S
lander 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, computer 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: RE
P. 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.”
T
he 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.”
“And what makes you so sure she’s lying?”
“For one thing, I can tell. It’s called trusting your gut. I’ve learned to look for a thousand tiny signals and reflexes. How to read body language. People speak a whole lot when they’re silent.”
“Oh, is that right?”
“I’m sure you pay close attention to your gut instinct when you’re reporting a story.”
“I do, and my gut tells me this is for real. So do the facts.”
“Then you’ve got a problem with your gut instinct. Also, with the facts. Like the fact that she’s not familiar with certain intimate details about the justice.”
“Oh yeah?” She meant to sound sarcastic, but her curiosity was getting in the way. She couldn’t help sounding intrigued.
“Yeah.”
“And are you going to share these details with me?”
“Sure. She doesn’t know whether he’s circumcised or not.”
That silenced her for a beat. Then she laughed dismissively. “She may not want to tell you. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t know.”
“Yeah, maybe she’s just too well bred a girl to discuss such impolite topics. So you’re certain about that, huh? Certain enough to stake your entire hard-earned journalistic reputation on it?”
“I’ve got Kayla on tape, I have hotel records, and I have a horny middle-aged Supreme Court justice, separated from his wife and in need of company. And an escort paid for by Tom Wyden. Who had a case before the court, conveniently decided in his favor.” She took another sip of her Diet Coke. “It’s a huge story. And it’s going to explode. I understand why you’d like to talk me out of it. Or discourage me, or intimidate me. Or whatever. Believe me, I’ve been threatened with probably forty lawsuits and have never been sued, not once.”
“I’m not threatening you with a lawsuit. Let’s be clear about that. I’m not a lawyer and never wanted to be one.”
“I did, once upon a time.”
“I’m here to tell you there are holes in your story. Let’s take one little detail. If Kayla really saw Jeremiah Claflin on three occasions, where do you think they met?”
“The Monroe. He stayed there on three different dates.”
“Sure, because you have records from the hotel guest registry.”
She smiled, nodded.
“Which tells you that someone with a credit card in Jeremiah Claflin’s name checked into the hotel.”
“And Claflin’s driver’s license.” She took a long swig of her Diet Coke, finished it off.
Something in the back of my mind bothered me, but I couldn’t quite grab hold of it. “Sure,” I said. “But whoever they were, they never entered the room. Not one time.”
“And you know this how?”
I paused. Ordinarily I wouldn’t give away operational details like that. But this wasn’t an ordinary circumstance. She had to be convinced I was right so she’d back off the story.
“The Monroe uses software that keeps track of room keys electronically. How many keys are issued. When keys are used. Every time a hotel room is opened from the outside, the system records it. So someone posing as Claflin checked into the hotel but never, not once, entered the room.”
There was a spark of something in her eyes. “Oh, and of course a hotel’s computers can’t be tampered with, right? You’re going to have to do a lot better than that. Kayla told me about your little ruse. Tricking her into thinking she was meeting me. You people, you’ll stop at nothing.”
“I’ve only been at this a couple of hours, and already I’ve punched a serious hole in your story.”
“Look, uh, Nick, I’ve got a heap of evidence, and the best you can come up with is some easily manipulated piece of computer data? I don’t think so. You’re going to have to do better than that. This isn’t going to move my editor at all.”
“Your editor is . . . ?”
“His name is Julian Gunn. And he’s as battle-hardened as they come. He’d laugh in my face if I brought this to him.”
“You know, I think you’re missing the real story. It’s right in front of your face.”
She was starting to look annoyed now. “And what’s that?”
“The fact that someone’s setting Jeremiah Claflin up to damage him, to discredit him. Who would do something like that? You see, I think you’re being used. The question is, by who?”
“By whom.”
“If you prefer.” I waited.
“Well, Nick Heller. Nice try. Thanks for playing.”
There didn’t seem to be much more to say, so I put down some cash and said, “Drinks on me.”
“You can expense it,” Mandy said.