Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“I hate to ask Frank Montello,” I said, “but I don’t think we have a choice.”

When I told him what I wanted, he said, “No can do, Heller. Not anymore. Verizon Wireless is really cracking down. All the cell cos are. Everyone’s gotten scared.”

“Is it a matter of money?”

“It’s a matter of no one wants to risk their job anymore.”

“My client is willing to pay extremely generously,” I said, and I mentioned a range I was willing to pay.

Instead of blowing me off, or hanging up, he suddenly sounded interested. He countered.

Then I countered back, and fairly quickly he admitted he might know a software guy who worked for Verizon Wireless who might be able to defeat the logging system and get CDRs for me. I suspected that his source at Verizon was someone he didn’t like to go to very often, someone easily spooked, but for the right price...

There’s almost always a right price.

Montello told me he’d get in touch with his source and see what he could do. It might take a while. He wasn’t sure. I offered a twenty percent premium on my already generous offer if he could get me something that afternoon.

Even before I’d finished talking to Montello, Dorothy had put a website up on the projection screen. It was the gossip site TMZ. The lead story, in a box with a red border, had a headline in big black type: HIJINKS IN THE HIGH COURT. This was over a big picture of Justice Claflin with a wild, leering look on his face. I recognized the photo. It had been taken at a party for his sixtieth birthday when he was about to blow out the candles.

I put down the phone and groaned.

“The story’s starting to spread big-time,” she said. She pulled up the Drudge Report. The same picture appeared there under the headline THE LOVE JUDGE.

“Shit.” Drudge was a gossip site, but it had first broken the story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, so it had a certain residual credibility. “What about the Times or the Post ?” I asked.

“Nothing there. Not yet.”

“Good. How about Perez Hilton?”

“Nothing. But check this out.” She clicked on Politico. On its front page was a small box with a photo of Claflin, apparently at a State of the Union speech. Over it was the headline CLAFLIN IN POSSIBLE CALL GIRL SCANDAL?

“That’s not good,” I said. “Politico is mainstream. At least it’s a question mark.”

Probably the best headline was the one in Vox: JUSTICE SERVED?

BuzzFeed ran a listicle about the top ten DC sex scandals, from Monica Lewinsky in 1998 to Senator Gary Hart and his girlfriend Donna Rice in 1987. A congressman caught sending lewd messages to young male pages in 2006, and a senator arrested in a Minneapolis airport bathroom in 2007 soliciting sex from an undercover police officer.

It must have been hard to narrow the list down to just ten. I could think of quite a few more.

“How much time do we have?” I asked Dorothy.

“Just about six hours.”

“Six hours to blow this story up.”

“Nick, this story is spreading like wildfire. Way faster than I expected. I think we have enough to go to Slander Sheet and demand a retraction.”

I cupped my chin in my hand and thought. True, the Claflin story was going big faster than I’d expected. None of the standard bearers of the old-guard legacy print media had picked up on it yet, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if their online versions ran something with a question mark, and soon. It was just too explosive a story to ignore.

“I’m going to talk to Gideon,” I said.

I wandered through the maze of hallways until I found Gideon Parnell’s office. His door was closed. His admin, Rose, sat at a desk right outside. She was on the phone. She nodded, smiled at me, held up an index finger.

When she hung up I said, “Rose, I need five minutes of Gideon’s time.”

She looked at his closed door, then back at me. “His phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Can it wait till things slow down?”

“I don’t think they’re going to slow down any time soon,” I said.

“He’s on the phone with the chief justice. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

She tapped at her keyboard. I sat down in one of the visitor chairs lined up outside his office.

After a moment, I remembered about the bald man who’d been following Kayla, Curtis Schmidt. I had a source within the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police who I’d worked with on a previous case, involving my brother, Roger. The last I knew, Detective-Lieutenant Arthur Garvin was with the Violent Crime branch, on a retirement waiver. When I worked with him, a few years back, he was just past the department’s mandatory retirement age of sixty, though they made exceptions in certain cases. But only up to sixty-four. He had to be retired by now.

I called him on his personal cell number. He answered right away, crisp like the cop he was for so long. “Garvin.”

“Art, it’s Nick Heller,” I said.

A pause. “Heller!” he said. “Uh-oh. You in some kind of trouble?”

I laughed and got right to it. “Do you happen to know a retired police sergeant named Curtis Schmidt?”

There was a pause. “Not that I can recall.”

“I need to find out what I can about the guy. What he’s up to, who he’s working for, whatever you can get.”

“I can make some calls, maybe dig around. What’s this about?”

Gideon’s office door opened and he emerged.

“I gotta go, Art. I’ll fill you in next time we talk. I owe you.” I ended the call and stood up. “You got two minutes?” I asked Gideon.

“Of course. Come on.” He led me into his office and closed the door behind him. “You have something?”

I nodded. “How’s the chief justice holding up?”

“He’s despondent, as you can well imagine. His office is directing people to the court’s public affairs office, and they’re giving out a statement that I crafted. What do you have?”

“Enough to go to Slander Sheet and demand a retraction,” I said. I told him what we had.

“Do we know she actually took those flights?”

I smiled. The same question I’d asked. And I wasn’t even a lawyer. “Not without getting the flight manifest from US Airways, and that’s something only law enforcement can do.”

“That seems like a hole, don’t you think? She might have bought tickets and not flown.”

“It’s a hole, but a minor one. We have less than six hours, and I think the smart play is to go to Slander Sheet with what we have. It’s enough.”

“Not yet,” Gideon said. “We need proof she was in Mississippi and not in DC at the time.”

“I think we’re in a strong enough position now.”

He shook his head. “I want that accusation discredited once and for all, no ambiguity about it, no games, no waffling.”

“I understand, but I think we can work with what we have.” I found myself in an unusual position. Normally I’m on the other side, pushing for more evidence, a more conclusive case. “They’d be idiots not to issue a retraction.”

“I’m the client,” Gideon said firmly. “And I’m asking you for more.”

“The problem is, for me to get anything more definitive could take a few days, and by then it’s too late. We have less than six—”

My phone rang. I glanced at it: Frank Montello. “Excuse me,” I said, and I answered the call. “Frank.”

“You’re not answering your e-mail.”

“You have something?”

“Check your in-box,” he said. “You owe me a chunk of change.”

When I explained to Gideon what call-detail records were, he broke out in a broad grin.

Gideon inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly.