Good Sam

by Dete Meserve

  Once, when doing a story about carjacking, she stood in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, yanking open the passenger doors of unsuspecting drivers to illustrate how vulnerable we all were to potential carjackers.

  “I’m not here about the robbery. I’m here about the contents of the bag on your front porch.”

  He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Just some old clothes. Nothing valuable. I already told Anna and the police all that.”

  I motioned toward the small red and black bruise by his right eye. “Looks like you put up a big fight to keep the guy from stealing your ‘old clothes.’”

  He rubbed his face. “Probably shouldn’t have…”

  “My guess is that bag contained a hundred thousand dollars in cash, and there was a lopsided number eight stamped on it.”

  He fixed a pair of steel gray eyes on me. “How could you possibly know that?”

  “I’ve interviewed three others who also found one hundred thousand dollars on their front porch. It was on the Channel Eleven news yesterday and today. We’re calling him Good Sam, short for ‘Good Samaritan.’”

  “I don’t really watch Channel Eleven much. The anchors shout too much.”

  I frowned. Could that be why we ranked fourth? “Why would someone want to give you so much money?”

  “No idea. I thought there’d been some mistake when I found the money. But the bag was addressed to me.”

  I straightened. “Could I see it?”

  He stepped back inside for a moment and brought back an empty canvas bag. On the side was the same lopsided eight I’d seen on Cristina’s bag, but pinned to the bag was a note written in careful block letters. It read, “Dr. K.”

  “Dr. K?”

  “Most people mispronounce my last name, so I have them call me ‘Dr. K.’ Easier than Kryvoskya.”

  “Then whoever gave you this money must be someone you know.”

  He combed his fingers through thin waves of gray hair. “That’s a lot of people. Factoring in all my students and people I’ve met in twenty years of teaching, I’d say we’re talking about a potential pool of ten thousand.”

  “You’re a teacher then?”

  “I’m a professor in the entrepreneur program at UCLA’s Anderson School.”

  “Can you think of anyone who had the means to give you a hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Plenty of my former students have the ability to give away that kind of money. But I can’t think of a single one who had a reason to give it to me.” He glanced at his watch. “Look, you’re wasting your time with me. Larry Durham also got money. And he saw the man.”

  “He saw Good Sam?”

  “Says he did.”

  I scribbled the name in my notebook. “How do you know Larry?”

  “He’s done carpentry work around my house over the years. He called me this morning, asking if I knew anything about the money he found on his front porch. He actually thought I might have had something to do with it. Me, on a college professor’s salary!”

  It was well past five when Josh and I reached Larry Durham’s home in Hollywood, a faded brown one-story house that sat behind a tired front lawn and a sagging wooden fence that had seen its better days during the Reagan years.

  While Josh readied his camera equipment, I started up the sidewalk to the front door. As I reached the front porch, a man rushed out, shrugging on a denim jacket as he pressed a cell phone to his ear. He appeared to be in his midthirties with closely cropped hair and a curved barbell piercing above his left eyebrow. I opened my mouth to say something and he put up his hand.

  “I’ll be there in under thirty,” he said into the phone. Then he slipped it into his pocket. “If you’re here to give me your Watchtower literature, you’re wasting your time.”

  I looked down at my black jewel-neck jacket and tailored Donna Karan pants and couldn’t see why he thought I was a door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness.

  “Actually I’m from Channel Eleven.” I waited as my words sunk in. Most people brighten when they hear I’m from a TV station, hopeful at the possibility of being on the news.

  Larry wasn’t most people. “And?”

  “We heard you found a hundred thousand dollars here on this porch. Can we talk about it?”

  He met my question with stony silence. “Rather not,” he said finally, slipping his other arm into his jacket and shaking it on.

  “Can I ask why?”

  “You can ask. But I gotta run.” He brushed past me and loped toward a faded green Oldsmobile Cutlass.

