Guilty Minds

29

In the hour before my meeting with Julian Gunn, I got on the phone while Dorothy combed the Internet, and fairly quickly I had a decent working profile of the guy.

He was British, graduated from Cambridge University, in England, and after college worked at Private Eye magazine for a few years. Then he moved to New York and started a few Internet ventures that made him reasonably rich. He’d started Slander Sheet in his Tribeca apartment, with a friend of his from Cambridge, but they’d had a falling out.

Slander Sheet gradually caught on, then he spun off Slander Sheet LA, for Hollywood gossip, and then Slander Sheet DC, for political gossip. Pretty soon he had an online gossip network. Slander Sheet seemed to publish items about almost anyone. The only people off limits, as Slander Sheet targets, were his friends (mostly journalists), and his college classmates. Actually, he didn’t seem to have many friends. “He’s the kind of guy even his friends don’t like,” someone told me. Two adjectives I heard about him repeatedly were “odious” and “loathsome.”

A couple of years ago, he’d sold Slander Sheet, but no one was sure who he sold it to. The sale was handled in great secrecy. Gunn remained editor in chief. He split his time among LA, New York, and Washington.

I showed up at the Slander Sheet offices in the old bread factory right on time, but Gunn kept me waiting. One of his minions, a white guy in his midtwenties with dreadlocks, explained that Julian had been doing interviews all day, with TV and radio and publications all around the world. He’d be with me as soon as he could get off the phone.

Gunn didn’t have an office. He worked at one of the long tables just like all his employees. Presumably he wanted to make a point about how democratic Slander Sheet was. So I was shown to a glassed-in conference room and seated at another long table.

After twenty minutes, Julian Gunn showed up, accompanied by an attractive but dour blond woman in a pink suit he introduced as his general counsel. Gunn was a small man with an oversized head, an acne-ravaged face, and receding pale-blond hair. He was wearing dark jeans and a shiny dark blue striped shirt.

“So sorry to keep you waiting,” he announced. “It’s a crazy day. We’ve never had such traffic. It’s mad. We’re up to almost ten million page views on the Claflin story.”

“Wow,” I said without enthusiasm.

Turning to his general counsel, he said, “We’re approaching the all-time record for page views — those photos of Kim Kardashian’s butt, in Paper magazine. Those got eleven million.”

He sat at the head of the table, his general counsel to his right. I sat on his left.

“So your name is Nicholas Heller, and you’re here to talk about our Jeremiah Claflin story, is that right?”

I nodded.

“I take it the great Gideon Parnell is too busy to make it here himself?”

I smiled. “You’ll have to settle for me.”

“So, Mr. Heller.” He opened his hands, palms up. “Have at us.”

“Have you set a sale price yet?”

“Excuse me?” He gave me a slow blink. He reminded me of a lizard, or of a frog about to flick out its tongue and catch a fly.

“On your little hacienda in the D.R. See, I figure you can get two point five million for it. You’ll need all of that and more.”

He looked puzzled, as I expected him to be. He’d recently bought a house on the beach in the Dominican Republic, but not many people knew about it.

“I thought you were here to talk about Jeremiah Claflin.”

“Exactly. Because if you don’t take down that fraudulent story by four o’clock this afternoon, and issue an abject apology on your home page, you’re going to be hit with a massive lawsuit that’s going to shut down Slander Sheet and wipe you out personally. You’re going to need to sell every asset you can.”

“Oh, please. Sue me.” He fluttered his fingers in the air. “Get in line. I’ve lost track of how many lawsuits we’ve been threatened with.” He turned to his general counsel. “We must get ten legal threats a week, right, Emily?”

“At least,” she said.

He turned back to me. “I know who you are, Nicholas Heller. Mandy Seeger did some checking. You dropped out of Yale to enlist in the Special Forces, in Iraq and Afghanistan and all those godforsaken places. Who knows what you were up to? I’m sure if we do a little digging, we’ll find some My Lai in your past. Some raped Iraqi woman, some bayoneted Afghan boy, maybe. And my goodness, your old man was that scoundrel Victor Heller. Who’s currently serving twenty-eight years in prison.” He shook his head. “I don’t imagine your clients would appreciate the sordid truth about your background coming out. Anyway, if you’re here on Gideon Parnell’s behalf, I assume you’re here to lodge a complaint.” He interlaced his fingers and steepled them. “Well, then. Lodge away. You have a problem with Mandy’s reporting?”

