A Little Trouble with the Facts

by Nina Siegal

  I thank him and leave him with the iced tea. I head back out onto the streets, to put more calluses on my knuckles. I get mostly shaking heads. Nope…never heard of him…. Don’t know about that…. What’s that name again?…Sorry…not familiar…. Wouldn’t know…ninguna…Did you try the guy across the street?…Did you try Diaz Pizzeria?…Have you tried his house?…His mother?…The school?…His aunt?…Why would you ask me?…Sorry, no English…. Those kids? They’re no good…. I wish they didn’t live around here…. Always making trouble…. You’re from where?…Did you say you were a reporter?…I’m sorry, you’re knocking on the wrong door…. No solicitors, please…. Following the wrong path…This isn’t where you should be looking….. Have you tried Manhattan?

  By midday, I’m picking up the Bronx’s two-three rhythm in my flats. Finally, I get confirms on the Rx alibi. American Airlines says that Rx redeemed his ticket from JFK to Montego Bay. Harlem Hospital says he was indeed in the waiting room that night drinking rum. And the kicker: a vandal squad dick who’s been at the gallery says none of the marks at Darla’s match the Bigs Cru handprint. Finally, Rx calls me himself, and a Jamaican area code shows on the caller ID. “Rickety told me to get in touch with you,” he says over the scratchy line. “You want something from me?” I ask a few questions, but I’ve already given up on that particular prescription.

  Next: I take the A express downtown to meet Curtis at Bomb the System, a West Broadway shop that sells all the paraphernalia anyone would need to fill a paint-stained backpack—fat and thin spray paint caps, grease pencils, stencils, black books, graff-inspired silk-screen tees, fanzines, and graffiti snapshots, or flix, along with concert tickets, fancy cigarettes, and bongs, just in case. We make nice with the owner, who calls himself Skid, though he’s so round and pale I doubt he’d leave marks.

  Once he’s convinced we aren’t coppers, he says, “I’ll help you as much as I can, especially if you put the shop’s name in your paper. We could use a plug. But just so you know: this isn’t some kind of taxi stand where I hire out vandals to the blocks I like worst. The customers here are mostly wannabe’s, but don’t let them hear me say that. The real writers are leery. They won’t believe you’re not the police. I won’t get in your way if you want to ask anyone questions. But I doubt you’ll get much.”

  For a couple hours, we query skateboard punks in line for concert tickets Skid is selling, European graffiti tourists in town to tag our hallowed walls, and a handful of Staten Island teens in search of a fancy stencil.

  “Have you heard about the recent gallery graffiti in Chelsea? (“There’s a graffiti gallery in Chelsea?”) It was on the news…. Someone broke into a place and sprayed up the paintings. (“Didn’t hear about that.”…“Just got into town.”…“Oh, yeah. I heard about that. Who did it?”) That’s what we’re trying to figure out…. Know any kids who ever broke into a place to spray paint? (“Why would they do that?”…“Plenty left to bomb out here.”) Seen any work that looks like this?…Or this? (“Wow, those are killer.”…“They did that?”) Look familiar? (“Nah.”…“If I knew that guy I’d know him, you know?”…“That’s a dope style.”) How so? (“Dunno.”…“Can’t really explain it.”…“Just different, you know? Look at the curve.”) Know anyone who could be hired to vandalize something?…Know anyone who knew Stain? (“Oh, yeah.”…“Sure, I know him.”…“He’s the Bronx guy.”…“He’s old school. Real famous.”) Any idea who did this?

  Nada. Nyet. Nein. Nu-uh. Ninguna. Dunno. Not a single word closer to the facts in any language. We wash down our defeat with bourbon at the SoHo Grand, flipping through graffiti fanzines and flix at the bar, searching for piecers that place. Curtis tells me about his morning at the courthouse and the cop shop. Seems Wallace had filed a complaint in State Supreme Court against Darla Deitrick Fine Art for ten paintings, valued at $50,000 per. He says he either wanted the paintings back or he wanted the money. If she sold them, she owed him half.

  I do quick math. “A quarter of a million dollars is not nothing,” I say. “Maybe it was enough to want to knock him off?”

