Slick

by Daniel Price

  Hunta was screwed.

  Even though I bought Doug’s version of the story, or at least rented it, there was no mountain or molehill I could build to get all the journalists, obstructionists, and water cooler cynics to side with Hunta. I realized this at 2 p.m., four hours before my scheduled meeting. My brilliant but elusive idea managed to flee the country and change its name.

  I was screwed. In lieu of wowing Maxina and the others with a magic-bullet solution, I would have to settle for presenting multiple catastrophe plans, the PR equivalent of assuming crash position. Anyone can hire a bastard. They’d specifically ordered a devious bastard. This would not help my career.

  The sound of the apartment buzzer pulled me back into the present. I pressed the intercom button by the door. “Yeah?”

  No answer. All I could hear was the crackle and hum of the speaker, the tinny sounds of traffic.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing. Whatever. Right as I sat back down at the coffee table... BZZZT.

  “Jesus.” Once again, I rose and pressed the talk button. “Who is it?”

  Once again, no answer.

  “Look, if you’re hoping to get buzzed in, you’ll have to give me a little more to go on, okay?”

  After a few more seconds of nothing, I went back to the laptop. I got so desperate I started to consider the ramifications of using the truth. So Hunta’s a philanderer. An adulterer. So what? So are half the politicians who have spoken out against rap. Maybe I should propose a “glass houses” attack against every senator who burns Hunta in effigy.

  No. Who was I kidding? Clinton’s affair, at least with Monica, was beyond consensual. And still they roasted him in the public rotisserie. Even chief griller Henry Hyde was able to admit to his own past infidelities and keep on basting.

  BZZZT.

  “Goddamn it!” I didn’t have time for this. I hustled straight past the intercom, out of my apartment, and all the way down the hall. A petite woman watched me through the glass of the front door. From a distance, I thought it was Miranda, until I saw her short hair and hoop earrings.

  Jean Spelling. The web designer/deaf driver whose SUV rode up my poor Saturn’s tailpipe. She looked much different in broad daylight. A little older, a lot cuter, and much WASPier. Maybe it was her sky-blue eyes. Her button nose. Or her respectful but ass-end-of-fashion Target blouse that seemed to scream “church.”

  I joined her on the front steps. She was alone, noticeably twitchy. With a sheepish grimace, she handed me her Handspring Visor. Its small color screen was filled with text.

  Hi Scott. I’m sorry to invade your life (again). I was wondering if my daughter stopped by here anytime in the last 24 hours.

  I glanced back up at her. Without her kid around to sarcastically translate, was I supposed to talk or write back to her? I flipped a mental coin, which landed on “write.”

  Wrong. She held my wrist, shook her head, then took back her handheld. She was a Jedi master with the stylus. I couldn’t believe how well she could use that thing. Anyone who’s ever tried a pen-based PDA knows how easy it is to GRTZXL up whatever it is you want to write. Not Jean. She wrote as quickly and accurately as I typed.

  It’s ok. I can read lips. Just not on a dark street at 3AM. :)

  Her real face didn’t quite match the smiley. She was at the end of her wits.

  “I haven’t seen her,” I said, in a slow and loud drawl usually reserved for idiots. “I don’t...Why do you think she would come here?”

  Jean let out a hesitant sigh before answering.

  Not to embarrass you but I think my kid has a little bit of a crush on you. She thought you were really cool, especially when she found out you were a publicist. She’s into all that media stuff.

  “No. Sorry. I don’t know how she would find me. I don’t even know how you found me. My address isn’t on my card.”

  I must have looked away while saying it. She touched my cheek and pointed me back in her direction, shrugging. Repeat, please.

  “How did you find me?”

  Ah. Your business card.

  “It doesn’t have my address on it.”

  I plugged your phone # into a reverse directory. I learned that trick from Madison. That girl could use the Internet to find her socks.

  “That is pretty clever.”

  With a cute but uneven smile, she scribbled more onto her handheld.

