“Oh, God, no,” I said, springing out of my chair. “I think she’s gonna do it. Give her a few minutes. This stuff is so good. We’ve got to get her to say it on camera.”
That’s when we heard Martina throwing up. At first I thought maybe she was just coughing, but after a few seconds, it was pretty clear she was having a violent reaction to something. I looked at Laurie and put my hand to my forehead, pressing my fingers to my scalp, trying to keep my brain from exploding.
“I say we get the crew in here before she can leave,” Laurie said.
“I say we—” my thought was interrupted by the sound of the bathroom door opening.
“I’m sorry,” Martina said, clearing her throat and coming back into the living room. “I think it would be better if you came back tomorrow, earlier in the day.”
“Just one more minute, Martina,” I said, gesturing for her to come sit back down next to me. “I know when we spoke on the phone it was important to you that we get this right. So let me make sure we have all the details. You were undocumented, yes? You worked for Fluke off the books, correct?”
“Yes,” Martina said.
“And during that time, you fell in love with him?”
“Yes.”
Before I could finish my thought, I heard a thud. I looked to my right and saw that Laurie had dropped her ginormous purse on the floor. I shot her a barbed look for breaking my flow.
“Oops, sorry,” she said. “Just making sure my ringer was off. Please proceed.”
“And you had a romantic relationship,” I went on, “even though he was married at the time.”
“Yes,” Martina nodded. And Laurie nodded. Strike two. Fluke’s bullshit marriage stance officially blown to bits.
“But I’m still unclear on why he bought you this house. Why did he buy you a house?” That’s when I heard another slam. This one sounded like a screen door. Damn fotog! I told him not to come in until I called him!
“Mommy?” a girl’s voice called from the back of the house. “They let me go early today because the kids had soccer practice—” A teenager burst into the living room and stopped when she saw us. “Oh! I didn’t know there was company over.”
Martina looked at the girl and cleared her throat. “I forgot to tell you, ma doudou. These are the ladies from that senior center. They came to interview me for the job.”
I nodded at Laurie and tried to affect the look of a kindly volunteer from a senior center as I stared at the girl, who looked eerily familiar, like maybe she was a cousin of mine, or like I’d seen her on a TV show, though that seemed impossible. And then the hair on the back of my neck prickled. I knew where I’d seen her—in Victor Fluke’s face. She looked like a young, female Fluke. I tried to keep my eyes from popping out of my head and my mouth from saying, “Holy shit! Hand me that Peabody now!” I turned to Laurie, whose eyes had turned into exclamation points.
“This is my daughter, Chrissy. So now that she’s home from her work, you should probably go.”
“Oh, don’t leave because of me,” Chrissy said quickly. “Do you need me to be a reference for my mom? She’s an excellent worker, I can tell you that.” Chrissy pulled out a chair.
“We’d love to hear about that,” Laurie said, turning her body immediately toward the daughter. “You must be very proud of her.”
“Oh, my goodness, yes. It hasn’t been easy for her, being a single mom. I’m sure she told you, my dad died when I was just a baby,” Chrissy said, shaking her head with the old loss. “So it’s just been me and her my whole life. And sometimes it’s been a struggle, but mom has always worked hard to keep this home and to have food on the table.”
“Oh, yes,” Laurie said. “Yes, she was just telling us.”
“Of course, I try to help. I work.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“I’m fifteen.”
“Where do you work?”
“I babysit. I take care of two kids. It doesn’t pay a lot, but it helps. And if Mom can work at the senior center, that will help a lot.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, and was tempted, right then and there, to offer Martina an imaginary job at the senior center. “You sound like a good team,” I said instead.
“We are! It’s like Mom always told me, ‘You don’t get to choose your parents but you can choose—’”
“—Your path,” I said slowly, finishing her sentence and gripping the pillow on the sofa, because it was all getting overwhelming. “I know that expression.”
