Guilty Minds

by Joseph Finder

  “And that would just feed the flames. Give the story oxygen, which is exactly what they want.”

  He had a point. “So how do you know what’s in the story?”

  “The reporter e-mailed a list of questions.”

  “To you? Or to this unnamed friend of yours?”

  “To him.”

  “Did he answer them?”

  “He ignored them.”

  “And they’re running the story anyway?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t like this.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Something doesn’t smell right about this. Like maybe there’s more to the story than you’re letting on. I’d put this in the ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ category. Meaning that there’s at least some truth here. So I’m thinking the real reason I’m here is that you want me to do a scrub.”

  Parnell fixed me with a steely stare. No more frightened puppy dog. “If you mean, do I want you to conceal evidence and make witnesses disappear or what have you, you don’t know me. As I told you, this entire story is false.”

  “Mr. Parnell, I can’t take this on until I talk to your friend.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s just not possible. And I’m Gideon.”

  “I understand.” I rose and extended my hand, but Parnell didn’t take it. “I’m sorry we wasted each other’s time.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Heller. Please understand, this is not someone you can just go in and interview.”

  “Well, until I’ve talked to the guy, I won’t do it.” I remained standing. “You know damned well you can easily find someone else. There’s no shortage of investigators who’d jump at the chance to work for Shays Abbott. I’m in the fortunate position of being able to pick and choose.”

  This was an out-and-out lie. In the past few months I had taken work I once swore I’d never do. Times were hard for everyone.

  “Perhaps I can arrange for you two to talk over the phone.”

  “I need to look him in the eye, Gideon. Either I talk to him face-to-face or I’m just not interested.”

  “As I say, that’s not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a Supreme Court justice.”

  I slowly sat back down. “Now I’m interested,” I said.

  3

  Which one?”

  Parnell took a sip of coffee, put it down, and drew a breath. “Jeremiah Claflin.”

  He wasn’t just a Supreme Court justice, he was the chief justice. I didn’t show any reaction.

  “Now you understand the sensitivity.”

  I nodded.

  My mental image of Claflin was of a man in his midfifties, one of the younger justices on the court. Pleasant-looking in a square-jawed way. He was fit. The first thing he did upon being named chief justice was order a renovation of the court’s run-down gym.

  So unlike some of his more geriatric colleagues on the high court, you could actually imagine him having a sex life. But would anyone believe he’d hired a prostitute?

  Yeah, probably.

  He was a regular churchgoer. The news media would salivate over a story like this. We all love seeing the mighty topple, but a lot of people find it particularly gratifying to have someone famous and morally upstanding exposed as a hypocrite and brought low.

  “How long have you known Slander Sheet was investigating the chief justice?”

  “Only since yesterday. The reporter had been calling his office for a week or two. Eventually they bounced her over to the court’s public affairs office, which did what it usually does.”

  “Stonewalled.”

  He nodded, took another sip of coffee. He leaned back in his chair. “Yesterday she e-mailed this long list of very specific questions and said the story was going up whether he returned her calls or not. The chief justice called me in a panic.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  Parnell pulled a couple of pages from a brown file folder and handed them to me. “This is a copy they FedExed me yesterday.”

  The first page was headed HUNSECKER MEDIA in an elegant font like it was Vogue. It was a letter to Chief Justice Claflin, cc’ing Gideon Parnell.

  “Hunsecker Media?”

  “Publishers of Slander Sheet.”

  I quickly skimmed the questions.

  “The reporter’s name is Mandy Seeger,” I said. “Why is that name familiar?”

  “She used to be at The Washington Post.”

  “That’s right.” Seeger was a hotshot investigative reporter who’d won a Pulitzer Prize for some big series of articles about . . . something, I didn’t remember, some government scandal. What the hell was she doing working at Slander Sheet? “Her byline on the piece is going to give it instant credibility.”

  “One of the reasons I’m taking this seriously.”

  I continued scanning the letter and the attached list of questions. “This looks pretty damning.”

  “It’s an elaborate setup.”

  “Hold on. It says the justice’s . . . meetings with the escort were paid for by Tom Wyden.” I knew the name. Wyden was a well-known casino magnate, the CEO of Wyden Desert Resorts in Las Vegas.

  Parnell shook his head in apparent disgust. “Wyden recently had a big case decided in his favor by the Supreme Court. If this story were true, it would be an impeachable offense. But it’s completely bogus.”

  “Do they even know each other, Claflin and Wyden?”

  Parnell nodded. “Yes. Not well, but they know each other.”

  “This is looking worse and worse. You say you made a deal with Slander Sheet. What kind of deal?”

  “I told them I’d give her an interview if she gave me forty-eight hours.”

  I groaned. “A mistake. You just effectively confirmed the story.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Why else would one of the most powerful attorneys in Washington bother to call some low-rent gossip website, if he wasn’t worried they were onto something?”

  Parnell looked at me for a few seconds, a glint of amusement in his eyes. “I’m not known for leaving fingerprints. I told her I would be happy to speak with her, but the justice would not.”