  I followed him to the car. “I only need a few minutes of your time,” I implored through the window.

  He rolled down the window. The edge of a blue tattoo peeked out over the neckline of his T-shirt. “Look. I don’t want to be on TV. I’m out of work. I don’t want people knowing my situation.”

  I flashed him a pleading look, a hint of a flirty smile. “What situation is that?”

  He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “Hurt my back a while ago. Laid me up for three months. No one wants to hire a carpenter on the injured list.”

  “So someone put a lot of money on your front porch to help you out. A Good Samaritan perhaps. Any idea who it was?”

  He lit his cigarette. “Could’ve been lots of people.”

  “You know many people who would help you out with a hundred thousand dollars?”

  “That’s the thing. I never told anyone I needed money.” He gripped the steering wheel. “No one knows I’m out of work.”

  “Surely someone knew. Someone in your family, a friend—”

  “I never told anyone.”

  I straightened. “Dr. K says you saw the man who put the money on your porch. Is that true?”

  “Yeah.” He turned the key in the ignition. The car chugged for a few seconds, then it started. “But it was dark—after midnight—and I only caught a glimpse of him. By the time I opened the door, he was gone.”

  “Would you talk to me on camera?” My breath was caught up high in my throat. I had a feeling his answer would be no.

  “Can’t. Gotta run.”

  “Can I level with you, Larry?” I said, lowering my voice to a half whisper. “If I don’t get this interview, my assignment editor is going to consign me to stories about baby zoo animals and lightning-bolt survivors.”

  He shrugged and put the car in gear. “At least you’ve got a job.”

  Okay, so that approach wasn’t working. “Look at it this way,” I said. “Other stations are already on this story, and it’s only a matter of time until they track you down. Do you really want swarms of reporters descending on your house like locusts at all hours of the day and night? Or do you want to do an exclusive interview with me and get it over with?”

  He thought about it for a moment, then he turned off the car. “Three minutes. That’s it. If you’re not done in three, I’m taking off.”

  Minutes later I had a microphone in my hand and Josh was pointing a camera at Larry. After years on the Bummer Beat, I’d become adept at nabbing quick sound bites from hurried interviewees. There’s an adrenaline rush that comes with it, akin to what a day trader must feel when she sees her stock start to take off or what a basketball player experiences when he throws the ball from the three-point line. In that moment, anything is possible.

  But I was also worried. With his tattoos, pierced eyebrow, and tough demeanor, Larry Durham wasn’t exactly the kind of person you see in TV news interviews, unless he’d been arrested for a crime.

  “Larry, you found one hundred thousand dollars on your front porch this morning,” I said, opening the interview. “Do you have any idea who might have given it to you?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Why do you think you were singled out to receive the money?”

  “No idea.”

  I bit my lip. If he continued with one-word or two-word answers, I’d have to work miracles with the editor to make this interview worthwhile.

&
nbsp; “Do you think there could be a Good Samaritan behind it?”

  “Nah. Los Angeles isn’t kind of place where you’d find a Good Samaritan. You hear about those kinds of things happening over the holidays in small towns, where people know each other. Not in a big city like this in the dead of January.”

  I smiled. I couldn’t have written a better intro for this story if I’d had all day to think about it. “What are you going to do with the money?”

  “Pay off my bills, save a little. Maybe give some of it away.”

  “Some of the other recipients of Good Sam’s generosity found the number eight on the bags with the money. Was there a number eight on your bag too?”

  “I didn’t see if there was or not.”

  “Does that number mean anything to you?”

  A strange look brushed across his face for a brief instant, but then he shook his head.

  “Are you certain?” I pressed.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” He glanced at his watch. “Time’s up.”

  The Good Sam story aired four minutes into the all-important six o’clock newscast. I watched on one of the dozen or so monitors scattered throughout the newsroom. One of the anchors, Kelley Adams, introduced the report.

