“You said he’s slept with hundreds of women—so what?”
Malcy genuinely doesn’t seem to get it, his view of how the disease transmits entrenched, his perspective echoed out across the whole country and beyond. The truth is, whether Sloan is secretly gay or he isn’t—and there’s nothing in his past to suggest he is—it’ll be the first assumption most people will make if it’s confirmed he has Aids. And then the idea that Sloan’s been hiding his sexuality behind the veil of a playboy, pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes for decades, will just become another attack line in every article that’s written about him and the disease.
“Who else have you told?” she says.
“No one. I always come to you fir—”
“Don’t lie to me, Malcy. Who else?”
He swallows. “I might have mentioned it to Jordan.”
Something twists in Hallie’s gut.
Like her, Jordan Sanchez is stuck in the leper colony of freelance journalism—but unlike her, he doesn’t have a conscience to hold him back. His area of specialty, such as it is, is celebrity gossip, but he’ll sell the tabloids almost anything as long as it makes him fast money. But his most lucrative sideline isn’t even writing; it’s forcing cops, studio execs, and movie stars to pay him off to bury the story he has on them.
“When did you give Sanchez the tip?” she asks.
“Couple of days ago.”
Forty-eight hours. It’s a big head start. Could Sanchez have taken it to the tabloids already? And more to the point, does Hallie even want any part of this?
She lets her thoughts gather.
The truth is, shedoesn’twant any part of it. Not really. She has zero interest in destroying someone’s life—their reputation, their legacy, the public persona they’ve meticulously built across decades. If Porter Sloan reallydoeshave Aids, he’s already been served a death sentence, as have any of the women he’s infected. That’s enough. She doesn’t want to add to their pain.
But then her thoughts lurch again and she’s back in that interview room with the asshole from theHerald, and she starts thinking about what would happen if shedidmake herself a part of this story—or if she was the one who actually broke it. Whoever gets there first will be the tip of the spear, the de facto expert, the go-to for comments and commissions, and suddenly Hallie would be on everybody’s radars.
And then there’s the money that comes with it.
Breaking this story wouldn’t just pay for another month in her shitty apartment—it would buy her a house.And I’m a better writer than Sanchez. I can treat this story with sensitivity. I can minimize the casualties.But even as she tries to convince herself that her words are true, she knows how phony they are. Being a better writer means nothing on a story like this—everyone in it will be a casualty.
Pinched between her fingers is a business card Malcy gave her. It’s for the lawn company the eyewitness works for. She looks down at it, flips the card, and stares at the handwritten telephone number for the gardener on the back.
“The kid’s eighteen and still lives at home withmamáandpapá,” Malcy says to her. “So call late.”
LA moves around them.
Malcy, squalid as he is, can see she’s wavering.
“Let me tell you how this plays out, Hals,” he says, digging into a new pack of cigarettes. “If youdon’tdo this story, Jordan Sanchez will. And when he does, he’ll make a shitload of dough, and you’ll sit there in your rat-nest apartment after he’s published his mega-exclusive and you’ll wanna hang yourself.” Malcy props a cigarette between his lips. “It’s time to leave your conscience at the door.”
The bus drops Hallie off on Wilshire Boulevard.
As she steps out onto the sidewalk, two Korean men are standing at a Datsun, screaming at each other, the fender of the car wrinkled and broken. Neon buzzes all around her as she heads the other way, signs for restaurants, grocery stores, herbal medicine shops, and pool halls blinking against the night. She grabs some takeout kimchi-jjigae from a twenty-four-hour deli on the corner of her block, and then eats it as she walks to her apartment. It’s on the third floor of a crumbling Art Deco building that was probably glorious when it opened in the twenties, but is now a rotting corpse, its tan stucco cracked, its courtyard awash in weeds, its pool long-since emptied.
As she heads to the stairs that will take her up to her door, she hears a TV in a first-floor apartment blaring out a Korean soap opera, and a screaming match coming from the unit next to hers. A Filipino family of five live there, even though every $300-a-month dump in this building only has a single bedroom. It’s always the husband and wife she hears, never the kids. When she lets herself in, bolting the door, the shouting carries like a siren through the paper-thin walls, and although Hallie has become good at tuning it out, she grabs her Walkman from the bedroom anyway, slips on theheadphones, and hits Play. The first bars of “Dancing in the Dark” begin throbbing in her ears.
The air is still, a box fan rotating slowly in the window of the living room and doing nothing to relieve the heat. She doesn’t have much furniture but she has a couch and a table and chairs, and it’s at the table that she settles. On top is her typewriter. Next to that is a stack of paper, every page waiting to be filled with words. She has piles of newspapers and magazines, a scrapbook full of clippings, a phone, and a Rolodex.
She pulls the scrapbook toward her—she jokingly refers to it as the “morgue,” a term real newsrooms use to describe the space in which they store hundreds of thousands of their clippings—and starts to look through it for anything she may have cut out and kept on Porter Sloan in the past. There’s nothing.
Next, she flicks through the Rolodex until she gets toPeter Szezny. “Sez” is a staff writer atThe Hollywood Reporter. They met at an Orion Pictures party that Hallie managed to talk her way into, then they dated for three months after. She takes off her headphones, punches in his office number, and gets a machine, so tries him at home instead. He answers after a couple of rings: “Hello?”
“Sez, it’s Hallie. How are you doing?”
“Well, well, well,” he replies, an edge to his voice already. “Hmm, let me think. We dated for a couple of months after Christmas, seemed to have a good time, and then you went totally AWOL.”
“I’m sorry,” she replies, “I just wasn’t looking for something serious.”And you were boring and only ever talked about yourself.“How have you been?”