  She’s too clever for her own good. (BTW, you don’t have to talk extra loud or slow around me. As long as you look at me straight on, I can keep up.)

  I was mortified. This seemed like such basic stuff. “Uh, has she been missing a long time, or... ?”

  Since last night. She does this a lot. Usually she runs off to the airport. Don’t ask. That’s where I picked her up from on Thursday, right before I [wince] ran into you.

  Before I could answer, Jean cleared the screen and wrote some more.

  Have you gotten an estimate yet?

  “No. I haven’t had time.”

  I’m so sorry. I swear I’ll pay for everything.

  “I know. It’s all right.”

  She ran her hand through her dark hair. Once again I noticed her beautifully simple wedding ring, which I’d originally thought was silver. In the light of day, it looked more like white gold.

  Look, if you see Madison, can you please e-mail me as soon as possible? You still have my card?

  “I’m pretty sure I do.”

  With a shrug, she gave me another one. Original X Web Design. I’d almost forgotten this was Marvel Girl. She probably spent as much money on comic books as I did.

  “Look, good luck with Madison. I hope it all works out.”

  She gave me a spirited grin, but the facade quickly collapsed. In the middle of writing her response, her hand got shaky, and she was forced to stop. She bit her lower lip and turned away.

  Before I could say anything, she held her other palm up to me. In layman’s sign language, it meant “talk to the hand,” but there was a soft grace to her movement that said so much more. No token gestures, Scott. I didn’t come here fishing for sympathy, and to be honest, it would only make me feel worse. Just bear with me.

  Maybe I read too much into it. It was a simple motion. But I remembered being amazed by how much information she and Madison managed to trade with so few gestures. It was fascinating. I was such a nut for research that I wanted to go straight to the Web and give myself a crash course in sign language. Unfortunately I was under the gun with Hunta.

  There were over three dozen fine-looking women at that party who would have fucked Jeremy for the price of a smile.

  There it was again. My rogue idea, the one I’d been chasing all over the city. With a mere flip of her hand, Jean managed to stop it in its tracks. Don’t ask me how my mind works. I was just glad to see it working again. I’d finally caught up with my muse. And she had a hell of a song for me.

  Jean took a deep breath, rolled her eyes at herself, then let out a tired sigh.

  So! Got any kids of your own?

  Absently, I shook my head.

  Smart of you. The keyword is “karma.” All the crap we put our parents through as teenagers...it comes back. Trust me.

  I smiled. I liked this woman. And I felt bad for her. But at the same time I desperately wanted to run inside and work out my new equations.

  Perceptively, she wrapped it up.

  Thanks for being so patient with me. You’re a good man, Scott.

  “I...You’re welcome. Good luck finding her. If I see her, I’ll let you know.”

  She squeezed my arm and bathed me in a moist look of gratitude usually reserved for living organ donors. It was inflated and mostly unjustified. But I certainly didn’t mind being mistaken as an angel for once. It made a nice counterweight to last night’s snit.

  Jean went back to her SUV. As she drove off, she gave me a final wave and apology. In her mind, I probably rued the day we ever crossed paths. In reality, her unannounced visit was the best thing that
could have happened for me, Hunta, and the entire music industry. It wasn’t hard to find the irony in that.

  ________________

  At 5:45, I left for my second meeting at L’Ermitage. Maxina had instructed me to bring two ideas, or at least one really good one. I had a really good one.

  But, “good” is a subjective term. The XFL, which was debuting right at that very moment, seemed like a good idea to many. After all, nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. At least until the XFL. Who knew? Spokespeople for the soon-to-be defunct football league would attribute the poor ratings to all the Melrose-fueled hypersensitivity. In other words, they’ll blame the blame.

  Some ideas were just plain bad from the start. Earlier that day, in Lake Mary, Florida, a twelve-year-old named Thomas Hitz doused his hand in bug spray and lit it on fire. Seeing his error in judgment, he tried to put his hand out on his cotton T-shirt. Also a mistake. By the time he jumped into his swimming pool, his only smart move, he had second and third-degree burns on his hand and chest.

