Damage Control: A Novel

by Denise Hamilton

  “I’d make time, Mom. Stuff like this is important.”

  “So is the bonus you get when a case goes well,” Mom said dryly. “It would be nice to put a dent in those bills.”

  “Let me know when the next appointment is,” I said. “And don’t forget to save me a burger.”

  I got the nagging feeling there was something else I needed to do, but then Faraday called, screaming where was I, and I said I was driving up the California Incline and would be shooting onto the Santa Monica Freeway any minute. And the thing I’d been trying to remember flew right out of my head.

  * * *

  Soon I was back in town, where smoke from a massive forest fire boiled in a pyrocumulus cloud above the San Gabriel Mountains. I was headed for a twenty-story building of glass and steel in an industrial park along an unfashionable stretch of Olympic Boulevard in West Los Angeles. No famous architect built it. There were no big-name tenants and no trendy restaurant on the ground floor. Building management shunned publicity, preferring to lease to insurance and accounting firms that kept regular hours. All prospective tenants were told the top five floors were unavailable.

  The upper levels were where I worked.

  It was here, from a penthouse overlooking Catalina Island, Downtown Los Angeles, and the San Gabriel Mountains, that Thomas Blair ran his secretive damage control empire.

  Blair understood the twenty-four-hour news cycle better than anyone else in the business because he helped create it.

  The story was on our website, and everybody had to memorize it because it helped to wow clients. In a snarky nutshell, here’s how it went:

  In 1980, just out of Emory University, Thomas Blair landed a grunt job at a little experiment in Atlanta called Cable News Network. His fortunes rose alongside CNN’s, and when he jumped ship a decade later to run the New York offices of PR giant Burson-Marsteller, our founder could already see how celebrity culture was beginning to blur the distinctions between Hollywood and Washington, Main Street and Wall Street.

  It was only a matter of time before the rest of the world caught on.

  After learning all he could at Burson, Blair gallop-a-trotted out to Hollywood, where he ran publicity at Columbia Pictures. For two years, he cultivated the city’s wealthy, famous, and fatuous and the journalists who wrote about them.

  Finally, he was ready.

  Leasing a twelve-hundred-square-foot office in the cheapest Westside address he could find—a half-empty building on Olympic—Blair hung out his own shingle. He cared nothing for decor and a prestige address. Most clients preferred to meet at their lawyer’s offices or on their own turf, a little power trip that provided the illusion of control as things around them fell apart.

  Once the stationery was printed and the website up and running, Blair contacted old clients and scoured the news feeds for new ones. He clipped stories of high-profile scandals, then e-mailed the besieged CEOs and celebrities to offer his services. He was the guy who pioneered the idea of using game theory and reverse engineering in PR campaigns.

  Soon Blair’s name was whispered in the city’s best restaurants, boardrooms, and bedrooms, his card pressed discreetly into palms. There were plenty of scandals to untangle in a place where giant egos, immense wealth, and dreadful behavior collided with metronomic regularity.

  But despite what I told the Holloways earlier today, our bread-and-butter work has never been scandal-ensnared celebrities. That gets the most ink, obviously. And each winter the Hollywood studios hire us to create PR campaigns so their films will win Academy Awards. But the bulk of our work is a lot more humdrum—corporate PR for firms that are merging, going public, or restructuring after bankruptcy.

  As Blair expanded, he began to hire associates from the world of politics, journalism, law, finance, high-tech, and pure academia. He looked for people with hungry eyes, drove them like Third World donkeys, and rewarded them with such magnificence that few ever left. Half our VPs have been here from the beginning.

  Several years ago, Blair bought the entire building and set about fortifying his empire. He brought in his own security and janitorial staff and wired the building with the best technology Silicon Valley had to offer.

  Blair made himself available to clients and media 24/7 and expected the same of us, which could be stressful when the phone rang at three a.m. on a family vacation. You might even say it helped break up my marriage. But by that time, most of us were addicted to the lifestyle or so in debt we couldn’t afford to quit anyway.

