stella began as a general assignment reporter for KCN, working the 5 a.m. shift four days a week and a shift on Sundays. It was the gruntiest of grunt work: getting man-on-the-street interviews, banking live feed that would go unused, enduring ridicule every time she flubbed a line or threw it back to the wrong person.
But glamour is relative. Stella was now Talent, capital T. She had an office, a small one, but it had a door and a window. She hired an agent to negotiate her contract. She used the Talent Only entrance at the side of the building. She spent a fortune upgrading her wardrobe, and several hours a day in hair and makeup. She hired a vocal coach; she wore whitening strips on her teeth every night. And none of this was silly or vain, because it was now her job to look good. Because if viewers liked watching her deliver the news, it meant they would keep the channel tuned to KCN, which meant we could charge steeper rates for advertising, which meant the rest of us could receive our salaries and health insurance and afford to buy groceries.
For someone in Stella’s position, cable news had a benefit: twenty-four hours of airtime to fill meant plenty of opportunities to get hits. A reporter could rise through the ranks on cable far more quickly than at a network. Stella’s big moment came in November, just a few months into her new role. A gas main exploded in Hell’s Kitchen and a fire tore through nearby apartment buildings. Stella was the first reporter on the scene. KCN had it up at least five minutes before anyone else. She held her stick mic, looked confidently into the camera, and delivered flawless live shots every thirty minutes for the next twelve hours straight.
“Who is that?” Rebecca said, looking at the wall-mounted screen in the newsroom. Night had fallen, and Stella was delivering yet another live shot in front of the smoldering buildings. The chyron blared BREAKING: TWO DEAD, SIX MISSING. “Is she new?”
“She used to be an assistant here,” I said. At least Rebecca didn’t remember who Stella was.
“You sure she didn’t come straight from the Mattel factory? She looks even younger than you, Violet.” Rebecca crossed her arms and watched in silence as Stella read the latest statement from the NYPD. “She’s not bad, actually.”
“Who is?” Eliza said, as she walked past. Then she followed Rebecca’s gaze to the screen. “Oh,” she said. “Give credit to Jamie on that one. That’s his new girlfriend.”
They had started dating right around Labor Day, and told me soon after. The careful choreography annoyed me even more than the news itself: their gentle voices, their glances back and forth, loaded with meaning. Is she okay? You go first—no, you go first. But be careful. They acted like I was so fragile I might shatter.
“We don’t want this to be weird,” Stella said, brow knitted in sympathy.
“Why would it be weird?” I shot back.
“It won’t affect our friendship,” Jamie said. “Or our working together.”
Stella took his hand, nodded earnestly. She often absorbed the mannerisms of the men she dated. For the moment, at least, Jamie was turning her into a heart-on-her-sleeve idealist. “You know how important you are to us.”
Us. They wrapped that word around themselves like a cozy blanket. Jamie began spending the night at our apartment. Once a week, then twice, then almost every night. One morning I ran into him in the kitchen, where he was clad in boxers and a T-shirt. Instead of sitting with me, he smiled sheepishly and carried two mugs of coffee back to Stella’s bedroom.
After he closed the door, I could hear them laughing. It was painful, how vividly I could imagine the rest of it. The mugs of coffee set aside, the minty toothbrushed kiss—Stella standing on her tiptoes to press her lips to his—then the kiss turning into more, the T-shirt and boxers easily shed. Stella had told me several times how good Jamie was in bed. How attentive, how generous, how unlike the men she’d been with before.
That fall turned into a long, dark, trudging winter. January, February, March. I bought earplugs so I could sleep through the night without hearing them. I wondered if it would be better to leave—find a new city, a new industry, or at least a new apartment, where I wasn’t constantly in the shadow of Stella Bradley. But at the same time, I was doing well at KCN. I got a raise, and then another. With my cheap rent, I was saving plenty of money. Rebecca and Eliza gave me more responsibility. They liked my pitches. I had that news instinct, they said. I loved the work.
And what was the issue, anyway? Why couldn’t we both succeed? I had no desire to be on camera. I had no desire to date Jamie Richter. So what was it to me if Stella succeeded in those arenas? But any attempt to be happy for her was an intellectual exercise. And there was no one to talk to about this, because I had lost my two closest friends to each other.
