Murder at the Falls (2 page)

He turned back to face her. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head in amazement that this masterpiece of roadside architecture could have escaped his attention. “Why is it that some New Yorkers have never been to the Empire State Building or some Parisians to the Eiffel Tower? I’ve lived within a few miles of Paterson almost my entire life, but I’ve only been there a few times. I’d even heard about the Falls View, but I just never got out there.”

New Jersey’s ascendacy in the diner world had to do not only with the artistic quality of its diners, but also with their sheer numbers. According to Tom, whose authority on such matters Charlotte considered absolute, New Jersey was home to two thousand of the nation’s estimated six thousand diners. At one time, most of the diners in America had been manufactured in New Jersey, which was the location of the Ford, GM, and Chrysler of diner manufacturers.

No one could have grown up in New Jersey, as Tom had, and not love diners, he claimed. It went with the territory, like calling an Italian sandwich a hoagie and body surfing at the Jersey shore. But it had taken a trip to the Museum of Modern Art to transform his native appreciation into an obsession. He spoke about the moment he fell in love with diners with the same kind of nostalgic warmth that is usually reserved for a first love.

The waiter brought their sandwiches. Leaves of fresh basil peeked out from between the edges of the roll. The smell was intoxicating: there was nothing like the aroma of fresh basil on a summer’s day, even one in September.

As Charlotte ate her sandwich, enjoying the warmth of the sunshine and the buoyant mood of the city, she recalled Tom telling her about that moment. He had been browsing in the gift shop at the museum when he found himself face to face with an art poster, a photograph of Pal’s, in Mahwah, N.J., the diner in which he had spent much of his misspent youth. His first reaction had been incredulity. “Pal’s is art?” he asked himself. But then, looking again at the sign that proclaimed “Pal’s” in flowing pink neon script and the stainless steel sheathing that gleamed like polished silver, he had realized that Pal’s
was
art, part of the rapidly disappearing roadside architecture of the mid-twentieth century.

The framed poster of Pal’s now hung in his living room. And Pal’s became the first entry in a journal of diner encounters that now extended to four hundred and eleven entries, each described according to make and model, which Tom knew the way others know the makes and models of classic cars. He was now thinking about turning his journal, complete with his collection of photographs, into a book.

Tom set down his sandwich, and looked Charlotte in the eye. “Graham,” he said, in an uncharacteristically serious tone, “I know I’ve said this before, but this time I really mean it. This is the one.”

Maybe it wasn’t a woman that Tom needed to settle down with, Charlotte thought. Maybe it was a diner. “What’s the specialty?” she asked suspiciously, knowing that she would be required to pass judgment on the cuisine.

“Hot Texas wieners.”

Charlotte raised a skeptical eyebrow, which was one of her screen trademarks, along with her forthright stride and her clipped Yankee accent. “Hot Texas wieners! In Paterson, New Jersey?”

“I know they sound terrible, but they’re really surprisingly good. Take my word for it, Graham. You’ll really like them. Local custom calls for them to be served ‘all the way’,” he added with a mischievous grin.

“Dare I ask what all the way is?”

“With mustard, chopped onions, and chili sauce. And”—he raised a finger for emphasis—“local custom also calls for them to be served with a mug of birch beer and french fries.”

“As in ‘two all the way with beer and fries?’” said Charlotte, who by now had acquired a certain knack for diner lingo.

“You’ve got it.”

“When are we going?”

“How does Sunday sound? As it turns out, that’s the day of the opening of an exhibit at the local museum that I’d like to go to, on the New Jersey diner. The opening reception starts at seven.”

“Eat at the diner, then go to the show?”

Tom nodded. “There’s an artist who’s exhibiting in the show whom I’d like to meet. Maybe we can arrange to have dinner with him. He paints diners,” he added. “I thought maybe he could do the cover for my book.”

“Sounds fine to me. Remind me to take along the Alka-Seltzer.”