  * * *

  At the parking entrance, I showed my ID to the guard (sometimes it seems I spent half my day running security gauntlets), then drove down several levels to a kiosk, where I inserted a key card and waited for the electronic arm to admit me into the secure area reserved for Blair employees.

  My heels clicked on the slick cement, and a free-floating anxiety kicked in. I hated these subterranean structures, with their buzzing fluorescent lights, their shadows and hidden alcoves. It was silly, of course. The Blair building has impeccable security. I was in much greater danger out on the street.

  At the employee elevator, I held my ID under a light that scanned the bar code before opening the door. There was supposedly a secret elevator somewhere in the bowels of the building that whisked media-shy clients directly into the conference room on the twentieth floor.

  But maybe that was just a rumor.

  The elevator shot me to the fifteenth floor, where a woman got on, carrying a salad and a fruit smoothie from our cafeteria, which is run by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s former chef. There’s also a free espresso bar and energy drink machine to keep employees focused.

  We exchanged hellos and she exited at the sixteenth-floor gym, where we can earn financial incentives for working out twice a week. I had yet to don workout gear, but the possibility existed aspirationally.

  When the elevator pinged again, I stepped out onto the seventeenth-floor lobby of the Blair Company. Despite the leather couches, the artwork, and the latest magazines scattered along the coffee table, the lobby was mostly for show, as was the handsome young man named Patrick seated behind the desk. Few clients ever waited here; it was anathema to everything that Blair stood for.

  “Hullo, Ms. Silver. Working late?”

  “Afraid so, Patrick. How are you?”

  “Tired. I was up late last night finishing a paper.”

  Patrick was a graduate student at UCLA’s English Department and I enjoyed getting book recommendations from him. As I walked past, I pulled a paperback from my purse and tossed it onto his desk. It was an L.A. werewolf novel he’d loaned me called Sharp Teeth, written completely in verse.

  “Thanks,” I said, walking to a side door. “It blows away all other werewolf novels.”

  I punched a security code, submitted to a hand scan.

  Patrick nodded thoughtfully. “Barlow writes in the grand epic style, like the classical Greeks. If Ovid was reincarnated as a Hollywood punk, he might create something like this.”

  I waited for the biometrics to recognize me. “Being a werewolf would be so cool,” I said, “even though I realize it’s just a sexual metaphor.”

  “Fangs, claws, fur,” said Patrick. “What’s not to like?”

  “There are days when fangs would definitely come in handy,” I said as the door buzzed and I stepped through. “Hope you get some sleep tonight.”

  Patrick waved and the door snicked shut behind me.

  This floor and the eighteenth were where most of our business took place. Vice presidents had corner offices with ocean views, associates had smaller offices with inland views, and the admin staff clustered in the middle with no views at all. I wasn’t sure what happened on the nineteenth floor, which was filled with computers and high-tech equipment and black-clad people who came and went at all hours. The twentieth floor was the private domain of Mr. Blair.

  I checked my cell phone mirror for smeared lipstick and put on my game face. Then I squared my shoulders and walked down th
e hallway to Faraday’s office.

  3

  Jack Faraday was sitting at his desk, leaning back, feet up. His secretary, Allison, was just leaving, staggering under a foot-high stack of files and legal documents. At the table, Samantha George and Matt Tyler, two associates, bent over their laptops, typing furiously.

  Seeing me, Faraday stopped midsentence. “Finally!” he said. “Sit down, Maggie.”

  Faraday was in his fifties, tall and muscular, with a pale Irishman’s florid complexion and strangely arched eyebrows that gave him a look of perpetual astonishment. He spoke slowly and eloquently, savoring each word before he spit it out. In the time I’d known him, he’d been abrasive, sexist, complimentary, patronizing, helpful, and irritable. It was whispered he was once in the CIA, a rumor that Faraday cultivated while making clear the subject was off-limits. I’d heard him screaming at subordinates behind closed doors and I didn’t want to get on his bad side.

