A Little Trouble with the Facts (12 page)

“I think you’re assuming I have power. I’m not even allowed to write under my own byline. No one would give me any story—let alone a story that big.”

He put some waffle into his mouth and chewed. When he was done chewing he started talking. “You may temporarily be in somewhat of a bad position, I’ll grant you that. But because of where you are—still working at that paper—you’re a very powerful girl. Maybe you don’t realize how powerful you could be. We come from a place that isn’t covered much in the media. The fact that you came up to the Bronx today was a sign that you’re tougher than you think. You came this far; maybe you’re willing to go a little bit further. You could help us find out who killed Malcolm. You write about it. We all win.” Cabeza dipped his waffle in syrup. “Malcolm was a real art star, perhaps the most important black artist in contemporary art, after Basquiat. I hate those distinctions—black artist, Latino artist, woman artist—but that’s how people thought of him. And if you check your art history, you’ll see there aren’t too many black artists allowed through the gates. If you found out who murdered him, you’d have a very big story on your hands. It would be the kind of story your editors couldn’t ignore, no matter who brought it to them.”

I was starting to get his point. I was starting to understand why he’d gone to all the trouble to invite me to the memorial and then to bring me in from the rain. He could’ve just called Battinger back to file a complaint. Anyone in that room could’ve done that. But he’d seen an opportunity I hadn’t seen—as long as I was still on staff, I could still make it right. But first I needed to know why everyone had ruled out suicide. “Why are you so sure that Wallace was murdered?”

He stopped chewing. “Because I know he didn’t kill himself. He wasn’t that type of man. It just wasn’t in him.”

I’d already heard this logic. I moved my silverware around on my plate. Cabeza could sense my dissatisfaction, and he didn’t let it slide.

“And because there was too much intrigue going on around him at the time of his death. You see, Malcolm spent the last several months looking for some paintings that had gone missing. He’d been down to see his old dealer, a woman named Darla Deitrick, who has a space on West Twenty-fourth Street by the West Side Highway, because he thought she still had some of his works.”

I knew about the Darla Deitrick gallery. Darla was a famous dealer who’d recently gotten attention for an exhibition called “Good Cop,” a series of portraits of New York’s men in blue just weeks after the Amadou Diallo shooting in the Bronx. It had caused a great commotion, and The Paper had covered the show at least three times. If Darla Deitrick indeed had something to do with Wallace’s death—even tangentially, even if I could merely mention her name in the same breath—it would indeed be the kind of story I could pitch to Battinger.

“I’ve tried to reach Darla about those paintings, but she doesn’t return my calls,” he said. “I imagine working for that paper qualifies you to go to art galleries and ask questions, no matter what subjects you’re supposed to cover.”

“You can’t possibly think a gallery owner would kill one of her artists.”

“I’m not saying any such thing.” He chewed politely for a while, and then swallowed. “I’m just trying to figure out if there’s any connection between these missing paintings and the fact that he ended up dead.”

“For instance?”

Cabeza’s movements were all fastidious, deliberate. He held his fork suspended before eating another bite. “For example,
Malcolm told me he thought Deitrick had sold his work but she hadn’t reported the sales, not to him and not to the IRS. If he was right, she committed a federal crime. That would be a good story for your paper, I think.”

Darla Deitrick committing tax fraud? Yeah, that would be a story for us. I could probably even go past Battinger, maybe even to the Culture desk. I swallowed a big sip of coffee, but my cup was getting cold and empty. The waitress came over and hovered above us with a pot of coffee that smelled like fresh peat. “She’ll have a refill,” Cabeza said. “None for me.”

“Let’s say I find something. How does that serve you?”

“I find out whether Malcolm was onto something. If he was, I can follow up. I can help the Wallace family secure his works, if she still has them. They would want them back. But I don’t know how it will all play out right now. All I know is I need someone who can get in there and snoop around.”

