“How can you stop it?” she asked.
“I’m not sure I can,” Pauline said, “but I’m going to give it a shot. Did you give any information to the reporter? Anything at all about Meghan, her life with Jake, anything else? Think carefully here, because if you did, he will cite you as one of his sources.”
“I just told him that Meghan was working for Jake,” she said. “I did say I did not approve of her doing that because I worried about her.”
“Okay,” Pauline said slowly. That would be one for the reporter. “Anything else?”
She thought for a moment. “Uh ... well, I did say that his information on how Meghan got hired was incorrect.”
“Really?” Pauline said. “How did he say she got hired?”
“His information, from his source, was that Jake recruited her using the internet. He put out an ad asking for applicants for the position of nanny, and asked that they attach a picture. He chose who to interview based on the pictures. And then, in the interview, the applicants were specifically told that having sex with Jake and his wife was part of the deal.”
“He told you this?” Pauline asked.
“Yes,” she said. “That was why I corrected him.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. Why the fuck didn’t you tell me this a few minutes ago when I asked you to tell me word for freaking word what the man said?? she did not yell into the phone. Instead, she took this information as the helpful tidbit it actually was. “Okay,” she did say. “This is helpful. What did you tell him to correct him?”
“The truth,” she said. “I told him that my oldest daughter was a labor and delivery nurse who helped Mrs. Kingsley deliver her baby. It was Danielle who told them about Meghan and they thought she might make a good nanny. Danielle put them in touch with her and they met her and hired her.”
“Did he ask to talk to Danielle?” she asked.
“No,” she said. “Not at all. In fact, he changed the subject to something else once I told him this. It was like he didn’t want to hear it.”
Pauline smiled. “He didn’t want to hear it,” she said. “It contradicts a rather juicy part of his story. This is very useful information, Mrs. Zachary.”
“In what way?”
“It suggests that the reporter has information that discredits his narrative. Journalistic ethics—which is what he would be judged under in any legal proceedings—demand that he follow up on this information and at least present it in the story. His lack of further questioning of you on this issue suggests he has no intention of doing that.”
“And that’s useful?”
“Potentially,” she said. “Tell me something. If this reporter prints this story as he presented it to you, with that bullshit about Jake finding her on the internet and telling her she needs to have sex with him intact, would you be willing to go on record with the true story of how Meghan came to meet Jake and Laura, and that you informed this reporter of this story prior to his publication?”
“Go on record?” she asked.
“That means tell your story to another journalist,” she said. “Make the public aware that this happened.”
“Uh ... well ... yes, of course,” she said. “If they print lies about Meggie I will absolutely dispute that on the record.”
“Excellent. Hopefully it won’t come down to that. One more question: Will your older daughter—Danielle is her name? Correct?”
“Correct,” she said.
“Will she be willing to go on record with the actual story of how Meghan came to be in the employ of Jake and Laura?”
“I’d have to ask her, but I would think she would,” she said.
“Very good,” Pauline said. “Please call her at some point before Tuesday morning and confirm that she is willing to do this. I’ll give you my office number and you can leave the answer on my machine.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to try to kill this story before it sees the light of day,” she said. “I think you have given me just enough ammunition that my scheme might work.”
Pauline called Meghan back after hanging up with her mother. The young nanny was still awake and sounded a little on the tipsy side. Pauline reassured her that she was doing everything she could to help rectify the situation. She then interviewed Meghan for more than forty minutes, asking her a series of personal questions related to the people she hung out with, the boys she had dated, the jobs she had had, and everything else she could think of. They did not go so deep as to start talking about Meghan’s abortion or her shoplifting arrest, but they scratched the surface.
“Okay, hon, I think I have enough now,” Pauline told her. “I’m gonna try to nip this thing in the bud.”
“Do you really think you can do that?” Meghan asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m going to give it a shot. And if it doesn’t work and they print that story anyway, I’m going to the fuckin’ wall for you. I promise you that.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks, Pauline.”
Pauline hung up the phone and stared thoughtfully at her notes for a little bit. She would take them with her on vacation and spend a lot of what should be leisure time compressing them and expanding upon them and organizing them into a coherent form. This just might work. And if it didn’t, the fucking American Watcher was going to incur the wrath of the Kingsleys.
Pauline, Obie, and Tabby landed back in Los Angeles just after ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. The holiday weekend was over. By now, Jake, Celia, Matt, and everyone else would be back in their studios and warehouses, working on their tours. Meghan would be back on the job, watching Caydee while Jake and Laura were in Los Angeles for the day. And those fucks over at the Watcher would be hard at work on their smear story, getting it ready for publication on Friday morning.
Upon arriving home, Pauline went immediately to the answering machine in her office. There were, like usual, multiple messages waiting for her. She listened to them. Most were nothing that required her immediate attention. One was kind of interesting in that bunch, however. Celia left a brief word that she and Laura had possibly found a new saxophone player during their trip to the jazz festival in Sacramento. She wanted to meet as soon as possible to discuss it.
Pauline made a note to call Celia back about this and then moved onto the next message. This one was the one that she was truly interested in. It was from Mrs. Zachary. Her daughter Danielle was quite willing to go on record regarding the story of how Meghan had come to be employed by the Kingsleys. She smiled as she heard this.
She listened to the rest of the messages and then cleared the machine. She then went to her bedroom and quickly unpacked her suitcase and then took a shower. She changed into her sweats and t-shirt again, no bra, no socks. She had decided that this would be her battle uniform from now on.
She walked into the living room where Obie was sipping a bourbon on the rocks despite the early hour and Tabby was watching Blue’s Clues from one of the DVDs of the series she owned. She was answering back in all the appropriate places.
“You got Tabs for a while?” she asked Obie. “It’s time for me to go tweak some balls.”
Obie grinned. They had talked extensively about what she planned to do. “I got her,” he said. “Go tweak away, darlin’.”
She closed herself in her office and then fired up her computer. Once it was ready for action, she opened up her contacts list and paged through until she found the office number for the American Watcher’s editor-in-chief’s office. It was not a number that the general public had access to, but she had dealt with this office, and with this particular sleazeball several times in the past. His name was Stanley Veneer. He was the kind of person that even lawyers and record company suits considered to be too slimy to want to touch. She put her phone on speaker so she could refer to her notes easily and then dialed the number.