Guilty Minds

by Joseph Finder

  “Was Congress in session?” I asked.

  “Ah, very good. Unfortunately not.”

  It’s a little-known fact that members of Congress cannot be arrested or detained while Congress is in session, except for treason or felony. “I told him who I was, and he said, ‘Shit,’ and he made a call. And after a long while he got out and told me to get into his cruiser and he took me home. And that was that, except for a nasty hangover. We managed to keep it quiet. Well, a few months after that, my office got a call from a reporter at Slander Sheet. Somehow they’d found out about the incident, and they were threatening to publish a story. You can imagine we went into something of a panic. What do you do? How do you induce them not to publish? Back in the day, if it was The Washington Post, I’d call Ben Bradlee, and we’d do some horse trading. I’d offer him an exclusive on something . . . A splash more, Nicholas?” He poured himself another few fingers of bourbon.

  I shook my head. “I’m good.”

  “But Slander Sheet is a new creature entirely. Who owns it? Who calls the shots? The editor in chief is a loathsome little toad named Julian Gunn, but he’s not the owner. And he doesn’t exactly play ball. My aides tried to negotiate with him, but no dice. So I called this Julian Gunn myself and said to him, ‘Look, what can we do here? Surely your readers don’t care about some antiquated senator from Massachusetts and what he does in his off hours!’ I promised him an exclusive, I offered him special access, but he wasn’t interested in any of that.”

  “He wanted dirt,” I said.

  “Exactly. Anything personal on the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, what have you. He wanted dirt, and he wasn’t going to settle.”

  “You gave him something, I assume, because I never saw the drunk-driving story.”

  Brennan bowed his head. A line of sweat beads had broken out across his forehead. “I did something I regret to this day.”

  I nodded sympathetically and waited. He looked genuinely agonized.

  “I gave them dirt. I gave them Steve Frazier.”

  “The congressman?”

  “Former.” He nodded. “And former friend.” Representative Steve Frazier was a powerful conservative congressman from upstate New York who’d recently resigned after Slander Sheet had published a story revealing that, in the course of some rocky divorce proceedings, his wife had filed a domestic violence complaint against him, which she later rescinded. “Someone in my office had learned about the allegation from someone in Frazier’s office. But I gave it to them. I gave them Steve Frazier’s head on a platter. Really, I traded my head for his. So that’s why I’m still here and Steve is gone.”

  “But there’s a difference,” I said, “between your drunk-driving incident and the Claflin story. The DUI story was true. Whereas this thing about Justice Claflin is a lie.”

  He was quiet for a long time. “Let me refresh your drink,” he said. I offered him my glass this time, just to be sociable. He poured some more into my glass and then his own.

  “Gideon and Claflin—” I began.

  “Good men. A real partnership.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, Jerry Claflin is sort of Gideon’s protégé.”

  “I figured.”

  “I know I get all the credit for pushing his confirmation through the Senate, but the plain truth is, it was Gideon who greased the wheels behind the scenes. Prepared him for the big-time oppo that hits any candidate for the high court.” By “oppo,” he meant opposition research. “Which was a sort of passing of the baton, you might say, because back in the days when Gideon’s name was bounced around for the court—he’s too old at this point—Jerry played that role. He was Gideon’s cornerman, his defender and confidant. You see, the thing about Gideon and Claflin—their relationship is all about loyalty. In both directions. In a town where loyalty is as scarce as spotted owls.”

  I nodded slowly, taking it in.

  “Jerry Claflin is a deeply honorable man,” Brennan went on. “Perhaps a bit of a stickler, to my taste. But a brilliant jurist. You know, I’m sure, about his contribution to mens rea law.”

  “Mens rea? I forget . . .”

  “Criminal intent. Literally, ‘guilty mind.’”

  “Right.”

  “It matters whether the defendant intended to commit the crime. What the defendant meant to do. Anyway, Jerry will always be celebrated for clarifying the vexed ‘conditional intent’ problem of mens rea. Adam Liptak in the Times compared his decision in Hagedorn to ‘a bed with hospital corners and sheets tucked so tight you could bounce a coin off them.’” He chuckled with pleasure.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “But this story is just scurrilous, and it will damage him. As Virgil tells us in The Aeneid, fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum. There is no evil swifter than a rumor.”

  “So who’s trying to destroy him?” I said. “Who has the animus and the resources to do something like this?”

  “The proper question is, who’s driving the story? Is it a plant by someone angry about one of the court’s decisions, and Slander Sheet is innocent? Or did Slander Sheet initiate the attack?”

  I nodded again. “If it originated with Slander Sheet, do you think it was political?”

  “Here’s the thing, Nicholas. Most of the time, owners of magazines and newspapers don’t hide their ownership. They want to be known as the owners, right? They want to be courted and flattered. The fact that we don’t know who really owns Slander Sheet tells me it may not be someone with a political agenda. If you look at the pattern of their hit jobs, I’m not sure there’s a political slant. They came after me, and I’m a liberal, of course. In my place they took down Steve Frazier, who’s as right-wing as they come. Then again, maybe there’s a subtle figure in the carpet. Hard to say.”

