Slick

by Daniel Price

  “Just keep going down this road,” she said, grinning. “We’re almost there.”

  ________________

  Okay, I might have overreacted to that whole scene. I might have read too much into her actions. Being an insanely beautiful woman (or man, I suppose) is like a having an extra muscle. Sometimes it’s used on purpose, for good or for evil, and sometimes it’s just reflexive. Simba, for understandable reasons, felt helpless in the grand scheme. Maybe she had to stretch that muscle just to convince herself she was doing something.

  Ordinarily, I would have realized this right away and not taken her actions personally. I could have saved myself a good twenty minutes of smoldering indignation, filled with grumbling thoughts about the nature of my species. Like I said, I was having an off day.

  Thank God again for Harmony Prince.

  By the time I finished my follow-up phone call with Eddie Sangiacomo, I had forgotten all my petty grievances. That was Harmony’s real power. It wasn’t enough for her to be blessed with a face you could fall into. She was also cursed with a backstory that—even in its driest form—made Anne Frank look like a spoiled JAP.

  “Sweet Jesus, Scott. Where did you find this woman?”

  He called at me at five o’clock. Ever since I’d gotten home, I had little to do but read e-mail and wait. I was tempted to do my own research on Harmony, but alas, the cyber pathways Eddie traveled went much further than mine. With just a social security number, he could piece together an entire life through stored records, both public and private. The vast majority of this information could be obtained easily, legally. As for the rest of it... let’s just say a good PI has a lot of file clerks for friends.

  I suppose I should have told him right off the bat that Harmony was young, black, and not exactly a member of the gold-card elite. But he found that out soon enough by digging up her birth certificate. When you’re an investigator and your target is a kid from the ‘hood, there are three smart sources to tap: the hospitals, the police stations, and the courthouses. Of all three, only the courts were closed today, but the Lexis database picked up the slack by leading Eddie to a whole slew of family-court dockets.

  As with all cases surrounding minors, the records were sealed, but Eddie was able to crack them open wide enough to get the name Sherry Greenleaf. She was a county social worker who played a supporting role in many of Harmony’s family crises.

  By one o’clock, Eddie was knocking at the door of Sherry’s home in Culver City. Although he’d brought three hundred (reimbursable) dollars of incentive in his pocket, it turned out Sherry was willing to talk for free. In fact, by the time she was done she had sacrificed two hours of her life and about a dozen Kleenex.

  Harmony Miesha Prince was born on January 21, 1982, in the nearby town of Inglewood. Her mother, Aasha Harris, was a fifteen-year-old orphan and ward of the county. The father, Franklin Prince, was the thirty-eight-year-old patriarch of Aasha’s foster family. When Harmony was two months old, Aasha and Franklin took their love child and fled upstate to Modesto to live happily ever after. It didn’t last. Soon Franklin left Aasha for someone even younger. She had little choice but to take Harmony back to Inglewood and throw herself at the mercy of Social Services. They put her in a group home for young mothers.

  Aasha eventually moved in with her new beau, a twenty-eight-year-old mechanic named Umberto Ortiz. Although his eye didn’t wander as far as Franklin’s, his parenting skills left a lot to be desired. In April 1984 a neighbor caught him whipping Harmony with an extension cord. That led to Umberto’s arrest and Harmony’s first appearance in family court. She was two.

  Once Umberto was out of the picture, Aasha moved on to John M. Jackson, a forty-two-year-old music producer with an unruly afro and a shepherding role in the brief forgettable career of the eighties funk band Picadilly (you might remember them from such cheesy tunes as “Watch Me Watch You” and “Phone Call”). Although not a millionaire, John did get Aasha and Harmony out of Inglewood and into a lovely three-bedroom house in West Hollywood.

  And here their real troubles began.

  For both Harmony and Aasha, the years 1985 to 1993 were a nightmarish string of abuse at the hands of Jackson. At the age of five, Harmony was sent to the ER for numerous fractures and contusions caused by a ball-peen hammer. When she was seven, she and her mother were treated for second-degree scald burns. The next year Aasha nearly died from multiple stabbings with a corkscrew. Each time the assaults were blamed on freak mishaps or anonymous attackers. Each time the social workers were left wary but helpless.

