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.”
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