A Little Trouble with the Facts (24 page)

“You’ve got me but good,” I said.

“That was just a little insurance,” he said. “I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

I was starting to see. He wasn’t going to do me bodily harm. His threat was much more grave. He was going to keep me close to him for the rest of my life so that the truth would always be a threat, always be my undoing. I put down the reel. I had to be smart. I had to play it just right. I tried to think of him as the same man I’d watched from bed that morning, so many eons ago, when I’d believed I knew something about love.

“The kinds of things you’re saying now,” I said softly. “I’ve been thinking about that too. A life together, a future for the two of us. That house in Woodstock. So, you have this exhibition in Germany and then, a month later, Jeremiah sells these works for a windfall. Okay. Do you really think we can get out? Do you really think the police will stop investigating the murder? And we can live quietly, with no fear that they’ll come for us later?”

He kissed me again, the kind of kiss that said,
Thanks for being in it with me
. “We’ve fixed that, I think,” he said, casually. He took the film from his camera and went to his closet and found a pair of pants. He put them on. “All evidence points to Darla. As you know, Wallace was harassing her about some paintings—easy, because true—and she wanted him out of her hair. This gives her motive to get rid of Wallace. Then there’s the ware
house fire, which looks ridiculously suspicious, as you know. The police are already investigating the link between those two.”

“Very smart. But she wasn’t responsible?”

“She’s actually a pretty respectable dealer. She cuts corners here and there but she wouldn’t do anything of this scale. She just gets kind of trashed in the press because she’s one of those people that the media loves to hate.”

“Then it was you who saw him that night on the Queensboro,” I said.

“All I did was tell Jeremiah when Stain would be going out bombing.” He was checking the size of his pants in the mirror, pulling at the waist. Apparently, he was pleased that he’d taken off a few pounds. “I knew he’d be going, because he’d been talking about it for weeks. I told Jeremiah and he took care of the rest. Jeremiah wouldn’t have done it himself, of course, but he’d know who to hire.” Cabeza looked at himself in the mirror on the inside door of his closet and sucked in his gut. “All rich boys are criminals at heart, you should know that, Valerie. Who was it who said, ‘Behind every great fortune is a crime’?”

Balzac, I thought. Or was it Raymond Chandler? Either way, I didn’t say anything. Instead, I watched him watch himself in the mirror. He moved closer to look at a blemish on his face, and he poked at it.

“And the paint in his mouth? The black tongue, the purple teeth?”

He turned to me, smiling. “Classic red herring. I liked that one myself.”

“Nice touch. You do have a flair for details, don’t you?”

Cabeza moved his hand away from the blemish and smoothed it over his chin, checking for stubble.

“And Wallace didn’t fall from the Queensboro Bridge. He was dumped from somewhere else. Or he fell from somewhere else,” I said after a while.

“You’re catching on.”

“It wouldn’t make sense. Why would Wallace go there at all? He had no reason. It wasn’t where he painted. There’s no graffiti on that bridge.”

“Smart girl. You’re doing very well. How did you know he was writing that night?”

“You said it yourself. He liked to keep in practice, ‘keeping it real.’ Even at forty-two, he liked to have that rush. He wouldn’t have been able to live without it.”

Cabeza combed a hand through his hair, turned his face to the side, and looked at himself in profile. “It’s true. Malcolm was that way. He had to make his mark. Without that, he didn’t see himself as an artist.” He took a belt off a hook in his closet and threaded it through his belt loops.

“So you figured that he’d do it sometime this month. You found out from him when he was going—going out for ice cream?—and you told Jeremiah and had him tailed. But he didn’t go to the Queensboro. It had to be somewhere upstream. His body drifted and ended up practically on your doorstep. How weird.”

He thumbed through his closet until he found a shirt he liked, a pale blue short-sleeved button-down. “It was pretty strange,” he said. “I have to admit. You’re right, again, Val. It was Hell Gate Bridge. Gustav Lindenthal’s beaux arts masterpiece.” He put on the shirt but didn’t button it. “When it was completed in 1916 it had the longest arch of any bridge in the world.”

