Damage Control: A Novel Page 10

* * *

  I’d barely sat down at my desk when the phone buzzed.

  “Have you called Anabelle Paxton yet?” Faraday asked.

  “Haven’t had a chance.”

  “Take your time,” Faraday said, in a tone that meant do it immediately.

  “And, Maggie? I’d like to stage an event where the media can shoot Senator Paxton with his wife and kids. Something that would humanize him better than a thousand of our words. The senator’s not sure about dragging his kids into it, but perhaps you could use your influence. Anabelle will want to do all she can for dear papa, hmm?”

  Already, Faraday was using me as a backdoor conduit into the family.

  I felt like such a tool.

  Again, I wondered how much he knew about my tangled history with the Paxtons. There was one secret from those days that I vowed would stay buried. It wasn’t relevant to the Emily Mortimer case. It was Anabelle’s business and nobody else’s.

  “Sure, I’ll talk to her,” I said, “but it will be awkward since—”

  “Of course, you have to do it in a way that feels natural,” Faraday broke in smoothly. “But I know I can count on you. You’re silky-smooth. The Holloways were impressed the other day in Malibu.”

  Now he was playing me, the shameless dog.

  “Except I haven’t had a minute to work on their case,” I said.

  “I’ve asked Tricia Coogan to follow up,” Faraday said. “I need you to concentrate on Paxton right now. Tyler’s been monitoring the media and he’ll brief us in ten minutes. My office.”

  He rang off and I noticed my phone light was blinking. I hit Play.

  “Hello, this is Fred Sentier. I’m a reporter and I’d like to speak to Senator Paxton as soon as possible. His office gave me this number.”

  Whom do you work for and why didn’t you speak to him at the press conference?

  “It’s about the Emily Mortimer case,” Sentier continued. “I’ve got information that will interest the senator.” There was a nasty chuckle. “It certainly interested me. I need to hear from him by four p.m. or it will be too late.”

  I hit Replay. I hit it five times.

  Then I picked up the phone machine and carried it into Faraday’s office, where Tyler and Samantha and Fletch were just sitting down around the table. Faraday was standing at the whiteboard, sketching out a time line of the Mortimer murder. He had a red marker in his hand and his glasses were low on his nose like a distracted college professor.

  “You need to listen to this,” I said, plugging in the phone.

  When Sentier’s voice died away, I said, “Is that a threat I hear?”

  “He’s going to go to the police,” Tyler said glumly.

  “No he isn’t,” said Faraday, “because then he’d lose his exclusive. The cops put out a press release and everyone’s got it.”

  “Then he’s going to throw it online at four,” I said.

  “He wants to confirm it first,” Tyler said. “It’s a better story if the senator comments.”

  “He didn’t say who he worked for.”

  “The name’s not familiar,” said Faraday, “and I know every hack in town.”

  “Let’s find out,” said Fletch, flexing his fingers.

  “What if it’s blackmail he’s after, not a scoop?” I said uneasily.

  “Call him and set up a meeting”—Faraday inclined his head to the phone—“so we can find out.”

  “Right now? Here?” I said, struck with sudden stage fright.

  Faraday slit his eyes at me.

  I picked up the phone and dialed.

  Fred Sentier answered on the first ring. He sounded out of breath or excited, and he balked at meeting with an underling. Maybe he thought he’d be ushered instantly into the senator’s presence like in a movie. I explained that Paxton was meeting with LAPD detectives and would be tied up past four, whereas I could personally deliver Sentier’s message to the senator once I had more details.

  Grudgingly, Sentier agreed and we set a rendezvous for Pershing Square downtown, in an hour’s time.

  My hand trembled as I put down the phone. Faraday was grinning. “Well done.”

  “Frederick Sentier is a reporter with the Washington Post,” Fletch announced, looking up from his ubiquitous laptop. “Suburban Metro, not the National Desk. I’ve just pulled up a slew of his stories. School board elections, zoning wars in Northern Virginia, penny-ante stuff.”

