A Little Trouble with the Facts: A Novel

1

The Death Beat

It was the high mercury end of July and no one was doing any dying. I wasn’t getting much work done, just moving faxes from one side of my desk to the other and finding homes for stray paper clips.

A few reporters had been sent out to cover the heat—chat with the fan salesmen, check on the polar bears at the zoo. Metro columnist Clint Westwood was under his desk pawing through old columns for new ideas. White-haired Rusty Markowitz was on the horn with a stringer he’d sent to stalk a Broadway ingenue. He was red-faced and barking, "Listen, give her the cell phone. Well, if she won’t take it just shove it right up to her mouth!"

The other Pulitzer Prize winners were out in the Hamptons putting the final touches on their next historical opus or cultivating a new patch of skin cancer. It was slow. Slow as a drunkard’s grin.

I was about to go upstairs for a cup of coffee when the phone rang. I took my gum out of my mouth and stuck it onto the filing cabinet with the other pieces.

Obits, I said. Vane.

There was no voice on the line, but I heard a siren, the rattling of steel. Maybe the Brooklyn Bridge was calling.

Valerie Vane, Obituary Desk, I tried again. May I help you?

Now there was a voice, low and soft. Yes, it said. I want to inquire about a story that ran in your pages today. The voice was male, deep and smoky, but tentative—a controlled burn.

Which story would that be?

The piece on Wallace, he said. Malcolm Wallace.

I reached across my desk for the morning edition and another stick of gum. Chelsea and Hillary were on the cover riding camels, next to our three-column overnighter on the heat wave—brownouts in Inwood, track fires in Chinatown, historic concessions lines at Jones Beach. I flipped past the genocide and nuclear arsenals, past the labor unrest and roaming bison, and found the story in the measly posterior of the Metro pages, one of the shorties below the fold.

Famous for Writing His Name, read the headline with the subhead, Artist Brought Street Life into Galleries. Malcolm Wallace, forty-two, painter—a graffiti writer self-dubbed Stain 149. The piece didn’t have a byline, but I already knew who’d written it, because I happened to be chewing her gum.

Is there a problem? I asked the caller.

Yes, I believe so, he said. I’m concerned about the facts related in the story. You see, the article here says he took his own life.

I checked the first paragraph of the story, where indeed it said that Wallace had jumped from the Queensboro Bridge. Correct, I said.

Suicide, he said slowly.

That’s right, suicide. I said it the way he’d said it, using his rhythms, his elisions of the vowels so that it sounded like Soocide. Killing of Sue.

But that’s not right, he said, and then he used the word again: Suicide.

I did a quick mental check of the facts I’d gleaned the day before from DCPI, police press. It was my typical morning call to Detective Pinsky for updates and confirms: Wallace, Malcolm A. Deceased black male found on the rocks near base of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, Queens side. Discovered Saturday, 5:47 a.m. Time of death: approximately 2:15. Body waterlogged, bloated, no visible marks. Jump from bridge. ID in breast pocket.

Let me see. I pushed some faxes around my desk to make it sound like I was checking. Yep, Sue Side is what we got. Each syllable on tiptoe. Sue Side from DCPI.

We got calls like this from time to time from people who weren’t happy when they saw the cold, hard facts in dark, gray ink. My first few months on the desk, I’d get nervous and run them by Jaime Cordoba, the chief Obit editor.

Jaime was an Orthodox Jew born in Cuba, raised in Georgia, and he’d gotten enough guff for just his name (hymie at the hymie-town paper?) that very little rattled him. He had skin the color of ginger and a mane of curly black hair he kept under his yarmulke with a few dabs of Brylcreem. When I needed his advice, he shook that mane like a just-roused lion, and spoke with a Latin southern twang no louder than a whisper.

People don’t like to accept death, he’d told me. It’s like a railway that runs on a senseless schedule and we obituary writers are station workers cleaning up after the train’s already left. We’re wearing an official uniform so people think we can give them answers. But here’s my advice: stick to pushing the broom. Just tip your hat and say, ‘I’m sorry, mister, I don’t have any control over departures.’

Since then, I’d developed a system for phoners. Step one was to comfort: It may take a little bit of time to get adjusted to your loss, I started, but the caller wasn’t listening.

Who said suicide? he wanted to know.

The police reported ‘jump from bridge.’

Malcolm just put the down payment on a permanent space for a painting school, the caller said. A man who’s going to kill himself doesn’t secure a mortgage. He doesn’t say he’s going out for ice cream and jump into the East River.