Rebuffing Jamie had been easy for me, because what he was offering—love, affection—didn’t seem necessary. But that’s because I already had love—I had it from Stella. It was such a given that I didn’t even think about it. Not until Stella and Jamie started dating did I realize the comfortable assumption that had formed my bedrock for so long: Stella wasn’t the type to settle down with a man, and I was too busy with work to meet anyone. It was perfect. It would be just the two of us; we were all the other person needed.
Now, that assumption was smashed to pieces. The resentment was suffocating. I mean this literally: muscles clenched behind my breastbone, making it difficult to breathe and drink and swallow. And along with this I felt guilty, too. Why couldn’t I be a better friend? Wasn’t that what friends were supposed to do—support one another, love one another, take pride in one another?
There was this economics class I’d taken in college. One day, we learned about the concept of a zero-sum game. “Of course,” the professor said, standing at the front of the room, “not every situation is zero sum. Most situations aren’t. The real world is infinitely more complex than this abstraction. And the more complexity there is, the less likely it is that zero sum obtains.”
That lecture lodged in my memory: the dusty chalkboard, the professor in her black sweater and gray slacks. She was pretty, young, on the tenure track. A diamond ring glittered on her left hand as she paced back and forth across the front of the room. But what I remember most was walking out of that classroom and thinking: she doesn’t get it. Of course the world is zero sum. Every gain demands a loss. The loser may not be aware that she is a loser. But the loss will reveal itself at some point. This pretty young professor was the type of woman to bake cookies for faculty meetings, to write thank-you notes after dinner parties. The type to believe that she didn’t have to be like the other guys—selfish, cutthroat—in order to get ahead. That there was such a thing as a win-win, as a rising tide.
I looked her up online after graduating. She had been denied tenure.
During the broadcast one night in mid-May of that year, my phone buzzed.
It was over two years ago, during that week between Christmas and New Year’s, that I had first read the Danner Pharmaceutical story. None of the employees had been willing to talk at length, but I’d kept in touch with one person: Darla, a former cafeteria worker. She was the kind of sweet older woman who you worried scam artists might rip off. She texted me pictures of her dogs and grandchildren. “It’s like buying lottery tickets,” Jamie said once. “You cultivate sources. Most of them go nowhere. But hey, sometimes you hit it big.”
I read and reread the text from Darla. Then I called her after the broadcast wrapped.
“And he’s not worried about getting sued, like you were?” I asked.
“Oh, honey, of course he’s worried about that. But he’s so young.” Darla coughed wheezily. She was prone to seasonal allergies. “He’s got a lifetime to pay back legal bills. Not like me. This debt is following me to the grave.”
“Don’t say that, Darla,” I said. “You’ve got plenty of time left.”
“George always stood in my line at the cafeteria, even when the other lines were shorter. He’s a good boy, Violet. You’ll talk to him, won’t you?”
“Of course. If that’s what he wants.”
“He needs to get it off his chest. That’s what he said to me. He said, ‘Darla, I need to get this off my chest. I can barely stand it anymore.’”
“And this thing he needs to talk about—this is what got you in trouble, too?”
Darla was silent. I could hear the faint sound of her breathing, in and out.
“Fair enough,” I said. “I’ll call him right now.”
The next night, I met George at a bar several blocks away from the KCN radius. I spotted him at the bar—brown hair and blue tie, as he’d described—and he sprang up when he saw me approaching.
“Thank you for meeting me,” George said, pumping my hand eagerly. Darla had said he worked in sales at Danner.
“I’m glad we’re getting the chance to talk,” I said, taking the stool next to him.
“What are you drinking?” He waved at the bartender. There was a nearly empty wineglass at his elbow. “This chardonnay is good. Are you a chardonnay fan?”
“Just a club soda, actually,” I said.
“Oh,” George said, his smile deflating slightly. “Sure. That works, too.”
George was good at small talk: sports, weather, television, what I was reading. Nearly thirty minutes passed, and he showed no signs of slowing his chatter. He’d probably remain in salesman mode all night if he could.
“George,” I said finally, interrupting his spirited analysis of last night’s Yankees game. “Darla said you had something you wanted to tell me.”
“Isn’t Darla the best? I remember this one time—”
“Look,” I said. “George. If you’re not ready, we can do this another night. I’ll just get the check and be on my way. Excuse me?” I started waving for the bartender.
