Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“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?”