  “A little review, for Maggie’s sake,” he said now. “You all signed confidentiality oaths when you started. That means nothing you learn here is to leave this office. Are we clear?”

  “Yes,” we chorused obediently.

  “Good. Our new client is a U.S. senator. He’s got a wife and grown kids, spent years in business before entering politics, and has been touted as a candidate for vice president in the next election. This afternoon a female aide in his Los Angeles office was found murdered.”

  I glanced at my colleagues, who gazed at Faraday with the rapt attention of loyal bird dogs.

  “Let me remind you of protocol. You must copy the senator’s attorneys on all sensitive correspondence. That includes e-mails, texts, or memos you send to anyone at Blair, the senator’s people, and anyone else connected with this case.”

  Faraday turned to me. “And why is this necessary?”

  “I know,” I mumbled.

  “Because,” said Faraday, unfazed, “copying the lawyer makes the correspondence a privileged document between the client and his attorney. And that means it stays out of the court record.”

  We nodded impatiently. There was something different about Faraday’s face today, his mouth maybe, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “Lawyer-client privilege does not, however, shield the client in the event of a serious criminal investigation,” Faraday continued. “I don’t believe that’s an issue here.” He paused. “But if in doubt, please do not fire off a text or discuss it on your mobile. Save it for face-to-face. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” we chorused.

  Faraday took his feet off the desk.

  We stood.

  “Separate cars?” I asked, not relishing another drive across town.

  “The client is waiting in the conference room.”

  My eyebrows rose. “We’re not meeting in his lawyer’s office?”

  “He appreciates the extra privacy and anonymity we can offer him at this difficult time,” Faraday said. “And turn off your BlackBerries. Nothing annoys a client more than feeling he lacks your full, undivided attention.”

  We fell into line behind Faraday like ducklings. I’d rarely seen him so wound up. Usually he just briefed me and handed over the file; the need for discretion went without saying. I also wondered what I was doing here. Unlike some of my colleagues, I had no experience in politics.

  In the elevator, Faraday punched a keypad and we rose heavenward.

  We exited into another world.

  Thomas Blair may have once settled for a no-frills office, but success has a way of changing things.

  Here in the penthouse suite, the travertine marble came from the same Italian quarry that supplied the Getty Center on its exclusive Brentwood hill. We stepped onto sumptuous Persian carpets and marveled at the Diebenkorns and Hockneys and Ruschas that hung from the walls. Beyond the picture windows, Los Angeles sprawled from purple mountain majesties to shining sea.

  A giant saltwater aquarium took up the middle of the room. It teemed with tropical fish and dead-eyed sharks that roamed in endless hunt. The metaphor was inescapable: This is a place of power, a place with teeth. And the carnivores are on your side.

  In the conference room, four men in suits huddled at a huge wood table that could have been pillaged from Beowulf’s longhouse.

  Two more men stood at the panoramic window, their backs to us, heads bent in quiet talk. The taller one wore an expensive charcoal suit. His colleague was in shirtsleeves with red suspenders, his posture slightly deferential. Charcoal Suit must be the senator.

  A bank of TVs below the ceiling played CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and C-SPAN. Faraday grabbed a remote and switched most of them to local stations, keeping the sound muted. The anchors moved their pretty plastic mouths as the inset screens cut away to a freeway chase and evicted homeowners. I watched along with everyone else, but not even the bottom crawl mentioned a senator or a dead girl.

  Everybody was now seated except for the two honchos at the window. Red Suspenders rested his arm on Charcoal’s back and murmured something. Then he glided to the table, his movements sinuous, his deep-set eyes darting as he assessed us and scanned for hidden threats under the table, behind the curtains, in our pockets.

  Suspenders’ face nagged at me. But then, I’d met so many men just like him—type A power brokers in tailored suits, Italian shoes, and hair strategically blow-dried to hide the bald spot. Maybe I needed to up my Adderall dosage.

  Charcoal stared out the window a moment longer. Then he turned in profile, one hand across his eyes, massaging his temples so the top of his face remained obscured. Thick wavy graying hair fell below his collar. No bald spot for him!