  “I don’t know about that, Valerie. These dealers trade in more than that at least once a week.” Curtis slugs back bourbon. “And why wouldn’t she just give him back the paintings if she had them?”

  I’m thinking it over. “She didn’t have them. She’s already sold them. She doesn’t tell him that, though. She tells him she’ll give them back, but she doesn’t have them to give back. So she burns down the warehouse and plans to give him the insurance money instead.”

  “Could be insurance fraud. If she planned to pay him why would she kill him?”

  I keep chewing on the ice from my glass. The barman comes over and asks me if I want another. I nod. “He found out about the arson?” I say. “Threatened to expose her? He’s like that. A big mouth, right?”

  “Was.” Curtis orders another bourbon. “I don’t think it’s enough. It would have to be something bigger. Otherwise she wouldn’t risk it.”

  “Maybe some kind of insurance fraud. You get real time for that, right?”

  We’re all over the ballpark, but at least we’re tossing it around. I don’t have a lot of practice in this game. I swig my new bourbon. It doesn’t make me any brighter. “She sold the paintings to an unknown collector out of state, but didn’t collect tax,” I try. “Or she had him pay her through a Swiss bank account. I’ve read about this kind of thing. She promises to get Wallace his paintings, then plants fakes and destroys them. She kills Wallace because he knows about the arson, insurance fraud, and tax fraud.”

  Curtis laughs out his nose. “Our Darla’s turning out to be quite a femme fatale.” He shakes his head back so his dreads dance. “I don’t know. The plot’s too thick. It’s got to be simpler. Anyone from August Dupin to Miss Marple will tell you: the solution to a mystery of this sort is always hidden in plain sight. The truth is right in front of your nose the whole time.”

  “Those are detective classics,” I say. “In the hardboiled school, nothing ends up simple. The solution is always ‘Nothing is as it seems.’”

  Back at the office, Bob Torrens, the red-bow-tied photo chief, is rapping at our door. He wants pix for a layout pronto and we haven’t even jotted word one. Now we feel the crunch: a day of reporting and still we have zilch.

  That night, I walk a few blocks east of The Paper and hail a cab, telling the driver to drop me near the Steinway factory, just over the Queensboro. It’s a short walk to Cabeza’s studio from there and nobody trolls the lonely cobblestone streets. No one but me.

  Cabeza uncorks a pinot noir and I ask him to list for me names of writers who were close enough to Wallace to factor. He starts with A-1, as the wine glugs into my glass, and he works his way up the alphabet from Ader to Zephyr, ticking off every graff writer Darla might’ve sniffed or snubbed since 1979. We talk old school and new school, toys and masters, legendaries, kings, all-city, buffers and battles, crews and lone gunmen on every train line from City Island to Howard Beach. We talk scratchiti, stencils, paint rollers, and stickers. We’ve got lists of names and lists of lists. We’re covering ground without getting distance. It’s after midnight and all I’ve made all day is lists.

  We stop. We turn down the lights. I stand up to get the bottle and pour myself some more wine, tripping over the leg of a tripod. The camcorder’s little red light is flickering. “Did you know this thing is on?” I say.

  “Oh, turn it off, will you?” he says, leaning back in his chair and taking off his sandals. “I was filming myself earlier doing monologues. I’m thinking about auditioning again for the screen.”

  “Again? You’ve done that before?”

  “You’re not the only one with secret movie-star ambitions.” He turns to show me his best celluloid profile. I get behind the camera and look through the lens. I pluck it off the tripod and zoom in. A few wrinkles here and there by his eyes, sure, but they give him dignity, they make him look tough, worldly-wise.

  “
Let’s do a little screen test.”

  He stands up and I follow him with the camera.

  “Ah, but you underestimate me,” he says. “I’m quite a good actor.” He raises his wineglass and clears his throat, takes a step back. He’s going to get thespian on me.

  “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this pretty face from day to day.” He reaches out his free hand and cups my chin. “To the last syllable of The Paper of Record, and all our yesterdays were fit to print our way to a dusty death.” He puts down his glass and twirls me into the crook of his arm. His nose touches mine. “Out, out, brief candle.”

  Day two: “Interesting factoid,” Curtis says by way of greeting at 7:00 a.m. “I asked Tracy to put together a list of Wallace’s biggest collectors. And who should appear at the top of it, but your old fiancé, Jeremiah Sinclair Golden Jr.”