“Right, and I lucked out with Mom.” Chrissy got up and went over and gave her mother a hug around the shoulders. “I’m going to go change. Nice to meet you. My mom is the best. If you hire her, you’ll never be sorry.” Chrissy gave a wave, then went into a bedroom. Martina sat there, looking shell-shocked.
“Martina,” I said softly, “I see why you’re scared to talk to us. I understand now. But this isn’t right. Does Fluke know he has a daughter?”
“Oh, yes,” she whispered. “He took me to a doctor. He said it was to make sure the baby was healthy, but this doctor was trying to trick me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He kept asking if I was sure I wanted to make a baby. He told me it would be very easy to stop the pregnancy.”
I didn’t have to look at Laurie for that one. I could read her mind. Strike three. Fluke wanted to ban abortion—for everyone except his pregnant girlfriend.
“Did he ever support you?” I asked. “Ever provide child support?”
She shook her head no. “He didn’t want his wife to know.”
“How have you supported your daughter?”
“I work. Different jobs all the time. And sometimes, if things are very bad, then Social Services helps.”
Laurie jotted that in her notebook, then said in her all-business but quiet voice, “Martina, Victor Fluke has gone after people on government assistance, he’s gone after immigrants. He calls children of immigrants ‘anchor babies.’ He calls them ‘Ameri-can’ts.’ He says he wants to outlaw abortion. But he operates with a different set of rules for himself. You can tell that story better than anyone.”
Martina shut her eyes and tears poured out of the corners. “I can’t,” she whispered.
“Yes, you can,” I told her. “We’ll take it very slowly. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to.” I hoped if I said it again, it would reassure her and seal the deal.
“I can’t let my daughter know I’ve been lying to her. She can’t find out that Victor Fluke is her father. She hates that man. She yells at the TV when he comes on. She calls him Victor Fake. I can’t do this to her. I’m all she has. She trusts me.” She wiped her tears and shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Martina,” I started, but she stood up and walked to the door and opened it.
“You have to go now,” she said. “Right now.”
I stood up from the sofa and reached for my bag, waiting for Laurie to work her special magic. Surely Laurie had something up her sleeve for this very occasion that could stop this derailment and get Martina to do the interview, expose Fluke, and get me back on the sofa with Rob. But instead, Laurie reached for her big black bag and walked to the door. “Thank you, Martina,” was all she said, then nodded at me to follow as she walked out.
Once outside, I put my fingers to my eyebrows to try to keep myself from crying. I shut my eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and when composed, I walked up to the crew van. “Sorry, guys. It’s no-go. Sorry to keep you out here for nothing.”
“Hey, no worries,” the fotog said. “That was the easiest twelve hundred bucks we’ve made in a long time.”
Laurie and I stood silent on the sidewalk watching the crew drive away. Then I turned to her and shook my head. “Fuck. I really thought we had her for a while there. This is horrible.”
; Laurie smiled at me. A cat-that-ate-the-canary smirk that gave me a hopeful lift. Maybe she had a plan after all.
“What?” I asked.
“I got it,” she said. “I got the whole thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I recorded it on my cell phone. We got it.”
“Laur, you can’t do that.”
“What do you mean? I did it.”
“Yeah, but you can’t use that.”
“Oh, I’m using it. And you should, too.”
“Laurie! We didn’t get her permission. She didn’t agree to that.”
“Doesn’t matter. Arizona is a one-party-permission state. We’re golden.”
“Laurie!” I grabbed her by the wrist. “You can’t air this. I promised her we wouldn’t use anything she didn’t want us to.”
“Yeah, you shouldn’t have said that. But I didn’t promise anything. And don’t worry. I won’t say I recorded it. I’ll say BNN ‘acquired’ the cell phone video from a source.”
“Laurie!” I involuntarily clutched my stomach because I thought now I might throw up. “You cannot air an off-the-record conversation! You know that.”
“She didn’t say it was off the record.”
“She doesn’t know to say that! She doesn’t know those rules. Stop playing this game.”
“Me? What game are you playing? We came out here to get the story. We got the story.”
