Guilty Minds

by Joseph Finder

  29

  In the hour before my meeting with Julian Gunn, I got on the phone while Dorothy combed the Internet, and fairly quickly I had a decent working profile of the guy.

  He was British, graduated from Cambridge University, in England, and after college worked at Private Eye magazine for a few years. Then he moved to New York and started a few Internet ventures that made him reasonably rich. He’d started Slander Sheet in his Tribeca apartment, with a friend of his from Cambridge, but they’d had a falling out.

  Slander Sheet gradually caught on, then he spun off Slander Sheet LA, for Hollywood gossip, and then Slander Sheet DC, for political gossip. Pretty soon he had an online gossip network. Slander Sheet seemed to publish items about almost anyone. The only people off limits, as Slander Sheet targets, were his friends (mostly journalists), and his college classmates. Actually, he didn’t seem to have many friends. “He’s the kind of guy even his friends don’t like,” someone told me. Two adjectives I heard about him repeatedly were “odious” and “loathsome.”

  A couple of years ago, he’d sold Slander Sheet, but no one was sure who he sold it to. The sale was handled in great secrecy. Gunn remained editor in chief. He split his time among LA, New York, and Washington.

  I showed up at the Slander Sheet offices in the old bread factory right on time, but Gunn kept me waiting. One of his minions, a white guy in his midtwenties with dreadlocks, explained that Julian had been doing interviews all day, with TV and radio and publications all around the world. He’d be with me as soon as he could get off the phone.

  Gunn didn’t have an office. He worked at one of the long tables just like all his employees. Presumably he wanted to make a point about how democratic Slander Sheet was. So I was shown to a glassed-in conference room and seated at another long table.

  After twenty minutes, Julian Gunn showed up, accompanied by an attractive but dour blond woman in a pink suit he introduced as his general counsel. Gunn was a small man with an oversized head, an acne-ravaged face, and receding pale-blond hair. He was wearing dark jeans and a shiny dark blue striped shirt.

  “So sorry to keep you waiting,” he announced. “It’s a crazy day. We’ve never had such traffic. It’s mad. We’re up to almost ten million page views on the Claflin story.”

  “Wow,” I said without enthusiasm.

  Turning to his general counsel, he said, “We’re approaching the all-time record for page views—those photos of Kim Kardashian’s butt, in Paper magazine. Those got eleven million.”

  He sat at the head of the table, his general counsel to his right. I sat on his left.

  “So your name is Nicholas Heller, and you’re here to talk about our Jeremiah Claflin story, is that right?”

  I nodded.

  “I take it the great Gideon Parnell is too busy to make it here himself?”

  I smiled. “You’ll have to settle for me.”

  “So, Mr. Heller.” He opened his hands, palms up. “Have at us.”

  “Have you set a sale price yet?”

  “Excuse me?” He gave me a slow blink. He reminded me of a lizard, or of a frog about to flick out its tongue and catch a fly.

  “On your little hacienda in the D.R. See, I figure you can get two point five million for it. You’ll need all of that and more.”

  He looked puzzled, as I expected him to be. He’d recently bought a house on the beach in the Dominican Republic, but not many people knew about it.

  “I thought you were here to talk about Jeremiah Claflin.”

  “Exactly. Because if you don’t take down that fraudulent story by four o’clock this afternoon, and issue an abject apology on your home page, you’re going to be hit with a massive lawsuit that’s going to shut down Slander Sheet and wipe you out personally. You’re going to need to sell every asset you can.”

  “Oh, please. Sue me.” He fluttered his fingers in the air. “Get in line. I’ve lost track of how many lawsuits we’ve been threatened with.” He turned to his general counsel. “We must get ten legal threats a week, right, Emily?”

  “At least,” she said.