I swallowed. “You love your bridges.”

“Oh, sure. That’s where my real passion lies. Connections. Look, let’s try to find a way for you to get yourself relaxed,” he added, slipping back into his sandals. “You’re going to need to be calm when you go in to talk to your boss. Maybe we can have breakfast after all? I’ll make you a Bloody Mary to take the edge off.” He began walking across the room to the kitchen.

“How did you know Kamal was going…?” I stopped myself.
Cabeza retrieved the knife from under the mattress and went to find his onion. He was smiling. He knew I’d figured it out on my own: he’d suggested the vandalism job to Kamal. He’d somehow made Kamal think it was his own idea. Of course that would generate publicity, and Kamal would take the heat. And he and Jeremiah had somehow arranged it so that the guard would be off duty and the doors would be left open so the teens had easy access. It would’ve been as simple as paying him off.

Cabeza put on an apron and wiped his hands. He smiled at me from the cutting board. “So, would you like onions, then?” He held it up. “I’m going to have some.”

“Don’t bother,” I stood up. “But you go ahead. I better get into the office. Battinger’s waiting. I’m just going to tell her I had no idea about the sale. I had no idea that Jeremiah owned Stain’s art. I’m just a dumb cherry-blonde, and I only know what I know, nothing more. The best I can hope is that I’ll confirm her earlier suspicions that I’m a lousy reporter.”

“But it’s the truth, sweetheart. You didn’t know about any of that. That’s the important thing. How could you? It’s not like you talk to Jeremiah. It’s not like Sotheby’s would announce a sale to someone like you—you’re only an Obit writer, after all.”

I picked up my handbag again. “Thank you for protecting me,” I said. “I think I should be fine. I didn’t know a thing.” I was moving mechanically now, reminding myself with each step and each breath how it was done. I was like a performer on opening night, playing a femme fatale for the first time, even though it was the role that had been written for me. Cabeza had directed me all this time; he’d rehearsed me through the blocking.

“You didn’t know a thing.”

“Right, exactly,” I said. “That’s the truth. I just have to stick to the truth.”

“The point is, as long as you don’t let on you know me, you’re in the clear, and everything goes along as planned.”

I was about to say,
Just as planned,
but there was a chance it would come out ironic. Instead, I was listening to the
tap tap tap
of the knife on the cutting board, and for the first time in my life, I identified with onions.

“So, what’s my cut?” I asked.

Cabeza smiled wide. “I told Jeremiah you’d ask. It’s funny, I know you better now. He said I should offer you a third if you’d been a good sport.”

“I don’t like that math. I’ll take half,” I said, impressed with my own improvisational skills.

“I’ll talk it over with him,” he answered.

I picked up my shoes. I walked toward him as coolly as Ava Gardner and pecked him on the cheek.

“Now, what kind of good-bye kiss is that?” he said.

“You’re right,” I said. I knew he’d want to seal the pact. My heart was pounding, but I kissed him full on the mouth. The air around us smelled of onions. He put down the knife and cupped my face in his hands. It was a horrible feeling, but I endured it. I nearly passed out with relief when he let go, then I made my way to the door.

“I should be gone for only about an hour,” I said. “Promise me, we’ll talk about Woodstock when I get back?”

“I promise,” he said. “I’ve already printed out a map.”

As soon as the door was shut behind me, I ran down the stairs in my bare feet, and didn’t stop until I was halfway across the Queensboro Bridge.

I
n front of the fortress, I caught my breath, leaning over, hands on knees. I’d run all the way west, weaving through a street fair on Third Avenue, dodging window-shoppers on Fifth, swiping tourists at Rock Center. Back in Times Square, my feet were raw with blisters, my clothes soaked through with sweat.

I looked up at The Paper, its dark gray brick looming. Carved into the stone arch above the doors were the words “To Give the News Impartially Without Fear or Favor, Regardless of Any Party, Sect, or Interest Involved.” Sweat from my forehead fell into my eyes and stung.

