“She was a ho from way back. Everybody knew that,” she said matter-of-factly.
When D climbed the steps and entered the master bedroom, he found Gibbs sitting in bed, glasses on his forehead, iPhone in his hand, and laptop by his side. Scattered around the room on chairs and cushions were Gibbs’s personal assistant Rachel; his boy from way back, Stace; TV producer and one-time employee, Sunny; his partner in several ventures, Ben Wilson; and a young attractive Asian woman whose dazed expression made D think she was Gibbs’s current girlfriend.
Dominating the conversation was Sunny, a jack-of-all-trades entertainment business figure who’d done publicity and talent booking, and had been in Gibbs’s circuit for decades. It was her voice that D had heard from downstairs.
“I never did like that bitch,” she said before she noticed D, then turned to him and asked, “You ran through her too, didn’t you?”
“No,” D said evenly, “I did not.”
“Then you must have been the only man in Manhattan who didn’t.”
Deciding to ignore this whole conversation, D turned to Gibbs and asked how he was feeling.
“Well, my life isn’t over,” Gibbs replied, “but other than that, I don’t feel too good.”
Usually animated by the joy of deal making, spiritual practice, or charming women, Gibbs now appeared low-energy, like an oven waiting to fully heat. Thankfully, he was not teary-eyed, but the sadness in the room was like a weight on him. It was weird to see Gibbs so down. Despite all this, his natural spark had been burning brighter since he’d started meditating. Gibbs had grown stronger, mentally and spiritually, and had developed a genuine heal-the-planet attitude.
The last few months, as D grew his management business, the two had mostly communicated via text and e-mail. Gibbs had a million projects cooking, but always took time to help D with deal points. D felt guilty that they hadn’t hung out before he left for Atlanta. Whatever rush that negotiating used to bring was, while not gone forever, permanently altered. Gibbs’s life would now be defined as pre- and postaccusation. The same for those around him. The people in this room were his friends and business partners. D wondered how many would still call him that in six months.
“You hurt your back today?” D asked, motioning to a back brace lying on the bed.
“Nawn,” Gibbs said, “last week. I really can’t get around too well. When God shits, it splatters everywhere.” He flashed that salesman’s smile but there was no mirth behind it, just the shadow of a buried joke. “It ain’t a shock,” he went on. “Ever since the Harvey Weinstein thing, I’ve had people claiming I bent them over tables at my office or grabbed their pussy. One of the girls wanted $300,000 for her ‘church.’ When I said it didn’t happen, she went away until today.”
“When did she say that happened?” D asked.
“Nineteen fucking ninety-three. I never touched her and would never have touched her. D, you know how I roll.”
“But Gibbs,” Sunny said, “you did manipulate a lot of women.”
“This woman here said she felt threatened and afraid,” Stace said, glancing down at the newspaper.
Sunny shot back, “She sucked his dick out of fear? Please. She sucked his dick to help her career.”
Gibbs didn’t like the implication that he got laid for status alone. “Well, maybe she just liked me.”
“So,” D asked, “none of these women thought you’d do something for them?”
“I didn’t like Harvey Weinstein,” Gibbs replied. “I didn’t like Bill Cosby. I’m not them and I will not accept being lumped in with them. I had consensual sex with a lot of women. Period. These seven women are wrong. They are caught up in the moment. They are having second thoughts. Maybe I didn’t end things right. I dunno. I know what I did and didn’t do. But okay, they may remember things differently.”
“What’s our next move?” Sunny asked.
“I have a call with my lawyer and publicist soon,” Gibbs said. “They are drafting a statement.” He was clearly trying to hold it together, but there was no doubt he was shaken to his core.
“Most of them are looking for a payday, right?” said Sunny. Of all the folks in the room, she was the only one who didn’t sound defensive. She had a high opinion of Gibbs and a low opinion of other industry women.
“You need to hire Trump’s attorney,” Stace said. “He’s obviously an expert at getting NDAs signed.”
“Shit,” Gibbs said, “Trump was there when I met half these women.”
“Didn’t you hook him up with hos?” Sunny asked.