No, I said. Not usually. I know these senseless acts are sometimes hard to understand. We need to try and look at the big picture… This was step two: Help the caller contemplate death in the abstract.

I was laying it on thick as cement, but I wasn’t much interested in the caller. I was thinking about my cup of coffee getting cold upstairs. This Wallace fellow had already gotten plenty of ink. He’d been famous in the eighties—hell, he’d even been the subject of a 1985 Sunday Magazine feature—but only for as long as it took to shake up a can of spray paint. He’d since been scrubbed from history. I figured the main reason he’d made the page was the weather: 104 by day, a sauna in the shade. Jaime had been complaining about our section looking geriatric and when he found the Wallace notice, he said, Finally, some young blood, slapping the fax on my desk. This’ll be fun for you, Vane. Has to do with art.

Listen, the caller was saying now. I know a lot of people don’t mean much to some people. A lot of people are just some other guy. I don’t know how the police concluded suicide, but I’m sure whatever they told you is wrong, because Malcolm Wallace would never kill himself. He wasn’t that type of man.

Then something crept up my spine. It was Detective Pinsky from the previous day’s morning call: They’re saying suicide but it’s too soon to tell. You know the drill, Val, I now remembered he’d said. DA’s got it.

I’d made a follow-up call to Betty Schlacter, the flak for the Manhattan district attorney. We’d chitchatted about the supermodel slaying and then she’d cut it short, claiming a lunch date. She couldn’t give me anything on Wallace, not even basics, she’d said. Investigations were off limits and off the record until they were closed. I’d jotted in my notes: O/B DNP (On Background. Do Not Print.). And then Jaime had come by with a frosted cupcake.

You see, for two years, I’d been an up-and-comer, a star cub recruited from a glossy to write flashy features for The Paper’s Style section. I’d covered society galas, celebrity soirees, and red carpet premieres. I’d been an all-access insider, behind the velvet ropes. But things had gone wrong somewhere along the line, and then they’d gotten worse, and then they’d gone all the way south. Ultimately, I’d been demoted to the Obit desk to putter out my remaining days with the washed-up hacks, the union stewards, and other miscellaneous nobodies.

The day before had been my six-month anniversary on Obits. Jaime meant the cupcake as a form of celebration, but to me it was more like a frosted nail in the coffin. I swallowed it down, and then excused myself for my half-hour lunch break and went in search of something to gnaw. Down the block, at the usual office haunt, there was no collegial patter at the cashier’s counter. No office chums clapped my back. I bought myself a day-old bagel and walked to the kiddy park to watch babies waddle in the spray. I wrenched bite after bite from the stale dough and pitied my sad fate.

When I’d gotten back to the office, Jaime was waiting on the Wallace squib to move the page. I’d been late and now I was harried, thinking I’d messed up again for good. I’d whipped up the Obit to specs, including jump from bridge. In my muddled state—I now realized—I’d forgotten all about Pinsky and Schlacter. I’d forgotten all about O/B DNP and too soon to tell.

This, I understood more acutely with each smoky breath on the other end of the line, may indeed have been a mistake. Another mistake. I didn’t say anything to the caller. I didn’t even let myself think it too loud. If I had to tell my editor that we had to run a correction, it wouldn’t look good for me.

I cleared my throat. Sir, I said. "This is The Paper of Record. We write the with a capital T, as in ‘The Truth.’ Maybe you want to speak to the news desk, if there’s news on this case. Maybe you’d like the cop shop, if there needs to be an investigation. At Obits, we don’t do updates. We just stack ’em and pack ’em."

Once it came out of my mouth, even I was surprised by the harshness of the phrase. I could hear the anonymous mister breathing in short, smoky bursts, saying nothing. His pause sprawled about a yard and then stopped abruptly.

Are you a reporter? he asked.

The word jumped up between us. I didn’t flick at it, didn’t try to grab it out of the air. He said the same thing again, only louder. Are you a reporter? His words poked me in the chest like a frat boy looking for a brawl.

A year earlier if someone had asked me that question I would’ve guffawed. Who didn’t know that Valerie Vane was a reporter? I wasn’t just a reporter; I was the supreme scribe of the urban zeitgeist. Who else could have gotten upstairs at Moomba for the first celebrity karaoke night? Who else would have convinced transsexual heiress Zita Marlowe to do her first, and only, face-to-face after the surgery? I had identified gray as the new black, and Thursday as the new Friday. And later, when the trends shifted again, I was the one who’d let everyone know that Monday was the new Thursday. That’s why Buzz Phipps, the Style editor, had always rushed over to my desk, breathless with the latest hot tip. He wanted every worthy story to get the Valerie Treatment.

