A Little Trouble with the Facts

by Nina Siegal

  “Sorry,” Blondie said. “I had no idea they were going to put you on the spot like that. It’s just, well, they’re fans. We’re all fans.”

  I took a deep breath. Maybe I’d been too hard on Blondie. He probably didn’t know how far he’d already pushed by asking to meet at a nightclub.

  Charles returned with my martinis. Blondie dispatched him after the dynamic duo. Then Blondie said, “This way.” I double-fisted my martinis and followed him down a black corridor flashing with lights and into a lounge. The room was small but Blondie and I found a corner that was darker than the dance floor and even less comfy.

  “First off, I’m not working for Style anymore,” I said.

  Blondie glanced up from his Red Bull. “I figured that when I called your office and they put me through to the obituary desk. That doesn’t sound very cheerful,” he said. Blondie’s freckles looked like perforations in his skin under the black light. His face reminded me of a strainer.

  “Then why did you still want to meet me?” I started in on my second martini.

  Blondie dropped his eyes. “Before I say anything, I really need to make something clear.” He looked at me plaintively. “I went to work for Darla because I really respected her. The way she got her start? A lot of people think all art dealers are just rich kids who dabble. Not Darla. She was from outside Cleveland. Her father is a plumber—don’t tell anyone I told you, she’d kill me! Her mother is the ‘Muffin Maiden of Smith Street.’ No joke. She makes six hundred types of muffins. And we’re not talking blueberry, here. Mushroom muffin, celery muffin. Bubble gum muffin! I kid you not.”

  “Muffins. Got it.”

  “Okay, she went to prep school, but Darla is basically a midwestern girl. She comes to New York after paying her own way through two years at RISD. She has no money. She has no backers. She has a recipe for Parmesan muffins and her charisma. That’s it. She opens her SoHo gallery dealing in unknown artists and—wham!—she’s a superstar, a wonder girl. I studied her in college. My art history prof had a crush on Darla Deitrick.”

  Blondie was about to give me something. He just had to pay penance first. I drained my martini glass. Sharon and her Chihuahua were already becoming a memory.

  “You see, I really admired her. But I’ve seen certain things—things you wouldn’t believe. And I don’t think it’s right. I mean, even in this business, which is full of sharks, I mean obviously. I just think it isn’t right.”

  We were interrupted by the sensation of someone hovering over us. Dear old Charles. “I have a little something!”

  Blondie looked up, right into the black light, and his eyes glowed demonic. “Honeeeeey,” he said, as if he were spreading it on toast. “You’ve had your Valerie time. Can’t we just have a minute?”

  Charles bowed his head and held out his palm. In it were two tabs of Ecstasy. Blondie perked up. He grabbed one, popped it, and then offered me the other. I shook my head. Charles shrugged and took it himself. He held up two fingers—a peace sign—and said, “Number Two! Anything else I can get for you girls?”

  I held up my two martini glasses. “How about some refills?” I didn’t necessarily want more now, I just wanted to get him gone. Now that Blondie had popped the pill, we were on a clock. I knew that in a half hour or less, he’d be rolling. Then he’d be as useful to me as a headless mop. “You’ve said your Hail Marys,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Blondie moved closer. “Those paintings by that graffiti guy? The ones you asked Darla about? She had them. I saw them in her storage facility, at least until a couple of weeks ago.” Now here was something. I looked into Blondie’s strainer and I wondered how well it would leak. “There were a lot by that Stain, but that wasn’t all. There were all kinds of graffiti paintings back there. Anyway, she was trying to empty out the space so she could close it down.”

  I asked Blondie why Darla was unloading. He moved closer still.

  “She’s brilliant in so many ways, like I said, but arithmetic is not her strong suit.” He shook his head sadly. “Not her strong suit. It’s gotten a little tight at the gallery. And Darla needs cash. There’s a Pollock on the market that David Geffen would kill for, and she’s been dying to sell him something…but I don’t need to get into that.”

  I would’ve wanted to hear all about it, but I saw sands spilling through an Ecstasy-shaped hourglass. “How many pieces are in the storage space?”