“Mandy Seeger is a top-notch reporter, but she got taken in by a clever hoax. Jeremiah Claflin never had a relationship with a call girl, period. Full stop.”

“Of course not,” Gunn said with a smirk.

“You jumped the gun. You ran the story without giving Mandy the chance to meet with Gideon Parnell, who would have set her straight. That’s what the lawyers call reckless disregard for the truth.”

“We put the story up this morning because our intel told us we were about to be scooped. That’s all. It turns out to be the biggest story we’ve ever run, and it’s getting us attention all over the world. That’s what I’d call a successful story.”

“If you’d waited, as you and Gideon agreed, you’d have learned the truth. You would have learned, for instance, that although rooms in the Hotel Monroe were booked under Claflin’s name on three different evenings, at no times were the keys used to enter the room. Claflin never stayed there. Here’s a printout of the audit report.” I slid a file folder of documents across the table to him.

He shrugged. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

I went on, ignoring his taunts. “You were used by a call girl. Someone paid her to get in touch with Mandy Seeger and you fell for it. As a result, you’ve done grave damage to the integrity of the chief justice of the Supreme Court.”

Gunn blinked again, slowly. One, two, three. “You work for the powers that be, Heller. I work against them. You’ll forgive me if I don’t immediately credit your claims. And claims are all they are. Are we done here? TMZ TV is waiting to interview me.”

I slid a tall stack of paper across the table.

“More printouts from the Hotel Monroe?” he asked.

I shook my head. “These are call-detail records. From Kayla Pitts’s cell phone. That’s Heidi L’Amour’s real name, in case you didn’t know. Proving without a doubt that she couldn’t have been meeting with Justice Claflin in the Hotel Monroe. She was in Pearl, Mississippi, on two of those nights, visiting her sister in prison. On the third night she was at a sports bar called the End Zone, in Arlington, Virginia.”

Gunn blinked again, slowly, twice, and pulled his hands away from the stack of printouts as if they were hot to the touch. He looked at the top page and then looked at his general counsel. He muttered something to her, then took out a cell phone. He pressed one key and put it to his ear. “Eric, I need you to take a look at something. Yes.”

He ended the call.

A moment later a scrawny redheaded man wearing a lime-green polo shirt entered the conference room. He went up to Gunn and tapped the stack of documents.

“This?” he said.

Gunn nodded. “This is Eric Ziegler, my chief technology officer,” he said.

Eric took the stack of paper with him and left the room.

“Uh, the chief justice is a public figure,” Emily said crisply. “It’s extremely difficult for a public figure to sue for libel.”

“Not at all,” I said to her. “As you know, his lawyers simply have to prove ‘actual malice.’ The malicious and reckless disregard for the facts. Which is going to be nice and easy, since your reporter was given the opportunity to meet with Gideon Parnell and learn the truth. Before you ran the story. A meeting you canceled.”

“Is this true?” Emily said to Gunn.

He shrugged dismissively.

“So you didn’t do your due diligence,” I went on. “The fact that you had the opportunity to correct your fabrications and you didn’t take it shows actual malice. I don’t know how you put a dollar figure on the reputation of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, but we’re going to start at one hundred million dollars and go up from there. Which will put Slander Sheet out of business and you into personal bankruptcy.”

“You’d never get that,” he said.

I went on, “You see, Julian, juries these days are turning against the power of irresponsible media to destroy the lives of innocent people. Maybe one hundred million dollars in damages is too small. Maybe we go for half a billion.”

Gunn’s phone rang. He answered it with a smug smile. “Eric?”

He listened for a moment. I watched as his expression molted from arrogant, self-satisfied gloating to what looked a lot like sea sickness. Without another word, he ended the call. He seemed about to throw up. He stood up feebly.

“Emily?” he said, and his general counsel got up as well, and the two of them left the conference room.

While I waited, I checked my e-mail, then my voice mail. I’d gotten a call from my DC cop source, Art Garvin. I recognized his cell number. I was about to call him back when Gunn and his general counsel returned to the room.

“Okay, Heller,” Gunn said quietly. “Appears that you’ve won this battle. But you’ve just set out on a long road that has no turning.”

“What does that even mean?” I said.

“I’m going to loose the investigative hounds on you. You’ll be a ruined man. I am not an enemy you want to have, as you’ll soon—”

“What do we need to do?” Emily said, cutting him off. And I realized right then that she was calling the shots. Not Julian Gunn. “What do you want, Mr. Heller?”