A Little Trouble with the Facts (4 page)

Next, I dialed Penny Highgrass, the city’s top flack, and invited her to lunch. I told her about my new position at
Gotham’s Gate
, and I said I was willing to place a few of her clients on the high board if she could get me victims for the ramp. She agreed. I called other flacks and made the same bid.

My first column was close enough to what I wanted to make more than a few people squirm:

“The way to become famous fast,” Walter Winchell once claimed, “is to throw a brick at someone who is famous.” Instead of daisies, I now had bricks in my basket.

Soon enough I’d scared enough publicists that I was on every VIP list in town. I had tickets to any show and invites to every opening, just so I couldn’t smear people for making me wait. And flacks did all they could to get me to anoint their clients or their clubs. I had too many items to handle on my own, so Zip gave me reinforcements. Soon, I had a team of stringers out partying across the city on my behalf. The tattlers at the other papers got boots in their ears for losing what I got weekly. They had to call my sources after they’d seen my item and say, “
Gotham’s Gate
is reporting X, Y, and Z. What can we get for scraps?”

Now, whenever I got my quiz—Who’s on Top?—I always had the answer. Because I wrote the answer.

“I never knew how smart I was,” said Zip, puffing a cigar, a few months later. “You’re the kid we’ve been looking for all these years. You’re the kid with the golden key.”

I rarely ate anything but canapés. I drank only promo specials. And soon enough, I found my crowd: a klatch of flacks named Tammi, Jenni, and Nikki. They were all twenty-five, all blond, and they were all pretti and perki. As children, they ate vine-ripened tomatoes from their mothers’ rooftop gardens and smeared their morning baguettes with goose liver pâté.

One rainy night when cabs were scarce, the girls invited me back to Tammi’s. As we downed RémyRed and ginger ale, they shared with me their master plan. “It’s called, ‘Don’t Forget the
I
,’” said Tammi, hiccupping and covering her mouth. “You know, since all our names end in
i
?”

I got it.

“I mean, we want to have fun at parties, but how can we have fun if the right people aren’t in the room?” she said. “What we’ll do is ensure the right people get into the right parties, so even if the parties aren’t that good, they’ll be good.”

I signed on. I told them they’d get a column inch for each bouncer I didn’t need to kiss. Within a few months, they controlled the ropes. And I had the password to every PR tax shelter in town.

“Dog bone,” I said one night, pushing past the bald man who’d eyed me through his peephole. I was at Motel, the Chelsea club the Three
I
’s were repping, where guests got anything delivered to their “room,” paid for in half-hour increments. Down the nondescript hallway and an all-white stairwell, I found myself at the check-in desk, where one of Tammi’s new recruits, Sari, glanced up and waved me through.

“Bill Maher is here,” Tammi whispered as she ushered me to a corner. “First night out, everything primo. We just had Brazil
ian mangos delivered to each suite. We have peacocks in pens downstairs—they’re so bii-iiig you wouldn’t believe!—and the bellhop brings them up at exactly two a.m. One already died on the way here. Really bad karma. But who cares! Which room do you want? I can give you San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in six, Elle the Gender Bender in four, or Matt Dillon in two.”

The parties, the clubs, the nightlife—it was fun for a while. But my dreams didn’t revolve around a measly gossip column in a second-rate glossy. I wanted my own roll of bills, my own limo, my own classy clique, my own designer coif and duds, vetted by my own stylist, my own, my own, my own.

So, at the end of my twenty-fifth year, I decided to cash in. I asked Zip for time off the column so I could work on a feature. I wanted a yard, not just inches. It took me three weeks, but in the end I had a six-thousand-word exposé, a detailed tell-all about the habits and habitats of the celebs on the gold-plated clipboards.

“The
I
’s Have It: The Klatch of Blondes Who Stole Manhattan” was my first cover story for
Gotham’s Gate
. It was somewhere between Candace Bushnell and Walter Winchell. The tone was lofty, strident with just the right touch of class-conscious alarm. It was full of substantiating detail, anecdotes no one could cull unless they’d
been there,
and delicious little morsels only an insider could snatch. I threw enough bricks, in short, to build a chimney.

It was a sensation; I was finally launched as a “journalist.” I was invited to parties with
New Yorker
writers and auteurs from
Vanity Fair
. And after that, something truly miraculous occurred: Hollywood optioned the story. They planned to make it a screenplay and Gwyneth Paltrow would play Tammi. I asked how much and they told me we didn’t even need to talk money. They would give me five hundred large up front and another two big bills once the picture was flickering.

It was the easiest half mill anyone ever made. People say that kind of thing never happens, but it did. First time out on a cover story for a glossy, and I made a killing. The facts of the transaction ran in all the insider rags. I got featured in a story in the Sunday Mag about big bucks for small fries—it was short and it was mean…but still.