  “No wonder I’ve never heard of him,” said Faraday.

  “Then for sure they’re not putting it online until they can confirm it,” said Tyler triumphantly. “The Post is not going to risk getting egg all over its face.”

  Faraday pushed out his lower lip.

  “I don’t like this. What’s he doing so far from home? I want you to be careful, Maggie.”

  9

  I got to Pershing Square early and ducked into the Biltmore Hotel for coffee, ogling the Art Deco architecture, the crystal chandeliers, the b&w photos of movie stars that lined the walls.

  When I got back to Pershing Square, I saw a few shabbily clad people, some office workers eating snacks, and a bum snoozing on the grass. A black man in a button-down shirt and khakis stood on the sidewalk, scanning everyone.

  “I’m Maggie Silver. Are you Fred?”

  The man looked around, as if fearing he might be overheard, but everyone was minding their own business. He nodded. We walked to a bench and sat down.

  “Got some ID?” he asked.

  I took out my driver’s license and my Blair ID. He studied them, frowning. Behind Sentier, a blond man with a suitcase and hornrimmed glasses moved into view. With a shock, I recognized Fletch. What was he doing here?

  “I need to get with the senator,” Sentier said.

  There was a sheen of sweat on his skin and his eyes shone with adrenaline.

  “How about showing me some ID?” I said.

  He extracted a Washington Post press pass from his wallet. The ID matched. When Sentier shoved the wallet back in his pocket, I saw a gleam of metal.

  I jumped to my feet. Fred Sentier had a gun. Anyone could print out and laminate a press pass. It didn’t mean anything. I wanted to run to Fletch and disappear with him into the downtown crowds, but if I did, I’d never find out what Sentier knew. And then how could I face Faraday? It was pathetic, but at that moment, I was more afraid of Faraday than getting shot.

  Sentier saw my alarm. He pulled the gun out to give me a better look and I shrank. “Chill,” he said. “This is for my protection. What I’ve got’s gonna blow the lid off this story.”

  From across the square, Fletch shot me a questioning look. Almost imperceptibly I shook my head.

  Our little dance had also caught the attention of a homeless man who’d been lounging on the grass. He got to his feet, pulled a bag of bread out of his knapsack and began to walk toward us, scattering crumbs every few feet.

  Sentier hissed in exasperation and put the gun away. “Will you please come back here? I won’t hurt you.”

  Fletch watched but kept his distance.

  The man with the bread walked past very slowly. Sentier watched him, his face scrunched up suspiciously.

  “If you wanted to talk to Paxton,” I said, “why didn’t you attend the press conference?”

  “And tip off my competition?” Sentier gave me an arch smile. If he had a mustache he’d be twirling it.

  “If you’ve got something, say it.”

  “I’ve got proof that the senator and that Mortimer chick were involved.”

  I tried to keep my voice cool. “What proof?”

  “It’s for the senator’s eyes and ears only.”

  The pigeons were cooing and pecking at the ground. The man with the bread was coming back. Up close, he lacked the weathered, dirt-caked texture of the chronically unhoused. But maybe he bathed at a shelter. Maybe he’d only recently lost his job and his house, a victim of the mortgage collapse. My skin prickled with unease. Was he eavesdropping?

>   “This is a serious allegation,” I said. “I need to talk to my boss.”

  Sentier looked at his watch. “You’ve got fifteen minutes. The editors are ready to throw my story up on the website.” He gave a Grinchy smile. “But of course we’d really like to include Senator Paxton’s response.”

  I walked to the shelter of a nearby tree and dialed Faraday. There was no time to go back to the office and tell him in person. I’d have to rely on a sort of hackneyed code and hope that my boss understood.

  The man with the pigeons turned his bag upside down and shook out the last crumbs, keeping his eyes on Sentier. Then he glanced in my direction and walked away. He no longer had the slow, halting shuffle of people who spend too many hours trudging through the city streets. Now he walked with the brisk stride of a man with places to go, people to see. A sense of awful foreboding came over me.

