Good Sam

by Dete Meserve

  It looked to me like the Gomez family had received a much-needed gift from a very generous yet anonymous friend. Josh and I taped an interview with Cristina, but I seriously doubted it would make it to air at all because of a car chase in West Los Angeles that was chewing up all the airtime.

  As we were about to leave, Cristina took my hands in hers, and in a voice barely above a whisper, she said, “You do not believe.”

  “Believe?”

  “I see it in your eyes. You do not believe this is a miracle. But you cannot see everything with your eyes, miss. You have to look in here.” She pressed a palm to her heart and closed her eyes.

  “I’m not here to judge…”

  “I’m not the only one to have this miracle happen to them.” Her eyes remained closed. “She would not want me to tell you this. Her name is Marie Ellis. She found money too.”

  Okay, I was intrigued—not the same level of intrigue I felt covering a murder scene at a celebrity’s home or a fire raging through the Palisades, but at least this story now had the makings of what we call a “muffin choker,” a bizarre or unbelievable news piece.

  “Are you sure you got the address right?” I asked Josh, as we turned on to a palm tree–lined street with luxury homes situated on rich green lawns. Many of the homes were true architectural masterpieces with grand entries and lush, perfect landscapes, and every one of them was a gem. Exclusive and expensive.

  Josh glanced at his scribbled note. “This is the address Cristina gave us: 625 North Roxbury. Beverly Hills. Even the air smells like money.”

  I smiled. Many reporters find their news photographers annoying. When you spend concentrated amounts of time with the same person in deadline situations, their habits definitely can get on your nerves. One news photographer I work with, Darren, is addicted to beef and bean burritos, which always makes the news van smell like a boys’ locker room. Another, Andy, loves to play wall-to-wall indie rock music on Spotify in the van. I like that music too but not at brain-numbing decibels. Fortunately for me, Josh didn’t have any quirky habits; he was funny, and we struck an easy friendship from the first day we worked together. He was like the cool, slightly younger brother I wish I had, without the bickering that usually goes with that.

  We pulled up in front of a rambling Spanish-style house with an orange tiled roof on a sloping corner lot. In Beverly Hills houses like these sell for upward of $4 million. How would Cristina Gomez know someone who lived in this kind of estate? As I pressed the polished brass doorbell, I figured Marie Ellis was either the housekeeper or the nanny.

  A little girl dressed in a Snow White dress and clutching a Snow White Barbie doll opened the door.

  “Someone is here!” she called out.

  “Hi Princess,” I said. “I’m Kate Bradley from Channel Eleven. Is Marie Ellis here?”

  “She’s changing Jasper’s diaper.” She held out her doll for me to see. “See what I got for my birthday?”

  I admired the doll. “Her dress is beautiful. Would you tell Marie I’m here?”

  “Marie is my mommy’s name,” she said, twirling the doll around. “And my middle name too.”

  A model-thin woman with a messy ponytail and a baby clutched in her arms rushed into the foyer. Her face fell as she glanced at Josh with his camera and then at me. Clearly we’d made a mistake bringing the camera before I’d had a chance to soften her up for an interview.

  “Are you Marie Ellis?” I asked.

  She nodded, turning pale.

  “Kate Bradley. From Channel Eleven. We received a report that you found a hundred thousand dollars on your front porch.”

  She sighed. “You’ve talked to Cristina.”

  “She thinks it’s a miracle.”

  “Well, I don’t want anyone to know about it. In fact I insist that you not mention me or my family in your report.”

  Her sharp tone startled the baby, and he started to wail. In a flash that seemed to defy the laws of physics, she pulled a pacifier out of her shirt pocket and popped it into the baby’s mouth. Instant silence.

  “Would you talk with me off the record then?” I motioned to Josh to put down the camera.

  She hesitated for a moment and then lowered her voice a notch. “We don’t think it’s any miracle. We think someone made a serious mistake and we expect they’ll return any moment to reclaim their money.”

