A Little Trouble with the Facts by Nina Siegal Read Free Book Online Page A

Harvard Crimson alum with familial links to The Paper’s masthead. He’d been donated to Battinger as a lackey. But, as a Yale grad, she didn’t like handouts from Harvard, so she put Travis on Rewrite and let him stew for thirteen months. “You never told me you were a graffiti artist,” Travis said.
    “Yeah, I did. I was a writer, ” said Randy, correcting Travis. “That’s what they say—not ‘graffiti artist.’ Writer. I was one of the original Queens Bombers.”
    “Queens Bombers?” Travis said. “I’ve heard of the Bronx Bombers, but not Queens . Hey, anyway, didn’t you grow up in Jersey?”
    “So?” said Randy. “I took the train in.” He swiped at Travis’s head, putting a few hairs out of place. Travis smoothed his dirty-blond swoop, drew his chair to his desk, and sulked on his fist.
    “I can’t believe they let you get Stain in the paper,” Randy said to me. “He was such a genius. That piece he did with Haring right off the FDR? I can’t believe how awesome that is. And it’s never ever been touched. Not a single buff. So, what’s your theory?”
    “Theory?”
    Randy pantomimed yanking a noose around his neck. His tongue flopped to the corner of his lips. Then his eyes brightened. “Come on, you must have some idea,” he said. “Why’d he do it?”
    “Maybe it’s tough being a graffiti artist when you’re forty-two.”
    “He seemed like a pretty happy guy when I saw him last.”
    “You saw him?”
    “Sure, at that anti-Giuliani rally downtown a few weeks ago. He was throwing dung at a painting of the mayor. I wrote it up. Didn’t make it into the paper, though. They said it was ‘too incidental,’ but what they meant was ‘too radical,’ you know? Man, I wish I’d gotten that in. It would’ve been good timing, the underground hero taking his last licks.”
    I couldn’t really hold up my end of the conversation on Stain. I’d gotten the fax and made two calls. I’d pulled a couple of articles off the Internet, and checked The Paper’s digital archives. I’d read the Sunday Magazine feature and then I did what I usually did when I had a three-hundred-word squib: I cribbed from the press release.
    Now, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to recheck. I left Randy venting to Travis. When I got back to my desk, I found my stack of paper clips strewn everywhere. For no particular reason, I was unnerved. I typed in “Malcolm Wallace.” After blinking at me for a minute, green letters flashed on the screen: “Please contact the morgue.”
    The morgue was The Paper’s newsprint archive. Jaime had told me a thousand times that I should use the morgue to do the bulk of my research on anything pre-1985, the year The Paper had begun digitizing. But so far I’d done all of my research from my desk. Are you a reporter? I asked myself. Are you a reporter? said that smoky voice.
    I went into the text documents on my computer to find my page of notes from my morning chat with Pinsky. There it was:“Wallace, Malcolm A. Deceased black male found at water’s edge near base of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, Queens side.” Et cetera. I scrolled down to the part where I’d written “Jump from bridge possible. O/B DNP,” and I put my cursor on the end of the line and backspaced.
    My heart sank a little—for myself—but at least now my notes substantiated my story, in case anyone asked. I could go home and climb into bed, and in the morning there would be a fresh paper on the newsstand, full of all kinds of new problems for people to worry about. That was the nice thing about news. By tomorrow, today’s paper would be fish wrap. It would be shredded for kitty litter. It would be taped inside shop windows to indicate the place was closed.
     
    The humidity fell on me like a raccoon coat when I pushed through The Paper’s brass revolving doors. A thin spread of gray clouds hovered low over the skyscrapers. Underneath it, the sky was illuminated almost to daylight by the glow from