by Lamar Giles
He hunched forward, recognizing that I wasn’t feeling whatever he thought I’d feel, and rapidly tapped at his phone, allowing for another half verse before he got it paused. “Tell me what happened, Paris. I’m not a journalist right now.”
It all came out. My beef with Grandma over leaving home. My money not being what it should be and Paula with the excuses. Kya getting brand-new on me and saying I was rotten trash or whatever. Fuse and bum Shameik sneaking around.
“The way my so-called friends flipped was the worst. Adults are adults, y’all don’t get how anything is. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Fuse and Kya backstabbing me like they did. It felt beyond betrayal. I would’ve trusted them with my life—now I know that would’ve been the absolute wrong move. Jealous heifers. They were just waiting to step on my throat.” It felt good to say it out loud.
“Wow. Better you found out sooner than later. Believe it or not, I’ve been through this sort of thing. It hurts now, but a year from now, two years from now, when you’re traveling the world and being the star you were born to be, you’ll barely remember their names.”
That lit up something in me. An ember, so warm. He sounded like a TV dad, the only kind I ever knew. “You got kids, Winston?”
He took his time answering, flipping the phone in his hand like an oversized coin. “Yeah. We’re not as close as I’d like. That’s my fault. This business has a way of straining relationships. As you know.”
“They don’t want things better between you and them?”
He spun his chair so he wasn’t facing me. I panicked, afraid I’d crossed the line, pushed him away. “My bad. It’s not my business.”
He didn’t correct me. “Speaking of business. If you’re really unhappy with Paula—from what I’ve turned up in my research, you wouldn’t be the first—you’re not obligated to stay with her.”
That I knew. When I wasn’t in the studio, I was researching other, better managers. Maybe I’d need a lawyer. Maybe Winston would help. “How would I break away? Who would I need to talk to?”
He jabbed his thumb toward himself. “You’ve started in the right place. First, you gotta be serious about exiting the PK Music Group. We don’t want to roll on this if you’re not sure.”
“Say I was. What’d be next?”
“If you were certain, really certain, I’d ask you this question: Have you ever heard of VenueShowZ?”
I lay in my bed, weary, still not sleeping well, and texting while a Nat Geo science program about uploading consciousness into the cloud played low on my TV. It’d been six days since Fuse talked me out of cooking Florian with that stun gun. Six days of nowhere leads from that little tech witch. No one’s seen or heard from Lil’ Redu, like he never even existed.
FUSE
Wanna set phasers to stun, go back to Florian’s house, and see if we can motivate her into some better results?
ME
As tempting as that is, I’d like to believe she’s smart enough not to jerk us around given the amount of pain we could easily visit upon her, if we so choose.
FLORIAN
Guys, you do know I’m still on this group text?
ME
Shut it, Flo. Fuse—are we kidding ourselves here? It’s going on a month.
FUSE
I don’t have a good answer.
Aside from her trying to track Lil’ Redu, part of our deal to not beat Florian down involved her running interference with her other masked colleagues, so she wasn’t totally useless. She continued to hang out in their secret forums, keeping their expectations low and, essentially, not spearheading further harassment since she appeared to be the local boss. The Dark Nation was finally off our backs. But finding Paris’s killer was never solely about them, and we were running into a wall.
Winston told us the police had already questioned Lil’ Redu. If they let us go because obviously we didn’t do it, and let him go, didn’t it stand to reason there was nothing there?
FUSE
And you believe Paula?
ME
We’ve been over this. She didn’t snitch on us, and she could’ve.
FUSE
Yet. Doesn’t mean innocence.
ME
She’s coming through on all her promises for the concert. The buzz is getting crazy. All the tickets gone. That’s a lot of visibility if you’re trying to distance yourself from the murder you committed in a fit of rage.
FUSE
Or it’s misdirection
FLORIAN
Guys … I think I have something.
