A Little Trouble with the Facts (23 page)

He took a few steps deeper into the room. “The recipe? Oh,” he said, looking back into the kitchen as if the answer was there. Then he said, “That’s easy. I read it on the Internet.”

“On the Internet.”

“Of course. You were once a little famous. Or didn’t you know?”

Everything in the room started to look wrong. The walls seemed too thin, like hastily tacked-up plywood. Temporary. The windows seemed surprisingly small. There wasn’t enough light filtering into the space. It would fool a camera, but cameras had ways of obscuring things, of leaving things out.

“You read it on the Internet,” I said. The little lie always reveals the big lie. “And you never met Jeremiah Golden.”

Cabeza clucked at me. “You’d be surprised. The Internet is a very powerful tool.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said.

Cabeza took a few strides toward me. He was still holding the knife at his side.

“Don’t come any closer,” I said.

“Valerie, what is it? Has something happened? You’re so on edge.”

I wanted to take a step back, but my calves were already hard against the edge of the bed. There was nowhere to go on my side
of the room. “Could you please back up a few steps? I don’t feel comfortable having you any closer right now.”

He took another step forward. “Sweetheart, what is it? What’s wrong?”

My body went rigid, my chest tensed. “Please!” I very nearly shouted, then steadied my voice. “I need you to take a few steps back.”

“
Claro,
okay, okay.” He backed up and I moved around the side of the bed. I looked around me for something heavy, like a bat or a frying pan.

“What do you want to know? I’m happy to talk about anything,” he said.

“Sotheby’s announced a sale of Stain paintings, all owned by Jeremiah Golden. The press release went out last night; that’s what they want me to come in to talk about this morning.”

“Ah.” Cabeza didn’t seem surprised. “How could it have anything to do with you that Jeremiah wants to sell paintings?”

“It’s weirdly coincidental.”

“Purely coincidental. They won’t be able to link you to him.” The phrasing was wrong.

“You knew about this sale?”

He didn’t answer. He seemed to consider it, but then his face formed an expression that said,
You’re smart. You figure it out
.

“Then you know about the Jeremiah sale.”

“I do,” he said, matter-of-factly. “That doesn’t mean you do.”

He was already reasoning out my defense. But I didn’t even know I had a defense I needed to make. I took a deep breath. “Cabeza, when did you meet Jeremiah?”

Cabeza pursed his lips. “A while ago, at a gallery opening at Deitrick’s. Just once.”

I held my breath, wishing he hadn’t said that. I moved to the editing table and grabbed a film reel.

“Is that really necessary?” said Cabeza.

I held tighter to the metal; it felt useful in my hands. Maybe Cabeza had nothing to do with this. Maybe I was behaving foolishly, but I didn’t have time to reason it out.

“How much of a cut are you getting from the sale?”

Cabeza laughed. “Okay, well, he is giving me a cut of the sale, but that also doesn’t mean
you’ve
done anything wrong. And maybe it’s best if you don’t know any of this, if you need to go in and talk to your editor right now. You’re not me. I’m not you. As far as your editor knows, we don’t even know each other. But anyway, for me, the money isn’t the main thing. It’s the exhibition that matters.”

I gasped. I hadn’t expected to be right. But now something solidified in the pit of my gut. My grip tightened around the film reel like it was a ship’s steering wheel in a nasty storm. “What exhibition?”

“The one at the Ludwig.” Now his body went slack, as if he’d been balancing a plate on the top of his head for weeks, and he’d finally let it drop. He was still shirtless and as he moved across the room I noticed how his skin sagged. He took a seat on the couch and his gut bulged over the top of his pants, like the folds of a curtain. He looked cheap, not like a leading man anymore. More like an impersonator. Everything in the room started to look shoddy. “You really have to trust me, sweetheart. I’ve protected you entirely. But you might as well know. I’m the curator of the Ludwig exhibition—it’s not official yet, but it will be soon, since I was technically working with Micah Stone. The Stain shorts will be of particular interest now.” He made it all seem as if we’d been collaborating, and these were the fruits of our labor.

I shook my head. “I’m not getting all this. I don’t see how what I did…” But even as I said it I was starting to put the pieces in place.