I finished my chicken and put the bones down on my plate. “I won’t be able to do any of this if I get canned for my mistake on the Obit.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I’ll see to it that no one makes a fuss. I’ll let them know we’re working together to make it right.”

“How will you do that?”

“I’m going to, that’s all. Ms. Deitrick has got a show going up just now, some minimalist
mierda
. So she’s got to be nice to reporters this week. That gives you an in.”

The waitress came by and lifted Cabeza’s plate. “Weren’t hungry, I see,” she said.

“It’s the chicken I can’t stand,” he said, passing her his bone-littered plate and winking. He routed through his back pocket and came out with two Handi Wipes, offering me one.

“Never touch them myself,” I said. “How did you meet Wallace?”

He was wiping his hands with the Handi Wipe one finger at a time. I got a whiff of its sweet alcohol scent. “In 1973, I made a documentary about a group of graffiti writers, the early ones tagging. I did most of the filming at the Bench, the subway stop on 149th Street where everyone would watch the trains go by. That’s where Wallace got his name, you know.”

I nodded. Stain 149. A name and a street.

Our waitress dropped our check on the table. Without looking at it, Cabeza removed a crisp twenty from his pocket, folded it the long way, and tapped her arm.
“Gracias,”
he said.
“Lo retenez.”

“I was very young myself,” he continued. “We were all kids. I shot the movie on sixteen millimeter and it wasn’t in great condition, but it got a pretty good play underground, so to speak. Malcolm was always with me, no matter what I did. I helped him get stretchers when he was short on cash. You could say I was a patron, of sorts. I also dated Amenia for a little while, years ago, before she converted to Islam. Shall we?”

He stood up and wiped the front of his shirt. He took his Havana hat off the table and put it back on his head. I stood up with him. I was mostly dry by now. The comfort food had made me feel brand-new. “Where did the rest of them end up?”

“Who?”

“The other graffiti kids you filmed. Other than Wallace?”

Cabeza walked me to the door, reached around me, and opened it for me. He was gentlemanly that way. “The truth is a lot of them are already dead,” he said. “Shot or overdosed, bad drugs, bad beefs, bad doctors. Some are in jail. Some still write. There’s a place in Brooklyn where some writers work on legal walls. Stain was one of the few who made it out whole.”

The air was lighter outside, since it had stopped raining. Cabeza asked me where I was headed and he hailed me another gypsy, handing me a ten-dollar bill. “You going to be all right getting home?” he asked.

I handed back his cash and took off his jacket. “Reporters aren’t allowed to accept gifts over twenty-five dollars from sources,” I said, handing it to him. “And you already paid for the meal.”

“That was just a meal between friends,” he said. “But should I take that to mean you’re willing to work with me to find out what really happened to Malcolm?”

I knew it was risky, but I also didn’t see any other road to redemption.

“Yes,” I said, stepping into the cab. “I’m in.”

I
sat on a white leather ottoman before a white marble desk in a white room in the back of a white gallery, looking at a white man in a white linen suit.

I was fidgety.

The man had a white phone to his ear and showed me the whites of his eyes to let me know he was on hold. “This will just be a minute.”

“Nice suit,” I said. “Dolce?”

He nodded and pursed his lips. Then he pulled the receiver away from his ear. He whispered, “All the assistants wear Dolce. She gives us a clothing allowance, but only for her designers.”

“Only Dolce and Gabbana?”

“Dolce, Paul Smith, Prada. The usual suspects.”

“Ah,” I whispered back. “A strict constructionist.”

He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “You don’t know the half.” Then there was a buzz on the other end of the line and he turned his chair to show me the white shell of his ear. When I’d walked into the gallery, I’d thought he was bald, but now I noticed a soft blond down on top of his head, cropped so close it shimmered.

“Listen, I’ve got someone in my office who wants to do an interview with Darla,” he said into the phone. “A drop-in. I should…Of course we’re opening tonight. Aren’t you coming?”