Now, with the word reporter balancing on the line between us, I wasn’t so sure.

The name’s Vane, was all I could offer the caller. Valerie Vane.

It meant nothing to him. Well, if you are a reporter or if you ever want to be one, don’t just take down what you hear from the cops. Try doing a little research.

I opened another stick of gum and folded it under my tongue. Who is this? I said, chewing audibly. I’ll take your name. I’ll get back to you.

The man laughed a slow, even laugh. No, Valerie Vane, he said, his teeth clamped on the sharp V edges of my name, his throat coughing up the As. I’ll take down your name and I’ll be calling you back. We’ll see this mistake is corrected one way or another.

The word mistake buzzed in my ear like a fly about to land in my soup. "You haven’t told me your name," I said.

He gave it a little thought and said, Cabeza. Just call me Cabeza.

Cabeza, as in— There was a dial tone, hard and flat.

Head? I thought. Wasn’t cabeza Spanish for head? Or was it beer?

The Paper’s newsroom was on the third floor of the copper-topped fortress in Midtown. It was arranged in concentric circles of clout. In the center were the top brass, orchestrating the movements of the planets and scorching any Icarus who tried to fly too high. In orbit were the lesser gods: backfield editors, assignment editors, and design chiefs. Reporters were spun out on the periphery like comets beyond the orbit of Pluto. Obits was in deep, interstellar space, far from the action. Close to the exits.

The furnishing was Late-Century Nondescript. Gray Formica desks connected low-slung gray canvas cubicles, boxy computers, gray swivel chairs. All of it was gray upholstered, with beige carpeting wall to wall. On most days, the place was about as lively as an insurance office. No one yelled, Stop the presses! or ran through the newsroom snapping out patter like Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. Reporters talked in hushed tones, and typed with their heads crooked solemnly over ergonomic keyboards. Clerks imported panini from the gourmet grocer and ate at their desks, swallowing three-dollar pink bottles of water called Calm.

But if I listened intently, with the right amount of reverence, I could sometimes hear the two-finger clickety clack of old Underwood typewriters. I could imagine blue suits waltzing in like Clark Gable from a wet lunch with the beat cops at Jimmy’s Corner. Or the boys in short pants running between desks yelling Copy! I could, just barely, if I listened with imagination, make out the subterranean rumble of the defunct printing presses, the throaty laughter of the newspapermen smelling of machine oil, cigars, and cheap scotch.

Most of them were gone, but a few still trolled the newsroom, like my cubicle mate, Mickey Rood. Rood had been at The Paper fifty-eight years and then some. He’d started as a copy boy at fifteen and had climbed the ranks until he hit a glass ceiling made of bottles of Wild Turkey. Some time ago, I didn’t know quite when, Rood had retired to Obits.

During his early years at The Paper he’d moonlighted as a jazz pianist, subsisting on a quart of single malt and three packs a night. The veins of his translucent cheeks mapped long-closed Greenwich Village jazz, blues, and juke joints. His face had three neat slits: two for his twinkling, cantankerous eyes and another for his thin-lipped grin. He wore a navy suit jacket with a stain around the neckline and loose threads at the wrists. His button-down was jaundiced, and his slacks, two sizes too large, were cinched against his waist with a stretch of white rope. When he wasn’t using his battered wooden cane, he hooked the handle to that rope. He trailed a smell of tree mold and shoe polish.

Name’s Rood, he’d said, clearing some phlegm and standing to offer me his hand, the first day I’d arrived at Obits. As in discourteous.

I plopped down the sad cardboard box I’d hefted from Style and shook. His hand covered mine like a wet baseball mitt.

Valerie Vane, I said.

Vane, said Rood, still clutching my hand. As in vainglorious. Boastful, proud. He was neither approving nor disapproving.

Or idle, fruitless, futile, I said, meeting his eyes and swallowing down a lump.

Rood relaxed his grip and frowned. You think you’ll hate the graveyard, he said. But you won’t. You can learn a lot here about life and death and you’ll get a first-row seat on the dispensation of immortality.

I felt sorry for the slope of his hulking shoulders under that polyester jacket, the checkered tie covered in little white crumbs. The obituary can be the last word in journalism, he added. An interesting life is an eternal fascination. To write an obit well, you have to know your subject inside and out, and you have to know how to probe to get to the dirt.

Sounds like dentistry, I said.

Or, he said, tilting on his cane and turning away from me, you’ll play your cards right and be out of here soon.

