The phone rang some time later, an unfamiliar purring ringtone, and I jolted awake. “You got something,” I said.
“This is Gideon.”
“Oh, sorry—Gideon? What’s—” I looked at the digital clock. It was 6:05 in the morning. I’d been asleep for five hours or so.
“It’s online,” Gideon Parnell said.
“What’s online?” It took me a moment to realize. “Slander Sheet? I thought they were giving us forty-eight hours.”
“They ran it anyway,” he said.
20
While I waited for Dorothy to throw on some clothes, I went online to SlanderSheet.com. The piece was the first thing that came up. In huge red type against a stark white background were the words:
SUPREME COURT JUSTICE IN CALL GIRL SCANDAL
Above the headline was an unfortunate headshot of Jeremiah Claflin, in black judicial robe and tie, smiling like a cat in catnip.
I clicked on the headline. A short article came up, Mandy Seeger’s byline right at the top. All around it were ads with photos of women in bikinis with huge boobs. Atop the article was another headline:
NATION’S TOP JUDGE IN ROMP WITH WYDEN HOOKER
Here was another picture of Claflin, this one in casual attire, getting out of a car. Next to that was a picture of Heidi taken from the Lily Schuyler website.
The piece began:
Jeremiah Claflin, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, has had at least three trysts with a high-priced escort in DC, sources tell Slander Sheet in an exclusive. The escort, identified as Heidi L’Amour, 22, works for Lily Schuyler, a pricey call girl service that charges upward of $3,000 an hour.
Reliable sources tell Slander Sheet that the country’s top jurist, who is believed to be separated from his wife, did not pay for the prostitute’s services himself. Instead, the sordid trysts were funded by casino mogul and Claflin pal Tom Wyden, who benefited from a favorable decision by the Supreme Court just recently.
The assignations took place at Washington’s ritzy Hotel Monroe on three separate evenings this spring.
. . .
The office of the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States did not respond to requests by Slander Sheet for comment.
Below the article were headlines about one of the Kardashians, and one about Angelina Jolie, and one about Britney Spears, and a report on Beyoncé buying “$312,000 diamond shoes.”
Then Dorothy knocked on my door and we were off.
—
In the cab, Dorothy checked Drudge Report and Gawker and Perez Hilton, TMZ and RadarOnline.com, and Celebitchy. All the gossip websites she could think of. The Claflin story hadn’t appeared on any other website yet. But it was early. The piece had just gone up.
“Check this out,” she said, handing me her phone. It was the most viewed column on SlanderSheet.com. Number 1 was “SUPREME COURT JUSTICE IN CALL GIRL SCANDAL.”
It wasn’t even seven in the morning.
“It’s only a matter of minutes before Drudge links to this story,” she said. “Or Wonkette. Then it’s going to blow up big-time.”
“Not if I can help it,” I said.
—
Fifteen minutes later we arrived at Shays Abbott Burnham’s DC offices, on M Street near where it crossed New Hampshire Avenue. Gideon met us in the law firm’s reception area. He was dressed in khakis and a light blue button-down shirt, open at the neck. His shirt looked crisp and unwrinkled, as if he’d just put it on.
But in contrast to his fresh clothes, he looked depleted and exhausted. Although I barely knew him, I could see the strain he was under. It showed in the deep lines creasing his face, the prominent bags under his eyes, the cluster of wrinkles between his brows. His large eyes glistened, seemingly with tears, but probably from exhaustion.
The overhead fluorescents were off, but in the dim light I could see that the DC headquarters of Shays Abbott were decorated in the same hard white glossy surfaces as the Boston offices—the white stone floors polished like glass, the frosted glass walls, the sharp-edged white leather sofas.
Dorothy seemed a little flustered to meet Gideon Parnell. Even at a time of urgency, this was a fan girl moment for her. She tried not to show how thrilled she was to shake his hand, to be in the presence of such a historic figure. But she couldn’t hide it from me. I had never seen her smile so much and act so deferential. It was as if Jesus Christ himself had come to visit.
Gideon was gracious but terse, and obviously distracted. He led us through a maze of hallways to his office.
“What happened to the forty-eight hours?” I asked.
“Just minutes before the story was posted,” Gideon said, “I received an e-mail from the editor, Julian Gunn, saying that they believed they were in imminent danger of being scooped by a competitor, so they had to run it immediately.”
“That’s a lie,” Dorothy said. “They saw how hard we were pushing back and they wanted to get it out before we disproved it.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not the reason. If they thought we were really going to prove it false, they wouldn’t risk running it. Too damaging to their reputation.”
“We disagree,” Dorothy said to Gideon.
It was out of character for her to contradict me in a meeting with a client. It was a little unprofessional. Not that I cared, particularly. I cut her some slack; she wasn’t herself; she was in the presence of greatness.
“What about the interview with Mandy Seeger this morning?” I asked.
“I canceled it. They broke their side of the deal.”
“I can’t help but wonder whether they ran it earlier because I was rattling the cage,” I said, and Gideon said nothing.
