Mars sported black Armani as well. A single-breasted, black Armani suit with a black, silk knit “wife-beater” underneath. They had to be the hottest-looking couple in the entire music industry and it was becoming abundantly clear that whatever was transpiring between the two of them was not just casual dating. Mars couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of Keshari and Keshari appeared to be blossoming right before the eyes of the music industry and the curious public. She still maintained careful distance from the media, but, otherwise, her whole demeanor seemed to have changed, opened up and become much more three-dimensional since her romantic link to the super-handsome, West Coast general counsel for ASCAP.
Jermaine Dupri, who was an ATL native, and his longtime girlfriend, Janet Jackson, along with members of Dupri’s SoSoDef record label, arrived. So did rapper Ludacris and his sizeable entourage. Expensively customized Hummers, Mercedes-Benzes, Lincoln Navigators, Porsches, and Ferraris crowded the valet parking lanes. Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot zoomed up in her trademark Lamborghini. Music video models dressed as minimally as Keshari strutted up the red carpet, trying to project the attitudes of superstars. The twenty finalists who had been selected in Los Angeles and New York were provided with passes and airfare to attend the Atlanta party, and you could read the barely controllable excitement on all of their faces as they were treated with the star quality that they all dreamed of having one day. Paparazzi were having a field day capturing photos of the incoming crowd, but they were kept at bay by very tight security and velvet ropes cordoning off the area.
In two days, the week-long Atlanta auditions would be under way.
Misha could work a room like nobody’s business. In the daring, black Gucci dress she’d chosen specifically for that night, she circulated from one side of the Roxy to the other, stopping to chat with party guests and accepting business cards from celebs and other high-profile Atlanta residents who wanted her to coordinate their next party, before she located a quiet corner in the packed party zone just for herself.
Brandon Casey of the R & B group, Jagged Edge, nursing a snifter of Courvoisier, followed her like an obedient puppy, his eyes intent on the switch of her perfect ass. Misha was like the Black version of Samantha on HBO’s Sex and the City. She was a magnet for men, she conquered them sexually, and then promptly dismissed them when they’d expended their usefulness in her life or had started to grate on her nerves.
She’d done an amazing job with all of the arrangements. Suede sectional seating was scattered all about. Dimmed, lounge lighting and potted palms set a comfortable, “VIP room” ambiance. Cristal, Courvoisier, Hpnotiq, and expensive cigars abounded. Unique, Southern cuisine and appetizers from a renowned Atlanta chef were there for the taking.
The dance floor was full and the music being spun by East Coast deejay Kid Capri was Larger Than Lyfe Entertainment’s finest. Keshari gave even Sean Combs a run for his money that night. She didn’t spare a dime to make sure that her party at the Roxy was the only place where anybody who was anybody in Atlanta wanted to be.
Keshari made her way through the Roxy, stopping here and there to talk a bit with other music executives and a few hip-hop stars. She located Misha in a secluded corner, kicked back on one of the suede sectionals with her bare feet in Brandon Casey’s lap. Misha grinned and hopped up when she saw Keshari approaching. She kissed her best friend on both cheeks, and then looked Mars over appraisingly before introducing them both to Brandon Casey.
“So, you’re Mars Buchanan.” Misha smiled, taking his hand and planting a kiss on his cheek. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Very impressive things. You’re the youngest general counsel ever to assume the role at ASCAP…never married, no baby’s mama drama… you’re very easy on the eyes…plus, you’ve won my sister’s heart.
“My sister is a very special woman…and I’m sure you are aware of this already,” Misha continued. “The man who hurts her heart should be fearful for his life…because, I assure you, when provoked, I am far more dangerous than I appear.”
Misha held eye contact with Mars challengingly. Her intuition was never, ever wrong about men, and she was confident that she would know if Mr. Mars Buchanan was operating on a BS tip. Mars, meanwhile, displayed a somewhat amused expression as if he was fully aware that Misha was sizing him up to give him her seal of approval. Keshari squeezed his hand and glared at Misha. The look she gave Misha told her to stop it…IMMEDIATELY. Misha fanned her off dismissively.