After the splash, Zip gave me a Christmas bonus that could’ve bought me a bridge. Then he gave me a journalistic blank check: I could write anything I liked for my next story. I no longer needed to log daily hours. All I had to do was show my face in his office once a week and report my progress.

I got myself a loft in TriBeCa, and Chuck Uptite, the installation artist, did my interior design. It was all industrial chic, stainless-steel medical cabinetry everywhere. Rolling emergency-room gurneys as sideboards, medical instrument stands for tables. I mixed flavored vodkas at the glimmering glass bar. My recycling bin was full of gourmet takeout containers. I kept a stack of invitations by the toilet, so guests could cherry-pick premieres. I had two cell phones and a pager and never answered any of them.

The bartender at my new corner haunt concocted a cocktail in my honor: the Vanitini. Vanilla vodka, sweet vermouth, and a splash of grenadine. Vanitinis were sweet, but I didn’t pucker. I was getting used to sweet: sweet as a perfect assignment, sweet as a five-figure bonus, sweet as a half-mill movie deal. The next time I got quizzed—Who’s on Top?—the answer was simple.

The answer was Vane.

A
t The Paper, night arrives with the copy editors. Midnight rolls with the presses. Somewhere in between, the hands on the clock tend to bend.

When I hung up with Cabeza, I sat still for a few minutes, trying not to breathe. I put a new stick of gum in my mouth and chewed slowly. The right thing to do to was to confess a mistake, file a correction, and move on. But it wasn’t so simple anymore. Jaime wouldn’t smile at another slipup, and Battinger would make a paperweight of my head.

No, I’ll wait it out, I thought, chewing a little faster. Cabeza wouldn’t try again. A correction wouldn’t fix what ailed him. He didn’t want the truth; he wanted justice. And The Paper couldn’t give him that. Maybe nobody could.

I looked around for Curtis, but he’d already gone back to Culture. LaShanniah had moved to graphics and out of our hands. The only people in the newsroom now were copy editors and the Night Rewrite boys huddled in their corner on the other side of Metro.

Night Rewrite was the 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. slot, aka the lobster shift, the dogwatch, the province of probationary reporters still proving their grit. The boys (and one or two girls) in that corner handled late-night shorties—boat crashes on the Hudson, shootings at the Latin Quarter—and reworked headline stories
after the lead reporters killed their phones. When I was on Style, I had nothing but pity for the poor Rewrite boys, chained to the desk while the city skyline sang me serenades. That beat seemed like hours with your feet up waiting for someone to drown.

One night, I’d glided past Rewrite corner, on mule stilettos, wearing a white lacy two-piece number, on my way to the White Party at Lotus. Maybe I was tipsy from cocktails at Joe Allen, or dizzy from champagne at a Fashion Week presser, but as I passed, I’d tapped one of the boys on the shoulder and promised, with a laugh, to “bring back a doggy bag.”

I shuddered now, thinking of it. Who had I tapped with all that disdain? Could it have been Matthew Talbot, who’d since been sent to Afghanistan to look for men in caves? Or Franklin Cook, who got the coveted biz-day posting in Silicon Alley?

Rewrite was where I ached to be. Maybe it wasn’t the Milan runways or even white tents in Bryant Park, but it was better than a plywood box. After six months or a year on Rewrite I would’ve been able to move to a legit Metro assignment, like the Brooklyn Courts or Albany capital watch. From there, maybe they’d consider putting me back on Style.

But when the masthead had convened to decide my fate after the, um, Incident, Battinger said, “Style girls don’t belong on Rewrite.” Style pens, she said, trafficked in functional froufrou, pugs as the new pocket pet, fearless facials, while the rest of The Paper nabbed the apple out of the roast and stuck their forks in the meat. Maybe Battinger was right. But that wasn’t the reason she didn’t want me on Rewrite. Obits was penance, plain and simple. And I didn’t miss the gist.

Maybe it was my longing glance at Rewrite that caught Randy Antillo’s attention. “Hey Val,” he said, and waved me over. I got up and walked across the newsroom. Randy was hovering over Travis Parsons’s desk saying “Oh, yeah baby.” I didn’t ask, figuring Internet porn. “Dude, can you
do
that?” Randy added.

I took a step closer and looked at Travis’s screen. It was Mullets Galore, a Web site honoring Midwestern eighties hair. Randy was rapt. “So, Val, you write that quick hit on Stain 149?” he said, without looking at me.

“The obit today?” I asked. “Oh, right, yeah, I…”

“Pretty cool, Val,” he said, standing up straight so I could get the whole length of him. Randy was a six-foot-three-inch matchstick with a cap of red hair. His byline, R. Horacio Antillo, had the sound of a hard-bitten scribe, but he was just a Williamsburg trust-fund hipster who wore his sideburns two inches too thick. Battinger had brought him in from Jersey briefs and put him on the night shift so he’d start his Metro climb. He wasn’t much to look at, but even I could see he was destined for glory.