“No—wait.” His smile disappeared. “I’m sorry. I’m a little nervous, I guess.”
“That’s understandable,” I said. “But tell you what. We’re off the record. I won’t even write this down. We’re just having a conversation for now, okay?”
He hesitated for a moment. Then he sighed. “I’m going to quit,” he said, his voice low and defensive, so different from his good-old-boy twang. “I am. It’s just that I have these student loans, and my mom needs the money—my dad’s out of the picture—and this job pays really well.”
He was quiet for a while. “There’s a but, isn’t there?” I prompted.
“But I can’t do it anymore,” he said.
“Can’t do what?”
“You know how pharma works,” he said. “Our customer isn’t really the customer. It’s the doctor. That’s who we’re selling to. We need them to write prescriptions for our drugs. So you’ve got guys like me, your district sales managers, to wine and dine the doctors. Tell them how great this new drug is, so they can tell their patients the same thing. That’s what the system hinges on. But guys like me—well, we weren’t getting the results that Danner wanted.”
George sat up a little straighter. “I went to Georgetown, you know. I majored in marketing. I’m good at my job. Danner used to pride themselves on their sales force. But suddenly the people they’re hiring—not so much. They laid off the guys I’d worked with and they replaced them with four very pretty girls. And do you know what else those girls had in common?”
I shook my head.
“My team—me and those four girls—we’d take a group of doctors out to dinner. It’s just business, right? Then we’d wind up at the hotel bar, have a few nightcaps. The numbers always worked out. After a while, each of the girls would lead a doctor upstairs. Two by two they left. They were former call girls. High-end. Slick. It felt totally natural. And then I’d wait in the hallway, in case anything happened. Do you know what that makes me, Violet?”
His face crumpled in anguish.
“It makes me a pimp.” His voice cracked. “I pimped those girls out. I let these twenty-one-year-old girls go alone into these hotel rooms with these drunk old men just so that we could get an edge on Pfizer and Bayer.”
“You were told to do this?” I said. “By your boss?”
“Our district was the guinea pig. Sales were way up. After it started working for us, they rolled it out across the country. Five-star service, that’s what my boss called it. White-glove client management.”
My heart was thrumming with a sudden, hyperalert instinct. I had to be careful not to betray this, not to spook George. “How long has this been going on?” I said evenly.
George was shredding his cocktail napkin into tiny pieces. “Two years,” he said. “But a few months ago, it got really bad. There was a rough night. One of the girls wound up with a black eye and a broken arm.”
“Did she report it to the police?”
“And tell them what? Danner would claim she was acting irresponsibly. That she’d picked up the doctor on her own accord. They’d fire her, and for good measure, they’d say that she had lied to the company about her previous—let’s call it—work experience.”
“This girl, the one who broke her arm, where is she now?”
“She’s lying low. She quit, obviously. And it’s not like she could do her job anymore, the shape she was in. She wanted to disappear. That’s what she said.”
“Was this when you decided you needed to tell someone?”
George scrunched his forehead. “I know that makes me an awful person. What the fuck? Someone almost needs to get killed before I’m willing to speak up?”
“You signed an NDA, I assume?” I asked gently. “And Danner obviously takes that seriously. Is that—that, uh, white-glove management—why Darla and the others were sued?”
He shook his head. “That’s the crazy thing. They didn’t even know about this. But Danner is so secretive, they’ll sue over anything. For, I don’t know, talking about what was on the cafeteria menu that day. I bet that’s why they sued Darla. Some unbelievably stupid bullshit.”
“So that story that ran in the paper a few years ago—”
“It was nothing. Half the people in central Jersey have been sued by Danner. I’m surprised that you’ve kept sniffing around for so long.” He squinted at me. “How did you know?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
George took a morose sip of chardonnay. He looked like he was on the verge of tears. “What a clusterfuck,” he said.
“George,” I said. “You’re speaking up now, right? Some people wouldn’t say anything. And you want this to stop, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’d like your permission to share this with my bosses at KCN. They’ll need to talk to you about this, too. Sooner rather than later.”
He nodded. “Okay,” he said.
I debriefed Jamie the next morning. His eyebrows climbed higher as the story went on. “And this came from that woman who sends you pictures of her beagles?”
