The Darkest Hearts

by Nelson George

  D tried not to be caught checking out the attorney’s butt when she walked away.

  “Smart woman,” Amos said.

  “Seems like it,” D responded.

  Then there was a pause as both men geared up for the uncomfortable conversation to come.

  “So,” Amos began, “you can imagine I was surprised to hear from you.”

  “I’m sure you know it’s a conversation about trouble.”

  “I’m gonna assume that this has nothing to do with that rapper you’re working with in Atlanta, or Night, or anything else aboveground?”

  “Yeah,” D said, “it’s underground shit.”

  Amos stared at D, evidently displeased. “If you’d made that clear, we could have met at my office.”

  “Well,” D said, “in case I’m being watched, I wanted it to look like a social meet-up, not business.”

  “Okay, James Bond, we’re here now.”

  “There’s an FBI agent asking questions about me back in Brooklyn. I just need some background on the agent, how much of a priority I am for them, and if this guy is freelancing or on some serious FBI-sanctioned investigation. You know a lot about freelancing agents.”

  Amos raised his voice: “Stop being so fucking coy and tell me what the fuck this is about.”

  “Eric Mayer,” D said evenly. “His body was found in Jamaica Bay.”

  Amos thought a moment, then asked, “What is this agent’s name and what is he asking about?”

  D related what he’d been told by Ice and what Fly Ty had heard. Amos ate his French toast slowly, not speaking. D waited, letting this power broker connect all his internal dots.

  Finally Amos said, “Do not meet with this agent Conrad until you hear from me. You hear me?”

  “I’m sitting right here.”

  “When Mayer disappeared, I knew he had it coming,” Amos said quietly. “You know how he turned on me. Someone was gonna take him out. I knew it wouldn’t be me—I don’t do that kind of thing. But I know in Brooklyn there are people who would cut throats for a quarter. People who’d be friends of yours. But I never made a big deal out of it ’cause that shit never splattered on me.”

  So Amos knew D had been involved in Mayer’s death. How much he knew, D didn’t care to ask. So he just puffed his chest and spat back, “But you did smell of it.”

  Amos wasn’t feeling D’s smug response. “Motherfucker, I could make a phone call and you’d be bound, gagged, and stomped into the size of a blueberry. Shit, I wouldn’t need to call—I could just text.”

  D knew this was true but he wasn’t there to back down. “You have enough on your conscience, Amos,” he said, trying to sound conciliatory though his tone was severe. “I lost someone I loved in that shit, so don’t threaten me. Besides, the world is a different place. Bill Cosby isn’t America’s father. Jesse Jackson can barely speak. There are crazy people talking about LeBron being better than Jordan. Amos, you don’t wanna join that list of fallen black gods of America. You have friends in high and low places. Find out what you can and we’ll talk. Thanks for the sit-down.”

  D got up quickly and felt Amos’s eyes on his back, hoping he’d do what D asked and not text the wrong people.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WHITE MEN IN SUITS

  D had no idea there was an area in Los Angeles named Highland Park. It was farther east than he’d been in the City of Angels. Leave it to Night to find new territory to explore. They hadn’t seen much of each other in the last eight months between D’s business building and Night’s work in Korea. His old friend seemed to have (finally) beat down his addiction demons and even had a girlfriend he hadn’t met at a club, bar, or backstage. Night had met Mina at Crossroads, a vegan restaurant in town, and they were now living together in Silver Lake. So now Night rarely came west of Hollywood and was mostly working out of a small studio called the Red Gate off Echo Park Avenue.

  The Red Gate was next to a drive-through Starbucks. There was an actual red gate in front, through which you entered into a small studio whose decor looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1993. Felt like the bar in Pulp Fiction. D was waiting for Marsellus Wallace to come out from the back talking shit. Night sat on a bruised-red leather sofa eating vegan tacos with a Mexican American engineer named Sam.

  After their greetings D observed, “This spot was probably retro before retro knew it was retro.”

  “Yeah,” Night said with a chuckle, “they can’t even auto-tune in this motherfucker—right, Sam?”