  “Under cover of darkness, he drops one hundred thousand dollars in cash on the front porch, leaving no clues to his identity,” Kelley announced. “Who is the mysterious Good Samaritan who has given away nearly half a million dollars to local residents? Channel Eleven’s Kate Bradley is in Hollywood with the latest.”

  There I was standing in front of Larry Durham’s house with chunks of concrete missing from his front steps and a battered aluminum screen door as a backdrop.

  “Throughout the day on this station’s newscasts and on other news programs around the country, we report on the frightening, the grim, the tragic,” I said, in the taped report. “We tell you about acts of crime, cruelty, violence, and trauma with headlines like ‘Neighbors Mourn Deaths of Six Children’ or ‘Man Drowns in Freak Accident.’ But what you’re going to see next isn’t that kind of story.”

  “That’s my Katie!” someone said from behind. I didn’t need to turn around to realize who it was.

  “Dad!” I said, hugging him briefly. “I thought we were having dinner tomorrow.”

  “We are. But I was in the area and thought I’d swing by and see if you were here.”

  My dad never changed. Even at age sixty-two, he still had a thick head of wavy hair, only a little grayer than I remembered. Despite all the dinners and lunches out and the high-powered events he attended, he’d managed to stay surprisingly trim. When I was a kid, he used to take me on five-mile runs, and I had to push to keep up with him. Now, I imagined, he probably had slowed down a little, but clearly he was still staying in shape.

  “I’m having dinner with the head of the California Democratic Party and some of his officers tonight.” He brushed a speck of lint from his tailored brown merino wool suit. “I was hoping you’d join me.”

  I frowned. “I already have dinner plans. And you know how much I love spending the evening listening to political talk.”

  “You might actually find this dinner interesting. Election season is almost here, and a few key California congressional seats are going to be up for grabs.”

  “So they brought you out here to get your opinion on who should run and who can win.”

  “That’s the drill.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “Katie, you know, now would be a perfect time to segue into a political beat at CNN. Dan Rawlings there keeps asking me when you’re going to stop covering breaking news out here and come work for him on the political beat.”

  “I actually like what I’m doing here.”

  “Reporting on child abductions, bomb threats, gang shootings, murders. … Katie, you’re much smarter than that.”

  This wasn’t the first time my dad had registered his disapproval of my career choices. In fact, he managed to make it a part of nearly every one of our conversations in recent months. As he entered his sixties, I think it began to weigh more heavily upon him that his only child wasn’t following in his political footsteps. Last month, he had paved the way for an interview working the political desk at MSNBC. Now he was working on a job for me at CNN. At this rate, he’d have me hosting a Sunday morning political show before the year was over.

  “Dad,” I said, trying hard not to let him know he was getting under my skin, “I’d like to think I’m covering the stories where the criminal gets caught, the person in trouble gets rescued, and the house in the midst of the mudslide is saved. I’d like to think that maybe amid all the violence and cruelty, I’ll find some good in this world. The first responders on the scene. The people who catch the suspects. The average guy who helps out the stranger...”

  His expression softened. “You remind me of your mother when you talk like that. She would be so proud of how you turned out.” He paused, and then his tone brightened. “I am proud of you too. And the upcoming election is shaping up to be one of the most newsworthy in a long time and I don’t want you to miss this opportunity to cover it. Think about it, and let me know when I can call Dan at CNN.”

  I squeezed his hand. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”

  He left a few minutes later, after pressing several crisp fifty-dollar bills into my hand and giving me a quick peck on the cheek. It had been a habit of his since I was little. The amount of money changed, but thankfully my dad hadn’t changed much at all.

  I was on my way out of the newsroom a few minutes later when Judy, the nighttime receptionist, stopped me. “A man named Jack Hansen called for you. He wanted me to tell you…” She glanced at the notes she’d taken. “He’s back in town from New York and wanted to see if you’d meet him at The Ivy at eight.”