“Tonight, you pass inspection,” Misha said saucily, “but be warned, honey. I’m watching you.”
Mars laughed and shook his head.
“You are exactly as Keshari described you,” he said.
“Oh, really?” Misha said, quickly looking at Keshari with feigned suspicion. “Just what did she say?”
“Only good things.” Mars smiled. “Only good things. And I can assure you that Keshari’s heart is safe from harm as long as I’m around. I will guard it with my life.”
“You’d better.” Misha smiled back. “Now, you two get out there on that dance floor and enjoy yourselves. I will get with the two of you later. We can do dinner tomorrow night before I fly back to L.A. As you can see, I’ve got some unfinished business over here. This man has promised to polish my toes and cook for me.”
She grinned back at Brandon Casey teasingly. He had nothing but lust in his eyes.
Mars flew back to Los Angeles to return to work a couple of days after the Atlanta launch party and it was as if drama had been anxiously awaiting his return. Portia Foster called Mars’s office the very same morning that he returned to work.
“I’d like to speak to Mars Buchanan,” Portia said. “Would you put me through, please?”
“Who’s calling?” Mars’s secretary asked.
“Portia Foster.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Foster. Mr. Buchanan is in a meeting. May I take a message?”
“Yes, please tell Mr. Buchanan that I need to speak with him as soon as possible. It’s urgent that I speak with him.”
“I’ll give him the message, Ms. Foster.”
Portia waited near her phone for three hours before Mars returned her call.
“My secretary said that you needed to speak to me urgently. What’s the problem?”
“We need to talk, Mars. Why don’t you stop by my loft after you leave the office, or I can come to your place.”
“There’s nothing we need to discuss or see each other about, Portia. I know that you’ve been calling my apartment in the middle of the night and hanging up. That shit’s childish. You need to stop calling me and spend some couch time with a good therapist.”
“I’m pregnant,” Portia said carefully.
Mars almost dropped the phone.
“Portia, why are you doing this? It’s over. I’ve used a condom virtually every time that the two of us have had sex. Why won’t you just let it be over? I’m beginning to regret the day we ever met.”
“I didn’t exactly plan this, Mars.”
“Then this is one helluva coincidence,” Mars snapped. “What’s the name of the gynecologist who did your pregnancy test?”
“I haven’t been to the gynecologist yet,” Portia answered. “My periods have always been so sketchy. That’s why I started taking birth control pills as a teenager. But I’m nearly three months late.”
“Three months?! What the fuck, Portia?! How do you go for three months without having a period and not see that as a HUGE fucking problem?!”
He exhaled in exasperation and switched the phone to his other ear.
“Schedule an appointment with your gynecologist,” Mars said. “Call me back and tell me the date and the time and I’ll accompany you there.”
“You don’t believe me?” Portia said darkly.
“To be completely frank,” Mars answered, “NO…I don’t. Schedule the appointment and we’ll have a licensed professional confirm it.” He hung up the phone.
“Shit!” he yelled, slamming his fist down on his desk.<
br />
While he firmly believed that this was a ploy of Portia’s to try to keep him tied to her life, something nagged at him deep in the pit of his stomach. What if she really is pregnant? Mars’s life would be tied to melodrama for the rest of his life and to a woman he was coming to despise. And how would Keshari take an unexpected pregnancy slapped right in the middle of their relationship?
Mars’s thoughts were interrupted when his secretary rang his office again.
“I have Portia Foster on the line.”
“FUCK!” Mars snapped, picking up his extension. “Put her through.”
“Mars, I scheduled an appointment with my ob/gyn, Dr. Kardashian, in Santa Monica. It’s all set for tomorrow morning at eleven. Is that okay?”