“No, we didn’t! She doesn’t want her story to be public. She would never have talked to us if she thought you were taping her. She would never have let us into her home!”
“Come on, Amanda.” Laurie sighed. “You think the reporter who got the cell phone video of Mitt Romney saying that ‘forty-seven percent’ stuff asked Romney for permission to air it? How about Anthony Weiner? You think he gave the New York Post permission to show his dirty texts? Sometimes cell phones change the course of history—and this is one of those times.”
“That’s not fair, Laurie,” I said, shaking my head. “Martina isn’t a politician. She’s a source. And you cannot burn a source! You protect your sources. That’s the first rule they teach you in journalism school. She trusted us!”
Laurie cocked her head at me. “Don’t worry. I don’t think we’re going to be needing this source again.”
“I’m not worried about us. I’m worried about her! That’s off-the-record information.”
Laurie set her jaw. “Amanda, this isn’t your Journalism 101 class. It’s a different world than it was ten years ago. We’ll be lucky if no one else breaks this story before tonight. Who knows what those crew guys heard. Maybe they planted a listening device on the window. Maybe Suzy Berenson has put two and two together by now. Maybe some blogger has figured out where to find Martina.”
“Laurie, you can’t do this! This is a real person. Martina and Chrissy are real people. They’re not just ‘good gets.’ This is not ‘fly in, get the gore, fly out!’ This will ruin their lives. You heard what Martina said about her past in Haiti. If this comes out, she’ll be deported. Have you thought about that? She is all her daughter has!”
“I don’t get what you’re doing right now,” Laurie said, staring at me. “We came here for the story. We got the story. This is the biggest story of our careers. It’s the story of a lifetime. You think Woodward and Bernstein shouldn’t have run with the Watergate story because it was going to ruin someone’s life? Not every story has a happy ending for all the players. Sorry. But we got the story we came for.”
“But Laurie, it’s not our story. It’s her story. And she’s not ready to tell it.”
“I don’t think that’s right, Amanda. It’s all of our story. Fluke paid her off the books—that’s tax fraud. He didn’t pay child support, and she’s on welfare—that’s every taxpayer’s problem. If he wins, he’s going after undocumented immigrants and their children. Maybe we’ll be saving Martina and Chrissy by doing this.” Laurie was staring straight at me, her arms out. “In one fell swoop, his followers see who he really is.”
“I get that, Laurie!” I said, grabbing both her arms. “But slow down. I have an idea. I think we can get her to talk. She was close to doing it. I’ll get us a hotel room and we’ll come back here first thing in the morning and convince her to do it. We still have twelve days before the election. We have time.”
“You can do that. But I’m not. I’m not sitting on this for another day.”
Suddenly I had a new thought that could stop this runaway train. “Have you checked your phone to make sure it’s there?” I asked. “I bet the audio is terrible. It’s probably unusable.”
She hit the play button and I heard Martina say, “I can’t have my daughter know I’ve been lying to her. She can’t find out that Victor Fluke is her father. She hates that man.” Clear as a bell.
“God, this app is incredible,” Laurie said, marveling at her own phone. “You can hear things like a mile away. I gotta call Gabe and figure out how to get this on tonight. Shit, it’s already 7:30 in New York. I really hope the fucking lawyers can vet all this in the next three hours. I bet you can get FAIR News legal to approve it by the time Wake Up starts tomorrow. You want your old job back? This is the answer.”
Yes, of course! That was the answer. I’d call the FAIR News legal team and toss this one in their laps. Surely the lawyers would find a way to justify using the clip. They’ll argue its newsworthiness and national import, and then, hey, whatever the lawyers say goes. Yes! A higher authority would relieve me of this guilt and sickening feeling, and then I won’t have a choice in the matter. I waited for the feeling of relief to wash over me. But instead, the nausea got worse, making me double over and take deep breaths.