  “Would you call him back and let him know I can’t make it?” I fired back. Then I felt bad for putting her in the middle. Judy had been a receptionist at Channel Eleven for thirty-two years. She’d been working for the news department before there were computers in the newsroom, before we did live reports from remote locations, before women reporters got much airtime. So she took this business seriously, never gossiped, and never got involved in anyone’s personal life.

  “He told me you’d say that,” she said efficiently. “And when you did, I was supposed to tell you to meet him for cream and toast.” She glanced at her notes again. They were written in shorthand, so I couldn’t fathom how she could read them. “No, that was cinnamon toast.”

  I didn’t mean to smile, but one crept across my face anyway. The night I’d met Jack nearly three years ago, we had eaten cinnamon toast.

  The way Jack tells it, he saw me from across a crowded restaurant and “knew instantly he had to get to know me.” Even though I was already on a date with someone else, he came over, introduced himself, and whisked me away to a French bistro, where we talked through the night.

  That’s not exactly what happened.

  I had just started seeing Rich Hendricks, an investment banker specializing in Asian markets. He was good looking in a Christian Bale kind of way, smart and ambitious, but he couldn’t get through dinner without taking at least three calls on his cell phone. I should say he couldn’t get through dinner without shouting through at least three calls. If he had been shouting in Italian or French, I might have found it a little sexy. But there’s very little to find appealing about a white guy shouting in Japanese all the way through a three-course dinner.

  That night, as I picked at my grilled salmon and listened to Rich’s end of yet another conference call with the Japanese, someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  I turned to look into a tanned face framed by a corona of unruly ash brown curls. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, laying on a gusher of a southern drawl. “Aren’t you Kate Bradley from Channel Eleven?” He extended a strong hand. “I’m Jack Hansen. I’ve wanted to meet you ever since Rich brought you to the company picnic in July.”

  Turned out we had more in com
mon than I’d expected, because as the son of former treasury secretary William Hansen, Jack also knew firsthand the perks and the pitfalls of growing up in a family of politicians and politics. I also was charmed by a man who knew how to hold up his end of the conversation without a cell phone glued to his ear, but I kept wondering why Rich didn’t object, why he didn’t ask his coworker to leave his date alone.

  Rich covered the mouthpiece of his cell phone and whispered, “This call is going to take a while. Why don’t you two order dessert?”

  “I think Kate is ready to go,” Jack said.

  Under ordinary circumstances, I would have been irritated if a man spoke for me. But Jack said it with a good ol’ boy finesse that made it sound playful and casual.

  “Catch up with you later, Kate.” Rich rose, his cell phone still pressed to his ear, planted a quick kiss on my cheek, and sent me on my way.

  His comfort with the situation perplexed me. At a French bistro around the corner, everything became clear.

  “So you and Rich work together?” I asked Jack.

  “You could say that,” he said. “I’m Rich’s boss. Actually, his boss’s boss’s boss. My father and I started the firm five years ago.”

  Rich had been so consumed with impressing the owner with how hard he was working that he hadn’t realized the guy had horned in on his date. Then again, maybe he didn’t care.

  Our waitress, a sliver of a woman with fine gray hair spun into a tall bun that defied gravity, stopped by again. “Have you decided what you’d like yet?” The key word was yet, as we’d been sitting there for nearly half an hour and hadn’t ordered anything.

  “Nothing for me,” I said.

  “Oh, come on,” Jack prodded. “Live a little.”

  “Really, I’m full.”

  “If you weren’t full,” he asked, a twinkle in his eye, “what would be your favorite food of all time?”

  I hesitated for a moment, but there was no real contest in my mind. “Cinnamon toast.”

  “Not on the menu,” the waitress snapped.

  “I’m sure your chef back there knows how to make cinnamon toast,” Jack said, all southern gentleman charm. And when Jack turns on the charm, I swear he could buy and sell the diamonds off the back of a rattlesnake. “Would you ask him to make us both a piece, please? We sure do appreciate your kindness.”