2

They left the city at about five in Tom’s 1962 Buick Electra 225 convertible, which was named for its overall length in inches—in other words, a boat—and which was nicknamed by car buffs the “deuce and a quarter.” The Buick wasn’t Tom’s only car. He also had a small Japanese car (Charlotte wasn’t the kind who could name makes and models, her descriptions of cars tending to run more to “small red” or “large gray”), but this luxury liner of an automobile with real leather seats was Tom’s car of choice for diner-hunting jaunts into the suburbs. Tom said it put him in the mood for a road trip, as it did Charlotte, especially when she was floating down the highway with the top down on a fine evening like this one, an old Beach Boys song on the radio. (Tom’s generation, not hers; but the rock and roll oldies stations seemed to go with the experience of a diner jaunt). Tom kept the Buick garaged on the West Side, near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, for quick getaways to prime diner-hunting territory on the other side of the Hudson.

“So what’s so special about the Falls View that it qualifies for the august rank of the perfect diner?” asked Charlotte, raising her voice to be heard above the roar of the traffic. They had just emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel into the land ’o diners, a landscape that for Tom was delineated not by cities, rivers, and mountains, but by the locations of roadside eateries.

“Lots of things,” he replied. “First, it’s a pristine pre-war diner, circa 1939, which I know you’ll recognize as a good year.”

It was the year in which Charlotte had made her first movie. Ironically, she had played a diner waitress who falls in love with a hobo customer only to find out later that he is a philanthropic millionaire who has assumed the role of a hobo to find out what life on the road is really like. They live happily ever after. Such were the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She missed them.

Tom continued: “Stainless steel banding; porcelain enamel exterior; sunburst stainless steel backbars; original menu boards; vintage Seeburg 100 Wallomatic jukebox; original neon sign and exterior clock; curved glass block entryway; open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; breakfast at any hour, day or night; plenty of newspapers for the customers …”

“Whoa. Slow down. As I understand it, what you’ve just listed are the basic qualifications for the rank of perfect dinner,” Charlotte interrupted. Though it
was
rare to find a diner that had all the basics. Like Miss Americas, even the best had some flaw: an overbite, a regrettable accent, a bustline that hinted at the probability of falsies. “What makes this one extra special?”

“You’re right. Those are just the basics. First among the features that makes this one special is the location.” He looked over at Charlotte. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a diner in such a spectacular location. Falls View isn’t entirely accurate. You have to walk up the street a little. But when you do, you are overlooking one of the most spectacular waterfalls in America.”

“I remember them,” she said. “The Great Falls.”

“The second special feature is tradition,” he continued. “The Falls View is still on its original site. Furthermore, it was built in Paterson. It’s a Silk City,” he said, naming the Paterson Vehicle Company’s famous model. “It isn’t often that you find a diner that hasn’t been moved, much less one that’s located only a few miles from the place where it was built.”

Tom was right. Originally built on wheels, diners were designed to be moved from one place to another, and often were.

“And third … I guess you’d have to call it local flavor. Lots of diners have a specialty, but it’s usually something you could find anywhere, like cherry pie or sticky buns or corned beef hash. If it is a local specialty, it tends to be a regional one, like New England clam chowder. Hot Texas wieners are truly a local specialty, at least the way they’re made here.”

They rode in silence for a while, enjoying the evening. The air was warm, but it had lost its August heaviness. They were passing the futuristic Meadowlands Sports Complex, with its gigantic football stadium and sports arena. Only fifteen years ago, the air would have been unbreathable. Then this marshland had still been the dumping ground for most of New York’s garbage.

“Last but not least, it looks like it’s there to stay,” Tom added after a while. “Not like—” His glance shifted to the side of the highway, where the Tick Tock Diner stood in all its modern splendor, a stone, steel, and glass structure in the style that Tom called “Greco-glitz.” The Tick Tock had once been cloaked in the mantle of greatness now worn by the venerable Falls View.

“
Sic transit gloria dineri
,” said Charlotte.

“You said it,” Tom replied.

One of Tom’s irritating personal idiosyncracies was tossing out phrases in Latin, the only use to which he was able to put his classics degree from a prestigious institution of higher learning, other than translating the Latin inscriptions on the pediments of museums and banks. Charlotte took great delight in tossing them back at him once in a while.

The sad side of the story of Tom’s quest for the perfect diner was that not all of the anointed eateries had been superseded by diners that Tom considered even more perfect. A common fate was to be traded in like a used car and put up on blocks in the back lot of some diner manufacturer in exchange for a new Mediterranean style diner-restaurant, or “dinerant,” as Tom called them.