  He turned back to me. “I know who you are, Nicholas Heller. Mandy Seeger did some checking. You dropped out of Yale to enlist in the Special Forces, in Iraq and Afghanistan and all those godforsaken places. Who knows what you were up to? I’m sure if we do a little digging, we’ll find some My Lai in your past. Some raped Iraqi woman, some bayoneted Afghan boy, maybe. And my goodness, your old man was that scoundrel Victor Heller. Who’s currently serving twenty-eight years in prison.” He shook his head. “I don’t imagine your clients would appreciate the sordid truth about your background coming out. Anyway, if you’re here on Gideon Parnell’s behalf, I assume you’re here to lodge a complaint.” He interlaced his fingers and steepled them. “Well, then. Lodge away. You have a problem with Mandy’s reporting?”

  “Mandy Seeger is a top-notch reporter, but she got taken in by a clever hoax. Jeremiah Claflin never had a relationship with a call girl, period. Full stop.”

  “Of course not,” Gunn said with a smirk.

  “You jumped the gun. You ran the story without giving Mandy the chance to meet with Gideon Parnell, who would have set her straight. That’s what the lawyers call reckless disregard for the truth.”

  “We put the story up this morning because our intel told us we were about to be scooped. That’s all. It turns out to be the biggest story we’ve ever run, and it’s getting us attention all over the world. That’s what I’d call a successful story.”

  “If you’d waited, as you and Gideon agreed, you’d have learned the truth. You would have learned, for instance, that although rooms in the Hotel Monroe were booked under Claflin’s name on three different evenings, at no times were the keys used to enter the room. Claflin never stayed there. Here’s a printout of the audit report.” I slid a file folder of documents across the table to him.

  He shrugged. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

  I went on, ignoring his taunts. “You were used by a call girl. Someone paid her to get in touch with Mandy Seeger and you fell for it. As a result, you’ve done grave damage to the integrity of the chief justice of the Supreme Court.”

  Gunn blinked again, slowly. One, two, three. “You work for the powers that be, Heller. I work against them. You’ll forgive me if I don’t immediately credit your claims. And claims are all they are. Are we done here? TMZ TV is waiting to interview me.”

  I slid a tall stack of paper across the table.

  “More printouts from the Hotel Monroe?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “These are call-detail records. From Kayla Pitts’s cell phone. That’s Heidi L’Amour’s real name, in case you didn’t know. Proving without a doubt that she couldn’t have been meeting with Justice Claflin in the Hotel Monroe. She was in Pearl, Mississippi, on two of those nights, visiting her sister in prison. On the third night she was at a sports bar called the End Zone, in Arlington, Virginia.”

  Gunn blinked again, slowly, twice, and pulled his hands away from the stack of printouts as if they were hot to the touch. He looked at the top page and then looked at his general counsel. He muttered something to her, then took out a cell phone. He pressed one key and put it to his ear. “Eric, I need you to take a look at something. Yes.”

  He ended the call.

  A moment later a scrawny redheaded man wearing a lime-green polo shirt entered the conference room. He went up to Gunn and tapped the stack of documents.

  “This?” he said.

  Gunn nodded. “This is Eric Ziegler, my chief technology officer,” he said.

  Eric took the stack of paper with him and left the room.

  “Uh, the chief justice is a public figure,” Emily said crisply. “It’s extremely difficult for a public figure to sue for libel.”

  “Not at all,” I said to her. “As you know, his lawyers simp
ly have to prove ‘actual malice.’ The malicious and reckless disregard for the facts. Which is going to be nice and easy, since your reporter was given the opportunity to meet with Gideon Parnell and learn the truth. Before you ran the story. A meeting you canceled.”

  “Is this true?” Emily said to Gunn.

  He shrugged dismissively.

  “So you didn’t do your due diligence,” I went on. “The fact that you had the opportunity to correct your fabrications and you didn’t take it shows actual malice. I don’t know how you put a dollar figure on the reputation of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, but we’re going to start at one hundred million dollars and go up from there. Which will put Slander Sheet out of business and you into personal bankruptcy.”

