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Overview
However, when she writes about a recently deceased once-famous graffiti artist, the phone calls start. A mysterious voice on the other end of the line tells her the artist's death was a murder—and if she were a real reporter, she'd investigate.
But can Valerie trade her stilettos for gumshoes?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061242908 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 02/26/2008 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 324,894 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.68(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Little Trouble with the Facts
A Novel
Chapter One
The Death Beat
It was the high mercury end of July and no one was doing any dying. I wasn't getting much work done, just moving faxes from one side of my desk to the other and finding homes for stray paper clips.
A few reporters had been sent out to cover the heat—chat with the fan salesmen, check on the polar bears at the zoo. Metro columnist Clint Westwood was under his desk pawing through old columns for new ideas. White-haired Rusty Markowitz was on the horn with a stringer he'd sent to stalk a Broadway ingenue. He was red-faced and barking, "Listen, give her the cell phone. Well, if she won't take it just shove it right up to her mouth!"
The other Pulitzer Prize winners were out in the Hamptons putting the final touches on their next historical opus or cultivating a new patch of skin cancer. It was slow. Slow as a drunkard's grin.
I was about to go upstairs for a cup of coffee when the phone rang. I took my gum out of my mouth and stuck it onto the filing cabinet with the other pieces.
"Obits," I said. "Vane."
There was no voice on the line, but I heard a siren, the rattling of steel. Maybe the Brooklyn Bridge was calling.
"Valerie Vane, Obituary Desk," I tried again. "May I help you?"
Now there was a voice, low and soft. "Yes," it said. "I want to inquire about a story that ran in your pages today." The voice was male, deep and smoky, but tentative—a controlled burn.
"Which story would that be?"
"The piece on Wallace," he said. "Malcolm Wallace."
I reached across my deskfor the morning edition and another stick of gum. Chelsea and Hillary were on the cover riding camels, next to our three-column overnighter on the heat wave—brownouts in Inwood, track fires in Chinatown, historic concessions lines at Jones Beach. I flipped past the genocide and nuclear arsenals, past the labor unrest and roaming bison, and found the story in the measly posterior of the Metro pages, one of the shorties below the fold.
"Famous for Writing His Name," read the headline with the subhead, "Artist Brought Street Life into Galleries." Malcolm Wallace, forty-two, painter—a graffiti writer self-dubbed Stain 149. The piece didn't have a byline, but I already knew who'd written it, because I happened to be chewing her gum.
"Is there a problem?" I asked the caller.
"Yes, I believe so," he said. "I'm concerned about the facts related in the story. You see, the article here says he took his own life."
I checked the first paragraph of the story, where indeed it said that Wallace had jumped from the Queensboro Bridge. "Correct," I said.
"Suicide," he said slowly.
"That's right, suicide." I said it the way he'd said it, using his rhythms, his elisions of the vowels so that it sounded like "Soo-cide." Killing of Sue.
"But that's not right," he said, and then he used the word again: "Suicide."
I did a quick mental check of the facts I'd gleaned the day before from DCPI, police press. It was my typical morning call to Detective Pinsky for updates and confirms: Wallace, Malcolm A. Deceased black male found on the rocks near base of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, Queens side. Discovered Saturday, 5:47 a.m. Time of death: approximately 2:15. Body waterlogged, bloated, no visible marks. Jump from bridge. ID in breast pocket.
"Let me see." I pushed some faxes around my desk to make it sound like I was checking. "Yep, Sue Side is what we got." Each syllable on tiptoe. "Sue Side from DCPI."
We got calls like this from time to time from people who weren't happy when they saw the cold, hard facts in dark, gray ink. My first few months on the desk, I'd get nervous and run them by Jaime Cordoba, the chief Obit editor.
Jaime was an Orthodox Jew born in Cuba, raised in Georgia, and he'd gotten enough guff for just his name ("hymie at the hymie-town paper?") that very little rattled him. He had skin the color of ginger and a mane of curly black hair he kept under his yarmulke with a few dabs of Brylcreem. When I needed his advice, he shook that mane like a just-roused lion, and spoke with a Latin southern twang no louder than a whisper.
"People don't like to accept death," he'd told me. "It's like a railway that runs on a senseless schedule and we obituary writers are station workers cleaning up after the train's already left. We're wearing an official uniform so people think we can give them answers. But here's my advice: stick to pushing the broom. Just tip your hat and say, 'I'm sorry, mister, I don't have any control over departures.' "
Since then, I'd developed a system for phoners. Step one was to comfort: "It may take a little bit of time to get adjusted to your loss," I started, but the caller wasn't listening.
"Who said suicide?" he wanted to know.
"The police reported 'jump from bridge.' "
"Malcolm just put the down payment on a permanent space for a painting school," the caller said. "A man who's going to kill himself doesn't secure a mortgage. He doesn't say he's going out for ice cream and jump into the East River."
"No," I said. "Not usually. I know these senseless acts are sometimes hard to understand. We need to try and look at the big picture . . ." This was step two: Help the caller contemplate death in the abstract.
I was laying it on thick as cement, but I wasn't much interested in the caller. I was thinking about my cup of coffee getting cold upstairs. This Wallace fellow had already gotten plenty of ink. He'd been famous in the eighties—hell, he'd even been the subject of a 1985 Sunday Magazine feature—but only for as long as it took to shake up a can of spray paint. He'd since been scrubbed from history. I figured the main reason he'd made the page was the weather: 104 by day, a sauna in the shade. Jaime had been complaining about our section "looking geriatric" and when he found the Wallace notice, he said, "Finally, some young blood," slapping the fax on my desk. "This'll be fun for you, Vane. Has to do with art."
A Little Trouble with the FactsA Novel. Copyright © by Nina Siegal. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
What People are Saying About This
“Valerie Vane is the best thing to hit the newspaper biz since Rosalind Russell cracked wise with Cary Grant. She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s sexy.”
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“An exceptionally well-written record of one woman’s quest for personal and professional identity. Siegal very skillfully dramatizes the styles of street artists, popular and classical art, and, most important of all, the bureaucratic tensions between the various departments of a major newspaper.”
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