  “Faraday,” my boss barked in my ear.

  “Hey there, it’s Maggie. A car almost ran me over just now. The driver is very agitated. He says he’s got proof that it’s my fault. Says he saw me necking with my boyfriend when I should have been watching the road.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Faraday, mechanically. “That’s horrible. So it’s a sex thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get any details about his insurance?”

  “I’m working on it. Problem is, we’re running out of time.”

  “Tell him you’ll do what he wants but you need a few more hours. Promise him a sit-down with your insurance agent. He can take photos. If he balks at that, throw in the offer of a second, unrelated insurance policy. But in exchange, the driver needs to lay his own insurance on the table. All of it. He can take it or leave it. But if he tries to leave, call me immediately.”

  I walked back to Fred and explained the terms. Fletch was sitting on a bench now, eating a banana and reading a paper.

  Fred grimaced with disgust. “You PR hacks are all the same. Cover and duck, dissemble, get your story together. You’re sleazy and despicable.”

  “Look, I know you’re sore because your 401(k) has tanked and your colleagues have all jumped ship to work in my profession. Every paper in this country is in trouble and that’s bad for all of us.”

  Sentier’s lip curled. “I’d rather starve than work for people like you, hiring yourselves out to the highest bidder.”

  I had my answer ready. Every new hire had to commit it to memory, it’s the damage control mantra for Blair itself.

  “Then you should know that ten percent of Blair’s billable hours are devoted to pro bono work. We don’t toot our horn, but since you brought it up, our clients include the NAACP, Council of Episcopal Bishops, Afghan Women’s Clinic, Big Sisters, and Tree People. So our rich clients subsidize the poor ones. Now if we can get back to business, what proof do you have about this alleged affair?”

  Sentier looked smug. “I’ve got documentation and an eyewitness who swears that Paxton and Mortimer spent a night together at the Mission Inn in Riverside in late May.”

  “Are you sure the senator wasn’t in Washington that day?”

  He smirked. “It was Memorial Day weekend. He flew home.”

  “You’re still not telling me what proof you have.”

  Fred Sentier pulled out a piece of paper and unfolded it. It was a hotel receipt stapled to a credit card slip with the senator’s name on it. The signature was illegible.

  I inspected it. “So he stayed there. This proves nothing. Maybe he spoke at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast.”

  “The girl was seen in his room late at night.”

  “What do you mean ‘seen’? Were you there? How do you know it was her?”

  Sentier stood up, scattering a flock of pigeons that were pecking at the remains of the homeless man’s bread. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he said, “I just do.”

  “If she was in that room, there was a legitimate reason. She handled his Twitter account, for instance, so she needed access. I’m afraid I need something more persuasive than this.”

  “They ordered a bottle of champagne. The drinks receipt has a date and time. It was one twenty-four a.m.”

  “Politicians don’t keep regular hours and neither do their staffers.”

  “He’s not exactly burning the midnight oil on the campaign trail right now,” Sentier said slyly.

  “How do you know the senator was even in the room? It could have been someone using his credit card.”

  “His personal credit card?”

  “There could be a million reasons . . . Did you actually see them?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So you weren’t there?” I pounced.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then why make such an allegation?”

  He turned on me angrily. “The waiter who delivered champagne to the room that night was my father.”

  I blinked.

  “He didn’t think anything of it at the time,” Sentier continued. “But when he turned on the TV last night and saw the dead girl’s pic, it jogged his memory. Because she was pretty and her hair was wet from the shower and she was wearing a hotel bathrobe and because she tipped him ten bucks. A waiter doesn’t forget that. So he had a pal in accounting pull a copy of the receipts without telling him what it was for. The name and date match.”

  I shook my head, still unconvinced, or pretending I was. “The Post flew you out here pretty fast.”

  Sentier gave an enigmatic smile and looked meaningfully at his watch.

