A Little Trouble with the Facts (25 page)

I tried to focus on the graffiti: Hager, Sane, Tyre, KiK, Tnx, Son, a new name every foot or two. But we were looking for
only one name, and a few steps past the landline, we found it. A throw-up, the same signature he’d painted when he was sixteen, just like the one he’d demonstrated in Cabeza’s flick, outlined in purple, filled with baby blue: STAIN. It looked fresh. The paint was still sticky and it hadn’t been buffed. I saw another, just about a yard ahead, and went to that, then another, another yard ahead. It was like following breadcrumbs out of the woods.

“When I was growing up, this bridge was supposed to be the scariest place on earth,” Curtis said, following close behind. “You always heard ghost stories. Kids said they saw lights for trains that never came or else trains full of ghosts. A homeless guy who lived under the bridge who’d snatch kids. Mafiosos dumping bodies. I knew guys who tagged up here in the seventies. Let me tell you, they had
cojones
.”

We continued along the span, finding another STAIN and then another, all purple outline filled in baby blue. There were just as many on the inside of the bridge as on its outer face. Wallace seemed to have hopped out onto the ledge to burn his throwie where drivers on the Triborough Bridge would see. About a hundred yards out over the center of the river, we found an unfinished signature: an outline “STA” but the fill-in wasn’t done. The
I
started but stopped short, got haphazard, and disappeared off the wall.

The sight was chilling. He’d painted here; that was clear. But he didn’t finish.

“He could’ve decided to stop,” Curtis said, reading the thoughts on my face. “Or he could’ve lost his footing. This doesn’t mean murder.”

I reached out over to the ledge, asking Curtis to hold tight to my wrist. I felt around blind on the base of the ledge, and when my hand came back, it was covered in something shiny and black. “Tar?” said Curtis.

I recognized the scent from my father’s motorcycle shop. It
was a smell you never forgot. I held my hand out to him. “Axle grease,” I said.

Stepping back over the ledge, I dialed Betty Schlachter’s emergency weekend number on my cell. I told her The Paper had some new news on the Wallace case. Since we’d helped find and deliver Kamal, she was nicer to me this time, but not by a whole lot. I told her we had physical evidence that Wallace had been murdered and it wasn’t a gang beef or anything to do with Darla. There was no dial tone this time.

A half hour later, a handsome young assistant district attorney named Mark Detain was eating burgers with Curtis and me at the Neptune Diner near the base of Hell Gate. I asked for mine without onions. I told Detain that I wouldn’t give him anything until he promised to get an officer out to a certain warehouse near the Steinway factory pronto. I also said that we needed a guarantee of on-the-record confirms from the DA’s office if he found our findings to be correct. No less. No anonymous quotes; no “department spokesperson says…” No compromise.

He agreed and I started talking again. After I talked, I took him to see Stain’s last tags and the axle grease. He called the Queens precinct to send out a squad. Then he joined us on a trip downtown to Chelsea, to visit Ms. Deitrick.

The defaced white paintings had been taken off the walls at Darla Deitrick Fine Art and all that was left was the outline of the frames where the spray painting had gone outside the lines. There were long ribbons of yellow police tape on the floor. I left Detain and Curtis to admire the new minimalism, while I went to find Darla. She was in the back room, behind the sliding glass door, sitting in front of a mound of papers I figured for insurance documents. Blondie was behind her, standing stiffly in a blue Prada mod-cut suit, holding the “Pure” catalog.

Blondie gasped. “Oh. My. Valerie. Vane,” he said.

Darla’s eyebrow twitched fiercely when she looked up at me.
“Interesting story you came up with. Too bad it didn’t answer any of the important questions, like who murdered Wallace. Made that culprit of yours look like a little saint. Thanks to you, my gallery has been swarming with federal investigators for days. They seem to think I burned down my own storage facility. I wonder why that is?”

I took a long breath in. “I think we can get those investigators off your back rather quickly, Ms. Deitrick, if you’ll answer a few questions.”

Darla picked up a handful of papers and shook them at me. “You going to take care of all of these too? That the power of the press?”

“Ms. Deitrick, you and I both know I wasn’t responsible for what happened here, so let’s dispense with accusations. I promise not to get you arrested if you keep your copper friends off my back. How about that?”

“I’m not in a bartering mood today,” she said. I had to like her for that.

“You will be,” I said. “Once I fill you in.”

“Talk, then,” she said.

I spilled for the fourth time that day. When I was finished, I said, “I’m afraid we’ll need to see the records of the transactions between you and Jeremiah Golden.”