  It all came to a tragic head in December 1993, when eleven-year-old Harmony was hospitalized for internal distress that was soon revealed to be—are you ready for this?—a miscarriage.

  I know what it’s like to be sexually abused, I pictured Harmony telling the press. I was taught to stay quiet about it. To let him get away with it. Well, I will not be quiet about this one. And I will not let Jeremy Sharpe get away with it.

  With the help of Sherry Greenleaf, Aasha and Harmony fled to Inglewood yet again and took refuge in a women’s shelter. But without a decent source of income, Aasha could no longer afford the twelve dollars a night the shelter charged. She and Harmony soon moved into the Dominguez Hills apartment of Kenneth Prince—Franklin’s son, Harmony’s biological half brother, and Aasha’s former (and obviously forgiving) foster brother. Before long, he and Aasha became lovers, and she became pregnant with her second child. This new addition to the family would be, like Kenneth, Harmony’s biological half sibling.

  Confused? Don’t worry. Things are about to get terribly simple.

  On June 17, 1994, at 11:15 a.m., John M. Jackson used an aluminum bat to break into the apartment and skull of Kenneth Prince. A hysterical Aasha tried to stop him, but a firm swing to her temple instantly ended her life and the one inside of her. She was twenty-seven.

  Four hours later, Harmony came home from her last day of school and discovered the bodies on the floor. She was a year younger than Madison.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  That was my first reaction. In fact, that was my only reaction throughout the entire tale. And Eddie wasn’t the best narrator. His delivery was embarrassingly flat, and his nasal, squeaky voice made him sound like Dustin Hoffman doing a bad impression of Andy Rooney. But Harmony’s story transcended the telling.

  John M. Jackson was caught, convicted, and sentenced to three consecutive life terms. This all happened with lightning speed and little fanfare. Domestic crimes, especially among the minority masses, were never big news to begin with. Even if a reporter had wanted to glom on to the human-tragedy angle of young Harmony’s plight, it would have been crushed under the wheels of O.J.’s big white Bronco, which made its historic run across every channel the day Harmony became an orphan.

  Well, half orphan. But Harmony’s biological father was nowhere to be found, so she became a ward of the county. For the next four years, she bounced her way through a dozen foster and group homes. Some of them were straight out of Dickens. At one home, the girls weren’t allowed to use electricity after 6 p.m. At another, Harmony was locked in her unventilated room all summer. And at yet another, Harmony was sent to the emergency room after a roommate attacked her with a knife. She had to get thirty-two stitches on her left arm.

  Despite all of this, she went on to become a model student. At fifteen, she made the local news by winning first prize at a regional poetry competition. This brought her to the attention of Jay McMahon and Sheila Yorn, a pair of freelance filmmakers who were looking to shoot a multi-part documentary about inner city black kids. Harmony gave them more than a hundred hours of footage: interviews with her, interviews about her, follow-arounds, you name it. Her story was so compelling that four of the other eight subjects were dropped from the lineup and the remaining three were relegated to supporting roles. On seeing the rough cut of the first episode, PBS began negotiations to air the whole series. Suddenly our tragic heroine was fixing to become the bigge
st thing to hit public television since Barney.

  And then, tragically, it all fell apart. Sometime during final editing, Jay and Sheila hit a major skid in their twelve-year romance and split up. Worse, they waged a long and vicious battle over the rights to the unfinished documentary. By the time I’d gotten wind of this, nearly four years later, the tapes were still trapped within the legal chalk circle, with both parties refusing to let go. My plans would only make things worse for them. That footage was about to become white-hot property.

  But I could imagine poor Harmony’s anguish. The documentary was going to be her claim to fame, her backstage pass into the hearts, minds, and checkbooks of the guilty white elite. Sorry, toots. It’s back to the scenery for you. But hey, you came real close. Don’t lose hope. Best of luck in the future.