We’d been here before. I didn’t bother getting my hopes up. Florian thought she had something when she’d gotten into Lil’ Redu’s SoundCloud account and discovered some metadata pointing to a computer in Hampton. It’d been an internet café. She’d thought she had tracked the tricked-out Range Rover he was known to ride in. It’d been a rental from a sketchy place that kept horrible records. She’d thought she’d found one of his girlfriends, but that’d been some Instagram model whose pictures he’d stolen and reposted. The more we looked, the more fictional Lil’ Redu became. A rap ghost.
Florian had seemed so bad at this, during that long ride back from Hampton the other day, I had to ask how she’d gotten into our phones.
From Fuse’s cramped backseat, she’d said, “You use the school’s Wi-Fi. It’s not very secure at all.”
Fuse had said, “What’s that even mean?”
“Kya, open your phone.”
I did.
“Swipe left until you can’t anymore.”
I’d swiped my index finger through the three screens of apps that normally occupied my phone. It should’ve been three screens only.
One lone app had been present on that fourth screen. Something called Hack in the Box.
I’d wrenched in my seat, grilling her. “You put this on here? How? It can’t be just unsecure Wi-Fi.”
She’d responded slowly. “You’d be surprised how much a public hotspot opens you up to.”
I’d grabbed Fuse’s phone from the center console, swiped to her last screen, sighed.
Fuse had said, “You do this to everyone in the school?”
“Just the interesting people. High-profile couples. Athletes. No one ever notices.”
“Not even when you blast their personal business for the whole world to see?”
Florian had the nerve to sound indignant. “My sites wouldn’t be so popular if people weren’t so hungry for—”
Fuse had jammed the brakes, locking my seat belt and throwing Florian forward so she bumped her head on the back of my seat. “Ow!”
“Sorry,” Fuse had said, resuming speed. “My bad. What were you saying?”
“My sites are—”
Fuse had jammed the brakes again.
“Ow!”
I’d said, “Take it off, Florian. Both of our phones.”
“You can do it yourself. Just delete the app, then do a hard reset. I’ll be locked out, so long as you don’t log on to the school’s Wi-Fi again.”
Even after that, I’d found I couldn’t delete my paranoia. I checked my phone constantly in case Hack in the Box reappeared while I wasn’t paying attention.
“Hey, Kya!” Mama opened my bedroom door without knocking. She brushed the hair on her left side away, inserted a large hoop earring, and squinted like her contacts were irritating her. “What you doing?”
“Nothing. Nat Geo.”
“You and your science shows. Ever since you was a little girl.” She smiled when she said it, not a criticism.
“You’re in a good mood.”
She went to work on the other earring, sashaying in place, near giddy. “Mr. DeVan Jamison is going to be in the audience tonight at Drift Bar. He’s in town for his niece’s birthday or something, and wants to see what sort of talent Ocean Shore got to offer.”
The name wasn’t familiar, and her good mood wouldn’t survive until morning. We’d been here b
efore. Without knowing a thing about him, I understood he was someone involved in the industry—a producer, or a manager, or an A&R for some label. Someone who’d half-listen to her set, accept a copy of her demo, then vanish until she saw him in the audience during the American Music Awards broadcast before she drank herself to sleep.
“Break a leg.” She didn’t need me to crush her.
“You know how I do!” She wiggled a little in her pencil skirt and exited, a cloud of lavender body spray dispersing in her wake.
Her heels clacked down the stairs, the door slammed. I was alone. Something that was easier—not easy—the more I put the Dark Nation behind me. I’d never forgive Florian for the discomfort I felt in my own home. So she better have something. Another wild-goose chase wouldn’t go well for her.
FLORIAN
You know the music videos Lil’ Redu put on YouTube? Supposedly he has a crew called the Velvet Vendetta Gang.
FUSE
GROAN—yes, I know about the VVG.
FLORIAN
Every video starts with this zoomed in shot of a burgundy velvet chair. The chair has a crest embroidered in it. I decided to look for it, see if I could link it to a graphic designer or something. Here’s what I found online.
The link she sent opened the home page of the Bay Breeze Country Club, where the crest was featured prominently.
