A Little Trouble with the Facts (9 page)

I push through the door before I hear the groans, moans. I don’t think much of it. It’s a club bathroom, anyway. This kind of thing is routine. And it’s normal to use the other stall. At first, they don’t strike me as familiar, so I take another step forward. But then there it is, the image to end my life. His black curls thrown back, his dimpled ass, and someone else’s bare thighs, someone else’s breasts. His button-down is open, her hands around his neck. Her alligator shoes are tipped over on the floor. All the pieces fall into place quickly. Jeremiah has VH1 VJ Angelica Pomeroy,
the new new thing,
pinned to the bathroom sink.

I scream so loud I don’t even hear myself. A girl looking for a stall assesses the scene and scuttles out the bathroom door. Jeremiah hears me and pulls back from Angelica, and she comes tumbling off the sink, headfirst into his chest.

Anyone with any sense would back out of the bathroom and run. But devil’s dust is in me and it doesn’t like good sense. I lurch forward, claws bared. I kick Jeremiah, and then ram my heel hard into his foot, to hold him steady while I dig for Angelica’s eyes. She has no idea what’s come at her, what kind of rabid bird, but I claw and scrape at her face and her hair until I’ve got some sort of hold. I don’t know what I’ve got, exactly, but I’ve got some sort of hold.

The stall girl must’ve gotten her friends, because a crowd of onlookers is now in the bathroom door. Angelica’s panties are still below her knees and her skirt is hiked up near her bra. But I don’t give her time to assemble; I grab a clump of hair.

“You low-rent Ronkonkoma reject,” I cry. “How dare you fuck my fiancé?”

She gasps, “What? You didn’t tell me—”

“I swear, Angelica, this woman is not my fiancée.”

“This woman!” I scream, to drown him out. “Now I’m
this woman?!
This morning I was your future wife—”

He is holding me back and talking fast. “She’s talking crazy, Angelica. We are not engaged. Do you see a ring on her finger? If we’re engaged, where’s the rock? Where is it, Valerie?”

“But you…don’t you…” I scream, now crying, then clawing. “How could…!”

Next, the VIPs are at the door with Tammi at the front, shouting, “Val, back off! You’ve got to let it go!”

And Nikki and Jenni chiming in, “Back off, Val.”

But I don’t back off. Devil dust won’t let me. No, I don’t hear Tammi, Nikki, and Jenni. And now Jeremiah’s chums are also on hand. Lance is pushing people away. Paul is yelling he’ll call the police. Even Arty Guzzler is fully alert.

“How dare you do this to me!” I yell at Jeremiah and Angelica, and then again at the assembled mass. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Valerie Vane! I buy ink by the barrel. I could ruin you. One article under my byline and I could destroy all of you!”

Jeremiah is trying to hold me out of scratching distance of Angelica, but his pants are still on the floor and all he does is waddle. He manages to get me in an elbow lock around the waist, so I need to bend over to reach her where she is, still pressed against the sink. I kick with my back hoofs like an angry nag, and I claw at her eyes like a wildcat. And it is this hybrid beast that the paparazzi manage to capture and splatter the next day on the front page of every tab in town.

“Don’t you know who I am?” I’m screaming, my mouth as wide as Oregon. “Don’t you know who I am?”

T
here are two ways to get to the morgue: out the window or up the stairs. I weighed my options. The window was a quick fix. But then again, I’d already logged six months in a state of disgrace. The gesture would be belated. The other morgue, the one upstairs, held Firehouse. And Firehouse could get me back on top.

I stood in The Paper’s elevator bank—Italianate marble, Art Deco brass doors reflecting my distorted face—and debated whether I dared take the lift. The Paper’s elevators carried editors in chief and ad men, rabbis and imams, activists and apologists, columnists and clerks. During election season, they lifted presidents and hopefuls to the publisher’s penthouse. Come springtime, their yellow doors emitted a stream of admin assistants in strappy dresses that let their shoulders lap up the sun.

When I’d arrived at The Paper, I was happy to get into those boxes, standing shoulder to shoulder with the redwoods and heading upward. But these days, I was a mere cut sapling in an old growth forest, easily trampled underfoot. I moved into the hallway and waited to see if I could catch a ride with a bike messenger or janitor. Today I promised myself that if anyone mighty were standing in the cab when the doors went wide, I’d pass the ride and hoof it up.

The brass doors opened in front of photo chief Bob Torrens.
A hard call. He was powerful, but cheerful. A slip of a man in a pale yellow suit and red bow tie. Not on the news side, so he couldn’t quite sneer. He’d always been a chum when I’d worked on Style, assigning me top-notch shooters and schmoozey freelancers who could stargaze without missing the shot. “Nice work on the singer, Val,” he said in a clipped English accent, a bit of an affect to go with his Savile Row suit.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling safe enough to step into the cab.

“Eight pix,” he said. “More than Elvis—but then again we weren’t quite as generous in those days. Still had trouble choosing. Prom dress, mermaid costume. We almost went with a shot of her in a cobra bikini, but we knew the editorial board would choke on it.” This was fine. The numbers were ticking up. We’d chitchat our way to nine, no sweat. “If you were still on Style you could’ve done a fashion postmortem.” He turned to face me. “Hey, maybe even Week in Review.”