Cabeza studied my face and began to speak again, patiently this time, as if he were working with a very sweet but quite illiterate child. “I didn’t get into it earlier because I was protecting you, and probably it’s better if you wait until after your meeting to hear the rest of it, but since you seem to be so upset, I’ll share it with you now. You see, Wallace was truly a great artist—perhaps one of the best in the eighties—but he’d done himself a disservice. He’d made himself out to be a kind of political clown and then he’d dropped out of sight. This wasn’t good for his work. The best thing for him would’ve been to die in 1987 or so, just after his peak. Then we would’ve all made money.”

I was listening. I didn’t want to miss a single syllable. “You mean for his market. For his collectors, that’s what would’ve been best.”

“Precisely.”

“You own his work too?”

“Stain gave me about twenty pieces over the years, mostly small tokens of affection. They were worthless until a few days ago. But thanks to your beautiful page-one story, they’re seeing a remarkable market explosion. Just as we’d hoped. I’ve technically sold my paintings to Jeremiah to make the whole thing easier, and also, actually, to protect you in case the graffiti artists you’ve talked to, like from Bigs Cru or wherever, get upset because they know about us. With Jeremiah’s celebrity status and Stain all the rage in the press, I’d say we stand to make a killing.”

I swallowed. “Poor choice of words.” My knuckles were getting white clutching the reel. I was standing in front of a man I didn’t know at all.

Cabeza chuckled. “Ha. Sorry. Bad pun. Forgive me.”

“I should forgive the pun?” Incredible. “How? How is it possible? Malcolm was your friend; you thought of him as a brother. Didn’t you?”

Cabeza stood up, moving the knife from one hand to the other,
mulling my question. “That would be harder to explain. Malcolm and I had a very, very long and complicated relationship.”

“I’d rather if you sit.” I backed up but kept my eyes on him. “I’ll take the time.”

Cabeza looked up at me with raised eyebrows. Then he looked down at his hand and the knife in it. He held it up and said, “Is this what you’re scared of? It was just for the onions, sweetheart. I didn’t even know it was still in my hand.” He slid the knife under the mattress and then showed me his empty hands. “See?”

I nodded. “I want to know why.”

“It would be hard for you to understand, Valerie,” he said. “Malcolm got under my skin, I guess you could say. His easy charm, his reckless good looks, the way he didn’t have to work for attention like everyone else did; they flocked to him and women, well, he never had a problem there. And he never even rubbed my face in it.”

“That’s it? That’s why you saw fit to—”

“He never used it, Valerie. He let it all go to waste. The guy had everything I never had, everything most people never have, all the tools to get out of the ghetto and to make it big. He didn’t deploy it in the right direction. He always had to make some kind of statement. I was tired of always seeing him squander his potential, on some principle. He thought he was better than all that.”

“What if he was better?”

Cabeza’s look was that of a college professor toward a campus activist, whose ideals he’s too busy to humor. “You have a tendency to get swept away with big romantic notions, Valerie. You should be careful.”

“Why does everything you say sound like a threat?”

“Relax, darling. You’re getting all worked up today.” Cabeza stood up again. “May I move around? Is that allowed? Believe
me, you’re fine. Your editor won’t be able to connect you to anything. I swear, you’d think you were completely in the dark about all this.”

“I
am
completely in the dark.”

He walked toward the foot of his bed and looked out the high window. “It’s sweet that you’ve taken to Malcolm’s memory the way you have. He was a rare person. But he was one of these false messiahs,
linda
. He started out for himself and he stayed out for himself. Just like all of us. I know you’re feeling more like a crusader today than you did yesterday, but isn’t it true that you’re basically the same girl who wants to be a big famous reporter? We got you that.”

“So you think this corrects it? The fact that you and Jeremiah get rich off this sale? Who else? Is Darla in on this with you? Who else gets rich?”

“Oh, no, no. Darla really had nothing to do with it. She was trying to get rid of those paintings because she didn’t want them anymore. Malcolm wanted them back because he had a sentimental attachment to them. Jeremiah wanted to buy them. He knew he could pull a few strings and get the market moving—it’s not that hard to make a market move if you know the right people. It takes only a few high-profile bidders out in front of the auctions.”