  Thomas and his parents would go on to blame MTV’s Jackass for the incident. They weren’t the first. The week before, a Connecticut boy named Jason Lind poured gasoline on his legs and lit himself up, hoping to imitate the same televised stunt that had inspired Thomas. On behalf of the Linds, Senator Joe Lieberman was quick to further publicize Jackass by calling for its cancellation. In actuality, four times as many kids (eight) were injured by real-live jackasses each month, and much more directly. From strictly a numbers point of view, donkeys were the more prevalent threat to our nation’s youth. Either Senator Joe didn’t know, or he was afraid to go after his party’s totem animal. Politics.

  Alas, it’s a strange world. A strange nation. In the end, though, everything balanced. For every overreaction, there was an equal and opposite action. Hunta was destined to bear the brunt of America’s latest outcry. There was no way to stop it or even slow it down. Same went for Lisa. I was so busy worrying about how to destroy her or discredit her when all I had to do was upstage her. If she wanted to cry rape, I’d simply have to find another woman to cry it louder. And sooner.

  7

  MAKAVELI, MADISON

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  That was Byron “Judge” Rampton: former car salesman, former VP of Columbia Records, founder and president of Mean World Records. If Buddha were black, impeccably dressed, and determined to show off his wealth through the bling-bling of expensive ornaments, he’d look just like the Judge. He eyed me from one of the many couches in the living room of L’Ermitage Suite 511. He insisted on being here for the meeting, even though I didn’t need him for what I had planned.

  “You want to save Jeremy from one slanderous charge by hitting him with another.”

  That was Doug, sitting next to the Judge. Once again he looked ready for the courtroom in his Fruit of Islam wear. Didn’t someone tell him it was Saturday?

  “No,” I replied. “I want to save him from one slanderous charge by missing him with another. That’s the key difference.”

  I paced around the room, high on caffeine and inspiration. The entourage was gone. My audience consisted of six people…six and a half if you included baby Latisha. Even she seemed incredulous.

  “The name of the game is ‘full public exoneration,’” I told them. “Lisa herself isn’t the threat. Her impending civil suit isn’t the threat. It’s the media we need to worry about. This is sweeps month. They’ll cast Hunta in whatever light it takes to keep things interesting. On the upside, they won’t care where their story comes from. So I say we preempt Lisa’s drama with ours. At least that way we have control over how it develops and, more importantly, how it ends.”

  “But why that?” asked Simba Shange. “Why swap one fake rape for another?”

  “Because if we go with any other story, there’s nothing to stop the press from placing Lisa’s allegation on top, like a cherry on a sundae. They don’t cancel each other out.”

  “Neither do two rapes.”

  That was Maxina, on the third couch. She was clearly in a motherly mood, judging from the way she rocked Latisha in her beefy arms.

  I smiled. “You’re right. Two different accusations only serve to strengthen each other. But two of the same accusation? Uh-uh. Then you’ve got a problem.”

  Behind Simba’s couch, a shirtless and sweaty Hunta hung from a portable chin-up bar. When the meeting began, he’d been in the middle of an impressively long set of lifts. Now he was too stunned to do any thing but dangle.

  “There were a lot of other women at that Christmas party,” I continued. “If we get just one of them to beat Lisa to the press with the exact same charge and the exact same story, down to the minute, then Lisa will be jammed forever. What’s she going to say? ‘No, Hunta didn’t sexually abuse that woman that night. He was too busy sexually abusing me’? Nobody would take her seriously. She’d be a copycat. A shameless opportunist. She’d barely get a mention.”

  Big Bank, the last person in on the conspiracy, stood next to Hunta. He chewed on my idea. “But if we use our own woman, what’s to stop Lisa from joining in and saying Jer messed her up some other night?”

