A Little Trouble with the Facts (2 page)

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 heavy
weights, 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.

T
he 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 of them had watched Cambridge disappear in the rearview of my dad’s VW camper in 1967. He was a chemist heading into his junior year, but classes conflicted with the Summer of Love. She was a high school songstress, good with a tambourine.

When I came along, five years later, they were holed up with a troupe of yippies and Merry Pranksters in a squat on Treat Avenue. Their pals organized Happenings and wrote agitprop plays with titles like
What Would Woody Do?
and
Tempeh for the Masses!
Rent was twenty-five smackers a month and no one’s wooden bowl ever wanted for brown rice.

Those early years were the happiest I can recall. The pastel houses on our street lined up like candy jars at the corner drug. Our bay windows poured in buckets of sunlight. Our storerooms were full of costumes, wigs, masks, and face paint to daub a cir
cus, so a little girl’s life never wanted for playtime. By day, my folks got run out of public parks for their antiwar skits. By night, the house filled with friends and fans whose banjos, rain sticks, and didgeridoos sweetened the night air along with the thick smoke of Mendocino kind.

We weren’t a family that stuck to schedules, but there was one thing we kept regular. Every Friday afternoon at four o’clock, my father would walk me over to Eureka Valley and he’d plunk down two dollars at the Castro Theatre box office, and then guide me inside the movie house. The Wurlitzer organ played and the Deco chandelier dimmed and my dad took my hand as we watched the screen flicker.

His great love, after agitprop, my mom, and me, was movies, the old black-and-whites. His own dad had taken him to the flicks once a week when he was a boy. It was the one aspect of his childhood in “the old country” (i.e., the East Coast) that he wanted to pass along to the next generation. And secretly, I thought he also liked to get a glimpse of the glamour he’d left behind, as directed by George Cukor, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawkes:
His Girl Friday, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Sabrina, Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, Week-end at the Waldorf
. On the way home to our squat, we’d play the characters in the movies. He’d be Walter Burns and I’d be Hildy Johnson. I’d be Sabrina and he’d be Linus Larrabbee. He was Nick to my Nora.

Sure, he had a handlebar soup strainer and a Nehru-collared paisley shirt. But I always figured my dad for a classic screen idol. With his aristocratic roots, his broad-cut chin, and his Roman nose, he could easily land a big-bucks blockbuster. I’d be right there beside him, a curly-haired Shirley Temple costar. We’d leave this ragtag troupe behind and take our act to Tinsel Town. From Castro Street to Mission, we planned plots set on city streetscapes, drawn from his high-contrast past: debutantes’ lily-white hands ringed thick with diamonds, street
urchins turned men of industry, old ladies coughing blood into their hankies and signing their mansions off to their cats.

Back at the squat, though, we went silent. My mother, who was otherwise too slack, was strict about one thing: the East was the past, and we didn’t mention it. Maybe she didn’t want to miss everything so much, because she’d left so much behind. But my father wasn’t so stony. He saw that my eyes glittered with the lure of New York celluloid and he fed my fervor. At night, when I was tucked under my homemade quilt, he dragged in his old steamer trunk and plucked out pictures. His top-hatted pop at the “21” Club; his mother in a Garbo-style gown at the Russian Tea Room; even a picture of Mom chasing pigeons near Central Park’s Belvedere Fountain. One night, he brought me an old volume of
Vanity Fair,
and I read it cover to cover. Then I read it again, and again, and again, like a girl on a fantasy merry-go-round, all bells and lights and whistles and no brass ring.

San Fran was swell but we couldn’t stay. My mother gave me the news at age ten: “Back to the land” meant swapping our flush toilet for a creaky outhouse, city sanitation for a compost heap. My mother’s cheery tone didn’t hide the truth from me: we were the worst pack of downwardly mobile, good-for-nothing hippies that ever passed the hat.

So one morning, we packed our props into the camper van and pointed our compass north. My dad strapped on an old duffel and climbed onto his Harley Road King. He was going to take the scenic route along Pacific Coast Highway and meet us there by midnight. Mom and I got into the van and watched the cityscape morph into evergreens and we arrived at our damp new cabin on the Eugene farm just in time for sundown.