Cabeza seemed to watch something moving outside the windows, a bird or a butterfly. “It’s a lovely day out there,” he said. “It’s too bad we can’t go for a stroll.” He turned back to face me. “Malcolm kept getting in the way, because he wanted to make a stink about the pictures. Darla told Jeremiah, as a joke really, ‘The only way that work is going to be worth anything now is if Stain dies a fast and well-publicized death.’ It was an offhand comment, but it was actually also a way to solve it all at once. We were a little bit off, though. We figured Stain would get a big spread when he died, but that didn’t happen. I guess times are different
now. Only pop stars get really big obituaries. So a few people tried to convince your friend over there, Curtis Wright, but he was busy. Then, of course, our stroke of good fortune: you wrote the obit and made that mistake. We had a second chance.”

The queasiness was now turning to bile and it was coming up the back of my throat. “What did Jeremiah tell you about me that made me so easy to manipulate?”

“Oh, sweetheart, if I told you it would make you blush.”

There was a rumble in the back of my head and a rush of anger so powerful I closed my eyes. I didn’t know I was screaming until my lungs were empty. I had thrown the film reel at Cabeza and I’d missed him. He was laughing softly. It was then that I realized how far I’d removed myself from civilization. At Cabeza’s warehouse, no one would hear my screams. No matter how many film reels I threw at him, no one would hear them clatter to the floor. I could kill him and no one would know. But, more likely, he would kill me. He’d committed murder—maybe with his own hands and if not with his own hands then somehow—and I didn’t doubt he’d do it again. I picked up another film reel off the editing table and held it tight to my chest like a life jacket. I took a few more steps back and my spine hit the editing table. I looked behind me for scissors, a razor, something that could cut.

Cabeza dropped his voice. “Valerie, you don’t have to be afraid of me. I know right now it seems like I’ve been double dealing, but the truth is, I’ve been protecting you all along. No one can connect anything to you. Also, honey, the relationship, what’s happened between us, that’s all genuine. I didn’t need any encouragement from Jeremiah to want to get close to you. But I did. That happened all on its own. Once this is over, we’re going to have the kinds of lives we’ve both always wanted. You and me, we’re in this together, don’t you see?”

I didn’t know what Cabeza was capable of, or what he
thought he’d done on my behalf. Did he really believe I wouldn’t care what had happened to Malcolm—that a man had been killed, a good man—and that we’d somehow go riding that carousel? If he could believe that, he could just as easily reach out and wring my neck. Then make tea until the cop cars were swarming.

Cabeza leaned forward and put his hands on my face, pulling me toward him. I jumped a little but I didn’t pull away.

“Sweetheart, I know this is a bit of a shock, but I know you’ll get over it once you see how it all works out,” he said. “I know that you won’t do anything to jeopardize this, because I know how much it means to you to finally have someone with whom you can be yourself, your true self. Not some ridiculous construction. I know it because I know you. I know you, and I love you, Valerie. And you love me too. We’re perfect for each other. It couldn’t be any other way.”

He kissed me, and the taste of his lips was metallic. I kept the film reel in my hands, but I didn’t pull away from his kiss because I was afraid of what he might do.

“But what made you think all this time I wouldn’t simply turn you in once you told me the whole truth?”

Cabeza didn’t even pause. “Because,
linda,
you’d ruin everything. Everything we’ve built here together. I mean, I’ve done most of the work, but I’ve done it for both of us. I know you wouldn’t hurt me. I know it. Just like I wouldn’t hurt you. And it’s always best to know the truth, no matter how unpleasant it is, right?”

There was that word again. The word he’d used to lure me from the start.

“And just in case that doesn’t cinch it,” he said, chuckling a little and pulling away from me and picking up his camcorder from the editing table, “I’ve always got this.” He opened the camera and removed the film. “There’s some good shots on here
that I’m sure would interest both your editors and the tabloids. You and me together—which they could easily link to the Ludwig show—and you and me in bed, et cetera. I’m a little camera shy, but I’m sure we have enough here to suffice.”

My eyes burned. I imagined the headlines and captions that would accompany those shots: “Former Gossip Gal Exposed After Exposé!” “New Vane Shocker!” If I’d never had Club Zero, no one would’ve cared. But since I’d been a media piñata once, there would still be people who wanted to get their licks in.