  “A couple hundred. Very old work. Some of it she’d taken to sell on consignment maybe thirty years ago. Most of it not worth anything. She asked me to do the inventory. It was just internal—I wasn’t supposed to show anybody except Darla. There were probably about ten or fifteen by your friend. I know he was very famous once, but he dropped out of the art world, you know, without croaking, and his market took a dive.”

  I was fuzzy on math myself, and to begin with, I didn’t know how all this worked. “Back up,” I said. “Work artists had given her to sell on consignment?”

  “Yes, ‘consignment.’ That means she had promised to sell them, but she didn’t own them outright. Like I said, they’d been in storage for maybe twenty, thirty years. I guess she just hadn’t sold them and no one had ever come to claim them. They all had different stories. They were mostly unknown artists of no account, except the Stains.”

  I was starting to settle into my seat. The martinis were helping, but I was also glad about Blondie. He hadn’t asked me here just to parade me around like a well-groomed hen at a 4-H fair. “So, does she still have them?”

  Blondie thought about it a second.

  “I saw a few of them in the viewing room. Darla was shopping them around. She was very aggravated because they were a hard sell. Nobody on the street wanted them. She kept walking around the gallery yelling, ‘Crap, crappity, crap, crap, crap.’ And of course, once she finally found a buyer and finalized the transaction, Stain comes around asking about them, wanting them back for some reason.”

  “Do you know who bought them?”

  “No,” he said. “Could’ve been more than one person. But probably not too many. The transactions didn’t happen during regular business hours. I know that much.”

  “But you know they were sold?”

  Charles was upon us again. He’d returned with my martinis, holding the glasses out to me like twin trophies. “Thank you sooooo much,” Blondie whined. “Kissy, kissy. Big hug! We just need another teeny weenie minute. Okay, honey?”

  Charles pouted for a second, then blew an air kiss like Jackie O and backed away. I picked up one of the martinis and decided against it. This was too good. I needed all my faculties. “What did Darla say to Wallace when he asked about them?”

  “I didn’t hear that part, either. All I know is after that I went into the inventory log and found she’d erased my notes and penciled in new ones. She had put in the word sold next to a few paintings. But in at least a couple of spots I could see that a longer word—consignment—had been sort of half-erased.”

  Definitely something. Even if I didn’t quite understand what kind of something it might be.

  “The next day, she asks me to take a bunch of stretchers over to the warehouse,” he continued. “A truckload, actually. I didn’t think much of it at the time. We sometimes stock up on canvases for our artists. But it was odd, considering that Darla was so keen on getting rid of that space.”

  “Blank canvases? You sure they weren’t just white?”

  He showed me the whites of his eyes again. “Anyway, there was a fire at the warehouse on Sunday night. The storage space was destroyed and so was everything in it. It could’ve been a fluke. A bunch of other art dealers had stuff down there too. I don’t know if was an accident or—”

  This was getting better every minute. “Arson?” I said. “Did she file a claim?”

  “I believe so. She told me she thought Wallace might’ve been responsible. He or some of his goons—that’s what she called them. But I don’t know. I didn’t think that sounded right. That gu
y wasn’t like that. And I mean, I love Darla, but I’ve seen the way she manages things, and I wouldn’t put it past her to, well—Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Sure, I do.” I could see the scenario he was suggesting. Darla secretly sells the art, covers her tracks by replacing the works with fakes, and then attempts to cash in on the insurance. It was shaping up to be a pretty exciting club night. Maybe I’d pose for a photo op with his Charles after all.

  “A fire. Sunday night.”

  “Yes.”

  “The night Malcolm Wallace got dead?”

  “I thought he died this week.”

  “He did.”

  “No, then. A week ago. A week before Wallace died.”

  A group of men had formed a daisy chain, rabbit hopping through the lounge. “I’m dancing on the head of a pin,” shouted one on tiptoe. “On the head of a pin!”

  “Might he have seen something? Might Darla have wanted him out of the way?”

  “It’s possible.” Blondie tented his fingers in his lap and looked down. He might’ve been praying, but I didn’t think so. Maybe he was starting to feel the effects of the Ecstasy. If so, my time was expiring.

  “You say that Darla kept these inventory books? Why would she do that if she was up to something criminal?”