The wind whistled balefully through the plywood wallboards and midnight came and went. It was the longest night that I ever knew, waiting wide-awake for the rumble of his motor up
the dirt road. I counted the slats in the ceiling, reread my
Vanity Fair,
and counted the slats again, so I wasn’t awakened when I heard my mother’s endless wail. Somewhere along the Lost Coast, Dad had stopped for gas. When he turned back onto the road, an oncoming trucker didn’t make out his bike’s night beam and he was killed in a white-hot flash.

What words can I assign to that loss? I never had them. I don’t know if I ever will. But I knew how I felt about Eugene. It had been a trip in the wrong direction. We didn’t belong back on the land. We didn’t need to be deeper into the dirt. I decided that first day that the farm, the West, the hippie life, wasn’t ever going to be the way for me. I never got good at potlucks and sing-alongs. I couldn’t sit cross-legged and bless my soy stir-fry. I was always too antsy, too ready for my screen test. As I saw it, life was high above this earthly gloom, somewhere in the skyscrapers that touched the clouds over Manhattan.

I arrived at the Port Authority by Greyhound bus on my twenty-third birthday, with everything I owned stuffed into my Guatemalan backpack. I had a few names scribbled on a piece of notebook paper in my pocket, those I could remember from my father’s stories over his steamer trunk. But I hadn’t counted on inquisitive doormen. And I hadn’t realized how many Millers there were in the Manhattan White Pages.

So I gave up on the family reunification dream—for the moment—and started circling ads for cheap shares in
The Village Voice
. After my futon was ensconced in an East Fifth Street walk-up, I called Zachariah Winkle, the publisher of
Gotham’s Gate,
a weekly glossy with a flair for the indiscreet. My English professor at Reed had given me his name.

“Call me Zip,” he said. “Everyone does. I’m not hiring now. But I’m always willing to look at a fresh face.” I offered to flash mine over coffee in SoHo, and landed an internship three days a week.

As it happened, I arrived during penguin suit season, that stretch of springtime when the city’s nonprofits host the $3,000-a-plate suppers that keep them afloat for the year. Guests get poached salmon, duck confit, a few speeches, and a chance to demonstrate charitable zeal. Corporate bigwigs buy tables for $10K to $50K a pop, and promise to show their expensive mugs. But when the time comes for them to lift a fork, they beg off and fill their seats with hired hacks.

Penguin-suit soirees are a snore to anyone in the know. But I was out of the know. My first month in New York, I was a blank book wanting script. In the first weeks, I’d tasted my inaugural almond cookie at Veniero’s on East Eleventh, played impromptu chess in Washington Square Park, skipped down the East Side promenade. One evening I’d even found myself on a fishing boat on the Hudson, drinking German Riesling while listening to a Czech opera with a Belgian chef. When Zip Winkle mentioned the PEN American Center Gala to this Oregonian wildflower, she very nearly swooned. “Oh, just do me one favor,” Zip added. “If you happen to notice anything intriguing about any of the guests, call it in to Bernie.”

Bernie Wabash was the
Gate
’s chief gossip columnist who penned “Inside Line,” six inches on page three with a handful of bold-faced lies. He always needed items, and all the mag’s lackeys were expected to supply them. I’d always wanted to get a tidbit on Bernie’s page. This was my first inside shot.

At a secondhand shop on West Tenth, I found a pink gown with a three-foot train and matching satin gloves. My redheaded roommate pinned it up with safeties, and I dabbed my lips red until she said stop. I counted my quarters and took my first yellow cab, gabbing at the hack all sixty blocks north. When my pink-tinted pumps tapped the grand plaza at Lincoln Center, I figured myself for Sabrina, just returned from Paris.

Inside, I snatched a flute of champagne from a silver tray,
almost toppling the waiter, found my place card with my name at Table 13, and placed my satin gloves on my plate. I had nothing to do but read and reread the gala program, memorizing the names and titles of the listed sponsors, assuming they’d all be my pals by the end of the night.

The evening’s honoree was Jeremiah Sinclair Golden Jr., son of the Vermont senator and founder of TriBeCa’s Odyssey Pictures, the indie film giant known for cinematic milestones such as
Under the Milk Sink
and
Dancing in Moscow
. Not yet thirty,
People
magazine described Golden as “the glamour puss of the cutting-edge art set,” praising his “indefatigable faith in unproven quantities.” Tonight, he was being honored for promoting poetry slams in the former Soviet bloc.

