Last year, while attending a VH1 party for guitarist Eddie Van Halen, Stomarti met Ms. Rio, the former Cynthia Jane Zigler. Three weeks later they were married in Reno, Nevada.

"Jimmy was everything to me, you know?" Ms. Rio said. "My husband, my best friend, my lover, my manager."

At the time of his death, Stomarti was producing an album for his new wife. The title: Shipwrecked Heart.

I re-read the piece and decide it's not terrible, for a forty-five-minute writing job. Maudlin as it is, the kicker works.

Jimmy Stoma's obit is 810 words, or about twenty-four column inches of type. The fastidious Emma will be plenty steamed. She told me fifteen inches, max. Anything longer won't fit into the layout of the Death page, meaning the story must be trimmed or moved to another section of the paper.

Emma would rather French-kiss an iguana than try to cut nine inches from one of my obits, because she knows I'll be breathing down her collar, giving her hell about every measly comma she has the gall to delete.

Even when allowed to toil unmolested, Emma's editing cannot be described as seamless. In the fever pitch of battle, she tends to quaver; even her punctuation (normally a strong suit) becomes shaky. Trimming an inch or two from one of my stories is merely excruciating. Cutting nine inches would be indescribable torture, and Emma knows it.

Which leaves the other option: Move the Jimmy Stoma obit to a section front. That would shift the editing duty into the hands of one of Emma's competitors. More unpalatably, it might result in a prominent display of my byline—an event as rare and mystical as a solar eclipse.

Poor kid. What choices!

Before pressing the Send button to ship her the Jimmy Stoma obit, I go through it once more, tidying up.

I delete the "likeness" after "mask."

I wince at the Chili Peppers reference, suspecting that the Slut Puppies had no influence whatsoever on that particular band.

I cringe at the "marred by heavy substance abuse" line, but I can't come up with anything that isn't equally cliched.

I insert the phrase "highly publicized" in front of "romances." ...

Tinkering is a way of stalling, and I'm stalling in the hope that Janet Thrush might still phone with a quote or two about her brother. Except for a few paragraphs of background from old clippings, the obituary is pretty much all Cleo Rio. Single-sourcing always makes me uneasy, and I'm stuck with Cleo's word on lots of material facts, including the cause of Jimmy Stoma's death.

I keep thinking of the shimmery-haired guy with the deli bags who got out of the elevator. Hell, there could be a dozen innocent explanations. Maybe he was Cleo's big brother, or some diving buddy of Jimmy's. That bull-semen cologne, though, was definitely too heavy for the occasion.

My eyes fall skeptically on the phrase "still dazed by the tragedy," which I've used to describe Jimmy's widow. I should probably take it out, but I won't. It paints a gentler scene than if I'd written she was "knocking back screwdrivers and staring blankly out a window," which was the sad truth.

One more detail jumps out of the obituary to give me a twinge of acid reflux: the bit about how Jimmy and Cleo Rio first met at a VH1 party. That's what Cleo told me.

Yet she also told me her husband had broken completely from his past, and wanted nothing more to do with the music world until he'd met her. So why was he attending a Van Halen bash?

One of many things I'll probably never know.

I check the clock. I punch the Send key, then e-mail Emma to tell her Jimmy Stoma's on the way. I head downstairs to grab a soda. Upon my return I see Emma has responded with an electronic message of her own: "We need to talk as soon as I'm out of the news meeting!"

She probably hasn't even read the obit—all she did was scope out the length, then freak. Minutes later I see her crossing the newsroom and I pounce like a wolverine.

"Metro took it," she says, acting as if she couldn't care less.

"Yeah? For out front?"

Emma says nothing. She knows where the Jimmy Stoma obit is being played, but she won't give me the satisfaction.

"Talk to Metro," she says, now pretending to edit a story by young Evan Richards, our college intern. Upon my approach Evan warily has drifted away from Emma's desk; he has witnessed too many of our dustups.

"What about you?" I say to Emma. "You got enough to fill the page?"

"I'll find something on the wires."

She won't look directly at me; her slender hands appear bolted to the keypad of her computer, her nose poised six inches from the screen. The worst part is, the screen is blank. I can see its bright blue reflection in Emma's reading glasses.

Unaccountably, I am overtaken by pity.

"Rabbi Levine won't be on the wire services, Emma. You want me to make a few calls?"

Her eyes flicker. I notice the ivory tip of a tooth, pinching a corner of her lip. "No, Jack. There isn't time."

Back at my desk, I dial three phone numbers: the rabbi's wife, the rabbi's brother and the synagogue. I bat out twelve inches in twenty minutes flat, shipping it to Emma with the following note:

"You were right. The hang-gliding stuff makes the whole piece."

On the way out of the newsroom, I hear her call my name. Walking back to her desk, I see the rabbi's obituary up on her computer screen. It's easy to guess what's coming.

"Jack, I like the brother's quote better than the wife's."

"Then move it up," I say, agreeably. Emma needs this one more than I do. "See you tomorrow."

Out of the blue she says, "Nice kicker on Jimmy Stoma." Not exactly oozing sincerity, but at least she's making eye contact.

"Thanks. Was it Abkazion who bumped it to Metro?"

Emma nods. "Just like you said. Our new boss is a Slut Puppies fan."

"Naw," I say, "a true fan would have put it on Page One."

Emma almost smiles.

Dinner is a lightning stop at a burger joint. Then I go home, open a beer and ransack the apartment in search of my copy of Reptiles and Amphibians of North America.Finally I unearth it from a loose pile of Dylan and Pink Floyd CDs. At the touch of a button, Jimmy Stoma is alive and well, shaking the rafters of my living room. I flop on the couch. Maybe he's no Roger Waters, but James Bradley Stomarti is not without talent.

Correction: Was.

I close my eyes and listen.

One night I fell through a hole in my soul,

And you followed me down, followed me down.

I fell till the blackness broke low into dawn

And you followed me down till you drowned ...

Smiling, I drain the beer. Irony abounds! Poor Jimmy.

Again I close my eyes.

When I awake, it's daybreak. The phone is ringing and with chagrin I realize I've forgotten to turn off the call-forwarding from my newsroom number. It can only be a reader on the other end of the line, and no possible good can come from speaking to a reader at such an ungodly hour. Yet the interruption of sleep has made me so bilious that I lunge for the receiver as if it were a cocked revolver.

"Yeah, what?" I say gruffly, to put the caller on the defensive.

"Is this Mr. Tagger?" Woman's voice.

"Yeah."

"This is Janet. Janet Thrush. I read what all you wrote about my brother in the paper."

Idiotically, I find myself anticipating a compliment. Instead I hear a scornful snort.

"Holy shit," says Jimmy Stoma's sister, "did you get scammed, or what!"