His office looked exactly as I’d expected: spacious, classical, fastidiously neat. Decorated to impress, for public display. There was a long mahogany conference table. A bottle of Old Overholt rye on a shelf. Two of the walls were ego walls, walls of fame, crowded with photographs of Gideon with a litany of the great and the powerful and the famous. My eye was caught by a photo of him in a golf cart with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
His assistant, a plain middle-aged blond woman named Rose, who must have come into work early, offered us coffee. It was a little weak, but it did the job.
“We need to talk,” he said.
21
We gathered around the mahogany table. Gideon sat at the head.
“We are well and truly screwed,” he said. “Has it been picked up by any other websites yet?”
I shook my head.
“Give it a couple of minutes,” Dorothy said.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said. “I really thought we’d have killed this thing by now.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” said Gideon. “This was always a Hail Mary pass.”
“We’re not done yet,” I said.
Gideon looked at me, tilting his head. “What the hell are you talking about? It’s out there now, Heller.”
“Lots of things are out there on the Internet. Websites about how reptile extraterrestrials are running the US government.”
He shook his head, as if in disgust, his eyes closed. “The world has changed since the Kennedy administration. Back then, everybody knew that Jack Kennedy had a parade of women coming through the White House. But not a word of it ever made the papers. Now, anything and everything does. Absolute rubbish gets reported on the basis of nothing more than rumor.”
“Not true,” I said. “It’s just gotten a lot more complicated.”
“If someone snapped a picture of the president with a hooker today, it would be online in minutes.”
“Sure. There’s always some website that’ll publish anything. But the Claflin story hasn’t been picked up by the mainstream media yet. Meaning it hasn’t been validated. That usually takes a while.”
“You see, right now it exists only on the Internet. As long as it stays an Internet-only story—Slander Sheet, Gawker, TMZ, Drudge, Vice, whatever—it’s just gossip. It’s not news. It doesn’t become permanent until it’s validated by the old ‘legacy’ media. The mainstream media. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. The NBC evening news, NPR, CNN. At that point it’s written in ink. It’s permanent.”
“And when does that happen?”
“You probably know better than me. I don’t know the exact timing. Doesn’t the Times have a morning news meeting or whatever?”
Gideon looked at his watch. “At ten o’clock this morning, The New York Times has their front-page meeting.”
“There you go. Someone’s going to mention the rumor about Claflin and a call girl. They’re not going to ignore it.”
“No, probably not.”
“Who runs the meeting? There’s always one person. It’s not a democracy.”
“The executive editor. I’ve met him.”
“Okay, so the editor’s going to ask, ‘Who else is running with it?’ What they really want to know is, Is anybody else in the mainstream media covering it? Any of the other big dogs? But it’s not going to be any of them. Not this fast. Not in two and a half hours.”
“But this thing’s going to spread like gonorrhea.”
“No doubt. It’ll be picked up first by BuzzFeed or Drudge or TMZ. But that’s not enough to push it over the line into the mainstream. So maybe the Times assigns a couple of reporters to poke around the Slander Sheet story, see if there’s any solid evidence there.”
“But it’s also going to be picked up by some of the more respectable websites like Politico and Roll Call.”
“Maybe. But not the big dogs. Not yet. Does The New York Times have another front-page meeting today?”
“At four-thirty.”
“That’s the one we have to worry about. Four-thirty. Enough time will have gone by that they can at least do a piece about the reaction to this rumor.”
“You’re right. Four-thirty.”
“That’s nine hours from now. Not much time.” I got to my feet. “So what are we doing, sitting here, talking? Dorothy, come on. We’ve got work to do.”
22
Gideon gave us a conference room to use.
It was like every other office conference room I’d ever seen, only nicer. There was a long, coffin-shaped table, made of mahogany. Around it were arrayed high-backed chairs that seemed to be upholstered in leather. Starfishlike speakerphones were placed every four seats or so. Down one wall ran a long credenza.
Dorothy pushed a button somewhere, and a panel on the far wall slid away, revealing a large video projection screen. She hooked up her laptop to some port built into the table—she worked without hesitation, seeming to know what she was doing—and the bright red Slander Sheet logo came up on the screen.
SUPREME COURT JUSTICE IN CALL GIRL SCANDAL remained number 1 in the most viewed column. She clicked around to TMZ. The Claflin story had been picked up. The headline read:
UH-OH
DISORDER IN THE COURT
TOP JUDGE SCREWS AROUND
“Shit,” I said.
“That took almost an hour,” Dorothy said. “Longer than I expected. I have a feeling it’s just going to accelerate from here.”
She quickly went through a series of websites—OK! Magazine, RadarOnline.com, Star Magazine, National Enquirer, PopSugar, ETonline—and found nothing. She entered “Jeremiah Claflin” into Google and pulled up the British tabloid The Daily Mail.
“It’s here, too,” she said. “Does this count as a news site?”
“Not even close. But it’s on the border between gossip and real news. All right, look. We have an ironclad alibi we can’t use. So let’s focus on Kayla.”
“Nick, you’ve already shown that neither of them could have been at the Hotel Monroe. What more do you think we’re going to get?”
