In addition to feeding what Garrison likes to call “Oh my God” stories to news networks, people like him serve another purpose: they make it easy for mainstream media outlets to pay for interviews while obscuring the fact that they do. The agent delivers the interview, and in return the network makes him a paid producer or consultant for that particular program; what he then does with the money—keep it or share it—is his own business. (For his part, Garrison tends to keep the whole fee, while sometimes promising to try to secure a book or movie deal for the grieving mother or accused murderer’s ex-girlfriend he is representing.) If the person has a diary or photo album to sell for on-air use, Garrison can help with that, too.

Garrison has been in the business in one form or another for decades, handling media, book, and movie deals for a host of people on the margins of dark celebrity: jurors in the Michael Jackson child-molestation case; a friend of Robert Blake’s dead wife; John Mark Karr, who falsely confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey. But he made his name working on the story of Holloway—the 18-year-old Birmingham, Alabama, blonde who went missing during a high-school class trip to Aruba in 2005, and became the apotheosis of a golden age of dead-white-girl television. Garrison teamed up with Natalee’s father, Dave Holloway, negotiating his TV appearances, speaking on his behalf, and co-authoring a best-selling book called Aruba: The Tragic Untold Story of Natalee Holloway and Corruption in Paradise.

Five years later, the Holloway story continues to be a source of fascination, and Garrison is eager to persuade John Muldowney to work with him. Like sharks on the scent of anchovies, Nancy Grace and Fox News have also come calling, looking for airtime with the elderly couple who might have inadvertently discovered Holloway’s final resting place during their Royal Caribbean cruise vacation. “I did the news on this for five years, I wrote the book,” Garrison tells Muldowney. “I have people in Aruba who can look for the body. You didn’t give out the location, did you?” Pause. “I can put in a call to Dave Holloway.” A man passing by turns to stare. Garrison has electric-white teeth, a deep tan, and carefully styled brown hair. With his Prada sunglasses and silver neck chain, he looks like some former Hollywood player you should possibly recognize but don’t. The matching car, a white Mercedes convertible with leather seats and vanity plates (MOVIE TV), sits out front.

Garrison has not yet secured Muldowney as a client; the conversation is aimed first at assessing his credibility—all sorts of attention-seeking cranks, faux psychics, and nut jobs have claimed to have solved Natalee’s murder—and then at convincing Muldowney that he should trust him. Garrison’s trying to get answers to a few questions that might illuminate the couple’s motives: why did they wait six months before coming forward with their discovery? Have they notified the FBI about the underwater picture they took, so that it can investigate? Is their story marred by inconsistencies? While Garrison tries to figure out the truth, he continues with a gentle, but insistent, sell.