“Yeah,” Mars said solemnly.
“Are you okay?” Portia asked with concern.
“I’ll pick you up at the loft around ten.”
Keshari flew back to Los Angeles as soon as the Atlanta auditions wrapped and it was as if drama had been anxiously awaiting her return. Her black Ferrari convertible pulled into the underground garage at her Century City offices on Avenue of the Stars. The white van doing surveillance at one of the parking meters at the curb outside her building allowed half an hour to pass before radioing the head of their task force. Then Thomas Hencken hopped on an elevator.
“I’d like to see Ms. Keshari Mitchell. Is she in?”
“Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked curtly.
“No, I don’t,” Thomas Hencken answered.
“If you have no appointment, Ms. Mitchell won’t be able to see you. I’m sorry. You’ll have to come back when you have an appointment.”
“I think that Ms. Mitchell will take a moment of her time to see me,” Thomas Hencken responded.
“What’s your name? What’s the purpose of your visit? I might be able to help you.”
Thomas Hencken reached into his jacket pocket, and then placed his business card on the desk in front of the receptionist. She frowned for a moment as she read the card, then looked up from it with wide eyes.
“One moment, please,” she said, going quickly to Terrence’s workspace, Keshari’s assistant, not quite sure what to do.
Terrence rang Keshari immediately and informed her who was outside. A moment later, he showed Mr. Hencken into Keshari’s office.
“Ms. Mitchell, how are you?”
“I’m fine, but I feel certain that you didn’t show up here at my office without an appointment to check on my well-being. Exactly why would a DEA agent have any interest in my record label? Do you rap…sing…produce?”
“I have a few questions I’d like to ask you and I believe that you can be a great help to my current investigation.”
“I can’t imagine any questions that I would be capable of supplying useful answers to for the Drug Enforcement Agency,” Keshari said. “Perhaps there’s been some mistake.”
“No,” Thomas Hencken said. “There’s been no mistake at all. You see, you’ve paid several visits to Mr. Richard Lawrence Tresvant, reputed founder of The Consortium, a Los Angeles-based crime organization, at the Men’s Central Jail prior to the start of his murder trial, and I’d like to know more about your relationship with him. I’m also interested in your role in The Consortium’s operations.”
Keshari narrowed her eyes. “Any questions or concerns that you have should be directed to my attorney, David Weisberg,” she said curtly. “I’m not at liberty to answer the questions of any law enforcement officer without proper legal counsel. Surely, you understand this.”
“Is that really the way that you want to play this thing through, Ms. Mitchell? I would seriously advise you against such a decision. It could prove quite detrimental to you…and your career and your record label. We’ve been carefully researching and documenting the movements of key players within The Consortium for eighteen months now. We want Richard Tresvant, but, if you turn this into an unnecessarily dragged-out skirmish between us and your overpaid attorney, we definitely have enough to direct our attentions at you.”
“Allow me to reiterate, Mr. …?”?” Keshari said.
“Hencken,” the agent supplied.
“Mr. Hencken, the only basis under which I will allow you to question me is by subpoena or arrest and, even then, I will only consider cooperating with your interrogation in the presence of my attorney.” She went to her office’s double doors and held them open. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have a meeting. Kindly make sure that you secure an appointment the next time that you decide to pay me a visit.”
Thomas Hencken stood to leave. “I thank you for your time, Ms. Mitchell. You’ll be hearing from me again very soon.”
When Thomas Hencken was gone, Keshari told Terrence to hold all of her phone calls, and then closed up in her office and stayed there for almost two hours. For years, she’d come to take for granted the cushion of safety she had from federal and local law enforcement because of Ricky’s strategically formed alliances with people in some of the highest places of the law. Not once had a federal agent ever set foot into the offices of Larger Than Lyfe Entertainment for anything. She’d never been so much as pulled over for a traffic stop, not once. Now the tables had clearly taken a turn.