“Shit,” Laurie said, still looking at her phone, “I’m not getting service here and I gotta put this video into Dropbox. I say we go to the airport. I’ll find a Starbucks and get this to New York. It’s up to you what you want to do with it.”
“Laurie, we won’t be able to put this one back in the bottle once it explodes. You’ve got to think long and hard about the unintended consequences here.”
“Let’s go,” Laurie said, opening the car door. “I’ll think at the airport.”
• • •
At 7:30 P.M., I looked up at the big TV monitor in the gate area of my red-eye flight and held my breath. I hadn’t seen Laurie since she dropped me off at the curb and went to return the car and make her calls. And she hadn’t responded to my texts pleading with her to give it one more day for the smoke to clear so we could make a rational decision. I put my hands together in prayer position and stared up at the open to Gabe’s show, praying that Laurie, or at least the lawyers, had made the right decision.
“Good evening,” Gabe said. “Tonight we begin with violence that’s broken out at another Victor Fluke rally, this one outside of Pittsburgh. We go live now to our chopper reporter over the scene . . .”
I exhaled and hoped I was right—that the network lawyers had put the kibosh on it. Laurie and I could regroup and I could devote the next ten days or however long it took to convincing Martina to tell her story. I sat there in the hard plastic chair for the entire hour, to make sure there was no mention of Martina. And when Gabe’s show was over, I reached for my phone and sent an email to Fatima.
TO: Fatima
FROM: Amanda
RE: Housekeeper
I tried. She won’t do it. Sorry. Getting on a plane back.
She responded right away:
TO: Amanda
FROM: Fatima
Tell her we’ll give her a ton of promotion and airtime. We can make it an hour special!
I snorted, then typed.
TO: Fatima
FROM: Amanda
She doesn’t want to be on AT ALL, not for a second, much less an hour.
TO: Amanda
FROM: Fatima
>
Tell her we’ll fly her out here. Maybe she wants a free trip to NYC! We’ll put her up at a great hotel. We can get her B’way show tickets!
Good God.
TO: Fatima
FROM: Amanda
She won’t do it.
Then I turned my phone off, grabbed my bag, and got on the plane, waiting for Laurie to take the seat next to me. But she never came.
Chapter 35
Hot Mic
The flight landed at JFK just before six in the morning. I was dehydrated, grungy, and achy, and couldn’t wait to get home and take a hot shower. I fell back in the taxi and looked out the window at the cars filled with commuters already humming to work, realizing I didn’t really have anywhere to go and maybe I wouldn’t ever have a morning show to go to again. Then I sat up with a start, remembering that I hadn’t turned my phone back on. When I did, it started pinging like a pinball machine.
TO: Amanda
FROM: Fatima
RE: Housekeeper
SO PSYCHED YOU GOT HER!!!! WHAT TIME CAN YOU BE HERE??
TO: Amanda
FROM: Fatima
RE: Housekeeper
We have you in at 8:45, unless you get here earlier. That way we tease your interview all show!
TO: Amanda
FROM: Fatima
RE: Housekeeper
HAVE YOU LANDED??? CALL ME IN THE CONTROL ROOM!!!!
I dropped the phone to my lap and put my hands to my face, my fingers over my eyes. What the hell is happening? My phone chimed a text, which I hoped was Laurie, but when I looked, it was Rob.
Hey! Great work in Arizona! Congrats. What time will you be here?
I felt the familiar sensation of my stomach dropping off the top of a roller coaster, and typed as fast as I could, my hands shaking.
What do you mean? I don’t know what’s happening.
F’ing Suzy Berenson trying to scoop you! he typed right back. How fast can you get here with the video?
What video? I typed back.
I sat in the taxi chewing the inside of my cheek waiting for Rob’s response, watching the clock, wishing I could call him, but I knew Wake Up, USA! wouldn’t hit a commercial until 6:18. I dialed Laurie’s number and when it went straight to voice mail, I yelled into it, “What’s happening? Call me!” Then I bit my nail, watching my phone until 6:18.
Amanda Wakes Up Page 32