  Sam agreed: “This joint is digital optional, analog dedicated.”

  There were beat-up Persian rugs on the floors, lots of leather (and pleather) sofas and chairs, curvy eighties lamps, and bit of analog equipment (mixers, stereos, vinyl) stacked along the walls for atmosphere. It was a recording studio that time forgot, which suited Night just fine.

  “I wanted you to hear this music in the right environment,” he said, “not on some Beats By Dre earphones while lounging in your ATL Jacuzzi.”

  “Okay,” D said, “you got me out in the ass end of LA. There’s more vintage boutiques out here than luxury-car dealerships, so I know you have some throwback shit for me.”

  “Throwback,” Night replied, “and throw-forward. I’ve realized that you shouldn’t spend more than 10 percent of your time worried about what people think of you on social media, people who never did a creative thing in their lives except make up a Twitter password.”

  “Okay, my suddenly wise friend, what have you been doing with the other 90 percent of your time?”

  “Eating. Sleeping. Fucking. Creating. But not in that order.”

  “I’ve seen Mina, so I know in what order you mean.” The old friends shared a laugh and then D said, “Okay, my man. Okay. You’ve been thinking a lot about your next moves?”

  “About time, right? I spent, what, thirty-eight years just doing shit? I was like an animal—all basic instincts, no reflection, introspection, or inspection of self. Time is precious.”

  “You made some good music in your youth, Night. Enduring shit, actually. ‘Black Sex’ is a classic, no doubt about it.”

  “I didn’t do enough, though,” Night said. Even frowning he still had the dark Gable looks that made him a sex symbol. “You see Bey? She outworked me. She outworked all of us. She wasn’t precious about a sound. She was the product and she used whatever sound or image or book or whatever was hot to stay hot. While I was playing with my dick or having someone else play with it, Bey was at work. Like her husband said, Can’t knock the hustle.”

  “Okay, Mr. Hard Work. Mr. Focus. Mr. Nine-to-Five. What ya got for me to hear?” D asked.

  Night motioned to Sam, who was now sitting in the small control room. Music flowed out of the Red Gate’s speakers. There was a touch of auto-tune on Night’s voice, but the track wasn’t a slave to the twenty-first century. There were a few Prince-like keyboard horn patches and it sounded like he’d done some kind of digital treatment on an 808. The keys were old Hohners and Wurlitzers and the guitars were as busy as James Brown’s backside. It felt funky and ominous, like an outtake from There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Night’s vocals were as angry as D had ever heard them. No song titled “White Men in Suits” was getting programmed next to Justin Bieber anyway.

  Singing hymns to property,

  Ringing bells to poverty,

  They’re all just white men in suits.

  White men in suits, white men in suits.

  Living lives of luxury,

  Drowning in designer things,

  Laughing from penthouse peaks,

  They’re all just white men in suits.

  White men in suits, white men in suits.

  They stand on legal steps,

  While taking illegal steps,

  They talk of mortality,

  When they just don’t want you free.

  They’re just white men in suits,

  White men in suits, white men in suits.

  Where do you go? Where do yo
u flee?

  When the doors are closed and the jackals roam free,

  They don’t need masks to hang us all from trees,

  And charge us with a fee.

  They’re just white men in suits.

  White men in suits, white men in suits.

  When the keyboard horns faded and the beat disappeared, Night turned to D and said, “That is a long way from ‘Black Sex,’ right?”

  “Absolutely,” D said.

  “So, what do I do with it?”

  “That song right there is what the Internet was made for. Lemme make up a release plan and bring it to you.”

  “You sure you have time now that you’re trappin’?”

  “That’s money, Night,” D said. “This is love.” He reached over and gave his old friend a hug. “Now, nigga, I hope you have some kind of new love song somewhere so I can get you some dates in Europe after the Trump Twitter storm behind this shit.”

  Night cracked up. “All right, D. Chill out.”