Pressing through The Paper’s revolving door, I swallowed hard. My legs could barely carry me, my heart burned in my chest. I took the stairs to the third floor and went straight to Battinger’s desk, expecting to find her and Curtis at her computer, fuming. But they weren’t anywhere. The Metro desk was like a union hall after the governor’s come and gone. A few copy editors clicked a key or two. A clerk answered a call. I ran up the stairs to search for Curtis. The phone was ringing off the hook. It sounded like it might scream itself to death.

Back downstairs, I dropped into my seat and turned around a few times. I took out a pack of gum and shoved a stick in my mouth. Then I took out another piece and chewed that too. But it still wasn’t enough. I opened up another and worked my jaws on all three.

On Mickey Rood’s computer, the cursor was flickering.
Ms. Steinerman is survived by her Labrador retriever, Chunky Bobo.
Someone was in the office after all. I was unwrapping a fourth and a fifth stick when I heard Rood’s three footsteps—two for each foot and one for his cane. He looked a little wobblier than usual, his tie was askew and his shoulders were covered with more than the usual dusting of flakes.

“That’s a lot of chew for a little girl.” He smiled, showing me his teeth, which had something white lodged by one canine. I opened up a sixth stick. “Jaime gave you the day off, Miss Vane. Shouldn’t you be sunbathing in Sheeps Meadow?”

“I’m supposed to talk to Battinger,” I said, garbling the words so it came out “gub suppa bat are ure.”

“She went out for a sandwich. Said she’d be back in a few.”

I nodded, rather than talk through my gum.

Rood eyed me with concern. “There’s been some trouble, I take it?”

I nodded again.

“Personal or professional?”

I nodded twice. Both.

“Why don’t you go to the cafeteria and get yourself some coffee-colored-water? I’ll meet you there once I file this Obit and we can figure it out.”

I went to the stairwell and began the eight-story climb. I took the steps two by two, lunging upward, pushing against gravity, swallowing my sugary spit. At the eleventh floor, I went down the hallway and pushed through a turnstile into the cafeteria. Hot plates at one counter, fries at the grill, salad bar, Jell-O cups under cellophane. I felt ravenously hungry for a moment, but then I smelled onions and felt sick all over again.

The cafeteria usually hummed with office intrigue, a senior editor dillydallying with a new blond clerk, investigative reporters hammering out a Pulitzer bid over BLTs. Today it was pretty
quiet. A few bleary-eyed overnighters spooned cereal by the far wall; near the windows, a weekend janitor was beating an editorial writer at chess.

I found a plastic seat at one of the scores of empty tables and looked out the picture windows. We were right above the Great White Way, but the view offered no neon lights or glimpses of the tourist throngs. All I could see was water towers, the blinkered windows of adjacent office buildings, and, if I strained my neck all the way to the right, a few threatening clouds.
Way up high, Sam, where it’s always balmy,
I thought bitterly, remembering Falco.
Where no one snaps his fingers and says, ‘Hey Schmitt, rack the balls.’
The wad of gum swelled in my gob. I chewed slowly, breathing through my nose, trying to make sense of it all. What had I done? How did it happen? Was I doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over until the end of time? Jeremiah had banked on my ambition, the singularity of my drive. Had he been right twice? Was my fatal flaw repetition compulsion?

Rood arrived carrying a Styrofoam cup, spilling with every step. He put it down with a trembling hand, spilling some more. He smoothed a napkin on the table in front of me. “Go ahead,” he said, eyeing my bulging cheek. “It’s time to uncork.”

I placed the wad of gum on the napkin.

“That bad, huh?” he said.

I nodded, taking a few deep breaths through my mouth and swallowing what was left of the sugar.

“How bad?” he asked.