Such had been the sorry fate of the fallen Tick Tock, which, like the Falls View, had once been a classic Silk City. Before it was “renovated,” the Tick Tock had been the subject of one of Tom’s Diner Alerts. As he had revisited the site of one diner after another only to find the lot vacant and the diner hauled off to a diner graveyard, Tom’s crusade had expanded from finding diners to preserving them. He had launched a magazine called
Diner Monthly
, whose Diner Alert column tipped readers off to threatened diners.

A mention in the Diner Alert column was guaranteed to unleash a flurry of protest from impassioned diner devotees. Often their preservation efforts were successful. But the Tick Tock was one of their failures. It had gone from the Diner Alert column to the Sentenced to Death column and finally to the black-bordered Obituaries section. Despite a full parking lot, it was dead as far as fans of the classic diner were concerned.

In the cases of classic diners that were replaced by something more modern, there was at least the hope of reincarnation. Even worse was to be hauled off to some “diner no-man’s-land” in Texas or California, and decorated with Elvis posters and old Chevy fenders in some ersatz imitation of what a diner should be. For Tom, such a fate was the equivalent of an art treasure being hauled off by a tribe with no appreciation of its proper history or use.

But one didn’t have to go to Texas to find diners that were victims of this retro-diner craze. Tom had once taken Charlotte to a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue that had been assembled from bits and pieces of classic diners. It was decorated with old movie posters, including one of herself with Fred MacMurray in a movie she would rather have forgotten. The diners from which the fittings for this imposter among diners had been salvaged had been given a special listing in
Diner Monthly
: “Cannibalized.”

Diners were even being shipped to Europe. There was one in Covent Garden, in London, and even one in Paris. “But,” Tom had said, upon telling her this, “The real question is, Can they do rice pudding on the Left Bank?”

The Falls View turned out to be everything that Tom said it would be. It sat on its lot on the bank of the Passaic River just above the famous Falls with the smug comfort of an establishment that had been there for a long time and had no plans to move.
Falls View Diner
was written in pink neon script along the roofline. A neon-ringed clock stood above the name, and “Open 24 Hours,” and “Try Our Famous Hot Texas Wieners” were spelled out in smaller letters underneath. The maroon, Broadway-style lettering on the gray porcelain enamel siding read: “Booths for Ladies” and “Gents’s Bar” on one side and “Consistently Fine Food Since 1939” on the other. Inside, the mood was one of warm, cozy comfort—a counter of reddish-purple marble, booths of Honduran mahoghany upholstered in maroon leatherette, and the intricate tile designs that were the hallmark of a Silk City. There were no missing tiles, no holes in the upholstery, no Formica panels replacing the damaged woodwork, only the warm patina of surfaces that had been lovingly cleaned and polished day after day, week after week, over the course of fifty years. It was untouched by time: a little slice of life from the late Depression. Charlotte felt right at home—they were both pieces from the same period.

“I see what you mean,” she said to Tom as they entered.

But if the Falls View had been overlooked by Tom, it hadn’t gone undiscovered. Above the cash register hung a display of T-shirts (one hundred percent cotton, $12.95), coffee mugs ($6), and postcards, all bearing a drawing of the Falls View, and aimed at the diner enthusiast. It was clear that the owner (Greek, judging from the poster of the Acropolis) had no scant appreciation for the commercial possibilities offered by the nostalgic appeal of his dining establishment. It was also axiomatic (and something of a mystery to Charlotte) that all New Jersey diners were owned by Greeks who were usually named Nick, just as all Manhattan vegetable stand proprietors were Korean and umbrella vendors Senegalese.

The diner artist with whom Tom had arranged the meeting was waiting for them next to a sandwich board by the door advertising that the Falls View’s famous sauce was available “for that special occasion” by the pint ($2) and by the quart ($3.50). There was no mistaking him. He was dressed as “the artist” for the opening reception: a black dinner jacket and red bow tie worn with blue jeans and high-top black sneakers. His shoulder-length dark blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. Charlotte groaned inwardly at the juvenile pretentiousness, the feeble effort at reverse chic. She could just imagine what his paintings were like.