  “He wasn’t my fiancé,” I say, putting down my purse.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Your booooyfriend.” The sides of his lips suppress a smile.

  “That’s low,” I say.

  “Still a little bruised, huh?”

  “A little.” I move to Smarte’s chair and sit, hoping to punctuate the conversation with a full stop.

  “Aw. Tell me where it hurts.” He pokes me with his pencil eraser. “Here?” He pokes me again. “Here?”

  “Okay,” I say. “I graduated preschool twenty years ago.”

  Curtis mock-pouts. “It’s a potential issue, though, don’t you think?”

  “What?”

  “Jeremiah’s collection of Stains.”

  “He was always pretty tainted. It was a little bit of a game for him, trying to find the jewel in the rough. It seems he wasted a lot of money on nobodies. He had one Warhol that was worth something and I understand he sold it to Gagosian to pay his legal bills.”

  Curtis tosses a back issue of Art News onto my lap. There’s Jeremiah, in all his preppy splendor, hair greased back, cheekbones airbrushed, standing in front of a twelve-foot Schnabel. “He had good luck early on,” says Curtis. “Seems he started collecting before he was even legal to drink. Bought Schnabel and Kenny Scharf, a few small Basquiat drawings. This story says he probably owns a dozen Stains,” Curtis says. “He sure knew how to pick them in the eighties.”

  The art in the attic. “I never saw Schnabel or Scharf, though I didn’t get a very good look at his collection. Maybe he’d already sold them by that time.”

  “He still owns some, at least. They’re going to be exhibited in a hip-hop retrospective in Germany. A place called the Ludwig Museum. I’m telling you, it’s only beginning. The eighties retro wave is going to hit us like a tsunami. This doesn’t present a conflict, does it, Valerie?”

  “What conflict? I don’t talk to the guy. He doesn’t talk to me.”

  “Do you know if they ever met each other—your fiancé and Wallace?”

  “I can’t imagine it.”

  Curtis stands up. “Well, as far as I’m concerned, that qualifies Mr. Golden for your map.” He picks up a Sharpie. His hand hovers over the Upper East Side of Manhattan on the wall map. He writes “JSG2” at the intersection of Sixty-third Street and Lexington, then he pauses. “That puts you on here too, Valerie. And where did you say you were from, again? Park Avenue?”

  I pull myself in under Smarte’s desk, fastening on my phone headset. I punch numbers for the DA’s office, largely for effect. The call goes through to Betty Schlachter, the flack, and I make my official request one more time: “Anything new on the gallery vandalism case? Anything on Wallace?”

  “We’re well aware of your interest in both cases, Miss Vane,” Schlachter says. “Both are still under investigation. We’ll call you when there’s any news.”

  “I’ll call you first.”

  Tyler Prattle sticks his head through the door. “Anyone got a moment to let this old codger vent on an idea for Week in Review?”

  Prattle is seven feet tall, mostly freckles—a giant pointillist masterpiece. If he moves too fast, he might scatter. I look at Curtis. Moore and Lessey have obviously asked him to check in with us. No way Prattle cares what a newbie like me thinks about his op-eds. Curtis nods, to say, “You go.” He’s making up for harassing me about Jeremiah.

  I follow Prattle into his office next door. Before I’ve taken a seat, he launches in: “Minimalist art and graffiti are at opposite poles of an aesthetic spectrum, right? Right? One is the ultimate expression of the art world’s elitism and the other its most populist, right? Am I right?”

  I nod.

  “No, I am not right,” says Prattle, gleefully clapping his hands. “That’s too simplistic. One doesn’t have to look very hard to see that these two movements have a tremendous amount in common, a tremendous amount. For one, each genre has an act of aggression at its core. It forces the viewer to overcome an initial resistance, even, perhaps, hatred, toward the artist, toward the piece. Neither provides the viewer with something that’s easy to look at. Both require the viewer to be uneasy, or to overcome that unease, to overcome the hatred of the act of painting. But that’s not all, is it, not all, right?”

  “I’m going to guess it’s not.”