  If there wasn’t already enough evidence to prove the existence of God through His inexplicable beef against Harmony Prince, here comes the final kicker. On December 18, 1998, just halfway through her junior year, she was hit by a speeding LAPD cruiser.

  Harmony had just stepped into the crosswalk at La Cienega and Arbor Vitae when the cop car turned a sharp corner and rammed her. Had the driving officer been even less attentive, Harmony would have been rendered to pieces. As it was, the policeman spotted her with just enough time to skid into her at thirty five miles an hour. In the span of a second, she was thrown into the windshield, flipped over the siren, and then spiked down to the ground like a touchdown ball. Her body rolled twenty feet before coming to a stop.

  Obviously this was California’s problem. The incident caused a major row between the city of Los Angeles, which was financially liable for the LAPD, and the county of Los Angeles, which was financially responsible for Harmony. Eddie had to sift through two hundred pages of bureaucratic hair-pulling just to find out what happened to her.

  After three days in a coma, she emerged with all her memories intact but left behind her ability to read, write, and speak. It took thirteen months of rehabilitation in a Watts convalescent home to bring her back to ninety percent of her old self. By then she was no longer a minor, and thus no longer California’s problem. Worse, at ninety percent functionality, she didn’t qualify for state disability benefits. Had she the mind or the will to hire even a crappy lawyer, she probably would have scored a high-five-figure settlement from the government, possibly more. But all she got was $212 of “good luck” money and a few references for private group homes.

  Thus, on January 25, 2000, Harmony Prince was set free into the world, left to God’s good graces. Fortunately, God seemed to be done with her.

  I guess that made it my turn.

  Life has not been good to me, I pictured a tearful Harmony telling the press. I know that’s no excuse for what I did. And I can’t apologize enough for what I put Jeremy and his family through. But in the end, I was tired. I was tired of doing everything the hard way. And when that white man offered me money to tell a lie, I did it. I was weak. I was wrong. And I am sorry.

  I took out the photo, the cruddy little Polaroid that had captivated me earlier that day. There was no doubt left. She was my Venus. And I knew the only way I could move forward without my nagging conscience tripping me up was if I convinced myself, once and for all, that Harmony Prince would finish this tale better off than when she started. When’d she tell the world she was sorry, it would be nothing but a happy lie. Just the latest in a long string of words, my words, coming out of her mouth.

  9

  TAXI DANCER

  “You were right. I was wrong. Your plan is ingenious. I see it now.”

  Those words came directly from the mouth of Maxina Howard. They had to travel through five miles of fiber optics, but they reached their intended source. Pinch me, Simba. I may be dreaming again.

  At 9 p.m on Sunday, I called Maxina at her hotel. My main goal was to tell her all about Harmony, but I also wanted to give her mad props for the Dateline NBC coup. Ever since Thursday, she’d been chipping away at BET’s video archivists, trying to get a copy of last year’s 106 & Park clip in which special guest Hunta described “Bitch Fiend” as a morality tale. Not only did Maxina succeed in shaking the footage loose, but she managed to get it to NBC’s midtown Manhattan office right under the wire. That may seem like no big deal to the average person, but then the average person can’t fathom the great corporate gorge Maxina had to jump. You see, BET was the recent three-billion dollar acquisition of media giant Viacom. Viacom owned CBS. CBS ran 60 Minutes. And 60 Minutes wanted a lock on that video, even though they weren’t sure if they were going to use it. Even if they did, Maxina knew they wouldn’t include the all-important caption indicating when the clip originally aired. That would have given their fourteen million viewers the false but dramatic impression that Hunta had been making his comments recently, in response to the Melrose shooting.

  Obviously Dateline wasn’t a bastion of journalistic integrity, either, but their producers were comparatively easy to bend. Once Maxina miraculously got the video across enemy lines, she strong-armed Jim Donnell—whose wife I’d recently boned—into running the clip with a date stamp. So at 8:20 p.m. (7:20 CMT), eight million viewers got to hear Hunta’s defense and know that it was made several months before Annabelle Shane’s bloody rampage. In other words, it wasn’t just desperate knee-jerk spin. Given what was coming, Hunta needed every morsel of credibility he could get.

