Necessary People

by Anna Pitoniak

  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.”

  H
e 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, watc
hing 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.