“Oh . . .” D said, for a moment excited at the prospect of implicating the president. But reality set in quickly. “I wish you could go there. You know a lot about him.”
“I do,” Gibbs said softly. “But being linked with him wouldn’t help me. It would open the door to more bullshit.”
D could see where this was going. He wanted to be loyal to Gibbs, but he also realized there were things about his friend’s behavior he didn’t know and never would. Gibbs had been too good of a friend to abandon. D would never do that. But if he was going to be useful, he knew he had to be clear-eyed and uncomfortably truthful. He said to Gibbs, “Can I offer a bit of advice?”
“Why the fuck you think I invited you over?”
“Take this L with grace,” D said. “Do not call these women liars. Your attorneys are gonna say, Don’t admit anything. Maybe from a legal viewpoint they are right. But in the real world of public opinion and Twitter, you can’t win by attacking them.”
Gibbs looked D in the eye and said, “I did nothing wrong.”
“But these women say you did. In this moment in history, being a powerful, rich man is not an asset. All the advantages it gave you before are now liabilities if you flex on these women the wrong way—”
“I hear what you’re saying, D. But I am not a bad person and won’t let myself be defined as one by standing back and being silent.”
At that moment, the awaited text from the Universal product manager hit D’s phone. He stepped off into a corner to read it, though really he was just looking for a graceful exit. The mood was like a wake, except that the body was alive. A few men D had encountered over the years had been accused of sexual misconduct pre-Weinstein. D’s days running a security company and being a private bodyguard had put him in contact with stars of all perversions. Drug use? He looked the other way. Run-ins with the law? He tried to keep them out of jail. Underage girls or violence against women? He stopped it when he could and quit when he couldn’t. It was easy to become an accessory to a crime.
As Gibbs and his crew continued their conversation, D wondered if he’d been an enabler, protecting men from little crimes that later gave way to true evil. Had he just been a tool in helping rich people exploit poorer folks? Not what he wanted to contemplate at nine in the morning.
As D was about to exit the room, Gibbs called him over to the bed and whispered, “Stay my friend, D.”
“Don’t doubt that,” D responded. “Don’t ever doubt that.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PRETTY WINGS
D rarely traveled out to Malibu. It was a part of the whole LA entertainment business lifestyle he’d yet to explore. So when R’Kaydia Lelilia Jenkins invited him to a lunch at Soho’s Little Beach House in Malibu, he said, “Of course.” He was a Soho House member, but the general membership didn’t apply out at the location by the ocean. You needed a special deal to gain entry and, apparently, D hadn’t quite made the cut. There were so many levels to the game out here.
He knew LA was a town defined by access. What meetings, parties, lunches, etc., you had access to meant what possible deals or projects could you stumble into. To really prosper in LA you needed a web of connections, a web that had never included very many people of color. Quincy Jones had the town wired for decades. D’s sometimes-partner, sometimes-antagonist Amos Pilgrim had been an African American inside man since the days they’d been called Negro. These two were the
rare legacy men of color in this dreamscape metropolis.
R’Kaydia had married into Malibu via the film producer Teddy Tapscott, but she’d also had her own serious Silicon Valley connections before the wedding. She was building a brand-new Hollywood mix of music, celebrity, and twenty-first-century tech savvy. Black Twitter loved R’Kaydia’s swag. White men loved R’Kaydia’s looks. You didn’t need much more than that to make money these days. Her relationship with D had been rocky at times. He didn’t find her quite as sexy as she required, which irritated her. Plus, despite working together on the hologram deals for Dr. Funk and Night, she felt D wasn’t giving her the proper respect as a businesswoman.
On the ride out to Malibu, D wondered if he was a male chauvinist. Had he seen too many groupies in his bodyguard days to take businesswomen seriously? Instead of truly embracing R’Kaydia, he’d kept her at arm’s length. If she’d been a black man making these moves, wouldn’t they have been closer? Maybe R’Kaydia’s combination of beauty and brains did scare him. Perhaps, if he was really being honest with himself, he just resented the fact that she was married to a white man.
