Guilty Minds

62

I spent the night.

You never know the etiquette, after you sleep with a woman. If you leave right away, you’re no better than a dog. But not all women want to wake up with a man in their bed.

We snuggled together, and I fell asleep, and I awoke sometime later to discover that it was early morning, though still dark. I got up quietly so as not to wake her and padded into her living room area where she kept the accordion file of her sources, her story leads.

The file was filled with tantalizing rumors. I pored through it. At one point I made coffee — she had a complicated Swedish coffee machine that took some figuring out — and when I was searching her cabinets for a cup, Mandy appeared. She was wearing the lacy panties she’d had on the night before, and a white tank top.

“Mmm. Could you pour me some, too?”

“Of course.”

“The mugs are in the cabinet to the right of the stove.”

“Good morning,” I said, taking down two mugs. I took the one that had The Washington Post logo on it, in case it spurred bad memories, and gave her the one with the WAMU logo on it, the local NPR affiliate. The coffee was delicious. She got some milk from the refrigerator, offered it to me, and when I demurred she poured some into her mug. She took a sip.

“I enjoyed that,” she said after a while. I knew she didn’t mean the coffee.

“So did I.”

“I hope you don’t mind my asking: Are you involved with someone?”

I shook my head.

“Back home in Boston, I mean. Are you sure?”

“As far as I know.”

“I was actually engaged.”

“To who?”

“A lawyer at WilmerHale.”

“It is Washington, after all. The odds are good you’d end up with a lawyer.”

“We broke up around the time I got fired from the Post. That was another thing my drinking screwed up.”

“Maybe it was just as well.”

“He was a really nice guy.”

“Then I’m sorry.”

“He wasn’t very interesting. But he put up with me, which is no minor consideration.”

There was a long pause. Maybe she wanted to trade ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend stories. But I didn’t do that. I patted the accordion file. “Thanks for this.”

“Find anything?”

“You’re a really good reporter.”

“Is there a ‘but’?”

“You were working for a shitty website. But you’re a reporter of an extremely high caliber.”

“You already got into my pants, Heller. You don’t have to be so nice.”

I didn’t laugh. Quietly, I said: “I think you were targeted.”

“Targeted how?”

“I think you were given that Claflin story deliberately.”

“I don’t... follow.”

“You were given a big story that was guaranteed to self-destruct. Just solid enough to withstand fact-checking by a smart journalist, like you. But with hidden fissures so that a high-powered investigator, with enough resources, would be able to take it down. Someone really determined.”

“Like you.”

“Like me.”

“Meaning I got played.”

“Maybe we both got played.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I think you played your role and I played mine.”

“Both of us? Why?”

“Because someone wanted you to stumble and fall.”

“Who in the world cares enough about me to try to destroy me? That doesn’t make sense, Heller. I’m just a journalist. Who’d been fired from The Washington Post. Working for a bottom-feeding website. Who would even bother?”

“You knew something. You had something. You had to be discredited. You and Slander Sheet both. The Claflin story was a booby-trap. A butterfly mine. You pick it up, and it blows up in your hands.”

“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

“Perfectly. Whoever they were, they knew what they were doing.”

“I’ll play along. What were they so afraid of?”

“Well, let’s think about what you were working on.”

“Stories for Slander Sheet?”

I nodded.

“Half a dozen, maybe more. The chief of staff at the White House—”

“With the shoplifting wife?”

“Right.”

“What else?”

“There’s a B and D club in Washington, and it’s rumored that a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff belongs.”

“B and D as in bondage and discipline?”

“Right.”

“Did you have a name?”

“Members of the club wouldn’t talk to me. So, no.”

“You said something about a retired cop on his deathbed, something like that? A homicide by some Washington bigwig that was covered up?”

“Right. The Senator Brennan thing.”

“How sure are you that it involved drunk driving?”

“Not sure at all. That was just my working theory.”

“How sure are you that it involved Brennan?”

“That was just a theory, too.”

I was silent. “Maybe it’s that.”

“Or the B and D club. Or any of a dozen stories I did.”

“Possibly, yes.”

“And maybe your speculation is wrong and I wasn’t targeted.”

“True.”

“Maybe they were targeting Slander Sheet, and I was accidental collateral.”

I remembered that Kayla said she was told to ask for Mandy specifically. “I’d say both you and Slander Sheet, at the same time.”

“Still sounds like a stretch,” Mandy said.

“Didn’t it ever strike you that it was a little too easy?”

“What was?”

“What I was hired to do. Disprove the Claflin story you were doing for Slander Sheet. It should have been harder.”

“How do you mean?”

“Look at it from their point of view.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Whoever was trying to bring Claflin down. They go to the trouble of booking hotel rooms at the Hotel Monroe in Claflin’s name. They actually have someone show up at the hotel and pretend to be him and check in. And then they don’t bother actually going into the room. What’s that all about?”

“They didn’t know the hotel’s keycard system kept track.”

I shook my head. “I wonder. Then two of the nights Kayla was supposed to have met with Claflin she was actually in Mississippi.”

“So?”

“We found out about the flights by getting into her laptop. But there are other ways we could have learned she flew to Mississippi to visit her sister. We could have gotten into her credit cards some other way. If I were trying to set Claflin up, I wouldn’t have picked a couple of nights when she was provably out of town.”

She looked at me for a few seconds. “You have a very conspiratorial turn of mind, anyone ever tell you that?”

“All the time,” I said.