“I loved Stain,” Randy was saying. “When I was thirteen, he was, like, my idol.”

“Every rebel has-been is your idol,” said Travis, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard Crimson alum with familial links to The Paper’s masthead. He’d been donated to Battinger as a lackey. But, as a Yale grad, she didn’t like handouts from Harvard, so she put Travis on Rewrite and let him stew for thirteen months. “You never told me you were a graffiti artist,” Travis said.

“Yeah, I did. I was a
writer,
” said Randy, correcting Travis. “That’s what they say—not ‘graffiti artist.’ Writer. I was one of the original Queens Bombers.”

“Queens Bombers?” Travis said. “I’ve heard of the Bronx Bombers, but not
Queens
. Hey, anyway, didn’t you grow up in Jersey?”

“So?” said Randy. “I took the train in.” He swiped at Travis’s head, putting a few hairs out of place. Travis smoothed his dirty-blond swoop, drew his chair to his desk, and sulked on his fist.

“I can’t believe they let you get Stain in the paper,” Randy said to me. “He was such a genius. That piece he did with Haring right off the FDR? I can’t believe how
awesome
that is. And it’s never ever been touched. Not a single buff. So, what’s your theory?”

“Theory?”

Randy pantomimed yanking a noose around his neck. His tongue flopped to the corner of his lips. Then his eyes brightened. “Come on, you must have some idea,” he said. “Why’d he do it?”

“Maybe it’s tough being a graffiti artist when you’re forty-two.”

“He seemed like a pretty happy guy when I saw him last.”

“You saw him?”

“Sure, at that anti-Giuliani rally downtown a few weeks ago. He was throwing dung at a painting of the mayor. I wrote it up. Didn’t make it into the paper, though. They said it was ‘too incidental,’ but what they meant was ‘too radical,’ you know? Man, I wish I’d gotten that in. It would’ve been good timing, the underground hero taking his last licks.”

I couldn’t really hold up my end of the conversation on Stain. I’d gotten the fax and made two calls. I’d pulled a couple of articles off the Internet, and checked The Paper’s digital archives. I’d read the Sunday Magazine feature and then I did what I usually did when I had a three-hundred-word squib: I cribbed from the press release.

Now, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to recheck. I left Randy venting to Travis. When I got back to my desk, I found my stack of paper clips strewn everywhere. For no particular reason, I was unnerved. I typed in “Malcolm Wallace.” After blinking at me for a minute, green letters flashed on the screen: “Please contact the morgue.”

The morgue was The Paper’s newsprint archive. Jaime had told me a thousand times that I should use the morgue to do the bulk of my research on anything pre-1985, the year The Paper had begun digitizing. But so far I’d done all of my research from my desk.
Are you a reporter?
I asked myself.
Are you a reporter?
said that smoky voice.

I went into the text documents on my computer to find my page of notes from my morning chat with Pinsky. There it was:
“Wallace, Malcolm A. Deceased black male found at water’s edge near base of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, Queens side.” Et cetera. I scrolled down to the part where I’d written “Jump from bridge possible. O/B DNP,” and I put my cursor on the end of the line and backspaced.

My heart sank a little—for myself—but at least now my notes substantiated my story, in case anyone asked. I could go home and climb into bed, and in the morning there would be a fresh paper on the newsstand, full of all kinds of new problems for people to worry about. That was the nice thing about news. By tomorrow, today’s paper would be fish wrap. It would be shredded for kitty litter. It would be taped inside shop windows to indicate the place was closed.

The humidity fell on me like a raccoon coat when I pushed through The Paper’s brass revolving doors. A thin spread of gray clouds hovered low over the skyscrapers. Underneath it, the sky was illuminated almost to daylight by the glow from Times Square. It wasn’t the usual incandescence of the Great White Way, more like a postnuclear haze. It was coming from my left, where, at the corner of Seventh Avenue, NASDAQ was putting the final touches on its colossal video screen. To test the green LEDs, they had turned the wall of lights all green.

Blinded, I took a few steps back and bumped into something. I thought it was a fire hydrant until I saw Battinger. She was standing in front of the building having a smoke, and I’d stepped on her toes. “Valerie,” she said, wincing and pulling her foot away.

“Oh!” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

She looked down to assess the damage.

“Nothing a little polish won’t fix,” she said. But she didn’t mean it.

Battinger had never liked me, not since the first day I stepped
into The Paper’s marble foyer. She’d been opposed to hiring a twenty-six-year-old straight from a glossy. She didn’t like my five-thousand-word piece on personal party planners. She told me she “couldn’t follow the thread” of my story on fit models for thongs. When I had trouble with my features, she was the first to tally up my corrections. By the time of the Incident, I’d already depleted whatever sense of humor she had left.