“She’s like a second mother to George. They stayed close.”
“Jeez, did you hit the jackpot.” Jamie shook his head. I felt a twinge of irritation: it was luck, sure, but it was also a persistent two-year-plus pursuit. “It’s almost too salacious to believe,” he said. “How confident are you? You checked this guy out afterwards?”
“Thoroughly. He’s on Danner’s website. There was a press release last year that said he won some big award at their annual sales conference.”
Jamie grimaced. “I bet he did.”
“Are you skeptical? Why would he make this up?”
“Who knows? A ploy for attention. Payback for some slight in the past.” Jamie opened his laptop to search for Danner Pharmaceuticals. “Wow. He wasn’t kidding about their stock price, though. So when can we talk to him?”
We called George that afternoon. On the phone, he repeated the same story to Jamie. Jamie asked more questions, the wheres and whens and whos, if there was a paper trail to prove that this was a coordinated strategy—a memo, an e-mail, anything. George said that the initial instructions had been given verbally, one-on-one. E-mails and memos were left purposely vague. “Closing the deal” could mean anything. Maybe it meant cigars and brandy after dinner. Maybe it meant an à la carte fuck with a call girl.
“George won’t be enough, obviously,” Jamie said, after we’d hung up.
“I know that,” I said.
Jamie raised an eyebrow. “I know you know that. I’m not second-guessing you, Violet.”
“Right.” I sighed. These days I was more easily annoyed by Jamie. It wasn’t fair. He was just doing his job, thinking out loud. “You’re right. I’m just—”
“You’re excited.” Jamie smiled softly. “This is big. It’s important.”
That night, after the broadcast, Jamie followed Eliza into her office and closed the door. He wanted to get her guidance on what came next. After a few minutes, my phone rang, and Eliza asked me to join them.
“Have a seat,” Eliza said, gesturing at one of the chairs across from her. “Jamie says you trust this guy.”
“I do,” I said.
“To start, see if you can corroborate what he’s saying,” Eliza said. “Right now it’s just one guy, and we have no idea what his agenda might be. If you get someone else on record, we can add more resources. But I only want you two working on this for now.”
“Understood,” Jamie said.
“What about tracking down the girl who went into hiding?” I said.
“She’ll be hard to find. She wouldn’t have used her real name,” Eliza said. “And, first, I’d like to find out whether this really was a top-down plan. Do you remember Jerome Kerviel?”
“Ah—no?” I said.
“That’s because no one does,” Eliza said. “He was a French trader, convicted for fraud. But Société Générale painted him as a rogue actor, and the rest of the company was untouched. He goes to jail, the world moves on, and nothing actually changes.”
I tried contacting other sales managers at Danner, under the guise of seeking comment for a story about digital innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. But e-mails went unanswered, and phone calls ended in abrupt hang-ups. George was right; Danner had done a thorough job of training its employees to never speak with journalists.
Jamie had slightly better luck. He selected his tools like a surgeon choosing an instrument: flattery, appeals to ego, horse-trading, subtle bullying. He convinced one of the sales managers to meet him for lunch. But Jamie returned a few hours later, looking frustrated. The man had only wanted to talk about his college basketball career, and how KCN really ought to do a documentary about the time Bucknell made it to the Final Four.
By June, several weeks into it, we were without a single lead. The days were too busy with regular work to get anything done, so after the show wrapped at 9 p.m., Jamie and I would put in a few more hours. After another fruitless night, as we were waiting for the elevator, Jamie sighed. “So there are two possibilities. Either Danner is running the most airtight operation I’ve ever seen, with fewer leaks than Seal Team Six. Or George is just making this up.”
We stepped inside the elevator. “Or,” I said, “the story is true, and the others are too scared to talk about it.”
“And, what, George is sneaking around like Deep Throat? Those things only happen in the movies.”
“But George hasn’t been sneaky. That’s why I believe him.”
“Okay. Occam’s razor. What’s the simplest explanation? That there’s a massive cover-up happening, which two persistent journalists haven’t found a shred of evidence for? Or that one guy is a little bit off his meds? So to speak.”
“I don’t buy that. You should have seen how upset he was.” I paused. “Why don’t we meet with him in person? Both of us. Ask him who else we should talk to, beyond the obvious.”