  “So now she can report that the chief justice’s attorney, Washington insider Gideon Parnell, denied the account. Which is another way of saying ‘the allegations are obviously true or else one of the heaviest hitters in Washington wouldn’t have taken time out of his busy schedule to try to make it go away.’ You just gave the story the street cred Slander Sheet wanted.”

  “Wrong,” he said patiently. “First of all, as I told you and as I told her, I am not the justice’s attorney. I’m just a friend. Second, I made it clear that my condition for speaking with her was that our talk be off the record, including the fact of any conversation. They agreed not to run the story until the reporter had spoken with me.”

  I nodded. “So basically you bought yourself some time.”

  “Until she meets with me, they’re not going to run the story.”

  “And when’s this meeting?”

  He looked at his watch, a gold bezel with a big white face on a brown crocodile strap. It looked expensive. “Tomorrow at five P.M.”

  “Nowhere near enough time. I’d need a minimum of two weeks, and that’s if we get lucky.”

  “Get lucky faster.”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “That’s all the time we have, Nick. I was surprised they agreed to hold off as long as they did.”

  “I’m going to need to talk to the chief justice. In person.”

  “I doubt he’ll agree to it, but let me ask him.”

  “One more question.”

  He inclined his head.

  “How many other firms turned you down befor
e you had Malkin call me?”

  “No one turned me down.”

  “I was your first choice? Somehow I don’t believe that.”

  “Of course not. I don’t know you. I had to make some inquiries about you first.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m in Boston, and this is a DC case. You could get anyone you want in DC, without having to pay travel. Including the obvious choice.”

  He knew I meant Jay Stoddard, my former boss, whose firm was the best known in the private intelligence business, a man who’d got his start working for Richard Nixon. Stoddard had recruited me from Defense intelligence and taught me the tricks of the trade. I learned a lot from him—a bleak education—until we had a falling out and I quit to start my own firm.

  He heaved a sigh. “Jay has too many close ties to powerful interests in Washington. Whereas you’re an outsider.”

  “Is that a polite way of saying I’ve made some enemies?”

  He shrugged. “It is what it is.” One of those annoying catch phrases that seem to have caught on like herpes. “Everyone in DC is in bed with someone. And this feels like some kind of inside job. An attack like this doesn’t come out of nowhere. Someone went to a lot of trouble to put this thing together, and I can’t take a chance with the local talent.”

  “Let’s be clear about something. You want more than information. You want me to do certain things in ways you can’t be associated with. Correct?”

  “I want you to do whatever it takes to kill this story. I want you to strangle the baby in its cradle. And yes, you’re absolutely right, no one must ever know that you’re working for me.”

  “And why is that so important?”

  A long, long pause. “Candidly, the senior partners in this law firm are deathly afraid of Slander Sheet. No one wants to be fed into that wood chipper.”

  “I appreciate the honesty. The chief justice is going to have to be just as open with me.”

  “I’ll see if he agrees to meet. He can be prickly. He’s very private.”

  “One more thing. If I find out the story’s true, I’m off the job. I’m not interested in helping cover something up. If that’s what you want, I’m not the right guy for this.”

  He smiled. “Oh, I know that well. I believe the phrase Jay Stoddard used to describe you was ‘loose cannon.’ He made it eminently clear that you’re not controllable.”

  “I have a feeling he put it more colorfully than that.”

  He gave a low, rumbling chuckle, glancing at his watch. “I have a meeting with the Boston partners, and I want to reach the chief justice before that. I’ll let you know what he says. Let me have your cell phone number.”

  I gave it to him. “The sooner the better,” I said.

  4

  In the cab on the way back to my office, I read over my copy of the letter Slander Sheet had sent to the Supreme Court’s public affairs office. I started to formulate a plan, in case I did take the case.

  It looked really bad for the chief justice. They were highly specific questions and implied a pretty solid article. The questions weren’t part of a fishing expedition. If Gideon Parnell was right that the story about the chief justice and a hooker was a total lie, then it was a fiendishly clever hoax. And not the work of amateurs. From what I could put together from the list of questions, the chief justice had—allegedly had, to be fair—three trysts with an escort hired from a website called LilySchuyler.com, “the world’s leading online service for discreet encounters.”

  I thought about Gideon Parnell. The fact that he was inserting himself in the middle of this battle was significant. His reputation was towering. He had much to lose, being associated with something as tawdry as this, true or not. He must have been a good friend of Justice Claflin’s.

  And I mulled over the question of why they’d contacted me. Was Parnell on the level when he said he wanted someone outside DC? In a situation like this, in which speed and discretion are of paramount importance, it would make a lot more sense for him to hire someone in town he knew. The question kept coming back: Why me?

  If the chief justice did agree to meet with me, I’d have to fly to DC immediately, which would mean rescheduling a few meetings and appointments I’d lined up for tomorrow and possibly the day after.