I’d been sitting on the ottoman looking at Blondie for twenty
minutes, waiting for him to finish up on the phone. “Of course you don’t go at two o’clock,” Blondie said, twisting the phone cord around his white finger. “It doesn’t get fun until five! I usually get there at about three thirty so I don’t have to deal with the hetero crowd clogging up the coat check. So? Take a disco nap.”

The gallery was everything a gallery should be, long and wide and pristine with cold polished granite floors, its cool minimalism showing high-class restraint. It was sealed airtight with soundless central A/C, so I forgot the 100-degree swelter beyond the glass doors. Before taking my lunch break to Chelsea, I’d conducted a little more research on Darla Deitrick. It was much more fruitful than the hour I spent searching “Cabeza” on the Internet. His name generated 39.4 million Web hits, none of them very helpful: the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca; Spanish medical sites about
dolor de cabeza
—a headache. The closest I got was info about a documentary called
Wild Style
, and a site that called itself a “cyber-bench.”

By contrast, there were buckets about Darla. Cabeza had been spot-on about her publicity lust. As a twenty-year-old junior at the Rhode Island School of Design, she’d strolled into MoMA one afternoon, pulled a can of spray paint out of her patent-leather purse, and hissed the words
Paint Makes Art
onto the surface of Jackson Pollock’s,
One: Number 31, 1950
. She’d turned toward Matisse’s
Dance (I)
when three security guards tackled her.

Once the Pollock was restored—she’d used water-soluble paint—and Darla had done her jail time and finished up her degree, she opened a gallery on Greene Street and positioned herself as a champion of illegal art underdogs—namely, Bronx and East Village street vandals she showcased like prize poodles. She moved to Chelsea from SoHo in 1995. Her first show there became famous because the artist distributed workable stun
guns. People downed wine and cheese and zapped one another until Darla was carted away in cuffs. She’d gotten the address of her new gallery in every rag in town.

I’d been to her Chelsea space once with Jeremiah, back when things were swell, to attend an opening for Tan Rififi. The artist had been naked, save a loincloth, and he crouched like a sumo wrestler over a pail of cow’s blood. He leaned in and soaked his hair, then took sumo strides to a canvas on the wall and shook his locks like a dog shaking off a bath. Jeremiah and I had gone straight to the dry cleaners from there.

Now I was considering Darla’s current exhibition: “PURE: A Retrospective of White-on-White.” All the paintings were white, or shades of white, white lines on white backgrounds, white boxes on white squares. One had a small red square in the corner of a white box. That was pretty exciting.

I didn’t know many of the artists in the show, but according to the catalog on the desk, they were something special: Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, Kasimir Malevich, Josef Albers, Piero Manzoni. There was one I recognized: Jasper Johns’s white-starred and-striped
White Flag
. It was on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art—which had agreed to hang it with Darla under the strictest of conditions, the catalog made clear—and it was hanging in its own alcove, with its very own guard. I figured I was standing in the most expensive whitewash ever produced—perhaps $50 million’s worth.

Could Cabeza be right? Why would a woman who obviously had high-level connects care one way or another about a smalltime graffiti dude who ran a paint school in the Bronx? She didn’t need to be bothering with minnows, when she was frying up great whites. And why was Cabeza so concerned about these paintings of Wallace’s anyway? I knew from my days on Style that everybody has an angle. What was his?

I strolled through the space and tried to name the paintings:
Snow falling on igloos. Bald man quick-sanded in a dune. Cloud descending over a first communion. Ghosts in smocks. I spent about ten minutes at that, got bored, and went back to Blondie. I watched his white skin play against the white wall for a while.

“I know, it’s tedious,” he was telling his friend on the phone. “The bouncers think they’re the maître d’ and the maître d’s think they’re the cooks, and the cooks, of course, are celebrities! Please. Stop flirting with Courtney Love and get back in the kitchen!”