  “Two sets of books,” he said. “There was another set of books for official purposes. You know, auditors and so forth. We get audited about once every four years. I think that’s a bad idea—highly suspicious, to begin with—and I’ve told her so. And simple math, not her forte.”

  This was the kind of detail I could’ve easily turned into a transparent blind item at Gotham’s Gate: “Why does a certain red-haired gallerist keep one business ledger by her door and another in her closet? Only her former clients can guess.” At The Paper, I couldn’t do anything with it. It had way too many holes, like Blondie’s face.

  “Where does she keep the second set of books?”

  “In the safe, of course.”

  “Do you know the combination?”

  Blondie hesitated. “No. Darla likes me, but not that much.”

  I thought that over. Was there a way for me to get to those books? Could I ask Blondie to try to find out the combination? That would be putting him at risk, but then, he had already put himself at risk by meeting with me. What was his angle, if not to show me off to his pals? Without my asking, he answered.

  “Are you still in touch with Jeremiah?” The name jolted me out of the calm I was starting to feel there in the dark. What he wants is his tabloid fix. Only I didn’t have anything to offer him, because I’d been detoxing for six months. “No,” I said. “The last time we talked was when I gave him the keys to my loft and he moved in with that woman.”

  “I know all about that,” said Blondie, showing me his glowing teeth. “She’s still living there, of course, but he’s not.”

  “No?”

  Blondie’s eyes lit up. “You don’t know? You haven’t read about it?”

  “I don’t read anymore.”

  He turned this over in his mind. “You’ve missed some juicy news, Valerie. Your buddies have split. Jeremiah had to replace Angelica in the role of Angelica in Terror in the City. You heard about that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Cast and crew agreed: VJ is no Meryl Streep. She floated right to the top of the tank, like a dead goldfish. Jeremiah replaced her with this lovely young ingenue, Claire something, and about a week into shooting Angelica finds the two of them going at it on some medical gurney. She sued him for breach of contract—both ways, movie and marriage.”

  This was juicy news. I was glad for it. But I didn’t ask for more, lest I start to drool. Luckily, Blondie didn’t need any encouragement.

  “She really got her claws in. She went after him with about sixteen lawyers. She exposed him as a blow fiend and a philanderer—great stuff! She even turned in his stash and gave the NYPD the name of his dealer, Ken something or other. Now he’s going to be broke too. His town house is already on the market; he even came in to Darla’s to try to sell his paintings. You have to be pretty bad off to try to sell art to pay legal fees.”

  I remembered the canvases up in his attic. All those paintings he’d acquired over the years from trendy artists. “Did he sell Darla his Warhol?”

  “No, that already went. Gagosian bought it and a few other little items. Jeremiah collected a lot, but a lot of junk, actually. He didn’t have a very good eye. Not from what I saw, anyway.”

  I liked that too. I wanted to ask Blondie a few more questions about Jeremiah, but his face had started to change in subtle ways. His eyes got a little watery. I could see he was swallowing a lot and grinding his teeth.

  “I’m just thinking about that guy, Malcolm Wallace,” Blondie said. “Your friend who died. He was bothering Darla, but I thought he was cute. You know? To think that he’s dead, that maybe he died because of…”

  “We don’t know anything,” I said. “Could be totally unconnected. Everything’s just speculation at this point.” The words made me feel authoritative.

  “It’s just so incredibly sad,” he said, reaching out to take my hand. “I can’t believe how sad that is. Wow, your hands are really soft. It feels so nice to touch you. Do you mind if I touch your elbow? I love elbows. That sack of saggy skin?”

  Blondie was already rolling. I patted him on the shoulder and told him I’d go find him his Charles. I took my elbow with me.

  I slipped out of Twilo across a row of slick naked pecs. It was after five and a new round of club kids formed a line up the block. Yellow cabs hovered like hornets. A girl fell headfirst from a cab. She seemed to want to share a secret with the asphalt. Horns blared. Fists raised. She kept right on blathering.

  I love this dirty town, I thought, channeling J. J. Hunsecker. I checked the lineup and didn’t notice any of the usual suspects. No Sidney Falcos, no Night Rewrite boys, no socialite shutterbugs likely to call in a scoop. It was a clear night. I breathed in the fresh air. The martinis were starting to wear off. I went west.