Rood had been right about one thing. In six months sponge-bathing the Grim Reaper, I’d at least gotten a line on him: poor people died in fires, rich kids by overdose. Teenagers in car wrecks and school shootings. Prostitutes were strangled, transsexuals thrown from windows or off cliffs. Businessmen drank exhaust overnight in parked cars. Politicos and ex-cops liked to eat their guns.

I didn’t feel sorry for the dead most of the time. I figured there were a lot worse things than being dead. In fact, lately I’d developed a kind of envy for the freshly deceased. After all, the corpses we packed in our rose-scented boxes weren’t any ordinary stiffs. They were corporate titans and political heavyweights, millionaire philanthropists and Tony Award winners, icons of the silver screen, pop princesses and peacemakers. Every name on our pages was synonymous with success. Even our mobsters and murderers were head of the class.

I would’ve been proud to lie down in that bone yard. But instead, I was in purgatory, pushing papers. And there was plenty of paperwork: paper files, clippings, background searches, Internet trolling, legal papers on assets, holdings, scandals, illness, distinguishing marks, cause of death, time and date, names of survivors, names of enemies and friends. Call the coroner’s office to verify, call the cops to verify, and, finally, convince the editor to memorialize the sap.

When all the facts were lined up, the editors assessed the assets and did the numbers. The biggest celebs got the front page, that’s A-1 and the jump—1,800 to 2,500 words with the full spread, as many as fourteen pictures. From there on down, your inches got shorter, your pix shrunk. Members of Congress pulled up to 1,800 words with just one or two headshots. Authors and actors, 1,000. On their heels, pioneering scientists and do-gooders—500 to 1,000. Notable criminals, especially the big splashy ones with high-priced crimes on their heads, got a good 400 to 800, and some of them trumped Nobel laureates. And when it was all done, if we still had space on the page, there were sometimes a handful of shorties, 100 to 300 words. The mention of a life, not quite worthy, but good enough for a filler squib.

This Wallace character had fallen among the last group. He ranked a cool three hundred. But if the Reaper’s harvest had been richer that day, I didn’t think he’d have rated ten.

I usually tapped Rood when I got angry callers. But he was at the center of the newsroom now listening to Jane Battinger crow. Battinger was the Metro News chief, a bottle blonde who’d mislaid the bottle. She didn’t talk so much as squall, loud and shrill enough to rouse, well, the dead. And she was working on one just now: LaShanniah.

LaShanniah, the hip-hop soul queen at the top of the charts, had died over the weekend in an unexplained yachting accident. It wasn’t that we’d missed the story. Rood had given her a generous write-up, turning her short-lived career of voice-enhanced canned drumbeats into a Cinderella story par excellence. Problem was the math. Instead of A-1, they’d put her on B-17, with just eight hundred words and one headshot. The tabs, by contrast, had splashed her across their covers for two days with second-day follows of her last harrowing moments and enough file photos to crush a librarian.

For two days Metro had been fending off angry phone calls and letters to the editor calling The Paper out of touch and—worse—racist. Now Battinger had it in her teeth, and she wanted to spit it out onto someone else’s plate. Rood was an obvious, if civilian, target. He’d written the inches, but he hadn’t worked up the numbers. It was the brass who assigned length and location. He’d just filed to their specs.

But Rood had been around long enough to know that if an editor wanted to yell, better to let her vent. So he squinted and took it until Battinger’s voice faded to a hoarse, bitter squeak, and then he lurched across the newsroom on his cane.

He went straight for Jaime. He was flushed and his breathing was rough. He didn’t like to be barked at, especially by a broad. Jaime nodded for him to sit, but Rood was too worked up, so he just stood and wobbled. Jaime didn’t need to ask what had happened and Rood didn’t need to tell him. The two of them just needed to look at each other for a while until they figured out a plan, and Jaime would execute it.

A few minutes later I saw Jaime climb the central staircase to the Culture desk. Next thing, he was headed back with the pop writer, Curtis Wright, on his tail. Then I got the picture: This was going to be a collaborative gig. Curtis was going to write the lead and get the credit, and some Obit hack would be dragged in to grunt it out.

I ducked my head behind my computer, trying to look swamped. I glanced up as they passed to get a look at Curtis, who was shaking his thick dreadlocks. He had on a told-you-so expression clear as the day is long. Tomorrow is already three days late, he muttered as he passed.

Jaime affected the look of a beaten dog, ready to take his licks. Sure, he’d let Curtis ride him a bit if it meant getting the top Culture writer on board. Then, when he needed to, he’d tell him where to get off. Politely, of course.