  He and Red Suspenders must be related. But Charcoal was taller and broader and his jawline well-defined. Red Suspenders was more spindly, with shoulders that sloped and a chin that receded. His clothes didn’t hang as well. He looked like a potter’s first, fumbling effort to cast a figure in clay. Charcoal’s eyes were still obscured by his hand, but I was seized with déjà vu. I knew this guy.

  A panel in the teak wall slid open, revealing a door, and Thomas Blair walked through, followed by an aide.

  I’d met Blair only once, during my final job interview. He was a big guy who made a big impression—black, hawklike eyes, large blade of a nose, a smoothly shaved head and close-cropped black beard, full pink cheeks glowing with ruddy health. He wore a black suit with a mandarin collar and shoes of buttery leather so soft they seemed woven.

  Blair’s aide set out the boss’s things: a PDA that looked like it was made of titanium, a notepad, several fancy pens and mechanical pencils. The movements were spare and ritualistic and somehow soothing instead of pretentious. Then he left, gliding the door shut with a whispered click.

  Blair moved toward the window where the senator stood and the two titans shook hands.

  “I could have gone with a political PR firm in Washington, Mr. Blair,” the senator said in a deep, modulated voice that I’d heard before, probably on TV. “But a New York Times reporter once told me you’re the best. Says he e-mailed you at three a.m. over a holiday weekend asking about some obscure court document. Five minutes later you sent him a detailed answer. And I remember thinking, that’s the man I want if I ever get in a jam.”

  “Thank you, Senator,” said Blair. “Your colleagues on both sides of the aisle speak highly of you. That bipartisan goodwill will be a great asset in the coming days.”

  Blair’s voice was low and melodious and he radiated serene confidence.

  It was said that Thomas Blair fed off chaos. As situations grew more tense, his movements slowed and his pulse dropped. He seemed to command time itself as he retreated deep inside, searching for the Zen path that would lead his clients away from the precipice and to safety. His focus was almost autistic savant in its intensity. If it was an act, it was one that played well on the cool medium of TV.

  But I knew that damage control, like magic, could be all about misdirection. And if modern wizards cloaked themselves in Eastern
mysticism instead of pointy hats and flowing capes, did that make it any less of an act?

  As the two men finally took their seats, I stared at my enigmatic boss, trying to figure out what made him tick. Then I turned to the senator and something pressed against my memory banks and I had to look away and grip the underside of the table.

  Blair nodded to Faraday, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  “Senator,” said Faraday, smoothly taking the baton, “let me introduce our crisis team. Matt Tyler, Samantha George, and Maggie Silver. Folks, this is United States Senator Henry Paxton of California, our new client.”

  The senator looked around the room, summoning his best professional smile.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet everyone,” he said.

  “It’s a great honor, sir,” said Tyler.

  “Lovely to meet you,” said Samantha.

  The senator’s eyes moved quizzically to me, but I stared at my hands. I was incapable of speech, my brain a numb, buzzing blank. His face, his voice, his name. His dishwater blond hair had grayed, he’d trimmed his luxuriantly shaggy eyebrows, put on a few pounds, and he moved with a new gravitas.

  But it was him, and I had to struggle to keep from blurting out, “Henry!”

  4

  There was an uncomfortable pause as everyone waited.

  “It’s a real pleasure, sir,” I said at last.

  Then Faraday took over, speaking in the silky tones he reserved for important clients.

  I studied my notepad, examining the senator from behind lowered lashes. I didn’t think he remembered me. How could he reconcile the sleek young woman in this corporate penthouse with the coltish kid in glasses and with unruly hair who was once his daughter’s friend? I hadn’t gone back to using my maiden name, so Silver would ring no bells. When he last saw me, I was Maggie Weinstock.

  And then the world tilted and I was Maggie Weinstock, fifteen years old and sitting awkwardly at the Paxton dinner table with a linen napkin on my lap.