The elevator opened. Our footsteps echoed at this midnight hour, the lobby quiet and empty except for a lone security guard behind the front desk. Jamie sighed again. “You know I’d only do this for you, Violet.”
The next night, a Friday night, Jamie and Stella had a dinner reservation at an obscenely expensive sushi restaurant in the East Village. On Friday, Stella was out covering a story on Staten Island. Jamie left several messages asking her to call him back. “She’s been talking about this place for weeks,” he said. “She’s not going to be happy.”
“We don’t have to do it tonight,” I said. “We could meet George another time.”
“Sooner is better. This has to take priority.” Jamie avoided my gaze, scribbling aimlessly on his notepad as he tried Stella yet again. He’d always been a bad liar.
That afternoon, I saw Stella across the newsroom. When she spotted me, she held a finger to her lips. She crept silently behind Jamie’s chair and put her hands over his eyes. “Guess who?” she murmured into his ear. Time moved twice as quickly in cable news, and the tranquil honeymoon phase of their relationship had passed. As reality set in, Stella had become both flirtier and more demanding of Jamie.
Jamie jumped. In the moment between Stella’s hands dropping from his eyes, and him turning to her, his expression flickered with dread. Then he forced a smile.
“What’s up?” she said. “You left, like, a million messages.”
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “I’m sorry, Stell. I can’t make dinner tonight.”
Her face darkened, quick as a cloud moving in front of the sun.
“I have to meet a source,” Jamie continued. “It’s a last-minute thing. I’m so sorry. I know you were excited about this place.”
“No way. It was impossible to get this reservation. I had to drop Rebecca’s name.”
“Isn’t the name Stella Bradley hot enough for them?” He smiled.
Oh, Jamie, I thought. You’re a dead man walking.
“Do not make a joke about this,” Stella said. “You’ve had this on your calendar for a month. And now what am I supposed to do?”
“I know, it’s just—”
“You and your never-ending excuses.” Stella whipped around. “What do you say, Violet? You in the mood for sushi? Want to be my date, because my boyfriend bailed on me again?”
“She can’t,” Jamie said.
“She can speak for herself,” Stella snapped.
“We have to meet with a source,” I said. “Both of us.”
It was barely perceptible, but Stella flinched at those words. Genuine injury: us. She curled her lip into a defensive sneer. “It’s this story, right? This big, important, mysterious story that you refuse to tell me anything about?”
“We can’t,” I said. “You understand that.”
“Understand this,” she said, flipping me the finger. Several people nearby turned at the sound of her raised voice, watching as she stalked away and nearly collided with a coffee-toting intern, yelling at him to get out of her way. Lately her temper had grown shorter and shorter. She couldn’t stand it when something didn’t go her way. The more success she had on camera, the greedier she became. The addictive, sugary thrill of attention brought out the worst in her.
“You in trouble, bro?” one of the assistants said to Jamie, once she was out of earshot. Jamie rolled his eyes and said, “You didn’t see that. Get back to work, all of you.”
That night, we met George at the same bar in Midtown. “How are you?” he asked, shaking our hands with the earnest vigor I remembered.
“Fine,” I said. “Listen, George, let’s—”
“I really appreciate it,” he said. “Both of you working on this with me.”
He was back in deranged salesman mode, blathering about the weather, about his plans for the Fourth of July, about the NFL preseason. Who gets excited about the NFL preseason in June?, I thought. As Jamie’s eyebrows arched, I panicked. Maybe he was off his meds. When our drinks arrived, I took my chance to interrupt.
“George,” I said. “George. Listen to me. We have a meeting back in the office in thirty minutes. So we don’t have much time.”
“What? You have a meeting at ten o’clock on Friday night?”
“Yes,” I said. “Our schedules are crazy.”
“Everyone at Danner is stonewalling us,” Jamie said. “Our boss is going to pull the plug on this, and soon, if we don’t get some corroboration for your story.”
“We need you to think,” I said. “Who else can back up what you’re saying?”
George, now with a concrete task at hand, calmed down. He cocked his head and ran through the list of obvious suspects, all of whom we had already tried. It was when George was musing about whether the hotels had security cameras that Jamie snapped his fingers.
“The footage?” I said. “There’s no way they’d turn that over to us.”