I figured he would arrive trailed by baby bluebloods. But as the guests filtered in, I saw most were probably pulling Social Security. Not that any of them needed a government assist. A single mink stole offered to the coat check could’ve supported poetry slams worldwide for as long as slams stayed hip. I popped mini crab cakes and washed them down with champagne. I walked out onto the patio with my flute and waited for a debonair millionaire to sidle up behind me and wrap me in a mink.

But instead, I shivered until a young man in a tux politely rang a dinner bell and called us all inside. The speeches were to begin immediately. I was tipsy by the time Jeremiah Golden walked up to the mike, and maybe lightheaded too, because I almost fell off my seat. He was the very portrait of polite East Coast society, straight from the dog-eared pages of my ancient
Vanity Fair
. His Savile Row tuxedo wouldn’t have looked any smarter on John-John. His black curls flounced. Yes, flounced. In place of a bow tie, he wore a yellow silk cravat, tucked into his black vest, with a matching display hankie. I guessed he wore Alfred Dunhill cufflinks and carried a compendium case. Forget the silver spoon; he was born with a whole table setting in his mouth.

I tried to listen. Really, I did. But I caught only a few phrases: “I couldn’t string together two words of prose, let alone improvise a revolutionary sonnet like these young people I met…” “The real honorees here tonight are the Ukrainian freestyler…” “I’ve always believed in underground movements, and never had the chance to…” My head was too busy with snippets of imagined repartee between us that would, preferably, take place in his Connecticut horse stables before he helped me mount. I heard the laughter of the crowd, punctuating the cadences of his thank-you speech, and I heard the thunderous clapping when he was through.

“Think globally, slam locally,” he said, returning to take another bow before the mike, a fist in the air, making a power-to-the-people gesture, though it read more like, “Go get ’em champ.” He returned to his seat at Table 1, and I immediately began scheming for ways to position myself in the empty chair beside him.

But then I remembered Bernie. I was supposed to be collecting string. I hadn’t gotten a single inch yet, not even the color of the room. We were between courses, so I took my notepad out of my purse and clutched my pen. I was standing on a gold mountain of gossip. All I had to do was mine. But how would I recognize any of the people I was supposed to be skewering? I didn’t know a single face, and even if I asked for names, they wouldn’t ring bells. These were all New York City insiders, after all, bigwigs with private bank accounts, not the kind of celebs appearing on
Entertainment Tonight
. Well, I thought, how hard can it be? I’m an attractive young woman in a spiffy dress. I hoisted my train and edged into a circle of gents. Their conversation stopped short and they all looked from my pen to my face and back again.

“Pardon me,” I said. “My name is Sunburst and I don’t know a thing about poetry slams. Can someone clue me in?”

“Starburst, you say?” said one of the gents. “As in fruit chew?”

The circle erupted in laughter.

“No, actually…”

“Do you come in assorted flvors?” More laughter.

“Why, I believe I’m your distributor!” said another gent, touching his watch chain. “We hold M&M/Mars.” Guffaws from the group as I backed away.

After a while, the dinner bell rang. I took my seat at Table 13, still clutching my blank notepad. About halfway through supper, the gold-dipped septuagenarian at my elbow asked me to pass her a roll. I picked through the assortment and said, “Ooh, they have cinnamon raisin. Those are my favorite. My mother showed me how to make cinnamon raisin rolls and…” The septuagenarian smiled at me with her penciled-in lips, said, “That’s very nice dear,” and turned back to the Rolex at her right.

After a couple of hours listening to silverware tap fine china, I heard crunching crinoline as the gents led their ladies away. I stood at the edge of the gilded railing on the second tier and gazed at the mezzanine. I’d failed to get any items or any contacts. I hadn’t managed a single round of witty quippery.

My celluloid fantasy was revived, though, because just then, Jeremiah burst back through the front doors and ran up the stairs. I wondered if I was imagining things, but he said, “I need to use the loo. Would you mind very much watching the door?” On his way out a few minutes later, he stopped. “This is no place for a beautiful woman in a scandalous gown,” he announced. “Unless you’re staying for the
Carmen
matinee, I could give you a ride anywhere you need to go.”