The Little Beach House was on the left side of the Pacific Coast Highway coming from Santa Monica and shared a parking lot with Nobu, a combo of moneyed watering holes for the pretty. After he checked in, D walked past a long bar up a staircase lined with myriad paintings and photographs along the white wall. On the second floor, he found a dark wooden deck to his right. Sitting at the table nearest the ocean was R’Kaydia, giving D serious Audrey Hepburn vibes with large oval sunglasses, large yellow hat, sundress, sandals, red purse, and matching belt. She was sipping white wine and gazing at the waves rushing against the beach below. When she smiled, it was a movie-star moment. Her teeth were so white that D had to squint.
“D,” she said, standing and giving him a hug, “so nice of you to come out here to see me.” Her perfume was honeysuckle with a hint of ginger. D took it in before sitting down. “How was Atlanta?”
She sat forward in her chair as D talked about Lil Daye, trap music, and the general ATL vibe. Her brown eyes were lighter than D remembered and danced with amusement as he described the night at the strip club with Lil Daye. Talking with the black Audrey Hepburn about trap music and pole dancers by Malibu’s beach was about as weird as it gets, D thought.
R’Kaydia pulled out her iPad and showed D visuals for the next phase of her company’s evolution; they were investing in virtual-reality locations around the country, including comedy VR experiences. It was all cool, but also stuff R’Kaydia could have sent links to. He figured there was more to this meeting than hyping him on her latest tech play.
Finally, R’Kaydia said, “You know your friend Walter is an asshole, right?”
“I knew he was aggressive with women,” D said carefully. “But what he’s being accused of I never saw.”
“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” she replied.
“No,” he said quickly. “It doesn’t mean that. But it’s hard for me to digest. I know of a few of those women from back in the day. A couple were class acts. A few weren’t.”
R’Kaydia sighed. “What’s a class act to you, D?”
Damn. D knew he was already in too deep. “A woman who can be flirty and sexy,” he said, “and still keep her poise and not get played by the men on the scene.”
“So,” she leaned toward him, staring hard, “you believe these classy women more than you believe the nonclassy women?”
“I didn’t say no stupid shit like that, R’Kaydia. What goes on behind closed doors only has two witnesses. So I don’t really think you know anyone sexually if you haven’t slept with them. But I can’t lie, it hurts to see all Gibbs accomplished, all the good he did do, obliterated. So lemme ask you: did Gibbs cross the line with you?”
“He said some slick shit to me once or twice, but if he’d touched me I would have snapped his little dick with pliers. I don’t have a girlfriend in this town he hasn’t tried to make a move on.”
“It’s hard to get a grown-ass man to change his behavior,” D said, “especially one with more money than you. You can offer advice. You can make comments. You can tell him calm the fuck down. But he’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. I wish he could have found and stayed in a healthy relationship. I’m not sure he’d know one if he had it. But hey, I’m not sure I would either. I mean, who am I to advise anybody on relationships?”
“Well, this is a new world, D,” R’Kaydia admonished. “Women’s voices are being heard no matter how powerful the man is or how uncomfortable it makes you or any other man feel.”
Now it was D’s turn to sigh. He looked out at the ocean for a moment, thinking before speaking. “Listen, when I did security I had to toss many a predatory fuckboy out on his ass. I know many men ain’t shit. I know that. You see people at night high off drugs and money and you see the ugliness bold as fuck. But this Gibbs thing has me feeling some kind of way and it will for a long time. He’s done me so many solids over the years; he’ll never be a villain to me—even if people try to tell me he should be.”
“Listen,” R’Kaydia said, soft but stern, “be his friend—he’s gonna need them. But let me give you a bit of advice: don’t get caught out there sayin’ he didn’t do this or that. You may even believe it. But know that people are keeping score. Don’t get caught on the wrong side of history.”
“I hear you.” D was looking in her direction but also right through her, his insides a jumble of despair.
R’Kaydia spoke to him like he needed to be snapped out of a trance: “I’m not telling you this just because I like you. I want you to be able to help us both make money. I know Gibbs’s role in your business career—adviser and deal consultant. Well, he’s gonna be busy trying to save his own ass. You’ll need new friends.”