  D loved “White Men in Suits,” but he knew it was going to be one more ball to uneasily juggle in the months ahead.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LET ME DOWN

  D hiked up to a landing at Runyon Canyon and was sitting on a bench looking down at Los Angeles spread out in front of him. His legs were tired but his lungs were happy. Filling them with the city’s slightly gray oxygen still beat walking on the Equinox treadmill and being barraged by TV screens. There were two cute ladies taking selfies as they sat on the edge of the hill. A man in awfully tight leggings served treats to his shaggy dog. A gay couple sat on the other side of the bench talking about a horrible boss.

  Speaking of bosses, D knew messages from the East Coast were already pouring in. He reached into his backpack and reluctantly pulled out his Samsung. There were a lot of fresh missives but one in particular caught his eye: LIL DAYE! WE MET IN ATLANTA. He opened up the message:

  Mr. Hunter, my name is Dorita Johnson. I met you at Magic City with Lil Daye, who I have been in an intimate relationship with for two years and seven months. We have expressed our love for each other many times. I was going to have a baby for him when I got pregnant but he wanted me to wait and I did. That was very painful for me, but for Lil Daye I did it. He said it wasn’t time and that I had to protect him until he was clear of his wife. He said he would marry me. He doesn’t say that now that he’s making big money. I didn’t want to hurt him but he has hurt me to my core. I have text messages from him and videos of his manhood. I know the code to his home and his wife’s dress size. I am not asking for much. I just need $150,000 right now to help me out. I gave him everything and he has left me alone and with nothing. I won’t cause him any trouble. I am not out to hurt him. I would never want to hurt him. He hasn’t kept his promises to me and that’s hurtful.

  D sighed deeply. He remembered Dorita from that night at Magic City. He figured much of what she wrote was true. If she said she’d had a baby by Lil Daye, he would have understood. But he was surprised to hear that Lil Daye had urged her to have an abortion and knew that information would be a bad look on black Twitter. D had no idea how Mama Daye would view this. She had to know Lil Daye had women, but that thing about knowing Mama Daye’s dress size was explosive.

  Now it was really time for D to earn his manager’s fee and be the guy who makes bad things go away. Before he did any heavy strategizing, however, he called Lil Daye, left a message, and then sent a text: Dorita Johnson just e-mailed me.

  He sat on the bench watching people absorb the LA vista as he awaited a response. Two minutes later, his phone rang. “So,” D said by way of greeting, “how do you want me to handle this?”

  “You don’t. I got this.” It sounded like Lil Daye wanted that to be the last word.

  “Really? She wouldn’t have sent this to me if you two were getting along. It sounds like she wants me to negotiate a truce.”

  “Dorita is a personal problem of mine,” Lil Daye said emphatically. “I’m sorry she got at you but I just want you focused on making deals and expanding my brand. This is some ATL shit, so I’m gonna handle it an ATL way.”

  “That makes me nervous.”

  “We making money moves, D, and we gonna keep making money moves. I ain’t gonna endanger my cash flow for some bitch. All right?”

  Lil Daye danced around the specifics of what an ATL way meant before he got off the phone, leaving D peering out at the city with very different eyes than just fifteen minutes earlier. Rap stars were not known for having good relationship judgment. Leaving this in Lil Daye’s hands sounded like a fast track to the penitentiary. That thought was D’s cue to head back down Runyon Canyon and get to work.

  * * *

  When D picked up his phone at seven a.m. the next morning, he was expecting a text from New York. A product manager at Universal Music Group wanted to go over the track listings and credits for a vinyl release of Lil Daye’s last LP. Though it wouldn’t mean much to Lil Daye’s profitability, D thought a vinyl release would give the project a bit of old-school class.

  But the text wasn’t from New York. Or maybe it was. He didn’t recognize the number, which had an 814 area code. Whoever it was didn’t leave their name either, not that it really mattered. The mystery of the sender was dwarfed by the impact of the link. It was a New York Times article headlined, “ENTERTAINMENT MOGUL ACCUSED OF SEXUAL ASSAULT: Entrepreneur Walter Gibbs Abused Seven Women.”