  “So who benefits from the destruction of Jeremiah Claflin’s career?”

  “Ah. That old shopworn phrase cui bono—who benefits? And I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth. I don’t have the slightest idea. It’s a goddamned mystery.”

  I got up. I had more work to do that night. “Can I give you a ride home?”

  “Don’t worry,” said the senator. “I have a driver now.”

  17

  Slander Sheet’s DC offices were located on the third floor of an old bread factory in Shaw, at Seventh and S, a few blocks from the Shaw metro stop. Until the riots of 1968, Shaw was the center of the black middle class in DC. After the riots, most people who could move out to the suburbs did. Now it was the center of a thriving Ethiopian community as well as home to a lot of recent college graduates, who lived in the once beautiful Victorian row houses. It had also recently become the funky home for small businesses and nonprofits and Internet enterprises like Reddit.

  It was early evening, and dusk was beginning to gather, but the lights in the old bread factory were blazing. Including the third floor. The lobby of the building was open and unattended. There was a lot of exposed brick and glass and steel. A depressing old relic of a building had been gussied up into a lively, edgy workspace. People were leaving work for the day, and most of them looked to be in their early to midtwenties. A wall plaque gave Slander Sheet’s offices as number 301.

  I took the elevator, a big clanking thing that looked like it was once used exclusively for freight, to the third floor. I was the only passenger. Everyone else was going down and out of the building. Fifty feet down a narrow corridor, a glass door was labeled HUNSECKER MEDIA. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and after a few seconds I recalled it as one of the names associated with the Slander Sheet operation.

  I pulled open the door, surprised that it wasn’t locked, and looked around. It was all one big open space. More exposed brick here, and pipes, and a pressed tin ceiling. Around a dozen people, all in their early twenties, were seated at several long tables that ran the length of the room, comp
uter stations on either side. There was room at the tables for around fifty. No one seemed to be in charge. Mounted to the ceiling was a huge TV screen displaying article headlines. Next to each one was a number, probably for the number of page views they’d received, and a green up arrow or a red down arrow, probably indicating how each post was trending. The most popular one, the one at the top, was titled CONGRESSMAN DICK: REP. DICK COMPTON SEXTS HIS MAN PARTS TO A CONGRESSIONAL PAGE.

  Just about everyone tapping away at their computers was wearing headphones. They were all quiet except for an occasional laugh. It was a digital sweatshop.

  I stopped the first person I came to, a heavyset guy with pork-chop sideburns. I touched him on his arm. He took off his headphones. “Yeah?”

  “I’m looking for Mandy Seeger.”

  He looked around. “She normally sits on that end.” He gestured with his chin. “But I don’t see her. I think she’s gone for the night.”

  “You got a way to reach her? It’s important.”

  He glanced at me for a moment, incuriously. He shrugged.

  I noticed on his monitor a small box on the side that looked like a chat window. I said, “Could you message her for me, please?”

  “Uh, like, who are you?”

  “Tell her it’s about Gideon Parnell.”

  “Gideon Parnell?”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t look like Parnell.” Even a low-level staffer at Slander Sheet knew who Gideon Parnell was.

  “I’m with Gideon. She wants to talk to me.”

  He typed something into his chat window. A few seconds later came a reply.

  “She says she’s seeing him tomorrow morning at nine.”

  “Tell her I know. This is an extra interview, if she’s interested. A special offer.”

  More tapping. “She wants your name.”

  “Nick Heller.”

  He typed my name in the chat window. He waited a few seconds. Then the answer came back.

  “She says to meet her at Lobby on Capitol Hill in half an hour.”

  I knew Lobby. It was a dive bar: two-dollar beers, beer-and-shot combos with clever names, and Skee-Ball.

  “I’ll be there.”

  18

  The bar was just as I remembered it: crowded and low-ceilinged, authentically working class, smelling of beer and french fries. The bar back was still painted red, and the beers were listed on a blackboard in different colored chalks. License plates from all fifty states hung on the wall. All types of people still came here: college students and construction workers, Capitol Hill staff, marines from the barracks at Eighth and I, Capitol Hill police, nurses out of DC General, lobbyists. Lobby opened at eight in the morning and closed at two A.M. when the law said they had to.

  I found Mandy Seeger holding down a booth. She was in her midthirties, with pale skin and coppery hair, amused light brown eyes, and a lively intelligence in her face. She was not beautiful, yet definitely attractive, and she wore a floral, hippyish dress and large hoop earrings. She didn’t look like a reporter, though I couldn’t say what a reporter was supposed to look like. Just not like this. In front of her was a tumbler of cola. Diet, I was guessing.

  She waved at me. “You’ve got to be Nick Heller.”

  I sat down on the other side of the booth. “How could you tell?”

  “You’re too old to be a college student, and you’re not nerdy enough to work on the Hill. Also, you look like a guy who can kick ass.”

  “Not at all. I’m a pacifist. I prefer to mediate.”

  “Well, you look like someone who could have been in the Special Forces. Or some kind of soldier, ten pounds ago.”

  I had no doubt that Kayla Pitts had already told her about me. But I played along. “You did some Googling.”

  She laughed. She had a great, throaty laugh. “You barely exist on Google. You don’t even have a website.”