“Absence of proof isn’t proof of absence. We need to focus on proving a positive, not proving a negative. We already know Kayla wasn’t at the Monroe on those three nights. You have a backdoor into the Lily Schuyler website. See if she had any other clients those nights.”
“Nothing. I already checked.”
“Well, she must have been somewhere. What about her Facebook page?”
“That was the first place I looked. Nothing there either. I’ve looked on Tumblr and Pinterest and everywhere I can think of, and nothing. But I have an idea.”
I looked at her.
“You know how you can post a picture on Facebook and it auto-suggests the names of the people in the picture?”
“You know I don’t have a Facebook account.”
“Right. Well, it freaks me out. Facebook is using facial recognition software for that, and for most people, those photos are visible to any of the billion people on Facebook. So I’m thinking there’s got to be a way to run a search of all DC-area Facebook accounts using a picture of Kayla and facial recognition.”
“Huh. Worth a try, I suppose. But you’re giving me another idea. Surveillance cameras.”
“Sure.”
“Traffic cameras, toll cameras, pharmacies, parking garages, supermarkets, gas stations, gyms, banks . . . that’s a lot of cameras. All we need is a time-stamped video of her on one of those nights.”
“You’re talking about searching all the surveillance cameras in her neighborhood? That’s impossible. In nine hours? We’d be lucky to get a gas station and a CVS and a Safeway.”
“No, we’d have to focus on places we know she frequents.”
“How?”
“Her credit card statements. See if she made any charges those nights.”
“And how do we get her credit card statements?”
There was a knock on the door. Gideon Parnell was now wearing a suit. “I think my e-mail in-box is going to crash our servers,” he said. “I’m getting e-mails from colleagues and friends and journalists from around the globe. This thing is really blowing up.”
“Hang tough,” I said. “This is going to go all over the web before the day is through. But as long as it’s slugged to Slander Sheet and doesn’t make the legit news websites, we’ll be okay.”
“I don’t understand, what makes you so confident you can still kill this snake?”
“Because the media establishment doesn’t yet own the story. Gideon, with all respect, let us do our work without interruption. Really, it’ll be better for all of us.”
After a beat he nodded at me. “Excuse me,” he said, giving me a long steady look. “You’re absolutely right.” He slipped back out and closed the conference room door behind him.
“Heller,” Dorothy said. “You don’t talk to Gideon Parnell that way.”
“He’ll get over it.”
“I won’t.”
“I was hoping you’d have a way to get into her credit card statements.”
“Well, she’s got an American Express card and a Citibank MasterCard, and I’ve tried to get in the usual ways. I tried guessing her passwords, tried all the obvious ones, but no luck. You think Montello might have a way in?”
I shook my head. My information broker, Frank Montello, had e-mailed me back last night. All he’d come up with on the number programmed into Curtis Schmidt’s flip phone was that it was another throw-away phone, a burner. That was no more than what I already knew. “I don’t think he can get it to us in time.”
“It’s worth a try.”
I nodded, reluctant.
Montello picked up his phone after six long rings. His voice was faint and muffled, as it always seemed to be, as if you’d just interrupted him doing something far more im
portant than talking to you. He operated in the gray zone between law enforcement and private investigation, a place I tried not to go except in extremis. That was the place where money changed hands, where laws were broken: the sort of thing that could lose you your license. You had to be really careful.
Montello knew people at phone companies and credit card companies and banks, people who were willing to sell you inside information. I had no moral objection to paying someone off to get me information I needed. I just preferred to put some distance between the source and me. Montello’s neck was on the block, and he knew it, and that was why he charged so much and acted so squirrelly.
I asked him if he had any sources at Citibank’s credit card division or at American Express.
“No one I trust,” he said, and he disconnected the call without further comment.
I looked at Dorothy and shook my head.
She said, “Then we’re out of luck.”
“No, we’re not,” I said, and I explained my plan.
23
There was a uniform shop in Silver Spring I used to frequent when I worked for Stoddard Associates. This place sold everything from chefs’ toques to lab coats to security officers’ blazers to hospital scrubs. I had a good contact there named Marge something, who used to get me whatever I needed, without asking too many questions. When you’re working undercover it helps to have access to a variety of uniforms.
Luckily, they had what I needed, and Marge still worked there.
—
Forty-five minutes later I rang Kayla Pitts’s apartment door buzzer. She didn’t answer. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. She could still be at home. It was ten in the morning; she was likely still asleep. Last time I tried her buzzer she didn’t answer either, even though she was probably at home.
She was surely frightened. Maybe she was hunkering down in her apartment, bracing for the explosion of attention she knew was coming, if it wasn’t already here. Journalists around the world were probably hard at work Googling “Heidi L’Amour” and “Lily Schuyler” and pulling up her page on the escort service’s website. It was only a matter of time before some smart and enterprising journalist figured out that Heidi L’Amour was actually a young woman named Kayla Pitts. Maybe a friend of hers would turn up and give away her real name. A classmate from Cornelius College might want to sell an interview to the National Enquirer. Or one of her colleagues at Lily Schuyler.
Guilty Minds Page 9