She shook her head as she stared down at Avenue of the Stars from the ceiling-to-floor windows behind her desk. She already knew that her receptionist had transmitted the story of the visit from the DEA agent halfway around the record label. Then, the people who the receptionist had told had transmitted details regarding the strange visit from the DEA agent all the rest of the way around the Larger Than Lyfe offices.
“David, we need to get together as soon as possible. It’s serious,” Keshari said, phoning her attorney on his cell phone.
“I’ll come up to your house this evening. I’ll bring dinner.”
Mars arrived at Portia’s Brentwood loft at ten o’clock sharp. Portia came to the door in white linen capris with a matching halter top and a straw sunhat, like the two of them were off for a drive up the coast or something. Mars watched her with irritation and wanted to wring her neck.
She smiled. “Good morning. How are you?”
“Cut the bullshit,” Mars snapped darkly. “Let’s get this thing over with.”
“You say that like it’s the end of the world.”
“The thought of having a child with you IS like the end of the world.”
“You son of a bitch!” Portia said.
Mars didn’t respond. He held the passenger door of his Mercedes open and Portia slid angrily into the car.
Mars sat in the reception area of the practically empty doctor’s office and sent text messages to Keshari and his secretary on his BlackBerry while Portia went to provide the nurse with blood and urine samples. Mars was trying to find the time in his busy schedule to fly to Miami for a couple of days while Keshari was there for the Miami auditions of her nationwide talent search. He prayed that he was not about to receive any unfortunate news that he was going to have to break to her when he flew out to see her. He hadn’t told her a thing about Portia’s supposed “predicament” and their doctor’s appointment that morning.
Portia returned to the reception area shortly after providing the blood and urine samples to the nurse. She and Mars were told that it would take approximately half an hour before the doctor would provide them with the results.
“There’s a Starbucks right down the street,” the nurse said to them. “You could go and get yourselves a latté and your results would be ready by the time you get back.”
Portia grinned with delight. “That sounds like a terrific idea. Come on, sweetie, let’s go.”
“Are you out of your mind, woman?” Mars snapped. “I don’t want any coffee. We’ll wait…here.”
Portia rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and shook her head mildly at the nurse as if Mars was merely an expectant father with a strong case of the jitters. She began thumbing through a Modern Parenthood magazine.
There had to have been warning signs all over the place over the course of the years that the two of them had dated to indicate to him how delusional and unstable this woman clearly was and Mars had been too busy watching the perfect switch of her ass to get the memo.
Mars’s BlackBerry beeped, signaling an incoming text message:
“Hope you’ve managed 2 get time off for trip. I’ll try & see you later tonite. Luv U. –K”
Portia glanced over and skimmed the message display on Mars’s BlackBerry and saw the private, little smile on his face.
“How dare you sit here and exchange text messages like a fifteen-year-old with that bitch while we wait for the status of our unborn child!” Portia snarled under her breath.
“Woman…PUH-LEEZE,” Mars said loud enough for the nurse at the reception area’s check-in window to look up from her paperwork at the two of them.
“The doctor will see you now,” the nurse said to them a few moments later.
She escorted them down the hallway to Dr. Kardashian’s office, where the forty-something redhead, in a white lab coat and a sizeable Asscher-cut wedding ring, sat at her desk overlooking Santa Monica Boulevard near the Third Street Promenade. She looked from Mars to Portia and smiled warmly. The smile made Mars’s heart drop. He thought that it was a smile of congratulations. Portia clearly thought the same thing because she smiled jubilantly back at Dr. Kardashian as if she was the happiest woman in the world.
“The good news,” Dr. Kardashian said, “is that you are a very healthy woman, Portia, and can certainly have many babies if you so choose. The unfortunate news is that you are not pregnant now.”
“There must be some mistake,” Portia said. “I took one of those home pregnancy tests three times and they all came back positive.”
Larger Than Lyfe Page 15