  “No, not all,” he says, clapping again soundlessly. His hands are dot clusters, held together by sheer serendipity—sort of like his argument. “There’s also the corresponding meta-function. Graffiti asks: Who owns art if art is everywhere, if art is public? Minimalism asks: Who owns art if art is light? If art is the way shadows play against a flat surface? Both say—you own art, you, the viewer. What you see is what you see, as Frank Stella said. Brilliant, yes?”

  “Brilliant,” I agree. It is my place to agree, but I’m also thinking it over. If I’m understanding him correctly, he’s breaking down the high-low duality, and saying there’s no difference between what Wallace produced on the streets and what Johns produced for the Met. It’s heady stuff, but I can’t imagine too many grannies who read the Sunday paper would swallow it. He’s maybe fishing for letters to the editor. In any case, Stain would’ve been pleased. I tell Prattle that much.

  He giggles and claps his hands. “This is a good one. One for the anthology!”

  Back out into the streets for more interviews. This time, Curtis and I tag-team. I query kids in Life Drawing class at the Wallace painting school. He questions art dealers in Chelsea and SoHo; I chat with pencil-tapping art profs who want to plug their books. He rounds up Bronx activists promoting local causes. I interview East Village eighties nostalgics who wish they were back in the good old days when no one but hard-core art lovers and drug dealers went downtown. He tracks down tony art-market reporters who regale him with stories about the exhilarating sales during the last art market boom. Back at the office, feet up on chairs, transcribing our notes, Curtis says, “At least if we don’t get the story, we can always compile an Encyclopedia of New York Poseurs.”

  What we don’t get—what it’s obvious we need—is legit graff writers, the ones still scrawling, the ones on the street. How do we get to them? They’re not at Bomb the System, obviously. They’re not at galleries. They don’t have union spokesmen or high-paid flacks. They don’t attend Life Drawing, and they don’t do legal walls. They keep odd hours. They fly by night. They climb scaffolding and rusted fire escapes. They hide. Finding them is like finding prowlers. Like finding Batman in his cave.

  Curtis goes in search of his old sources from his days at the Voice. I track down our subway reporter, Lou Gaines, and ask him to tell me the best-painted tunnels. He tells me a handful of stations. He suggests I wait at the edge of a subway platform, near the NO TRESPASSING signs. He says the kids jump onto the rails once the trains pull out. He suggests I watch and wait.

  I do as he says. I start at 6:00 p.m. at the Jay Street–Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn and I wait. And I keep waiting. I see nothing for a long, long while. I hear Gaines in my head: “It’s sort of like waiting for rats in an alley. They’re there. But they might not be smiling at you. Just keep an eye out.” A
t 10:00 p.m., I finally spot one: the train pulls out, and I look right, and a kid is slipping past the signs. I follow, like a mugger, a thief. I see him sidestep down the narrow edge of the platform, then get to the end and jump onto the empty tracks. I think, “Third rail.” I’m afraid. “I’m about to get fried.”

  But then I hear Battinger’s final caveat: This is your last shot. Page one or the exit. I don’t have a choice. It’s onto the rails or out the door.

  I jump. I find the kid a few yards up, his spray can hoisted and hissing, the black wall of the tunnel sprayed wetly with the letters TNL. He hears my step and he bolts. I chase. I shout, “Reporter! Not cops! Not MTA! I need help! A reporter!” Maybe because my voice is female, maybe because he’s just a little kid, he stops. I give him my name. I tell him what I’m doing. I say all I want is an idea how to find another writer.

  “Could you take a look at these flix?” I say, holding out the snaps from Darla’s vandalism job. He blinks at me through his facemask. Maybe he’s amused that I’ve got the lingo. He looks back at the flix, lit by a safety light in the tunnel.

  Finally, in a squeaky voice, he says, “I can’t recognize these others. But I’d know those curlicues anywhere. That’s RIF’s hand for sure.”

  My notebook is out of my pocket fast. At long last, a genuine lead. “Where do I find him?” I ask my kid. He tells me. I nearly kiss him. “How do we get out of here?” I ask. He leads me through the tunnel down the line. We cross onto an idle track until we’re deep under the grid. There’s a doorway there that leads to a staircase. We climb up a ladder on the wall to get to the door. We hear something move behind us.