  “You don’t think a Good Samaritan is involved?”

  She shook her head. “Michael, my husband, is the head of neurology at St. Joseph Hospital. Look around. We don’t exactly need help from a Good Samaritan.”

  I glanced at the midnight blue Mercedes convertible in her driveway. Unless this Good Samaritan was as nearsighted as Mr. Magoo, he couldn’t possibly have mistaken this family as needy.

  “How do you know Cristina Gomez?”

  “She was my housekeeper a few years ago. This morning she called and asked if I had given her a hundred thousand dollars, and I told her I’d found the same amount on my front porch. Now I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Was the money in a canvas bag with the number eight on it?”

  “It was in a bag, but I don’t remember if there was any number on it,” she said.

  “Would you mind checking?”

  The pacifier fell out of the baby’s mouth, and he wailed again. Marie picked it up and tried to slip it back into his mouth, but this time he wouldn’t take it. The crying grew louder, and then the little girl came to the door crying too.

  “Mommy, I lost my doll shoes.”

  “I have to go,” Marie said, and without another word, she closed the door.

  If she had been the victim of a crime or a witness to one, I would have pressed harder to get an interview. But it’s not a crime to find one hundred thousand dollars on your front porch, no matter how rich you are. Besides, this was a feel-good report, certainly not one that warranted guerilla-style interview tactics.

  Still, none of this made sense. If a Good Samaritan really were involved, why would he give money to both the needy and the wealthy?

  “What if this Good Sam isn’t doing this for good?” I asked Josh as we headed to the van.

  “Someone who’s given away two hundred thousand dollars sounds good to me—like someone I’d like to meet.”

  “Maybe there was a time when people went around doing things to help other people, but I think the days of the Good Samaritan are over. The guy we think is a Good Samaritan is probably scamming us.”

  Josh placed the camera in its case and snapped it closed before we climbed into the van. “How long have we been working on the Bummer Beat together? Almost a year, right? At every accident or disaster, you’re always trying to find the people who are working to make the situation better—the helpers. This Good Samaritan giving money away is one of the helpers, Kate.”

  I wanted to agree with him, but I knew better. “Lots of people appear to be good samaritans when in reality they aren’t. Remember the story we covered last month about the teenager who rescued four people from a burning apartment building in Pomona?”

  He nodded. “He got a medal from the fire department.”

  “Everyone hailed him as a hero until they found evidence he had started the fire.”

  Josh frowned and started the van.

  “How about the story we covered about the guy who was helping people fix their cars that had broken down in parking lots around the city?” I continued. “Then we found out that he had disabled the cars when the owners were away and offered to fix their cars for a small ‘donation.’”

  “Okay, you got me,” Josh said. “But even you have to admit that this is different. For the first time, we’re covering a story where no one is dead, injured, or in a hostage situation. There’s no threat at all. Why can’t you see this as someone just doing something good?”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Maybe I’ve lost that ability.”

  My report about Good Sam aired on the noon cast, a sixty-second story to help viewer
s forget the previous twenty minutes of murder and mayhem before we started talking about the weather.

  Chapter Two

  A dozen long-stemmed white roses wrapped in white paper and silk ribbon were waiting for me on my desk when I returned to the station that afternoon. I slipped the card off the plastic stem, crumpled it without reading it, and buried it deep in my trash. Then I walked across the reporters’ bullpen in the center of the newsroom and placed the flowers on one of the news interns’ desks.

  I’d done this every time I’d received flowers from him. One of the interns asked me once if I knew who had left expensive flowers on her desk, but I feigned ignorance. I didn’t want to explain why I was giving away flowers from my fiancé.

  Ex-fiancé. We had broken up six months ago, but Jack couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that we were never getting back together. At first I’d assumed that if I didn’t return his phone calls or acknowledge the flowers, he’d stop trying. But Jack was used to getting what he wanted, and my ignoring him didn’t discourage him.