FUSE
How does this help?
FLORIAN
Look at these screen caps of his videos.
What came next was no surprise. Bikini girl in the pool. Bikini girl in the hot tub. Bikini girl in the sauna—
The guy was married to his aesthetic.
ME
Get to the point.
FLORIAN
Now look at these pics from the country club’s photo gallery.
I sat up then, kicked my comforter away as each new image came in. A pool. A hot tub. A sauna. The same one’s from Lil’ Redu’s videos.
FLORIAN
Guys, this club is private. You can’t just shoot a video there.
ME
We think Lil’ Redu—Mr. Street Game Poppin’—belongs to Country Club?
FLORIAN
Worth checking out. Right here in town.
ME
How we gonna get in if it’s private?
FUSE
Easy. I’ll get us in. My dad’s a member.
ME
For real?
FUSE
For real.
FLORIAN
Can I come?
ME
Shut up.
Saturday. We drove past the Bay Breeze Country Club. Fast at first, because I missed the turn. Dad’s membership was a family membership, but he’d never brought me here. Mom didn’t go because of the club’s “history of discrimination.” I never knew—or cared about—what she meant. Leave it to Kya to come through with the stellar research.
“This club didn’t have a black member until 1986. The year after their centennial.”
“Okay.”
“There was a big news story about it. You can find old local broadcasts on YouTube in the ‘You Knew This Was Gonna Be Racist’ playlist.”
“Okay.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Of course.” My second and third pass was more creep mode, really inspecting the marble columns bordering the entrance, and those hedges on steroids blocking the view of anything beyond that paved, intimidating inlet.
Kya said, “So Florian’s gotta be wrong again. Places like this don’t let someone who raps about ‘buckshot spray the VA way’ join their ranks. Right?”
“You would think so.”
My fourth pass wasn’t a pass. We turned onto the blue-gray asphalt drive, and the manicured forest swallowed us. Sunlight broke through foliage gaps, projecting blotchy silhouettes of leaves and branches over us for what felt like an hour before the driveway opened into a looping arch swooping up a hill. At the peak sat a clubhouse, wide enough where you could classify the opposite ends as wings, and built of pale bricks. There was a central entrance with gargantuan double doors and a canopy offering shade where crusty old dudes offloaded their golf clubs, I guessed. Beyond that, the drive had an offshoot to a parking lot at least half-filled with cars celebrities boasted about. Benzes, Beamers, Jaguars, and one royalty-like Maybach with silk curtains blocking anyone’s view into the backseat. My tiny economy vehicle might get bullied here.
Still, I parked (a few spaces away from a futuristic-looking butter-yellow sports car that might transform into a robot at any second). We got out, and the clubhouse loomed.
Kya said, “No one’s stopped us yet.”
She wasn’t wrong.
No doorman greeted us as we walked into the frigid lobby. It was warm today, but the AC here would’ve been suitable for a two-hundred-degree day. Gotta keep the money crisp. I shuddered and hugged myself. Kya took it like a champ, only raising the zipper on her thin hoodie jacket to her chest. A blond man—six three, in a polo shirt that hugged his toned chest, and bulging calves visible thanks to his pleated khaki shorts—emerged from a nearby corridor, his attention on the clipboard in his hand. When he glanced up and recognized he wasn’t alone, he flinched. “Oh, hey. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“My dad’s a member!” I blurted, fumbling the never-used Bay Breeze ID card from my pocket. “This is my friend. She’s not a member, but the rulebook says I’m allowed one guest.”
Kya elbowed me, whispered, “Fuse.” She didn’t say, Stop being extra. Still, message received.
The blond dude said, “Awesome. I just need to scan your card and have you sign your guest in.”
An unoccupied podium stood off to the side of the foyer. He took my card and passed the bar code beneath an infrared scanner, triggering a quick confirmation bee-doop noise, then passed me a sheet. “Sign your name, her name, and the current time.”