  Maxina’s feat took a level of skill and clout that few mortals possessed. It still may not seem like great shakes to you, but to me it was like watching Superman stop a runaway train. I was in awe of this woman, which made her praise all the sweeter. Here it is again:

  “You were right. I was wrong. Your plan is ingenious. I see it now.”

  I’d spent twenty minutes filling her in on Harmony’s dramatic history. Compared to Eddie, I was the far better storyteller, but the material alone would be enough to send Toni Morrison into a blue funk.

  “My God...”

  Maxina had two ways to go from there. She could have fallen into a fit of simplistic, hackneyed Parade-magazine-style morality and insisted I keep my sleazy white-devil mitts off of poor Harmony, who’d clearly suffered enough. Or she could have looked beyond all the weltschmerz and examined the situation on a more intrinsic level.

  Props again, Maxina, for picking Choice B. From the beginning she’d believed my plan would serve its function, but only at the cost of an innocent young woman. Her concerns were actually quite valid. But Harmony was the battery that would last and last and last. In a land that thrived on high drama, political correctness, and sweet-young-victim chic, she made Elián González look like a tapeworm in a fat man’s ass. Even when the jig was up, she would not only remain impervious to media and political scorn, but to prosecution.

  “They’d never touch her,” Maxina said. “You were right. Even if she admitted to fraud, the law would never touch her.”

  And only because the law felt bad about running her over. In their endless quest to heal their tattered public image, the LAPD was forced to err fifty miles this side of caution when it came to high-profile black people. And considering that the city mowed her down in a crosswalk, bandaged her skull, and sent her on her merry way without so much as a fruit basket, it was obvious that any public figure who called for Harmony’s head would soon have his own handed back to him by the liberal furies. In short, Harmony would become the ultimate L.A. paradox: a red-hot celebrity sensation who couldn’t get arrested in this town.

  “She has no criminal record,” I stressed while pacing my living room carpet. “No history of substance abuse. No children, legitimate or otherwise. She’s never applied for any kind of government aid. And if that’s not enough to make her a conservative’s wet dream, the poem she wrote? The one that won first prize in the regional competition? It was all about abstinence.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  That was when I told Maxina the best part. Not only did Harmony come standard-equipped with a great face and a monst
rous past, but she was also available with a documentary feature—one hundred hours of raw footage just waiting to be cooked, sliced, and tossed, hibachi-style, into the open mouths of hungry news directors. Granted, it was a bit of a side quest to hack through the legal red tape of Jay McMahon and Sheila Yorn’s creative-property dispute, but if anyone could do it...

  “I’ll do it,” said Maxina, just as I’d hoped. “This is incredible. Absolutely incredible. Tell me, Scott. Were you amazingly brilliant in discovering this woman, or just amazingly lucky?”

  “I’ll never tell.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly say this...”

  I was right. She was wrong. My plan was ingenious. She saw it now. Don’t worry, that’s the last time you’ll hear it. For the most part, that was the last time I’d hear it.

  ________________

  “No. No. No!” the Judge barked from atop his porcelain throne. “That’s a dangerous idea! That’s a shitty idea! I’m not going to let it happen that way!”

  After talking to Maxina, I phoned Doug to fill him in on the latest. He insisted we conference in the Judge, who was currently relaxing with the wife and kids at their home in Pacific Palisades. I could tell from the succession of background sounds—a television, a radio, a juicer—that the Judge was working his way through the house. By the time I finished my second rendition of Harmony’s tale, the noises were gone, and his “Jesus Christ” had the padded, echoey lilt that could only come from a man on the crapper.

  It wasn’t Harmony herself that made the Judge nervous. After getting the whole story, he and Doug were in hearty agreement that she was the perfect foil to Lisa Glassman, maybe even the perfect foil to Annabelle Shane. It was my proposed method of hiring and managing her that caused the argument.