  I had the taxi drop me off on High Street, at the old brick, converted lead-pipe factory in Boston’s Financial District where I have an office. It was still early, but by then my office manager/receptionist, Jillian Alperin, was in. She stood, back to me, struggling with a printer, trying to feed it paper.

  Jillian was in her early twenties and had all sorts of piercings and tattoos. If I saw a lot of clients at the office, she wouldn’t have been a good hire. She was a little young, a little rough around the edges, not exactly business-appropriate. But she was competent and tried hard and I’d grown to like her.

  “Nick,” she said, “Dorothy was looking for you. Also a couple of queries came in—I forwarded them to your e-mail.” Dorothy Duval was my forensic tech and researcher.

  She sounded uncomfortable saying my first name. It had taken her a long time to stop calling me “Mr. Heller.”

  “Thanks.”

  She turned around. “Also, a client called—Shearing?—and wanted to talk to you right away.”

  Her face was red, and she looked like she’d been crying.

  “Hey,” I said gently. “Everything okay?”

  I didn’t know her very well and tried to stay out of my employees’ personal affairs. But not to ask seemed coldhearted.

  She sniffled. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s just . . . that guy, Shearing, you know?”

  “What about him?” Shearing was a lawyer at a midsize firm in New York who’d hired me to do due diligence on a German businessman. The German was the CEO of a company in Düsseldorf and was being considered for a US company’s board of directors. I’d asked a colleague in Munich to work the case. Most of my clients come to me through lawyers, which has its plusses and its minuses. Dealing with a lawyer was often easier than dealing directly with clients, who could be emotional. Lawyers tended to be more professional. But some lawyers were just plain assholes, and Bob Shearing was exhibit A.

  “He just called up looking for you, and I told him you were tied up with a client? And he demanded your cell number.” She sniffed a couple of times. “And when I told him I couldn’t give that out he got . . . really abusive. He said, ‘Goddamn it, I’m a client and I want his cell phone number now!’ And ‘Listen to me, bitch, you better give me that number now, or I’ll have your job.’” She looked miserable, her eyes and nostrils red.

  “He said that?”

  She nodded, reached for a tissue on her desk, and blew her nose. Then she said, “I don’t know if I made a mistake. If I was, like, angering a client. But you told me you’re the only one who can give out your cell number. And now I don’t know if I lost you a client!”

  “He called you a bitch?”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry, Nick, if I screwed up.”

  “Can you put me through to Shearing in two minutes?”

  She nodded again.

  I went to the coffee station. Dorothy was already at the Keurig, filling a mug that said JESUS SAVES, I SPEND. She was wearing a turquoise raw-silk blouse and black pants and very high heels. She always dressed well, though she didn’t have to—as my tech, she rarely met with clients. She could wear jeans if she wanted to. But she usually didn’t want to.

  She gave me a questioning look. She knew I’d just come from a supersecret meeting with a potential client and wanted to know what happened. The answer wasn’t as simple as thumbs up or thumbs down. I wasn’t sure I was going to take this new client on. “Meet me in my office in five, okay?”

  She nodded. “Uh-oh.”

  In my office—I have the corner office
with a view of the street and a glimpse of the waterfront—the phone was buzzing. Jillian’s voice came over the intercom: “I have Mr. Shearing on hold on line one.”

  I picked up the phone. “Bob, it’s Nick Heller.”

  “There you are, Heller. Your damned secretary wouldn’t give me your goddamned mobile phone number.”

  “She told me.”

  “I need the word on Kleinschmidt today,” he said.

  “Did you call my receptionist a ‘bitch’?”

  “I told her it was urgent but she kept saying she wasn’t allowed to give out your number. I said, ‘Hey, I’m the client here.’ You gotta train your girls better.”

  “Well, Bob, I’m afraid I can’t help you either.”

  “What are you talking . . . ?”

  “With Herr Kleinschmidt, I mean. I’m too busy to take on your case.”

  “Too busy? You already took the goddamned case.”

  “My schedule has gotten crowded all of a sudden. I don’t really have time to work for assholes.” And I hung up.

  I noticed Dorothy lingering at the threshold of my office. She entered, eyes wide. “Am I hearing correctly? Did you just fire a client?”

  I nodded. “I never liked the guy anyway,” I said.

  “Nick, our clients are a little thin on the ground. Can we really afford to lose one?”

  “Dorothy,” I began, but then my mobile phone rang.

  It was Gideon Parnell. “The chief justice has agreed to meet,” he said. “Can you be in DC this afternoon?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “He’ll see you at four o’clock. Your name will be on a visitor’s list at the court.”

  I ended the call and looked at Dorothy. “Looks like we just may have a new client,” I said.

  5

  The Supreme Court is, I think, the most beautiful building in Washington. It’s a gleaming Greek temple, its exterior bright white Vermont marble, chosen because it was so much whiter than the marble of the buildings that surround it, including the US Capitol. It was modeled after the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, with its frieze and the Corinthian columns and such.