  “You’d never get that,” he said.

  I went on, “You see, Julian, juries these days are turning against the power of irresponsible media to destroy the lives of innocent people. Maybe one hundred million dollars in damages is too small. Maybe we go for half a billion.”

  Gunn’s phone rang. He answered it with a smug smile. “Eric?”

  He listened for a moment. I watched as his expression molted from arrogant, self-satisfied gloating to what looked a lot like sea sickness. Without another word, he ended the call. He seemed about to throw up. He stood up feebly.

  “Emily?” he said, and his general counsel got up as well, and the two of them left the conference room.

  While I waited, I checked my e-mail, then my voice mail. I’d gotten a call from my DC cop source, Art Garvin. I recognized his cell number. I was about to call him back when Gunn and his general counsel returned to the room.

  “Okay, Heller,” Gunn said quietly. “Appears that you’ve won this battle. But you’ve just set out on a long road that has no turning.”

  “What does that even mean?” I said.

  “I’m going to loose the investigative hounds on you. You’ll be a ruined man. I am not an enemy you want to have, as you’ll soon—”

  “What do we need to do?” Emily said, cutting him off. And I realized right then that she was calling the shots. Not Julian Gunn. “What do you want, Mr. Heller?”

  30

  I checked SlanderSheet.com in the Suburban on my way back to the Shays Abbott offices, and sure enough, the Claflin piece was gone, replaced by a notice, bordered in black:

  A Note to Our Readers

  This morning Slander Sheet posted an item concerning the private life of Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeremiah H. Claflin. We published the article in the firm belief that it was accurate. Given new information received by Slander Sheet, however, we have come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in publishing this item, and we extend our deepest apologies to Chief Justice Claflin and his family.

  Ordinarily I should have been feeling some satisfaction, the glow of victory—I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do, what I’d been hired to do—but that wasn’t how I felt at all. I felt uneasy. I knew that something was very wrong.

  The call girl, Kayla Pitts, had obviously been coerced into making a false accusation. She was scared. She had some ex-cop following her, protecting her or watching her. What was her story? How had she gotten involved in a scam targeting Justice Claflin? Who else had been involved? Who was behind it, and what was the objective?

  This case was over, but it didn’t feel that way to me.

  I called my office in Boston. Jillian answered and filled me in on what was happening there, which wasn’t a lot. “I’ve decided to stay in Washington another day,” I told her. “To tie up loose ends. Keep me in the loop by e-mail, and call if there’s anything urgent.”

  I returned to the hotel and told Dorothy the plan. “That’s fine with me,” she said. “I was planning on staying a few days longer anyway, take some personal time. Also, I think we should have a celebratory dinner somewhere nice.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Restaurant Nora okay with you?”

  “If you can get us in, sure.”

  “Oh, Nick, you asked me to look into why Mandy Seeger left The Washington Post?”

  “Oh, right.” I laughed. “I forgot about that. Why did she leave the Post, anyway?”

  “She got fired.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. Apparently she violated the Post’s policy against lying to sources—she pretended to be a defense contractor or something when she was working on some big story about corruption in the Pentagon. The Post doesn’t allow its reporters to misrepresent themselves, to lie about who they are to get a story. She went too far.”

  “Huh.”

  “Sound familiar?”

  I smiled innocently. “How so?”

  “You know damned well how so. You’ll stop at nothing, too, when you’re on a case.”

  “Yeah, well, no one says I can’t lie if and when I have to. I’m not a reporter.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Thanks.” I remembered about the message that my retired police detective friend had left. Without listening to it, I called Detective Garvin back.

  “Nick,” he said. “That guy you asked me about, Curtis Schmidt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s bad news.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I meant it sarcastically, but Garvin answered anyway. “He’s a bad apple. He got out when the going was good.”

  “Why?”