The elevator stopped at four.

“Well, that’s me,” he said. “Anyway, next time I hope you get a byline,” he said on his way out. “It’s a shame, Valerie, considering your name used to be all over this rag.”

I looked down at my feet and took in the blocky toes of my beat-up heels until I got to the ninth floor. From now on, I’d take the stairs.

At nine, I got out. The corridor was dark and silent as a mausoleum. As I walked toward a flashing light at the end of the hall, Cabeza’s voice smoldered in my ear, joining with my Sidney Falco hangover:
Are you a reporter? All I’m looking for is the truth. And if you’re a reporter, that’s what you’ll want too—the truth. Way up high, Sam, where it’s always balmy. Where no one snaps his fingers and says, Hey, Mouse, Mouse. Are you a reporter?

Maybe Cabeza had known a hundred girls like me, fresh in town from nowhere in particular. Maybe he was the type who asked where you were from and didn’t accept a coy smile as an
answer. Maybe he was one of those people who didn’t let things go so easily.

I could hear Burt Lancaster as J. J. Hunsecker in
Sweet Smell
saying to Falco: “You’re dead, son. Now go get yourself buried.”

That night in the ladies’ of Club Zero turned out to be a stellar photo-op for the paparazzi that hadn’t followed Demi out the door.

There was the shot of Jeremiah in boxer shorts. The shot of panty-less Angelica edging out from behind the sink and fleeing past me. The shot of me biting Jeremiah’s finger when he wagged it in my face. Blood on the ladies’ room floor. The shot of Jeremiah raising his finger and screaming. The shot of the cops parting the crowd. The cops wrestling me to the floor. The cops frisking me. The cops discovering my marble. One cop holding up the drugs—this one copied widely, with the vial in focus in the foreground and my pathetic profile in soft-focus in the background. And of course, the shot of me being cuffed as I insisted, screaming, that they couldn’t take me anywhere because I’d pour barrels of ink on all their heads. The most oft-used caption was “Don’t you know who I am?”

The story splattered the tabloid front pages for four days. Gossip columnists milked it for at least a month, and incidental items still popped up now and again. The shocking parts—Jeremiah’s and Angelica’s unclad privates—were digitally blurred in the interest of good taste. So the image showed me strung conveniently between Jeremiah and Angelica, like the crossbar of an
H
. Angelica, by some horrifying photographic distortion, came off looking quite proper, her mouth agape as if she’d been attacked out of nowhere while sipping pekoe tea with the queen. Jeremiah, also quite improbably, came out looking heroic, his chest bared as he yanks me away from his new new thing.

The “Club Zero Incident,” as it came to be known—or just
“Club Zero”—turned out to be my big publicity campaign for that fine Midtown establishment. If anyone hadn’t been there before, they went there now to glimpse the tabloid landmark. The club obliged tourists by hanging a framed copy of the
Post
’s “
VANE-GLORY
” cover in the ladies’ room at the scene of the crime.

The Incident only lionized Golden and Pomeroy. It turns out they announced their engagement while I was being processed through Central Booking. No wonder he wanted to wait. A week later, they appeared together on
Entertainment Tonight
—Angelica still with Band-Aids on her cheeks—to announce that they would co–executive produce a new Odyssey Pictures release,
Terror in the City
. It would be a neo-noir cinema verité—that is, a thriller based on a couple’s encounter with a madwoman modeled on yours truly, except that my character would be a
Basic Instinct
–style serial murderess named Victoria Vile. The role would’ve been perfect for Joan Crawford. They could even have used clips from
Sudden Fear
. Angelica, however, had decided on a career in pictures, and so she would star as herself.

For all my promises of blotting Jeremiah and Angelica out with my pen, it turned out I didn’t have the power of even a Bic. The barrels of ink came spilling on me—me, the cuckolded ex. Sure, now I was a bold-faced name but not in the way I’d ever wanted to be. Maybe there aren’t a lot of wet eyes on that account. And I don’t guess there should be, considering how easily I’d always thrown bricks. Live by the swordfish, die by the seared tuna, as they say.

Tammi bailed me out, but when she dropped me in front of my TriBeCa loft, she said, “I’m sorry, Val, but this has got to be it. I’ve got to cut you off,” just like Paulie Cicero to Henry Hill when Henry crosses the mob boss in
Goodfellas
. “You’re no good for business.”

I knew she was right. It wasn’t just the marble; it wasn’t just the fact that I’d clawed the face of a television personality. We both
knew. I’d never be let back into another VIP section. I’d never get past a bouncer, even if my name was the only name on his clipboard. My face was all over town, like a Western wanted ad. I’d become a media piñata, and everyone in town was taking a whack.

“You’ll need to hide out for a while,” said Tammi, in the most comforting voice she could muster. “Do you know anyone in Spain?”