She didn’t look terribly surprised, but she still resisted. “This will surely come as a surprise to you, Ms. Vane, since you seem to have a very low opinion of art dealers, but our business does follow a code of ethics and unfortunately Mr. Golden is still a private client of mine. My records are—”

“Ms. Deitrick, Jeremiah was responsible for the fire at your warehouse. He was trying to frame you for murder. Does that change things?”

“Jeremiah Golden? He had something to do with these graffiti kids?”

“There was another man too, someone named Cabeza. He was the one who got the kids involved. The link should be all there in your own records. You’re lucky that Gideon here told me what he told me, about your second set of books. Those will be able to help clear you.”

Darla stood up, knocking into Blondie, who reeled back and dropped the catalog. “Second set of books? Why I have no idea—”

“Let’s save the theatrics for the courtroom, Ms. Deitrick. We’ll need you to testify against Mr. Golden. And don’t be mad at Blondie, here. Those books are going to clear you, and get these federal investigators out of your hair.”

I called Curtis and Detain in from the gallery and made introductions. Detain told her everything all over again and made the same request for the books I had a few minutes earlier. If Darla could provide any support for a case against Jeremiah and Cabeza, he told her, he’d see to it that the feds would be waved off. That made her open up in a way she hadn’t since prep-school prom.

“She’s lucky she has you,” I told Blondie as he followed us to the door. “Everyone should have such a loyal tattletale.”

Blondie was still trying to piece together the puzzle. “Wait a minute, Valerie, your ex? Jeremiah bought Stain’s…? Did you know? Oh. My. Wait. It makes sense. He was so strapped—he was here all the—and he
bought
. I see. But, Valerie, doesn’t that make you—”

I turned back to him and smiled. “Yep, it does make me. You’re not bad, Gideon. You were reading the signs all the wrong way, but at least you were reading the signs. We’ll need you to testify too.”

Blondie beamed. “You mean I’ll be on the stand? In the trial of Jeremiah Golden?”

“Should be plenty of press. Make sure you get a good headshot out.”

On the way uptown to Jeremiah’s town house, I put in a call to Amenia. She told me Kamal was out on bail already. That was good news.

“There’s something else that might make the judge go easier,” I said. “How well do you know a man named Cabeza?”

Amenia paused. “Cabeza?” She thought about it for a while. “I dated him a long time ago. It was a big mistake. He had some kind of crazy thing about my brother. Like some kind of obsessed groupie. Does that man have something to do with this?”

“We think he’s the key to it,” I said. “Can you put Kamal on the line?”

Kamal’s voice was weak when he said hello. “Remember at the memorial you asked me if I liked that guy, Cabeza?” I said. “Did he put you up to this stunt?”

Kamal was silent for a moment. “He told me when the guards would be off-duty.”

I smiled into the phone. “Listen, Kamal, can you meet us down at the office today? We’re going to want a little more information from you.”

I ordered a cup of coffee at Eat Here Now, a diner on Lexington Avenue across the street from Jeremiah’s town house, while Curtis went inside with Detain. Before I was done pouring my half-and-half, Curtis returned with the beginnings of a shiner as big as a grapefruit and a grin as wide as a barn. “He sends you his love,” Curtis said.

“That’s the prettiest confession I ever saw,” said Rood, back at the office, when he saw Curtis’s face. Rood filled us in on what he’d told Battinger. We filled him in on our day’s expedition. There were two hours left before deadline. Curtis sat down to wait for Kamal and to type. I had something else to do.

Rood walked me down to Battinger’s private office just off the hallway from the Metro bullpen, and opened the door. “You’ll
be fine, Miss Vane. You’re a toughie,” he said, winking. “Call me when you’re done.”

The office was tiny and devoid of adornments—not a single picture of a kid or a husband, not a knickknack from travels abroad, and whoever designed it had a special affinity for beige. Battinger was sitting behind a beige desk and Jaime was in a cheap-looking beige seat.

I dropped my letter onto Jane’s desk. She picked it up and read it over. It wasn’t very long. It expressed my appreciation for the opportunities I’d been given at The Paper. It said I thought it was more than I deserved. She didn’t seem surprised, since Rood must’ve told her pretty much everything, but she still looked angry. She handed the letter to Jaime.

“So, what’s this supposed to be?” said Battinger. “Falling on your sword?”

“It’s better for everyone concerned if I distance myself.”

“Will you be giving us corrections for the story you wrote with Curtis?”

“All the facts were correct in that story. They just didn’t go far enough to explain the truth.”