  The newsroom’s receptionist hailed me from across the bullpen. “Kate, there’s a man on the phone asking for you. He’s rambling on about a Good Samaritan or something.”

  No wonder we ranked fourth in the market. Our own employees didn’t even watch our newscasts. “Thanks, Ann. You can put him through.” I waited for her to transfer the call.

  “Kate Bradley?” the man on the phone said. His voice was full and deep, almost chocolate in its smoothness. “Saw your report about Good Sam today. Have any idea who’s behind it?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Can I get your name?”

  “Rather not say. You think there’s some kind of Good Samaritan behind this?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “It could be some kind of marketing promotion. Maybe a radio station or an Internet start-up giving away money to get publicity.”

  “They do that?”

  “Last month Gnarly.com staff members stood on a street corner in Manhattan in the middle of rush hour and handed out twenty-dollar bills with an announcement about their new outsourcing service. They gave away ten thousand dollars in an hour and got ten times the value of that in marketing exposure.”

  “That’s fine for ten thousand. But what does anyone hope to gain from giving away three hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Actually Good Sam has only given away two hundred thousand,” I replied.

  “Two hundred doesn’t include me. I found a hundred thousand dollars on my front porch this morning too.”

  I gripped the phone tightly. “What is your name?”

  “He left a note with the money.”

  I scribbled a giant question mark on my notepad. “What did the note say?”

  “It says, ‘This is for Lauren to go to law school.’ Lauren’s my daughter.”

  I put down my pen. “Does she want to go to law school?”

  “She got accepted at Georgetown last fall, but I’m on a pension, and she doesn’t earn enough as a second-grade teacher to afford it.”

  “Do many people know that your daughter wants to go to law school?”

  “Just about everyone she knows.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might’ve wanted to help her get there?”

  “Lots of people want to help. But they don’t have a hundred thousand dollars to give away,” the man said with a chuckle. “You got any idea who’s behind all this?”

  “Not yet. But I’d like to record an interview with you.”

  Silence. Then he cleared his throat. “Can’t do that. If people knew we got a windfall like this, there’d be no end to the calls and e-mails asking for a piece of it.”

  The muscles in my shoulders tensed like they always did when I was on the verge of losing an important interview. “There’s not much of a story if I can’t talk to you on camera.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Will you reconsider?” I continued.

  More silence. He had hung up.

  Channel Eleven offers its newsroom employees quite a few perks. We get free tickets to movies distributed by our movie studio parent company, and at Christmas we get discounts on used cars at one of the mega car dealers that buys commercial time during our afternoon talk shows. But the perk everyone covets the most is the Cellini. Time after time this gleaming hunk of chromed steel in the newsroom kitchen brews up a perfect, frothy confection of milk and espresso; topped with whipped cream and sprinkled with just the right touch of cinnamon, it’s pure heaven.

  I had just started on my third perfect cup and was scrambling to finish a story about Good Sam for the Channel Eleven website when Alex, one of the intern reporters, rushed over to my desk. He was dressed in the standard intern uniform: khaki pants pressed a little too carefully, a button-down shirt, and Converse tennis shoes.

  “This just came over the scanner. Police were called to the scene of a robbery-assault in Westwood.”

  I kept typing. “Anyone injured? Dead?”

  “No, but—”

  “Is a current or former celebrity involved?”

  “No.”

  “Do we have photos? Cell phone video?”

  He shook his mop of shaggy brown hair.

  “Not much of a story then.” I drained the rest of my espresso and stood.

  “The only thing is—”

  “Look, Alex,” I interrupted, “if we reported every robbery that happened in LA, there wouldn’t be any time left for important stuff. Like celebrity news. And if we don’t make time for celebrity news, we don’t sell commercials. And if we don’t sell commercials, we don’t have jobs.”

  I started to walk away. I knew I sounded like a blowhard, but I hoped I had conveyed an important lesson about what kinds of stories were newsworthy at Channel Eleven.