  “I don’t need one.”

  “Well, la-di-dah. I had to do a hell of a lot more than Google.”

  “And yet you’re still willing to meet me.”

  “Morbid curiosity.”

  A waitress came by with a pad.

  “Another Diet Coke,” Mandy said.

  The waitress turned to me.

  “I’ll have a Natty Boh.”

  When the waitress left, Mandy said, “Natty Boh, huh?”

  I shrugged. That was localese for National Bohemian beer, which I knew they served here on tap. “Russian owned, by the way,” I said.

  “No, actually, it’s owned by Pabst.”

  “Right. And Pabst is owned by a Russian oligarch now.”

  “Well, who knew?” She shrugged, conceding the point. I had a feeling she didn’t like being wrong. “So you’re almost a local boy, aren’t you?”

  “I spent some formative years in DC.”

  “Working for some supersecret unit of Defense intelligence. I know.”

  “Everything in the Pentagon is classified. Lunch menus in the cafeteria are classified. You must know that.”

  “ ‘Classified’ is just a red flag to me.” She smiled. “And after the Pentagon you went private, working for Jay Stoddard.”

  I nodded.

  “Working for big companies and politicians and the rich and powerful.”

  “Largely. But not always.”

  “Not a lot of people know about you. But the ones who do had mostly good things to say.”

  “Clearly you didn’t talk to everybody.”

  “So Gideon Parnell hired an investigator. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “If my story weren’t totally solid, they wouldn’t bother to put someone like you on it.”

  “Not at all. Most people are afraid of Slander Sheet. A lie this outrageous, you take it seriously. You do what you can to make sure it dies a proper death.”

  “I think Gideon hired you for clean-up duty.”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “Come on. You’re an attack dog for the rich and powerful.”

  “Not exclusively.”

  “Only the rich and the powerful can afford you.”

  I didn’t want to tell her that I took this job because I believed the story was a lie, and I could see where this conversation was going, so I took a detour. Decided to try my best to defang her. “You did some great work at the Post.”

  “You have no idea what kind of work I did,” she said with a grin.

  “Not true. You did that major series on the out-of-control secrecy in the US government a few years back. That was huge. What’d you say, like almost a million people hold top-secret security clearances? More than the entire population of Washington, DC?”

  She shrugged. “Right.”

  “And you were also the first one to write about the CIA’s secret prisons overseas—that was a big deal, too, that piece. And the one about the abuses at Walter Reed.”

  She actually seemed to blush. That I didn’t expect. “You did some Googling, too,” she said.

  “I didn’t have to. I remember. You were good.”

  “Still am. Just get paid better. And you’re here to threaten me, I bet. Scare me off the Claflin story. Well, you might as well stop wasting your time.”

  “I never threaten. I don’t need to.”

  “Not the way you look, you don’t. You don’t have to. You just glare at people and they fall in line.”

  I wasn’t sure that was a compliment, but I said thanks anyway.

  The beer came, in a tall plastic tumbler, along with her Diet Coke. I tipped mine toward hers. “To morbid curiosity.”

  She smiled and took a sip of her Coke. “You’re very charming and very smooth. And nice-looking. In another set of circumstances, I could be swayed.”

  “So you
’ve moved on from the CIA’s secret prisons to pictures of Congressman Compton’s dick?”

  “Less charming all the time. That’s actually not my piece, to be fair.”

  “It’s trending number one, right? Over a million views already.”

  “Hey, Compton’s the one who texted the picture of his dick to a Congressional page. Not us.”

  “You’re just making it available to the masses.”

  “We blur it out. You have to click through to see the not-safe-for-work version in all its glory. Which is not much glory, by the way.”

  “What’s Hunsecker Media? Who’s Hunsecker?”

  “Burt Lancaster,” she said.

  “Huh? I mean the sign on the door of your office. It says ‘Hunsecker Media.’”

  “Right. Like I said. It’s from an old movie called Sweet Smell of Success. Burt Lancaster plays a powerful gossip columnist, J. J. Hunsecker.”

  “Now I get it.”

  “Hunsecker Media is the parent company for Slander Sheet New York and Slander Sheet DC and Slander Sheet LA.”

  “So are you Slander Sheet’s J. J. Hunsecker?”

  “If I’ve got a good story and I’m onto the truth, sure.”

  “See, that’s the problem with your Claflin piece. It’s not true.”

  “Says the corporate mouthpiece.”

  “It’s just like my beer and the Russkies. You’ll see I’m right.”

  “Really.” She smiled again, but this time it was an unpleasant, sardonic smile. “And what, Heidi L’Amour doesn’t exist either?”

  “Well, strictly speaking, you’re right, Heidi L’Amour doesn’t exist. She’s Kayla Pitts, from Tupelo, Mississippi.”

  “You are an investigator.” She said it archly. “And I suppose you think Kayla is lying.”

  “Most certainly. Though she’s very good at it. She’d probably fool most people. I’m sure she’s good on camera. You guys are obviously paying her a lot.”

  “Nothing illegal about paying a source.”

  “I’m not talking about illegal. But a big payday is a good incentive to lie.”