Then the lawyers came in and grazed. Angelica and Jeremiah didn’t press charges, but, after some consideration, they decided they would sue me for my TriBeCa loft. Club Zero even got a cut—they said the crime scene investigation had cost them four days’ bar. There wasn’t anything left to go around after that, because I’d already blown the rest on, well, blow, for myself and all my so-called friends.

The Paper was even less forgiving. When I arrived at my desk Monday morning, Buzz didn’t have nice things to say, like “We’ll fix this.” Or “Would you like some shea butter?” This time, he said, “There’s a special editors’ meeting called for today and the subject is Valerie Vane.”

The masthead convened. A memo was distributed to every bureau from Roanoke to Rangoon: If you’re appearing in print elsewhere, don’t expect to stay on here. To look like they cared, they offered me a month in rehab. After that, they got out their carving knives. They couldn’t fire me outright because of certain obscure union rules a discomfited news steward explained to me over coffee. I had at least a year left on my contract and if they broke it they’d have teamsters on their backs. I got a few calls from tabs that thought my “party girl” persona could come in handy for a nightlife columnist, but I wasn’t that cheap. Well, maybe I was, but I didn’t care to exploit my own shame with vegetable pulp all over my face.

It was Jaime Cordoba who caught my fall. He was short on obituary assistants, he said, and he could use me. He promised Battinger
he’d keep me under wraps, out of the limelight. I’d be doing administrative work, mostly, and if I wrote much of anything, I wouldn’t get a byline. All in one lift of Jaime’s hand, I was saved and I was damned: at twenty-eight, I’d be a lifer without any hope of a life.

The morgue was at the end of the hall and light flashed like a lighthouse beam. I continued down the corridor, my eyes fixed on the flashing light, but the closer I moved the farther away it seemed, like some camera trick from Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
.

Are you a reporter?
No, I wasn’t a reporter. I didn’t know the first thing about Truth with a capital
T
. I was about as easily led astray as a donkey.

I found the door to the morgue and turned inside. Clerks in gray were methodically moving files from one shelf to another. A photocopy machine flashed and hissed, sliding back and forth, back and forth, with a metronymic hum. A female clerk in a shapeless gray dress noticed me. She stepped behind a long wooden desk and sat down. She adjusted the tortoise-shell glasses on her nose. “You must be here for the Firehouse file,” she said, handing me one of two files in the tray.

“Yes,” I said. “Also the file on Malcolm Wallace.”

“That’s here for you too.” She put them in my hands. I placed the Stain file inside the Firehouse file, hiding it, and put both under my arm.

“Just a minute,” she said. “You’ve got to sign both of those out.”

I took the pen from her and leaned over to write out my name. “That ever get to you?” I said, nodding toward the copier.

“Nah,” she said. “It’s like living with a bad smell. You don’t even notice it after a while.”

She watched me write my name. Then she picked up the paper and read it. “I’m sorry, but doesn’t that say Valerie Vane? I thought she was…”

I smiled. “Nope,” I said. “The rumors were greatly exaggerated.”

“Must be hard living with that,” she said.

There’s a reason people pay twenty-five cents to flip to page ten for Page Six every day. It’s because they sit in windowless rooms where copy machines make their lullabies. I grabbed the pen out of gray girl’s hand and took the files. I proudly scrawled my signature, big and bold, under my name. “Why don’t you take that and sell it for a hundred bucks?”

I cleared my desk and put the files down. The Firehouse folder was stuffed with about a hundred clips. They were all brittle and folded, taped together with small strips of yellowed Scotch tape with running dates scribbled in ink across the newsprint. But I wasn’t interested in that file. My fingers twitched nervously over the Wallace file, which was, I was horrified to learn, just as bulky.

I’d never been much for research. Files, paper, history. Yellowing papers and ancient ideas didn’t help me capture the zeitgeist. But I figured this research on Wallace wouldn’t take long. I knew what I was looking for—something to exonerate me—and I was sure it wouldn’t be hard to find. Something that showed this Stain had plenty of reasons to let go of that rope to which he’d been clinging. An open and shut suicide.

I tried to organize the clips by date so that I’d create a basic Wallace timeline. The first was June 24, 1971, and the headline read, “‘Tonka 184’ Makes His Mark.” There was no byline, but there were two photos showing scribbles on a wall, and scribbles on a street lamp. The pull quote read:
“It’s just a name. It’s like what can you make out of it?”

So, Wallace was a graffiti pioneer, one of the first noted taggers. That made him interesting; even I had to be impressed. The next clip, dated October 17, 1974, was a short art book review about Norman Mailer’s
The Faith of Graffiti,
and it started with a description of Mailer’s book party, which was attended by a handful of taggers, including Stain. “None of this matters,” Stain told the reporter, waving his hand toward Mailer’s buffet table, the caviar and pâté. “It’s all about the trains. It’s about getting your name up, not about having your name in a book.” The art critic suggested that the impulse to tag was more akin to the need to stand on a soapbox and shout. “Among the kids I met at the opening, I got one feeling: ambition. Nobody wants to be nobody. All of them want to be famous,” the critic concluded. “If you take them at their word, every teenager in this room is Goya, Michelangelo, or da Vinci.”