  “Look,” I said quickly. “I promise you’ll get your interview. But this has got to stay off the Internet. If what you say is true, it’s the scoop of a lifetime and a few hours won’t make any difference. But if you’re wrong, it will blow up in your face and you’ll lose your job. And there are none left in journalism, as we both know. I’ll brief the senator as soon as he gets out of his meeting and we’ll call you with a time and place.”

  “No,” said Sentier. “You already had your time. He gets on the phone right here, right now, or it’s going live.”

  Sentier took out his phone and began to press buttons.

  “Wait,” I said.

  There was triumph in his eyes as he thumbed off the phone and crossed his arms. “Well?”

  “Give us a few more hours and we’ll throw in information about another of our high-profile clients. Possibly even arrange for an interview.”

  “Who with?” Sentier was intrigued but suspicious.

  “I’ll have to talk to my boss.”

  Sentier licked his lips.

  “You repping any pro athletes that got caught doing the nasty like Tiger Woods?”

  “I can’t give you any specifics now. But we work closely with the press. We like to build relationships that can last years.”

  Sentier considered. I could see his thoughts leapfrogging into the future, counting up all the stories he’d break, all the promotions that would come his way.

  “Okay.” He nodded. “But if you burn me, I will kick your sorry ass into next year. And I’m warning you, the story is already written and ready to go. If anything happens to me, they have instruc—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said. “But leave your gun at home tonight or you’ll never make it past security.”

  * * *

  In the outer lobby of Senator Paxton’s Los Angeles office, an earnest young man was explaining why the senator could not see us without an appointment.

  “Dear God, give me strength,” Faraday said.

  He stepped back, dialing on his cell phone, and bumped into a woman pushing an oxygen tank and carrying a file who’d been waiting when we arrived. Documents scattered. I bent to pick them up. The woman thanked me and said she was waiting to talk to the senator about her canceled medical insurance.

  My heart gave a little tug—that woman could be my mother.

  Faraday said, “Yeah? Well tell him that Jack Faraday is in his lobby and it’s an emergency.”

  Soon a side
door opened. As the woman with the medical file squawked in outrage, we were ushered inside. Bernstein appeared and led us down a hallway. We stopped outside the senator’s office where a young man sat at a desk, juggling three ringing lines, flashing phone texts, and a computer that beeped with constant new e-mail.

  “You can’t go in, he’s in conference,” the man told Bernstein without looking up. “And whoever they are, they don’t have an appointment.”

  “These people are from Blair, and it’s an emergency. Put a note under his nose.”

  The scheduling secretary’s eyes flicked over us disapprovingly. In a world where face time with the politician was the most important currency of all, the senator’s scheduler was the royal gatekeeper, with the attitude to prove it.

  “Very well,” he said at last.

  A moment later, he emerged from the senator’s office and said it would be a few minutes.

  Faraday’s shoe tapped impatiently. Five minutes later, the door to the senator’s office opened and the man himself told us to come in.

  Paxton’s inner sanctum was decorated like a Ralph Lauren ad, with antique oak furniture and bookcases and a forest-green leather couch. The senator could look out the fourteenth-floor window upon his constituents in the Los Angeles Basin. Framed photos of Paxton’s family added a homey touch to the stacks of papers and thick black briefing books prepared by his staff.

  Senator Paxton took a seat behind his large antique desk and said, “This better be important. I just cut short a conference call with Washington.”

  He looked very imposing, with the seal of the United States government behind him as a backdrop, but his voice held a thickness I associated with sleep, and the couch bore the slight depression of a human body.

  Was it possible we’d caught the senator napping?

  He hadn’t even finished his first term in office, and already people were referring to his bright future as a national leader and a star of the Democratic Party. It was hard to believe that my friend’s father might someday live in the White House. But this morning I’d heard him speak. He had the politician’s gift for inspiring people and making them believe. Would it be enough to get him through this crisis unscathed?