Murder at the Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

noticed that he didn’t offer to pick up his share of the tab,” Charlotte said after he had left.
    “I noticed that, too. I don’t think I like that guy.”
    “I know I don’t like that guy. I sure as hell wouldn’t give him any cash until he’s produced a painting. Are you going to go through with your meeting with him, or are you going to try to get out of it?”
    “I’m going to go through with it. I’d still like to see more of his work. But if I do want to get out of the arrangement, I know how to go about it.”
    “How?” asked Charlotte.
    “Ask him to use less paint.”

3
    The museum where the art exhibit was located was just down the street from the diner, in one of the historic factories at the foot of the Falls. As they walked along the street paralleling the river, Tom filled Charlotte in on the local history, which he had picked up on a walking tour of the district on his earlier visit. The nation’s first industrial city was the dream of Alexander Hamilton, who, while picnicking at the Falls (lacking the convenience of a nearby diner, as Tom put it) with George Washington and Lafayette during the Revolutionary War, envisioned a network of raceways that would harness the waters of the Falls. After the war, Hamilton formed the S.U.M. (Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures) corporation and engaged the architect of the nation’s capital, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, to lay out a raceway system. Over the next hundred years, Paterson was to become renowned as the nation’s foremost industrial city. Among the many products produced in the red brick mills lining the river banks were locomotives, the Colt six-gun, and the beautifully dyed silk that gave the city its sobriquet of Silk City.
    Paterson’s heyday as an industrial power came to an end in the early twentieth century when a series of crippling strikes organized by the notorious Industrial Workers of the World, or the “Wobblies,” led to the demise of the silk industry. Many of the mills fell into disrepair, and the area around the Falls was destined for demolition when a redevelopment movement led by a group of persistent and energetic citizens resulted in its being designated a national historic district. The citizens’ vision was to create a “historic Williamsburg of industry,” centered around the Falls. With the help of Federal monies, local agencies created a series of parks in the vicinity of the Falls, and restored the scenic network of raceways. One of the goals was to restore the deteriorating mills. This was accomplished in part by providing rent subsidies for loft apartments to artists and musicians fed up with the hassle and expense of living and working in nearby New York. As a result, an artists’ colony of New York refugees had grown up—a mini-Soho, as they liked to call it—which had in turn attracted restaurants, boutiques, and galleries. It was a community that was still struggling to survive—as the many still-empty mills, and the winos, crackheads, and lunatics that inhabited them substantiated—but there was no doubt that the artists’ presence had injected a much-needed dose of vitality into the blighted city.
    None of this was apparent in the neighborhood of the Falls View, which consisted of a series of garages, run-down apartment buildings, and two-family houses lining the river bank. The historic district began about fifty feet up the street, at the bridge that spanned the river just above the Falls. Here, the street was paralleled by the first tier of the three-tiered raceway system that diverted the water to the mills below. Tom said that the water, propelled by turbines, had once rushed through this raceway, but it now flowed languidly between the brownstone retaining walls, which were overhung with willow trees, their pale green leaves now tinged with gold.
    Another fifty feet or so down the street, they had their first glimpse of the Falls. In the thirty-odd years since she had seen