“Not the footage,” Jamie said. “The staff. They might have seen something.”
At the hotel in New Jersey the next day, Saturday, we started by ordering lunch in the bar, talking with the bartender—he would have had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama. But it turned out he was new, only a few weeks into the job. We paid the bill quickly and moved on.
Over the next few hours, drifting through the hotel as inconspicuously as we could, we tried talking with the maid, the concierge, the bellboy. Each was polite and helpful, until our questions moved from the general to the particular. Once they sensed an agenda, they backed away and shook their heads. This was turning into another dead end. I looked at my watch. Almost 5 p.m. The traffic back into the city would be bad.
Five p.m. A sign had said that the hotel bar opened at 10 a.m. That meant—
“Jamie,” I said. “Let’s go back to the bar. I bet the shift is about to turn over.”
Sure enough, there was a new person on duty. We took two seats at the bar.
There was something different about this bartender. He looked me straight in the eye when I ordered, but his manner was abrupt. The drinking he oversaw at this blandly corporate hotel was intense and joyless, drinking designed to make you forget that you were exhausted and wearing a rumpled polyblend suit, and that your alarm was going off at 6 a.m. Prostitution was practically legal at a hotel bar like this. Jamie cut straight to the chase and told him why we were there. The bartender nodded, and said, “Yeah, I remember.”
I felt a jolt of adrenaline. Our first confirmation that George was telling the truth.
“Can you tell us what you saw?” Jamie said.
He cocked his head like, do you think I’m an idiot? Jamie removed a stack of twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, folded them in half, and slid them across the bar.
“Appreciate it,” the bartender said, pocketing the bills. “What I saw was eight or nine people come to the bar for a nightcap. There was a younger guy who was buying the drinks. A bunch of young women and a bunch of old guys. They paired off pretty quickly. One of the old guys told me he had dibs on the redhead.”
“How long did they stay?” I asked.
“A few hours. The old guys were drunk, and getting grabby. I almost had to kick them out. They were making the other guests uncomfortable. The younger guy stayed to close the tab.” After a pause, he added, “You should talk to the night manager who was on duty that night.”
“Why?” I said. “Did she see something?”
“Ask her yourself. Her shift starts at ten.”
We stood in a far corner of the parking lot, near the dumpsters and the back door to the hotel kitchen, propped open to let in the mild night air. I could hear the clatter of pots and pans, the rat-a-tat of a knife chopping, the tinny radio and shouted Spanish. The night manager crossed her arms, waiting for us to begin.
“You might remember a group of guests who stayed here a while ago,” Jamie said. “Five rooms, reserved by Danner Pharmaceuticals. They had dinner in the restaurant.”
“We’ve got 206 beds in this hotel,” she said. “Average length of stay is one night. And you’re talking about how long ago, so you do the math.”
“Maybe it’s unlikely,” I said, “but if you recall anything—”
She waved a hand. “Relax. I remember. Jesus, how could I forget?”
There had been noise issues, she said. A guest had called the front desk to complain about shouting and raised voices. The first time the night manager knocked on the door, it settled down for a while. Then it started back up, and it was worse. The guest next door said she could hear loud thumps, something shattering. Sobbing and screaming.
The manager went back upstairs, this time with a security guard in tow. She passed a man in the hallway. He was sweaty and out of breath, his shirt unbuttoned and flapping open, but she had no cause to stop him in that moment—he was a guest, after all.
When she reached the room, the girl was alone. She had two black eyes, a broken arm. Bruises around her throat, blood dripping from her nose. The doctor had already gotten a taxi and was long gone. The night manager wanted to call the police, but the girl insisted that George could just drive her to the emergency room. She was okay, she said. She’d drunk too much and tripped over the furniture. She was clumsy like that.
“He tried to pay me off,” she said. “That kid, George. His hands were shaking like crazy. Here was five hundred dollars for the cleaning fee, he said. The cleaning fee! Give me a break. I did have to replace the carpeting in that room, by the way. Her blood was everywhere. No way to get the stains out.”
“So you didn’t take the money,” Jamie said.
“Take a bribe from a jackass like that? No way. He let this girl get beat to a pulp and then pretended like all she had was a bump on her forehead. The Danner guys don’t stay here anymore.” She grimaced. “Too ashamed to show their faces.”