  On Eleventh Avenue hookers were fishing fares at the one-hour hotels. Hairy lugs in leather chaps trolled the cowboy bars. A cluster of teenyboppers squealed as they dodged traffic across the West Side Highway. I turned north, thinking I’d hail a cab once I escaped club land.

  It was another muggy night, but a breeze was blowing off the water. I could feel it cooling my neck, drying the sweat off my back. At this hour, most of Twelfth Avenue was shut up tight, heavy metal grates over storefronts.

  As I walked, I read the words painted onto the dingy metal, quick scrawls in cursive, letters packed tight: IKE, MIX, Marty & Shawn 4-Ever, PEEK. Three-d letters, EZ, ROT, SNUFF. Names so jazzed with motion they couldn’t be read. On one grate, I could see the edges of lettering, but I couldn’t make out the word. I backed up to the curb but still couldn’t read it, so I backed up some more. Using what Kamal and Cabeza had taught me, I finally saw it. “Seen,” I read aloud. Seen, I thought, as I walked on, picking up speed. That’s right, you are.

  I crossed the West Side highway to get a better view of the building. I looked up to the rooftops, the white roller letters COST/REVS, a giant name all full of stars and arrows, DOZE. A big name, NATO, sprawled across a wall. Further up, a huge name painted in black and white across roll-down riot gates: ESPO.

  The more I looked, the more I saw. Names were everywhere, all over like roaches in a New York kitchen when suddenly there’s light. As I walked up Twelfth Avenue, I looked down and saw stencils on the sidewalk, a flower missing petals, a laughing face. There were stickers on the phone posts: HELLO, MY NAME IS… ROY and HELLO MY NAME IS…BINGO.”

  Names scrawled TYRE, tiny illegible scribbles, ergem, ttuffu, big bubble letters, SPY, outlines, jottings, Guru, Anow, doodles, TIE, paint on trucks, JIZ, NST, mailboxes, HC, SIC, stickers plastered on doors, HELLO, MY NAME IS…Bigga, scratchiti EXEXEX, a face with crossed out eyes, KAWS, a face in superhero mask, ROACH, loose
petals, SIN, AOA, green horse, WOE, a man from Mars, TAR, Aerub Ketsu, Heller, RAE, a white screw, TWIST, letters in circles W, G, letters swinging, letters dancing, KIZA, JRC, a sneaker, VEG, HELLO, MY NAME IS… METAPHOR.”

  Graffiti was dead now that it wasn’t on trains? That’s what they’d said, and that’s what I’d thought. I’d lived in Manhattan for almost five years, and I’d never seen what was everywhere—the writing on the walls. There were anonymous strangers tagging, jotting, scrawling their names for all the city to read. Hieroglyphics, everywhere, signals, signs. In Times Square they turned neon, they turned massive, they were blocks of names in the sky. “Don’t you know who I am?” they cried out. “Don’t you know who I am?”

  My feet chewed up the pavement for a long time and I kept looking until my eyes got weary. I thought about Wallace and I knew that he’d been killed. I didn’t know by who or how. But I knew I’d gotten the suicide thing wrong and I regretted it. I thought about what Blondie had given me and where I could take it. I thought about Cabeza and what he wanted from me and Darla and what she wanted from Wallace. I thought about it all while noting the markings, glyphs, jots everywhere, as if the walls were griots telling stories, inchoate texts I had to decipher and reorder from beginning to end. And soon enough, I’d walked myself all the way back to the Upper West Side.

  On West Eightieth Street, I looked down Broadway back the way I’d come. It had been a long walk, but I’d hoofed it. And now a band of pale pink light was pushing up the black curtain of night. I wasn’t in a hurry to go in. I lingered there for a moment. It was nice, at last, to see a sober dawn.

  14

  Memorial Wall

  I slept the next day until noon. It was an old habit with new charms. I didn’t have a headache. I didn’t have to harvest cotton from my teeth. Outside my window, some chirping birds sounded like Mozart.

  In the bathroom mirror, I looked at my face. It wasn’t red and beaten. There were no rings under my eyes. I went to the kitchen and turned on the coffee maker. I cracked some eggs. I toasted toast and drank a little coffee. I didn’t need coffee, but I liked the way it went down with my toast.