“Aren’t we friends already?”
“We get along well enough, I think,” she said with a sly smile. “We’ve made each other money. I live in the tech world and that’s where the real money is nowadays. You get along well with talent. Our skill sets complement each other. Our agendas match up.”
That’s cold-blooded, D thought, but on point too. He said, “Sounds like you’re proposing a partnership.”
“Not a formal one. Not yet.”
“What’s your husband think of this idea?” Oh damn, he immediately thought, why did I go there? He could feel her writing Male Chauvinist on his forehead with her eyes.
“I give him advice, D,” she said with a bit of steel. “He doesn’t give me advice. I do what makes sense. A stronger connection between you and me makes sense. Think about it.”
A woman D didn’t recognize approached the table—thin, white, blond, and dressed tastefully, including the big rock on her left hand. She and R’Kaydia began chatting about a charity event the following week in the Pacific Palisades.
D’s gaze drifted out to the Pacific. In the distance he saw two dolphins dancing like children in the waves. A good life, he thought.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
LAKE BY THE OCEAN
After dining with R’Kaydia, D drove down to Santa Monica and posted up on a bench overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway. The ocean was in the near distance and the Santa Monica Pier to his left. Homeless men wandered around talking to themselves. There were portly tourists taking selfies with the Pacific as the backdrop. Teens on electric scooters zoomed by, heedless of pedestrians. A seagull hung over D for a moment and then, after some deliberation, decided not to dump on his head.
The sun was slowly lowering and giving off a nice wave of heat as the ocean breeze made sweating impossible. In an hour or so, he’d need to button up his jean jacket and grab a cup of tea on the 3rd Street Promenade. But at this moment, with his arms hanging over the top of the bench, his legs spread wide, his eyes closed, he felt an especially pleasing breeze and contemplated that perhaps he should just join the active homeless population in Santa Monica and set himself up on this nicely curved piece of green-p
ainted metal. D smiled as two seagulls danced a duet in the distance against the light-blue sky.
Whenever D questioned his new life in Los Angeles (which was often), he came out to the Pacific Ocean and the city’s sins were redeemed. D had considered getting a place in Santa Monica, Venice, or another ocean-side community, but ultimately decided against it. He didn’t want to become immune. No way did he want the calmness that overtook him on his visits to the ocean to become commonplace. He’d found only a few things in his life that made him feel this good. He didn’t want to OD on it.
With his head clear and his breath slow, D knew it was time to turn his attention to more unpleasant matters. He felt like he’d done his due diligence with Lil Daye. Like a lot of poor black kids in Atlanta, Daye (real name Javon Dillard) had been in and out of juvenile detention centers for much of his adolescence. He hadn’t grown up in a trap house, but many of his friends had. Bits and pieces of that lifestyle filled out his rhymes.
Far as D was concerned, that background just made Daye another young black boy in a country that viewed them as a) cannon fodder, b) athletic entertainment, c) walking nightmares, d) born to be jailed, or e) valueless. It was D’s opinion that no matter what you thought about today’s rap as art, its existence was justified because it empowered the hungry in ways few avenues of American capitalism did.
D hadn’t looked too deeply into Ant’s background, an oversight that Ice’s cautionary words made him regret. He knew Ant had been part of Lil Daye’s camp since his first tracks blew up on SoundCloud, serving as an adviser, bodyguard, and financial backer. But if Ice knew about Ant, it meant he might have some bodies on his résumé, and that was not a good look.
Down in Atlanta, Ant had projected low-intensity hate toward D, though he’d never actually said anything threatening. It was just a vibe of discomfort. Maybe he was disappointed that he couldn’t make the moves D could. Maybe he was insecure that he’d reached the ceiling of his usefulness and that translated into hostility toward D. If Ant actually owned a piece of Lil Daye, then D was making him money. But foolishness often led people to work against their self-interest. The problem was that aside from Ice, whom he didn’t know how to get in contact with, his only other real contact in Atlanta was old-ass Fly Ty Williams, who didn’t have any idea who ran ATL trap houses.
The Darkest Hearts Page 9