  “I heard on the scanner that the guy was assaulted because the thief was trying to steal a large canvas bag from his front porch. I guess the homeowner put up one heck of a fight and the burglar didn’t get away with it.”

  “Where’s the story in that?” I said over my shoulder.

  “I thought it might be related to your Good Sam story. You know, because of the canvas bag on the front porch.”

  I whirled around. “Smart thinking. I’m impressed,” I said, with my best crow-eating smile. “Where are you going to school, Alex?”

  “Northwestern University.” He handed me a Post-it note. “I took down the address. You think I could work on this Good Sam story with you?”

  Interns don’t usually get assigned to individual stories or specific reporters. They work wherever they’re needed most each day—usually researching story ideas, retrieving video, answering phones, or working on scripts. But Alex clearly had strong reporter instincts and he was bold enough to ask me for an assignment, something most interns rarely do.

  “Definitely. I’ll get David to assign you to me and this story.”

  As Josh and I raced to the address Alex had given me, my phone flashed with a text from my father. Well, actually it came from his assistant because my dad definitely doesn’t send text messages. It read: NY Times says LA is hit-and-run capital of US.

  If there’s any bad news about Los Angeles, my dad always let’s me know about it. From his perspective, the city is filled with shallow, celebrity-obsessed people who lounge on the beach and regularly dodge bullets from gang members, get stuck in snarled traffic, and breathe smog-choked air.

  But that’s not the Los Angeles I live in. Yes, LA is a place of gorgeous beaches and paradise weather, but it’s also a reporter’s dream with its mudslides, wildfires, and earthquakes. Millions live well below the poverty line and many thousands are in gangs, yet LA is also home to one of the world’s greatest concentrations of millionaires and billionaires. Which makes it a city where anything can—and does—happen. An ordinary news day can include a brush fire, a celebrity meltdown, a big-rig crash, a dead body on a hiking trail, a freeway chase, and a dust storm.

  “This is it,” Josh said, inter
rupting my thoughts. We pulled in front of a modest one-story home, a brown bungalow with a broad front porch. But what distinguished this bungalow from all the others on this quiet street in West Los Angeles was its lawn. The grass was the deep emerald green that you would see on the East Coast where they get rain year-round. Seriously, it looked like it something out of Better Homes and Gardens—there wasn’t a single weed or blade of crabgrass growing anywhere, and the edges looked as though they’d been trimmed by hand. I’d seen grass this perfect once in front of a condo building in Beverly Hills. But that stuff turned out to be artificial grass. I leaned down to touch it; this was the real deal.

  Josh waited in the van again while I headed for the front door. Given that the man we hoped to interview had scuffled with a thief, we both suspected he wouldn’t be nearly as welcoming as Cristina Gomez had been and we didn’t want him to slam the door when he saw the camera. When there was no answer at the front door, I walked down the driveway to the backyard. A white-tiled pool glittered in the late afternoon sun. Most people would have thought it a beautiful sight—pale blue water, its surface rippled in the light breeze. But after my near-drowning experience last month, I hated water and all its camouflage. Oceans, lakes, swimming pools—I despised them all. Water had nearly claimed me once, and I was certain that, given the chance, it would attempt to finish what it had started.

  “What are you doing back here?” A voice startled me from behind.

  I swung around to see a thin man standing on the back porch. He was about my dad’s age, with a neatly trimmed beard and silver wire-rimmed glasses.

  I walked toward him and extended my hand. “Hi, I’m Kate Bradley from Channel Eleven.”

  He looked at my hand but didn’t shake it.

  “I understand police were called here because of a robbery-assault,” I continued.

  His face darkened. “I already talked to another reporter about it. From Channel Four. Anna Hernandez.”

  Damn. Anna Hernandez, the guerilla reporter. Anna could take even the simplest fender bender and sensationalize it into a matter of national security. I had no doubt she’d position this story of a foiled robbery into something akin to a standoff in the Die Hard movie franchise.