eliminating the middleman, so to speak. But then, she
has
a lot of money, so maybe she doesn’t really have that much of a motive.” She paused to think again, and then continued: “Bernice, of course. Everyone is already saying that Bernice did it, or hired someone to do it.”

“Bernice who?” asked Charlotte.

Diana seemed astonished that they didn’t know who she was talking about. “Bernice Spiegel, of course.”

“The wife of the artist?”

She shook her head. “The sister of the artist, and the heir to his estate. Do you mean to tell me that you haven’t read about Bernice’s legal battle with Randy? It’s been written up
ad nauseum
in the art journals, to say nothing of the newspapers. I think there was even an article about it in
People
.”

Charlotte and Tom both looked at her blankly.

“Well, I can see I have a lot of filling in to do. Living in such a hermetic little world here, we sometimes forget that everyone else doesn’t have the same interests we have.”

“I think you’d better start at Square One,” Charlotte said.

“Okay. Square One. Bernice Spiegel is, or rather was, Don Spiegel’s business manager. She is also the self-appointed keeper of the flame, guardian of the grave, whatever.”

“A Cerberus,” said Tom, the classics scholar.

“I guess you could call her that.” She looked over at Tom. “Was Cerberus a pit bull?” she joked. “Anyway, Bernice was president of the corporation, the Gryphon Corporation, which managed Don’s business affairs. He was a salaried employee. It was a tax shelter, also a convenience for Don. With Bernice in charge of his money he could devote himself entirely to his painting. He didn’t have to worry about monitoring his investments or paying his bills.”

Charlotte was familiar with the arrangement. Though she herself was too suspicious to trust somebody else with her money, she knew that many of her acting colleagues did. In fact, there were businesses that provided a similar service for Hollywood celebrities.

Diana continued: “The dispute arose over Don’s will, which stipulated that, apart from a substantial trust that had been set aside for his son, the remainder of his estate, including his property holdings—namely the Gryphon Mill—and all of his paintings would go to the Gryphon Corporation. In other words, to Bernice. The value of the residuary estate has been estimated at anywhere from forty to sixty million dollars.”

“Gulp!” said Tom.

“Don was one of the most financially successful painters of his generation. Now, to backtrack a little: Randy was Don’s assistant. He had worked for Don for ten years or so. He was hired a year or two before Don split up with his wife, Louise. Not only did Randy mix paints and stretch canvases, he also did all the cooking—Don never cooked—the cleaning, the grocery shopping, the errands. He was the household manager.”

“He became the wife.…” said Charlotte.

“Exactly. In all fairness, I have to say that he worked like a dog. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. He wasn’t paid much—two fifty a week, he once told me—but to talk about his pay is misleading because Don, or rather the Gryphon Corporation, also covered all of Randy’s expenses: rent, food, dry cleaning, airport limos—you name it. There were other benefits too. It was Don who started Randy painting diners, who introduced him to high rollers like the Lumkins, and who promoted his career in general. The dispute between Bernice and Randy arose over another of these perks: an agreement that upon Don’s death, Randy would take possession of a collection of twelve paintings which Don had loaned to him over the years, and which hung in Randy’s studio at the mill. The gift agreement was Don’s way of providing for Randy’s long-term security. It was a formal agreement, drawn up by a lawyer and including detailed descriptions of the paintings. The value of the paintings at the time of Don’s death was estimated at eight to ten million dollars.”

“Whew!” said Tom. “A million a year isn’t bad long-term security.”

“Yeah,” said Diana. “Don was a generous guy, extravagantly so. It was just as well that Bernice was managing his money. He probably would have pissed it all away otherwise. Anyway, this document was drawn up, oh, maybe three or four years ago. To continue the story: as Randy became more and more successful, he began to resent his position as Don’s vassal, however well-treated he might have been. He started neglecting his duties: not showing up, throwing temper tantrums when he was asked to do something he considered beneath him. That sort of thing. He also developed a serious cocaine habit. I’m not talking party coke here. I once found him passed out in my doorway when I got here in the morning. He must have been hanging out with the winos. Anyway, he and Don began to quarrel. Then came the
ARTnews
incident. In an article on artists’ assistants, Randy claimed that he had actually painted some of Don’s paintings himself, paintings that were signed ‘DS.’ Don always signed his work with his initials, which were hidden somewhere in the painting. Randy made it sound as if Don’s paintings were like the products of one of those Renaissance workshops in which the only parts actually executed by the signatory artist were the finishing touches and the signature.”

“Was it true?” Charlotte asked.

“Let me tell you about the Gryphon Mill. The mill was an ongoing house party. If the art community of Paterson could be said to have had a clubhouse, the mill was it. Artists, would-be artists, dealers, collectors, sycophants, jazz musicians, groupies, poets, writers—you name it. People like the Lumkins thought it was great, a safe little taste of Bohemia. There were people going in and out of Don’s studio all day, every day. Rare was the night when there weren’t a dozen people for dinner. Part of the reason that Louise left Don was that she couldn’t stand living in a goldfish bowl. In all the times that I was there—and I was there three or four times a week over the course of twelve years—I never saw anyone but Don put a brush to one of his canvases. Besides, it would have shown. Don had a magic touch: he was very precise. He could create an effect with one stroke. Randy’s technique is entirely different.”