“Okay. Do you think you could tell me what you told Gilloway?”
“This again?”
“I know. Just lay it on the line for me,” Hallie says, with a smile, hoping it comes across in her voice.
In response, she just hears Heraldo sigh. It’s a crude, slightly infantile sound, and it reminds Hallie that Heraldo is only a kid.
“I was shaping some hedges at the side of the house,” he says, his tone flat and indifferent, like he’s reading off a grocery list, “and I happened to look in through a window. Porter Sloan’s in there and there’s this doctor, or nurse, or whatever.”
“What was the doctor doing?”
“Nothing. Just talking.”
“He wasn’t administering any medicine to Sloan?”
“No.”
“Any IV drips close by, oxygen tanks—anything like that?”
“Not that I saw.”
“And the doctor was fully covered up, right?”
“Yeah. I could only see his eyes, but even those had glasses over them.”
“And how did Sloan look?”
“Okay, I guess. I don’t know. Old.”
“Old in what way?”
“Just old.”
“Older than when you’ve seen him in movies and the newspapers?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
As an eyewitness, Heraldo is next to worthless.
Hallie thanks him and hangs up, then uses the Rolodex to find the numbers of as many editors in the city as she can. She starts doing a call-around, subtly asking questions aboutwhether they’d be interested in a bombshell story about a major Hollywood star’s private life. She tells them it’ll be the biggest exclusive of the year—ofanyyear. She’s not looking for ayes, because she knows—without having to pick up the phone at all—that even a respected outlet like theTimeswould bite her hand off for a story on Sloan potentially having Aids. What she’s looking for is a pause on the line, a fractional silence, an indication that the editor already knows where this is going; that they know which Hollywood star she’s talking about, because Jordan Sanchez has already signed, sealed and delivered the exclusive.
But she doesn’t get that.
Everyone says yes, providing the story is as big as she claims, and a few editors even start floating ballpark money. It’s huge. High five figures.
Maybe more depending on what she’s got.
She hangs up and goes over the calls.
The reactions tell her Sanchez hasn’t been in touch yet, or if he has, he hasn’t communicated the sheer gravity of the Sloan exposé. And a part of her worries about why. Have all the editors just lied to her? Or is this a trap?
She finds Sanchez’s number.
It’s his home in Echo Park. She’s only been there once—back when she started trying to make it as a freelancer, thinking her and Sanchez could work together. Atwo birds, one stonekind of proposal. She talked about a tip she’d heard concerning a senior police detective at the LAPD beating a suspect to a pulp in the back of a pool car, and Sanchez told her it was a killer lead and they should very definitely work the story together. Within twenty-four hours, he’d sold the whole thing to theExaminer.
Their paths have crossed many times since and, every time they do, Sanchez always says the same thing to her.
It’s dog-eat-dog out there, Hallie.