“Did you put anything into that piece to help either Jeremiah Golden or this person, this Cabeza figure that was feeding you facts?”

“No, I didn’t. I was looking at the picture. I didn’t see the frame.”

Jaime let my resignation letter fall into his lap. “These are problems, Valerie. But it doesn’t sound like you intentionally damaged the integrity of the reporting. The story stands.”

“That’s right. But the piece serves the wrong ends.”

Jane stood up and so did Jaime. She shook my hand, and Jaime gave me a hug so tight I got a nose of Brylcreem. “You’ve been through a lot this week. Leave your stuff for now,” he said.
“Come back once you’ve had a chance to sleep on it. Maybe there’s another way.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ll change my mind.”

I went back to my desk. Just as I was about to push in my chair, the phone rang. “Obits,” I said. “Vane.”

“This is un-fucking-believable material, Valerie,” Curtis said. “I wish you were writing it with me. We’re a good team, you and I.”

“You’ll do great,” I said. “I don’t have any worries.”

M
ickey Rood’s obituary in The Paper was 250 words, a squib at the bottom of the page. It ran with the headline “Lifelong Newspaperman Mourned by Colleagues,” and the subhead “Veteran of Almost Sixty Years Started as Teenage Copy Boy.”

He’d died the previous night, in his comfy chair at home in his welfare hotel in Gramercy, reading the late edition of the Sunday paper, the one with a story, “Golden Heir Arrested in Death of Graffitist,” by Curtis Wright. A blues singer who’d once sung with his band discovered Rood slumped over just before nine o’clock. A little frazzled and unsure of what to do, she’d called Obits first and had reached Jaime, just when he’d arrived in the office after his Sabbath break. The desk had scrambled, using a clerk and one of the advance writers and squeaking out an Obit at the eleventh hour for the morning edition.

I’d watched Jeremiah do the perp walk on TV the night before with Amenia up at her apartment in Hunt’s Point, while Detain was in the other room, prepping Kamal for his court testimony. Jeremiah looked as wrecked as I’d ever seen him, even in the bleary-eyed dawns of our bathroom floor binges. Amenia said, “He’s just like all these white boys with too much money and time on their hands.” I can’t say it felt good because too much of my own frailty was linked to his fate. I wished I could feel superior and righteous, but there was part of the monster in me too. I’d
fallen for him, after all. And I’d fallen for another one, just like him, just the same.

The cops had questioned me about Cabeza, but as I was telling them what facts I thought I knew—about his childhood in Aguas Buenas and life on the farm with his grandfather, his stint in Los Angeles as a young wannabe filmmaker, his move to 103rd Street in El Barrio, his early graffiti docs—I realized it was all probably lies anyway. Meaningful, well-constructed lies that seemed to hang together as some sort of truth. I’d have felt superior and righteous about him too, if I hadn’t been so good at creating those kinds of narratives myself. In the end, all I could really offer the cops were descriptions of his distinguishing marks.

They did better on their own. My darling Cabeza, it turned out, went by a few names other than “the brain.” The one he used to pretend he was a filmmaker was Jose Rodriguez; the one he used when he wanted to act like a curator was Roberto Hernandez-Gonzago, and he’d managed to acquire quite a reputation in Europe, it seemed, for his ability to acquire and exhibit singularly American works of art. But the one on his rap sheet—the one that was now being circulated around New York and across the nation, along with his mug shot—was Raoul Jimenez, from Huntington, Long Island. Turned out he was a middle-class kid from the ’burbs, whose mom was a math teacher and whose dad was a furrier who owned a little store.

He’d always be Cabeza to me, but I didn’t get a chance to tell him so. He’d skipped town before Detain could get to his Queens studio and he’d have been halfway to Managua or Reykjavik by the time the cops released his mug shot. Jeremiah might’ve found some way to tip him off, but it was also possible he’d just had a hunch I wasn’t coming back Friday morning while he was eating his onion omelet. It’s possible he did know me at least that well.

I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop: Cabeza’s little home movie. I was certain he’d release it to all the right people at just the right time; I just didn’t know when. Maybe when he felt clear of the cops, maybe once he was settled into a hot tub in Sweden. But I preferred to imagine him south of the border, in Acapulco at a cantina called Pablo’s, sipping bourbon with the ghosts of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Maybe someday, if the urge got strong, I’d go down and join him.

Even without Cabeza’s flick, I knew I’d be facing new notoriety. The Paper was already preparing a long mea culpa spread, explaining the background to the reporting on the Wallace story and noting the fact that I’d already resigned. Even if the facts in my original reporting hadn’t been totally off the mark, the article planned to say, the reporter had no business getting involved with a source, behind the scenes, and using facts obtained through that relationship to drive her investigation.