Then I spilled. It came out fast, because it had to. Because I knew everything. I knew who had killed Wallace and I knew why they’d done it. I’d seen evidence all over the place, and I’d logged it somewhere in the recesses of my mind. I’d even felt it, somewhere in my gut. I remembered the canvases in Jeremiah’s attic that night he’d seduced me against his grandmother’s rocking chair, Kamal’s bitter expression when I asked him about Ca
beza at the memorial, Cabeza’s photo in the Sunday Magazine, the aristocratic flutter of his hands at our M&G late-night lunch, Jeremiah’s parting shot at me the previous day. And that camera of Cabeza’s, always rolling. Sure, I’d seen it all, even if I’d tried to ignore it. It had been right there on the walls all the while.

I told it to Rood straight, from the first Cabeza call to the last chop of the onion. I didn’t hold back anything, not the embarrassing parts, not the incriminating parts. I told him about Cabeza’s offer, my request for half the take, and his eyes glistened.

“Not tempted to take the money?” he said. “That could solve a few problems too, you know.”

“Tempted? Sure. I thought about it for about half my run from Queens. But when I stopped running, that felt better. Now I have to decide, because I’m sure Battinger’s back from lunch and she’s waiting on me. And probably Curtis has gotten back to his desk by now and the two of them are going to want answers.”

Rood blinked at me a few times. He leaned both hands on his cane and rested his chin on his knuckles. “Miss Vane, I’m no model of virtue. I’ve made mistakes ten times in my life that people should never make twice. Everything good I ever had I traded in for vice: one of my lungs, most of my money, both of my wives. I’m not going to sit here and tell you you’re a bad girl, if that’s what you want.”

“I should just march right over to Battinger’s desk and tell her to fire me, have me arrested, something.”

Rood pushed his coffee cup toward me. “Self-pity is very unbecoming, Miss Vane.” The coffee looked about as appetizing as swamp water, but I took a sip anyway. “Did you know everything you just told me when you wrote the piece with Curtis?”

“It all came to light this morning.”

“So when you wrote your last piece, you were using your best resources to formulate a story based on what you had in front
of you at the time.” He didn’t say it as a question. “That’s what newspapermen do. You have to go with the best information you have on deadline, and then you update when you know better. If you ever know better.”

“I was a pawn,” I said. “A sap. I should’ve been able to read the signs here, connect the dots, somehow. I should’ve seen the whole picture, because it was there all along.”

Rood scowled. He pressed his rough mitts against the edge of the table and pushed himself back. His chair legs screeched against the floor. “Did I ever tell you how I ended up on Obits, Miss Vane?” he said.

“No, Mickey. I don’t think so.”

Rood had a way of making time slow down. Even if the world was a big rush of chaos, when Mickey talked, time gave way. He propped his cane against the table and crossed his arms in front of his chest, signaling that this story would take a while.

“I was a young man then, a beat reporter, like you, except I was working the neighborhoods, the city streets. Back then, nobody cared how hard you hit the bottle, and so I hit it pretty hard, and whenever I was too enthusiastic about it, they moved me to a slower borough to let me dry out. Staten Island was the cruise ship, slower than slow. Incidentally, I was also having an off and on at that time with Jane—that’s right, battle-ax Battinger. Don’t look so surprised—she was young once, too, and she was a hotshot on Metro, the deputy weekend editor and not yet thirty. I was always impressed with that, I thought I might even ask her to marry me some day, but she wasn’t looking for a second stringer; and anyway, it was her career she really loved.”

I tried to imagine Battinger as a young woman, and it wasn’t so easy to do. Maybe she’d been an Elizabeth Taylor type, curvy in all directions, but with a kind of acid running through her veins, maybe
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. No, later:
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“So, a notice came across my desk one day about a pharmacist killed in a Staten Island drugstore; I went over there and got a look around. I thought maybe there was a good story in it—maybe racially motivated, since the victim was black and there didn’t seem to be any explanation. But the PD convinced me otherwise. They labeled it black on black, some neighborhood grudge. In those days, that meant we didn’t follow up.”

Rood didn’t need a corollary from one of my old black-and-whites. He was the genuine article. He’d walked the mean streets, he’d worn his press card in his fedora. He’d spat whiskey breath more than once into an editor’s face.