  “I had a buddy check the PPMS, the MPD’s Personnel Performance Management System. He and some other cops scammed the department out of almost a million bucks in fraudulent overtime pay requests, for court appearances they never made.”

  “But he has a red-stripe card. He’s retired. Not fired.”

  “The department had to handle this on the DL for fear of jeopardizing any criminal prosecutions these a-holes were involved in. So about four, five years ago, they were all forced to take retirement.”

  So Curtis Schmidt was a bad cop. That was obvious to me from the moment I found the red-stripe card in his wallet. Obviously he’d found a new source of employment. But was it connected to Slander Sheet? If so, how?

  Garvin said, “You want me to dig around some more?”

  I thought for a moment. It no longer made a difference, did it?

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got what I need. Thanks.”

  And I ended the call.

  31

  Slander Sheet had become a laughingstock.

  When we returned from dinner, I flipped from channel to channel on the hotel TV while Dorothy checked online. Even though the Claflin story never got any serious traction in the mainstream media, it had been splashed all over. It wasn’t just the story that had been discredited, it was the website itself, mocked and derided and lampooned.

  On the Tonight Show on NBC, Jimmy Fallon opened his monologue with a photo of Vladimir Putin next to him. “Huge news today,” he said. “Russia’s Vladimir Putin is transitioning into a woman. That’s right.” Then the photo turned into a Photoshopped picture of Putin as a very butch-looking woman with lipstick and flowing tresses, in a low-cut dress. “It’s got to be true,” Fallon said with a straight face. “I just read it on Slander Sheet.”

  On ABC, Jimmy Kimmel announced that his show was now number one in the time slot, and after the applause, added with a blank look, “It was on Slander Sheet, didn’t you see it?” Each of the late night hosts did some riff on Slander Sheet. Online, the ridicule was widespread.

  Dorothy said, “You have to admit, this feels pretty good.”

  I nodded. “Yeah,” I said tonelessly.

  Gideon Parnell called me, profuse with gratitude. I didn’t know a man of his gravitas was capable of gushing, but he did. He’d put Claflin on the line, who was more restrained but still heartfelt in his thanks.

  I should have been e
xultant. But something about this victory felt hollow.

  Thoughts raced around in my brain that evening. I didn’t sleep well at all.

  32

  The next day passed in a blur of meetings, congratulatory messages, debriefs at Shays Abbott. Dorothy went to visit her brother again. I sent my nephew, Gabe, a text and met him after school for a late lunch at a vegan café he liked, not far from St. Gregory’s, the private all-boys school in DC he attended and loathed. The café was a tiny place, mostly for take-out, with a few tables. I knew at a glance that I wouldn’t be eating. They featured faux meat sandwiches made out of tempeh, and soups and salads. Gabe had a veggie burger. I had coffee. I took one sip and put it down. It tasted like something brewed by someone who disapproved of coffee.

  Gabe was dressed all in black, his usual fashion. He wore skinny black jeans, a studded leather belt, black Chuck Taylors, and a Bullet for My Valentine T-shirt that showed a skull adorned with red roses. The only thing different was his hair. He used to dye it jet black, but he’d let his natural dark-brown hair grow out. I guess you’d call him “emo,” though he never did the whole emo thing, the lip rings and the eye makeup and so on. His only piercing was a gold stud earring in his left ear.

  He was an interesting kid. He was my brother, Roger’s, stepson, but Roger was in prison, and Gabe didn’t get along with his mother, Lauren. He was brilliant and insanely talented. He wrote and illustrated graphic novels—not comics; he was always correcting me—that were as good as anything I’d ever seen in a bookstore. He liked me a lot and I liked him. He was the closest I’d probably ever come to having a kid of my own.

  He wolfed down two-thirds of his “burger” before stopping to talk. “How long have you been in town?” he asked.

  “A couple of days.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” he said, heavy on the sarcasm.

  “It was a last-minute trip. Plus the case got really busy all of a sudden.”

  “What’s the case?”