Drawn by a dab of color, I got up again and stood before a wall of framed snapshots. There were two dozen pictures, dating back to when Darla was paying fines for her Pollock. I saw from the photos that she was a redheaded pixie with tresses that fell in two cords in front of her chest. I recognized some of the people in the photos: Warhol, Bowie, Mailer, Madonna, and Leonard Lauder—and finally, in one picture in front of what seemed to be her SoHo gallery, Wallace. He was in the back row, all the way to the left, wearing the same smile I’d seen in the 1985 Sunday Magazine shot. I wished I had a pen-sized camera, so I could take a little spy-shot of that and bring it back to Cabeza.

“Bye, kiss, gotta go, bye!” said Blondie, finally. I turned as he placed the phone in its cradle, and breathed deeply, a yoga Kapalabhati breath. Then he stood up and attempted to smooth the folds in his linen pants. They resisted. He frowned and tried to smooth them again. They didn’t budge. “Hate the summer!” he said to the pants.

Then he turned his back to me and thrust open the sliding door. He went inside, saying, “This will just take one second.” A moment later, he came out again. “I’m sorry, Miss, what did you say your name was again?”

He hadn’t asked me before. I cleared my throat. “Valerie Vane,” I said.

Blondie straightened up as if he’d touched an electrical wire. He thrust the sliding glass door into its casing with a thud. “You?”
he said, and then he took another yoga breath. He started again. “You. Are. Valerie. Vane?” He swallowed. “Oh my
God
.” He scampered toward me, scanning my face. “You are!” he declared. “You. Are. Valerie Vane! Oh my God. I
LOVE
you! I mean, Lit-er-al-ly. I
LOVE
you!” He folded his arms and looked me up and down as if I were
David
, on loan from Florence.

“But your hair is darker. You’re a little, well, you put on a touch of…nothing, really! You’re gorgeous! And I didn’t realize how tall you were! An Amazon! Oh, heaven have mercy.” He plunked down in his seat again. “I cut out your ‘Blondes’ cover story from
Gotham’s Gate
two years ago. It’s
still
on my refrigerator. A work of genius.
Genius.
Oh you got it dead on. Really,
dead
on. It made me dye my hair. And it’s still blond!” He put his hand through the moss on his head, surprising himself, and shook his scalp at me.

“It is still blond,” I said.

Blondie was just like the gray girl I’d met at the morgue, or maybe the flip side of the same coin. They were both entranced by infamy, but where she found schadenfreude, he found envy. He walked back behind the desk, picking up the phone. He started to laugh, “Oh, my
God,
I kept you waiting for so long while I was on the…” He laughed a little bit more and started to punch numbers. “Charles will die. He will simply die when I tell him I have the real Valerie Vane right here in the gallery staring at me. You’ll talk to Charles? Will you talk to him?”

I didn’t say anything, but it’s possible I frowned. Blondie reconsidered the receiver. “Of course, you didn’t come here for that. I’ll go get Ms. Deitrick.”

He looked like he would go get Darla this time, but he stopped, pivoted, and leaned his knuckles on the desk. “You know, I am so sorry about what happened to you,” he whispered. “That Angelica Pomeroy is, frankly, a whore. Lord knows we all have tacky friends, but please! Can you believe that she—”

Darla Deitrick stepped into the frame of the sliding glass door. She posed for a moment with one hand against the frame and the other teapotted against her hip. She was no more than five foot one, hoisted up on a pair of scaly red stilettos. Her hair might’ve been called red, but pumpkin was more accurate. Her black Dolce pencil skirt was all business, transacted through Swiss bank accounts. Her face was powdered white and her eyes were encircled with black kohl. Her temples had the stretched-thin look of trampolines. I guessed a Botox buffet, though she was not yet pushing fifty. She wore glasses with heavy frames, black with leopard spots. Against all the white, she looked like a popup cutout.

“Gideon,” she said, sternly, stepping through the glass.