  “Nothing. She could do it. So could fifty other women. But as far as the press is concerned, it’s not who’s right, it’s who’s first. If we get there first, our woman will be the tentpole. She’ll be the one the reporters rally around. And once she goes down, everyone goes down with her. It’s like fruit from a poisonous tree. That’s why it’s really important that we work fast and get our decoy out there first.”

  Big Bank nodded in amazement. I also caught the sun rising on Doug’s face. Two down.

  Simba remained firmly rooted in skepticism. She looked damn good in clothes, even though there was more cotton to be found in aspirin bottles than in her white baby T.

  “I don’t understand, “ she said. “You’re going to have one of these dancing skanks come forward, frame Jeremy, and then what? Admit it was all a lie?”

  “Yes, but not hers. That’s the best part. She’ll tell the world she was offered a lot of money by some unnamed source, some shadow conspirator with an anti-rap objective. The press will eat it up. They’ll do a total 180 and go after all the people who were going after Hunta. How’s that for payback?”

  I turned to Hunta, still hanging. “Not only will this silence Lisa, not only will this turn you from monster to martyr, but it’ll weatherproof you against all future accusations. For the rest of your life, you’ll have the benefit of the doubt. You’ll have precedent.”

  His expression morphed from disbelief to abject wonder. Dare he dream?

  Maxina, naturally, wasn’t as easy to sway. “That’s very ambitious, Scott. A few problems, though. First off, if this woman—this patsy of yours—admits she made it up, that’s a straight guilty plea for fraud and extortion. She could get thirty years in prison. Are you planning on mentioning this when you hire your actress? Or are you just going to let her find out the hard way?”

  I shot her a crooked grin. Uh-uh. Not tonight, toots. My shields were at full capacity.

  “Nobody’s going up the river. Not if we pick our actress carefully. We need someone sympathetic and telegenic. Someone with a dramatic reason to need the money. Sick mother. Sick child. Brother in dutch with loan sharks. Anything, as long as the audience understands why she lied for cash. Plus, if she comes forward on her own, if she makes the moral choice and decides she won’t slander a fellow human being for any dollar amount, forget it. She’ll come out of this with a slap on the wrist and a book deal.”

  Maxina still wouldn’t budge. “You can’t say that for sure. Manipulating the media is one thing. Manipulating the legal system is quite another. I’m not saying your plan isn’t clever. It is. But when it comes to gambling with the lives of innocent people, it has to be foolproof.”

  Hunta finally dropped back to the ground. “Besides, what’s to stop this woman from giving us up if the police s
tart putting the heat on her and shit?”

  “She wouldn’t even have to know we were involved,” Doug replied, with gawking awe. “As far as she’ll be concerned, there was a white conspiracy behind it.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly—”

  The Judge cut me off. “But what if somebody else gets to her? Somebody who offers her more money not to absolve Jeremy? I mean we’re putting a lot of power in this woman’s hands.”

  “That’s why I’ll record my initial conversations with her,” I stressed. “If she goes rogue on us, we’ll simply leak a tape that exposes the plot to frame Hunta, but not the plot to absolve him. Either way, she gets outed and we’ve got our asses covered.”

  Speaking of covered asses, my so-called Palm Pilot was once again capturing the moment from the warmth of my shirt pocket. The sound chip was going into my safe the second I got home.

  Maxina shook her head. “I don’t like it. There are too many things that could go wrong. Even if your girl comes forward and says she lied, what’s to stop people from thinking that Jeremy’s guilty anyway? That someone paid her off or threatened her into saying it never happened?”

  Hunta nodded along. “Right. Yeah. I don’t wanna be the next O.J.”

  I counted off fingers to him. “Okay, one: you won’t be fleeing in any Broncos. Two: there’s much more motive to frame you, a hot young rapper, than him, a washed-up football star. And three: if Nicole Brown Simpson suddenly showed up in front of the cameras and confessed that she faked her own death to screw the Juice, I think we’d all be changing our tune about him. You agree?”