If you had anyone down here who kept tabs on youth, Curtis continued. And Jaime shot me a glance as they walked beyond hearing range. I’d volunteered a few days earlier to handle LaShanniah, but he’d told me I wasn’t ready for anything that big.

I moved to the fax machine and pretended I had something incoming. Try to advance it somehow, Jaime was saying. "I don’t know a thing about this girl, so tell it to me like I was born yesterday. Or maybe like I was born a half century ago, because that’s closer to the truth. That means I grew up listening to Dave Brubeck. And a lot of our subscribers still don’t know what the word hep means. Curtis cracked a toothy smile. I’m giving you Valerie Vane for research. Jaime nodded in my general direction. Got that, Valerie? You two just get it out fast."

I headed back to my cube. Before I could wipe out the screensaver, Curtis was hovering. Want a shot at an A-1 byline? he said.

I couldn’t complain. Curtis Wright was tall, and I could use a touch of Culture.

That evening, after the backfield edit and the slot edit and the copy desk rounds and the page one editors meeting and a final look from Battinger, Curtis and I had our feet up on the desk and were eating takeout lo mein. He chopsticked some hanging noodles between his lips and eyeballed me.

I bet you’re glad to be out of Style. He coughed a little laugh.

"I’m a real fashion don’t."

Buzz misses you, he said.

Sure. I crunched a piece of lemongrass between my teeth. Like a house cat misses his mouse. Anyway, he’s got Tracy.

Since I had left Style, a new girl, Tracy Newton, had taken my place. It was All About Eve, all over again. When I was on the desk, she was a freelancer, snatching side dishes after I nabbed the big roast, the Iowa chorus girl waiting in the wings for the leading lady to break her leg.

Tracy and I couldn’t have been more different. She was dark and angular with jet-black hair, a nose to ski off, cheekbones doubling as scenic peaks. She gave new meaning to the term legwork; her endless trotters could cross the newsroom in four strides. Me, I’m a winding country road with cherry-blond hair. Everything on me goes round: big eyes, big lips, big everything. I wear my hair in short curls behind my ears, and apply an extra coat of mascara. Where Tracy Newton titters, I purr.

Curtis held his chopsticks before his lips. Tracy, he said, can’t hold a candle to you.

It’d been a long time since anyone had flirted with me, and it was like easing into a hot bath. You flatter me, I said. Tracy has her good points.

Yours are a few points higher, he said.

I was putting on my best coy smile, slow as a pair of long silk gloves, when one of the copy editors shouted from across the room, Val, can you handle a call on Obits?

I put down my carton. Ring it through!

The phone rang. Vane.

I knew who it was by the metallic ache behind the silence. Cabeza? I said.

I’ve got some new facts, he said, skipping the niceties. I want you to investigate this murder.

A few minutes ago I’d been contemplating LaShanniah’s string bikini and now the word murder was on the line. I turned to Curtis, batted my eyes a little, and pointed at the mouthpiece with a shrug. He nodded, lifted himself out of his seat, waved bye-bye, and went to talk to the slot. I hunched over in the swivel chair with the phone close to my chest. Listen, Cabeza, Mr. Beer, whatever it is you call yourself, I said. I think maybe you have the wrong idea about me. Gumshoe isn’t my bailiwick. I’m more of a cocktails and furs kind of girl. It wasn’t true anymore, and I knew it, but he didn’t.

I don’t think I have the wrong idea, he said.

When a body’s gone, I like to leave it be, I said. I don’t dance with corpses.

He laughed. It was a tight little laugh, both feet on a dime. You think I don’t know anything about you, but I do. I know you wrote that article and I know that you also suspect you might’ve made a mistake. But where you are, people don’t like to admit to mistakes.

I’m sorry, I said. I disagree. I reached out to put down the receiver, but before I could he spoke again.

You can be a reporter again, Cabeza said.

I put the phone back up to my ear. He did know something about me, then. All I’m looking for is the truth, he continued. And if you’re a reporter, that’s what you want, too.

I thought about it for longer than I care to admit. I knew he heard me thinking, though there was no sound except for the two of us breathing at each other.

Thanks, I said. Not interested.

Then I hung up the phone.

2

Cinderella Redux

The truth was, I wasn’t hard-boiled. I wasn’t a lot of things I pretended to be, least of all a first-class news hawk. If I’d been a cocktails and furs kind of girl, it’d been too short a stint to stick.

In truth, I was born on the hardwood floor of a Mission District squat in San Francisco, circa 1972. And my given name was Sunburst Rhapsody Miller.

My mother was a Boston society escapee and my father a Harvard dropout. The two