As I scribbled the particulars, Kya leaned over me, squeezed my arm, and the hairs on the back of my neck raised. Were we in danger? My head swiveled, expecting masks.
She jerked her chin toward the sheet I’d been signing. Took a second before I saw it. Two lines above my signature, signed in less than a half hour before. I jabbed my index finger on the sheet, pointing at the member’s name. “You know him?”
Blondie said, “Of course. Everyone knows Redu!”
“Where is he? We’re friends and I want to say hi.”
Blondie blinked rapidly, surprised or confused. I couldn’t tell which. “Last I saw, he was enjoying brunch in the dining room.”
“Thanks.”
We moved with purpose, following placards displaying the direction and turns to the dining room. Kya said, “First, Lil’ Redu’s a legit member here … which is amazing. Florian got something right.”
“Second?”
“Dude got weird when you said we were friends with him. Did you notice?”
“Maybe it’s because I’m not a video girl in a bikini. I don’t know. Here.”
A sign over the door read “Hubert and Diane Payne Dining Hall.” Beyond, round tables arranged like islands, rimmed with mostly unused place settings, and decorated with lush floral arrangements in center vases. I scanned the room for brown skin, took like a half second. Seven of the ten waiters were people of color, three were black. Of the thirty or so sporadically seated diners in the room, only two were black. Just one male. He wasn’t our rapper.
That guy was older than my dad. Plump, clean-shaven, with ashy gray hair, dressed for golf in a lavender shirt and beige pants. He laughed heartily at something his pink-faced dining partner said.
“What the heck, Kya?”
She shrugged.
The dining room was washed in natural light beamed through floor-to-ceiling windows looking over a recreation area. Teal water lapped the edges of a pool. Children of various ages participated in, or played spectator to, an in-progress Ping-Pong match. A patio door opened, granting access to a third type of black person.
Not a waiter, not a diner. I almost didn’t recognize him.
“Fuse.” Kya pinched me again.
“I see.”
A scrawny, smiling, young guy in a V-neck sweater and pressed fitted jeans approached the older black diner. Sound carried, and they were close enough to make out the affectionate, “Hey, Pops!”
What Lil’ Redu talked about with his pops, we didn’t know. It ceased abruptly when his eyes cut our way and recognition dawned, the “oh no” look on display.
Oh yes.
We delved deeper into the dining room and could just about smell the anxiety on Lil’ Redu when we rolled up on him. “Hey!” I said.
“Hey.” He positioned himself between us and Pops so the old man wouldn’t see all the complicated things his face did. Twitched. Sweated. Ticked.
Pops said, “Who are your lovely friends, Reggie?”
I said, “Please. Introduce us. Reggie.”
Reluctant but playing the role, “Pops, this is Fatima Fallon. A friend from school.”
And what school was that, Reggie? “Hello, sir. My dad is a member here.” I still had manners, shook the man’s hand.
“I don’t know you,” Lil’ Redu told Kya through a sneer.
She maintained the pleasantries. “Kya Caine.”
Pops’s fellow diner gave us polite nods. Then Pops let us in on Lil’ Redu’s earlier request. “Tell the desk to sign the theater room key out to you under my account. Enjoy your movie.”
Pops’s dining buddy said, “What fine piece of cinema will you all be indulging in?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “I’m kind of in the mood for a good mystery. How about you, Reggie?”
He walked away, jerked his head for us to follow.
No loud, tacky fashion labels now. His clothes were visual Muzak, pastel and wrinkle-free, soothing. He wore glasses, round lenses with barely there frames. His grill was gone. His tattoos were gone. What was happening here?
We followed him back to the blond, where he acquired a key like some video game quest, then to a room in a separate wing. He unlocked the door, pawed in the dark for an LCD remote requiring both hands, tapped some commands, and amber sconces flared at intervals along the wall. The color scheme was burgundy (the walls, tiled floor, and ceiling) and cream (the plush leather recliners, love seats, and couches sitting at an incline before a screen). A projector was suspended from a ceiling rod, shooting ghostly blue light.