“In walks this dame to our bureau one sunny afternoon, a real sweetheart with some prize-winning gams. She’s the sister of the deceased and she tells me the cops got it wrong. She says it goes much deeper. She says her brother had refused to pay off some round hats on the take. He could afford it, all right. He just had a conscience, thought it wasn’t right for the police to skim the cream off an honest man’s wage. I had to agree with him.”

Rood traced a figure eight on the cafeteria tabletop. “Sure, I fell for her. But mainly I was interested in the case. I wanted to play good cop. They had a real racket going in the 122, and I had the goods to bust it wide open. But I couldn’t get it in the paper no way, no how. For months, I badgered the Metro chief, but he kept telling me I had my facts mixed up. It was a few years before I found out why he killed it. Turns out Jane had found out somehow about the sister and me, and she made sure the story wouldn’t run anywhere near the page. I don’t know how she did it, because she was still a small fry, but she had a way of convincing people of things when she wanted to. As far as I know, it was the only time she pulled a stunt like that. But it wasn’t right of her to do it. I had that story legit. There was nothing wrong with my facts.”

Rood’s face looked pained. His sadness deepened the wrinkles cutting across his brow. Maybe he’d been over this story a hundred thousand times in his head, maybe he’d told it aloud once or twice. From the look on his face, I could see it still hurt.

“You asked to be transferred off the Metro desk when you found out?”

“That’s right. I was pretty easily scandalized for a guy who was supposed to be tough. I didn’t mind knowing about corruption out there, in the big bad city. What upset me most was this place. I thought it was better than that. I’d believed in it. The institution. The stronghold.” He leaned forward. “Okay, you slept with a source.
Tsk, tsk
. Bad girl.” Mickey waved his finger at me and then laughed a little. His laugh turned into a cough. He pounded the table until it subsided. “The more important issue is whether you have the guts to report it out. To see that justice is done.”

Rood cleared his throat roughly and wiped his mouth with his hankie. Then he balled it up and tossed it in the nearest trashcan.

“The answer isn’t to go to Jane,” he said. “She’s no father confessor. What you need to do is get the story written. Leave Battinger to me. I’ll handle her until you get your ducks in a row. She owes me a little something after all these years. Let’s you and I figure out how to make her good for it. That sound right to you?”

“Just right.”

“That’s my girl,” Rood said. “And when we’re done with this little expedition, remind me, I’ve got something for you on those names you gave me last week.”

Rood called down to Battinger and Curtis and told them that I was in the building and that I needed a few more minutes to
get my act in gear. Then he and I mapped it out, the whole plan, down to the last nickel. We had less than ten hours to move a story, and I had to watch my back. Cabeza would be in contact with Jeremiah by now, waiting to see what I’d do. They’d killed Stain for money and for a little bit of fame; despite Cabeza’s claims of love, I didn’t think either he or Jeremiah liked me so much they’d spare me if I crossed them.

I found Curtis at the fourth-floor soda machine clunking quarters through the slot. He said he’d already been down to Sotheby’s and had talked to the specialists for the sale and it all looked pretty legit. He’d said as much to Battinger, so I needn’t worry. She was planning to run a short follow, and they’d be happy to have my assist.

While he stood sipping his A&W, I told him why I did need to worry—why he did too. I reprised all I’d told Rood, but I did it faster now that I’d rehearsed it once already. His eyes were wide when he put down the can. “Battinger’s not going to like this. I’ve already convinced her the sale is on the level.”

“That’s why we need to get everything lined up just right.”

Curtis and I took the back stairs out of the fortress. The first stop was Hell Gate Bridge, the site of Stain’s last graffiti stand, the bridge that connected North Queens to the South Bronx. It all seemed so obvious to me now. If Cabeza wanted to get to Wallace, Hell Gate was the shortest distance between two points. We hailed a cab to Astoria, and asked the cabbie to drive under the Amtrak Bridge until we could find a place where it was easy to get onto the rails. As we climbed onto the span, Curtis said, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter.” I felt a tingle run up my spine from my hips to my shoulders. Someone could be watching. Cabeza or Jeremiah could be anywhere. They could make sure I slipped.