Free Murder at the Falls by Stefanie Matteson Page B

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