Blondie turned around. “Oh, Ms. Deitrick. I was just coming to get you. You’ve got an appointment with Valerie Vane. She’s a reporter from the Style section,” his voice was outright shrill, “and she wants to talk to you about the exhibition. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Darla glanced at Blondie vaguely and her lip turned up a little. “Of course, I recognize your name,” she said, though obviously she didn’t. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person. I am very close with Tyler Prattle,” she said, referring to The Paper’s top art critic. “I hope we’ll see him tonight at the opening. You’d be coming then, I assume?”

“Ms. Vane is of course invited this evening,” Blondie put in. “Silly me, I completely forgot to give you your invitation.” He turned to Darla. “I’m afraid I’ve made Valerie wait, but she’s been eager to speak with you.” Then back to me. “Is it okay if I call you Valerie? I feel as if we’re old friends.”

“Sure,” I said.

Blondie clearly hadn’t heard about my demotion, and that was because The Paper kept a lid on internal reassignments; as far as the public was concerned, I could’ve been in Baja or Sibe
ria. Being fawned over had its perks. I felt around in my purse for a business card.

Darla stepped through the doorway and clip-clopped on her heels a few inches closer. She offered me her hand and shook weakly. Her left eyebrow, plucked almost to invisibility, twitched.

“I’d love to discuss the show,” she said. “Unfortunately, I’ve scheduled clients for the entire afternoon. If all goes well we’ll be sold out before the case of Stags’ Leap even arrives. Is Tyler coming?”

I said, “I have only a few questions. It will take just a minute.” I tried to make it sound like a barter: a minute for Tyler. I couldn’t produce Tyler, but I figured I was good for a minute after waiting twenty. Darla shifted on her feet, cocking her head to look at a small old-fashioned alarm clock on the marble desk. She was going to give me a minute. But not sixty-one seconds.

Darla looked at Blondie now, and ticked her neck to the side, so he’d skedaddle. “So nice to meet you,” I said, and reached out to shake his hand. I pressed my card into it, keeping an eye on Darla. She didn’t notice. Then Blondie scuttled out through the glass door with a slavering smile.

“It’s about Malcolm Wallace,” I said, once we were alone. “Stain 149.”

Darla’s face didn’t register any particular expression, but her eyebrow twitched again. “Well, I haven’t heard that name in years. Is he showing again? What
is
he doing these days?”

“Not too much,” I said.

“Ah. And how does that warrant a story for the Style section?”

If she’d already heard about Wallace’s death, she’d have found a way to say it then. And if she knew but wasn’t saying, her expression didn’t betray her.

“I have some bad news, I’m afraid,” I said. “Wallace passed away on Sunday morning.”

“Malcolm?” Her face collapsed, and then her body did too, into the ottoman. Her knees were bracketed together, her fingertips to her nose. She gave the impression of a cocktail umbrella folding. “How?”

“It’s unclear. He was found below the Queensboro Bridge.”

She gasped. “How horrible!”

“I know this is a difficult subject, and I’m sure it will take some time to get adjusted to your loss, but I hoped you might be able to answer just a few questions about Wallace. We’re trying to put together a story about his artistic career. The family said I’d find one of his best works here.”

“This is terrible news,” she said. “Malcolm was a dear, dear friend. And in his day he was a wonderful artist.”

What registered on her face wasn’t the loss of a friend, though. She seemed just a tad irked that the joy had been stripped from her opening day, and that now she had to discuss a subject that wasn’t on the agenda.

“He was such a lovely man,” she continued. “When I knew him he was just a boy. A sweet boy. Well, I was a baby then too! But I’m afraid you are misinformed. I haven’t represented Malcolm Wallace in twenty years.” She was talking to me absently now, as if working on an equation in her head.

“You were the last dealer to represent him,” I said.

Darla nodded slowly, and her hands fell to her lap. “Yes, I was. He didn’t want a dealer after he left me. He didn’t want anything to do with SoHo.”