Hush Money

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

One of the people who’d been outed by OUTrageous was a television reporter named Rich Randolph. I sat with him in his cubby inside the newsroom at Channel Three, next door to the news set.

“I wasn’t exactly in the closet,” he said. “But I wasn’t, you could say, broadcasting it.”

“Probably not the road to advancement,” I said.

Randolph was slimmer than he looked on camera, with a good haircut, round, gold-rimmed glasses, and a sharp-edged face.

“Hell, glasses put you at a disadvantage.”

“And well they should,” I said.

He glanced at me for a moment and then smiled.

“Nothing,” he said, “is too trivial for local television.”

“Did you know Prentice Lamont?” I said.

“He the guy ran the magazine?”

“Yes.”

“No, I didn’t know him. I saw his name on the masthead. Somebody, I assume it was he, wrote me an unsigned letter saying that I was scheduled to be outed in the whatever date issue of OUTrageous, unless I wished to make other arrangements, and included a phone number. I called the number and I said what sort of arrangements, and he said, financial. And I said you mean you’ll take money not to out me? And he said, yes, and I told him to go fuck himself, and hung up. About two weeks later I was out.”

“Sounds like you passed on a good piece of investigative reporting.”

“I did,” Randolph said. “It was also my life, and I thought maybe I can just sit tight and it’ll blow over. I mean who ever heard of OUTrageous, anyway? I thought they might be bluffing, and if they weren’t I thought no one read the damned thing.”

“Unless they backed it up,” I said, “and made sure somebody saw it.”

“The station manager got a copy in the mail.”

“How’d that work out?”

“He was hurt,” he said, “that I hadn’t leveled with him. The sonovabitch. Like he’s telling me about his sex life.”

“But he didn’t fire you.”

“Hell no. The union would be on them like ugly on a warthog. The PR fallout would swamp him, and he knows it.”

“He taking any action?” I said.

Randolph shrugged. “You watch the news on this station?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, if you did, you might next see me covering a fashion show.”

“Or modeling them,” I said.

“Ah, if only,” Randolph said.

“Was it Lamont that was doing the blackmail, you think?”

“I don’t know. The letter was unsigned, appeared to be written on a computer. The voice on the phone was anonymous. I have no idea who I talked to, but how big an operation was it?”

“Maybe bigger than I thought,” I said. “Could you tell anything from the voice? It was male.”

“Yeah, male. Native English speaker, I’d say.”

“How old?”

“Couldn’t tell. Wasn’t a kid, or an old person. Twenty to sixty, somewhere in there, I guess.”

“Race?”

Randolph shook his head.

“Anything to indicate that it wasn’t Prentice Lamont?”. “Given that I don’t know who Prentice Lamont is, no.”

We sat for a moment. Outside his cubicle the newsroom clattered and hustled. Monitors gleamed. Assignments were being given. Phones were ringing. Computers were being keyed.

“You talk to any other people who’ve been featured in OUTrageous?” I said.

“No.”

I nodded.

“How come you get a cubicle?” I said.

“Senior correspondent,” he said.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah,” Randolph said.

We sat for another moment.

“You know what my real name is?” Randolph said. “My real name is Dick Horvitz. Media consultant said it didn’t have sympathetic overtones.”

“Gee,” I said, “I choked up the minute you said it.”

“You ever wonder why people care about shit like this?” he said.

“Often,” I said.

“You have an answer?”

“No.”

He leaned back and put his feet up.

“Senior correspondent,” he said.