  D sat up in his bed, the morning LA sun flowing in around his window shades. He’d known Gibbs since his days as a doorman at Manhattan nightclubs, back when New York was hip hop “every day, that’s my word,” and Jay-Z was sharing champagne “with six model chicks, six bottles of Cris’.” Gibbs had been a role model for D as he moved from hired beef to talent manager. The businessman had been an adviser on most of D’s deals.

  Gibbs had always been aggressive with women and, in D’s eyes, successfully so. D thought back to blurry nights at Lotus when he’d pulled Gibbs out of the ladies’ room on several occasions. Had those girls been willing or just stoned out of their minds? Had Gibbs’s hands under tables been seduction or a prelude to rape?

  Damn, D thought.

  He texted Gibbs: You see the Times article?

  Four seconds later, Gibbs replied, Come over. The man had been an early riser ever since he, along with half his generation of hip hop folk, had relocated to Los Angeles. He often meditated after waking up. Afterward, he was usually doing business calls to New York by eight a.m. Gibbs’s lifestyle was a long way from nineties New York when rappers, models, and sundry creatures of the night roamed the Big Apple.

  According to the Times article, it was precisely those nights that had Gibbs in trouble. One woman accused him of forcing her into oral sex in the back of an SUV. Another said he’d made her jerk him off at the Russian bathhouse on East 10th Street. The most serious was a model who claimed to be underage when they got busy at his Tribeca loft. There were some familiar names in the piece. D recognized the name of an aspiring publicist–turned–advertising executive from back in the day. But thankfully, most of them he didn’t know. As he read the piece, they seemed united—they all testified that the spirit of the #MeToo movement had emboldened them to speak out.

  As D got dressed, he recalled how tight Dwayne Robinson had been with Gibbs. Both their careers went back to the days when hip hop was called rap and it was an underdog movement, not a billion-dollar business. Thinking about Dwayne, his unfinished book, and the legacy of nineties violence, D realized that the past was inescapable and that the excesses of youth could calcify into middle-aged scars.

  D’s last visit to Gibbs had left a lingering bad taste in his mouth. It had been November 8, 2016. Gibbs had organized an election-night soiree which, as the electoral college results came in, transformed into a wake. The electoral college had made a raging, narcissistic reality-show star and debt-ridden businessman into president of the United States.

  People muttered to themselves. A wo
man cried in a corner and sipped a lot of red wine. A Jewish man raged at God out by the pool. Everyone in that room was either a Democrat or Independent and all had, to varying degrees, supported Hillary.

  Gibbs had sat there in front of his huge screen and wondered if the new commander in chief was still open to cutting deals. Gibbs knew the man had no principles so, in his opinion, the Dems could still find common ground. His naive optimism was a holdover from those nights when the then-young real estate mogul had been open to anything. Trump and Gibbs had partnered on a couple of small ventures in Atlantic City back when that was the new promised land. They hadn’t spoken in years but Gibbs wondered if maybe some of that old friendship still had value.

  D handled security at so many parties where the then-dark-haired businessman would sit in banquettes with Gibbs and others, talking about deals, models, and where to live in the Hamptons. That was just before he discovered that public racism was an effective marketing strategy and called for the lynching of the Central Park Five. No amount of evidence that those five boys from Harlem were not rapists ever got him to apologize. In his bottomless desire for acceptance, Trump’s hip hop hangs had been replaced by the embrace of the right and a different brand of predatory capitalism. Needless to say, Gibbs and his old buddy never rekindled their friendship. Who needed hip hop connections when you had the power to launch nuclear warheads?

  * * *

  Gibbs lived in Beverly Hills, not far from Sunset Boulevard, in a house protected from the street by tall hedges decorated with roses and gardenias. There were several cars parked along the curb so D had to drive up the block to find a spot. He was about to text for the code to the gate hidden by the hedges, but then saw that it was open. So was the large brown front door. The interior hallway was dotted with art (paintings by Clemente and Basquiat). Other than the artwork, the place had the feel of a very fancy Asian-fusion restaurant. From the stairs, he heard CNN droning on, though its sound was somewhat drowned out by live voices. A woman’s voice was the loudest.