It made no sense that Battinger was outside having a smoke. Her shift had ended hours earlier, a few squawks after she’d finished with Rood. I wondered if she couldn’t find a bar like any other self-respecting alkie. “So are we finished with this LaShanniah business now?” she said.

“Yeah. I think Curtis got us out of the woods.”

“I hope so.” She took a long drag off her butt. “It’s why we put young people like you on the Obit desk, you know. To keep abreast of this new generation.”

She looked about to spit. We both knew the real reason they put people like me on Obits. Battinger stubbed out the last of her cigarette on the hydrant. “I got a call today from some character who wouldn’t leave his name. Said he was interested in an obit that ran today. Unbylined. I told him that probably meant you wrote it. You hear from him?”

I swallowed. “Yes, I think so.”

“Think so?”

“Yes, I talked to him.”

“Any problem there?” she said. She stared me dead in the eyes.

“No. He just had some questions.”

“He sounded like he might be upset about something.” She flicked her butt into the gutter. “But when I pressed him he said he’d take it up with you. Asked me a lot of questions, though. How long were you on Obits; did you write for other sections; were you working with Metro? Guy was damn curious.”

That raccoon coat started to weigh tons.

“I guess you spoke to him,” she continued when I didn’t answer. “So, if it’s a problem, I’m sure we’ll hear about it tomorrow. Meantime, you’re looking a little haggard. You should get some zzzz’s.”

“You too,” I said, and then tracked back. “I’m beat.”

But the truth was, I was as alert as a hummingbird. I wanted to know what Cabeza had told Battinger. Had he already sold me out? She walked past me and, maybe sensing this question, looked back before she hit the revolving door. “Anything else?”

“No. No, Jane. Mrs. Battinger. Have a good night,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Hopefully that’s the last of it.”

“Hope so.” I turned quickly on my heel and headed west.

On another night like this, nearing midnight with the sky so phosphorescent, I probably would’ve called a private car to dash me off to Asia de Cuba for grilled baby octopus and balsamic portabellos. In my Style days. Or if I was feeling chatty, I might’ve headed down to Chelsea to meet the post-art-opening crowd at Lot 61 to sit on a high stool and flirt with the gay barman.

Tonight, I had nowhere to go, nothing to do. I heard the patter of feet, the crunch of rubber through wet potholes, the burst of horns forcing their way out of Times Square. I moved into the crowd toward Eighth Avenue.

A group of teenagers in matching pink tank tops and low riders pushed past the door of the local welfare hotel, linking arms and screaming a show tune. An old woman stepped out, wearing a housecoat stained in wide circles under the arms. A wiry Indian man sat on a lawn chair next to a tree stump and sucked on a brown bidi. At the corner, a family in long shorts, big tees, white Reeboks, and socks piling up their ankles stood outside Ben & Jerry’s. As I passed, the little girl in a pink overall dress said, “Look at all those little lights up there, Mommy. Do people really live up that high in the sky?”

The whole family—Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa—gaped up, their plastic spoons pressing their tongues into their mouths. I looked up to see what they were seeing. They weren’t looking at anything, just skyscrapers filled with little lights, all the little boxes where we New Yorkers make our tiny lives. It didn’t look like much, did it? A whole lot of people in their little rooms, each of them trying so hard to light up the sky. Ultimately, each one would shut out their light, but the New York sky would still be filled with eight million more. So what was the point?

After playing tourist, my neck hurt. I turned off Forty-third Street and onto Eighth Avenue, where walkers and diners and laughers and smokers cluttered the sidewalk. I pushed on, watching my feet chew up the wet pavement, watching the marquee lights swirl in onyx puddles. Up ahead of me, there was a darkened stoop. A man in a trench coat leaned forward, his face hidden under the shadowed brim of an old fedora. I saw the red tip of his cigarette, smoke obscuring the lineaments of his face.

Cabeza,
I thought. He’s followed me. I saw the green lantern of the subway stop and, just as I realized I was being paranoid, took the stairs quickly down.

I pushed my key into the door on Broadway near Eightieth Street, and smelled fresh-baked bagels from the H&H bakery below. The foyer was dark and empty, the brown and tan tiles polished to a patent sheen. I collected my mail—nothing but circulars and bills—and began to climb the narrow stairway.

The first landing smelled of untended cats and I could hear the grunts of our resident Deadhead investment banker either catching the game or getting lucky. A bag of garbage had pushed a door ajar on four, and I could see a couple chopping vegetables on the floating butcher block in their duplex. I counted the eight stairs between each landing until the sixth floor, where I caught
my breath. I found my keys and opened the door to my studio. It had to be about 110 degrees inside, as I’d forgotten to open the windows and turn on the fans. I locked all four Yale locks and kicked my way through balled-up socks and piles of laundry to get to the windows and flick on the A/C.