The German museum’s retrospective of early graffiti, featuring Stain, was still under way, except Roberto Hernandez-Gonzago was no longer the curator. Amenia had filed an injunction to prevent the Sotheby’s sale, and was also contesting ownership of the paintings Jeremiah had lent the museum. Darla Deitrick was helping. She said her own archival research indicated—as Malcolm had argued when he’d searched for the works the first time—that Wallace had only loaned her the paintings, so she’d had no right to sell them in the first place. The argument would cost her, but considering everything, she was willing to pay. Amenia had another plan: she wanted to get all of Stain’s paintings back and establish a Bronx-based nonprofit graffiti museum called Free People.

Of all the men I’d thought I loved that year, the only one left in my heart was Rood. I put down the paper and rolled my swivel chair over to his desk. It was dusted with those tiny white flakes. The tin where he kept the pictures of his grandkids was
still on his desk, and the pencil holder with its white plastic fork. I reached for the other tin—the one with his smokes—and took out an unfiltered Lucky, putting it between my teeth.

I opened the filing cabinet and found his brown paper bag, reached inside, and felt the sardine cans, four or five of them, enough to make it through another week before he’d have to stock up at the bodega again. There was a brand-new pack of lemon sugar wafers too.

At the back of the drawer was a yellow manila file, marked “For Miss Vane.” I took it out and found inside the list of names my mother had sent, now with a few check marks. Attached to it, by paper clip, were a few other pages of handwritten text, all in Rood’s looping script. There were nine pages in all. Relatives of S. R. Miller. Actual people, connected to me. Maybe I did have a history out there, somewhere, after all. I put everything back and closed the drawer, except for the folder with my list. Then I went back to my former desk and began to fill up my cardboard box for the last time.

The phone rang. “Obits,” I said. “Vane.”

“
Out of the Past
is playing at Film Forum at eight fifteen,” said Curtis. “Want to come with?”

“Can’t,” I said. “Need to leave town for a while. I’d rather not explain, right now, if that’s okay with you. You’ll understand soon enough.”

“Such a mystery lady,” he said. “Okay, but you don’t get off that easy. I’m going to try you again soon.”

I told him that would be okay, and I hung up the phone. In my filing cabinet, I searched for anything salvageable, dumping old death faxes in the recycle bin and saving the odd folder that contained some stitch of worthwhile research. I found yellow pads with lists of old Style ideas:
designer shrugs?? French chefs on private-jets?? What makes Ricki love PETA so bad?
Jottings from a gentler era.

It was a lazy early morning in the dead heat of August. Randy Antillo was snoozing in his swivel chair in Rewrite, his head jerking into consciousness every few minutes when his chair fell too far back. Clint Westwood arrived sleepy-eyed, wearing seersucker, grumbling about the 4/5/6 train. Rusty Markowitz rushed to his desk, put down his briefcase, and swapped his penny loafers for a pair of black velvet slippers. Life here would go on without me, just as it always had, and maybe the world was better off with one less Valerie Vane.

Jane Battinger came by when my box was almost full. I still had the Lucky in my teeth. “You helped Curtis with a nice spread there, Valerie,” Battinger said. “It’s too bad the way everything turned out.”

“Thanks for saying so,” I said. “And I’m sorry about Mickey.”

She nodded. “Me too.”

I watched her walk away. Her gait was slower than usual; her hips swayed with the tune of melancholy. I wondered how she and Rood had spent the day on Friday. Maybe he’d taken her to the park to sort things out. Maybe they’d mended fences. I hoped so. Jane wasn’t all bad. It was possible that she’d been a looker in the old days, too, like Rood had said. And I bet Mickey had always kept a spiffy shine on his shoes. I imagined the two of them, young again like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in
His Girl Friday
. Maybe for a while they’d been a rat-a-tat duo in a newsroom full of copy boys and newsmen who wore cigarettes behind their ears and pencils in their caps. Rood would’ve been a go-getter willing to put sources in closets and climb out windows—anything for a scoop. Jane would’ve been gutsy and straight shooting, calling every card a spade.

Yes, it was true. I’d missed the best parts of Rood’s life, the glamorous past. He’d been there for me, all along, though, and the file he’d created that was in my hands was going to lead me to
my own past. Whether it was glamorous or not, I didn’t yet know. I wouldn’t be able to thank him, and I was sorry about that.

But isn’t it funny how well you can know someone after they’re gone? Better, it turns out sometimes, than when they lived.