Slick

by Daniel Price

I sighed. “Harmony, I wish I could say just the right thing to put your mind at ease. I really do. But it’s late. You’re tired. And I’m officially out of new things to tell you.”

  “Just promise me.”

  I waited for a rider to that, but it didn’t seem like one was coming.

  “Promise you what?”

  She was still working out the verbiage, as if I were one of those cruel genies who always granted wishes in the most literal, ironic sense.

  “Promise me that when this is all over, that when everything’s said and done, I won’t hate you.”

  Although awkwardly phrased, her request was almost brilliant in its wide-ranging simplicity. It pretty much covered all bases.

  “Harmony, I can’t control whether or not you hate me. All I can promise is that I’ll never give you a reason. You’re going to have to accept that, plus my heartfelt conviction that when this is all over, when everything’s said and done, you’ll be glad you met me.”

  That was it. There was nothing left to add. Her hard disk was full. She spent her last few watts on a skeptical smirk.

  “I see why they call you Slick.”

  She grabbed her purse, opened the door, and then stared ahead for several seconds. “I got to get my braces tightened tomorrow. At ten.”

  “Okay.”

  “After that, I’m free.”

  I smiled. “Okay.”

  ________________

  I kept smiling all the way home. I couldn’t stop. A wide, shit-eating grin usually reserved for lovelorn schoolboys. This wasn’t love, despite what “Dave” may have thought. This wasn’t even infatuation, despite my urge to sing Harmony’s name. Although I’d meant every word of what I said, and would fight to the end to protect her, the ugly truth was that she was still just a vehicle to me. She was just a potent way for me to get to her. The Bitch. That fickle and elusive model/goddess who stretched and writhed atop an entire nation and beyond, endlessly bored with our petty little offerings. Annabelle had managed to get her to look this way, and then conveniently left the scene. Now it was my turn. No cheesy love notes this time. This was a full-blown serenade. I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t wait.

  Upon returning home, my phone emitted a series of beeps. The LED informed me that I had one new text message. It seemed the curious Jean Spelling was something of a night owl. I scrolled through her words.

  Scott. Got your note. Madison’s coming tomorrow at 3. Get a good night’s sleep, my friend. Then buckle up. You’re in for a hell of a ride.

  Yeah. Weren’t we all?

  — THREE —

  NOISE

  I’m a shameless man living in shameless times, but the blood of my vocational ancestors runs through me. The seeds of my profession were planted centuries ago by men with the ingenuity and nerve to manipulate thousands. In fact, it was Benjamin Franklin, the father of electricity, who secretly discovered a different source of power: the media hoax.

  In 1732, at age twenty-seven, Franklin published his maiden edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac. In order to generate buzz for his new endeavor, he used astrological hooey to predict the exact date and time that Mr. Titan Leeds—Franklin’s number one competitor in the almanac market—would die of natural causes. Naturally Mr. Leeds was quite smug, ten months later, when his prescribed expiration date came and went without so much as a headache. Like Franklin cared. The next edition of Poor Richard’s included a heartfelt obituary for the dear Titan Leeds, plus a warning to readers that any future written statements from the deceased, re: his not being deceased, were purely the work of profit-seeking forgers. Franklin’s head game was unprecedented for its time, and quite successful. Despite Leeds’s repeated and furious insistence that he was still alive, sales of his almanac dropped consistently each year, all the way to his actual death in 1739. Once the final edition of Leeds’s work was published, Franklin openly thanked the forgers for giving up the ghost.

  In 1835, Richard Adams Locke, a cheeky young reporter for the New York Sun, used astronomy instead of astrology to trick the masses. Trading in on the name of Sir John Herschel, a renowned British stargazer, Locke invented the tale of a giant new telescope that revealed the existence of unicorns and bat-winged people on the moon. His continuing chronicle of Herschel’s “discoveries” was so successful that competing papers ran sensational confirmations of the story, just to get a contact sales high. Eventually Locke’s own big mouth did him in, but nobody seemed to mind being duped. Even Herschel himself took it with good humor, months later, when the story finally caught up to him at his observatory in South Africa. The only one left grumbling in his absinthe was Edgar Allan Poe, whose own attempt at a moon-related hoax was eclipsed by the Sun.

  Not all fabrications were driven by greed. In 1874, Joseph Clarke, a writer for the New York Herald, was so incensed by the cruel treatment of zoo animals that he vented his rage through a five-column fib. The animals have staged a mass escape! he declared. Two hundred beasts are running amok through the streets! People are being eaten by lions! Gored by rhinos! Trampled by hippos!

  Word spread fast. All over town, screaming citizens boarded up their windows and huddled with their guns. Some even jumped into the river in hopes that the crisis was limited to land creatures. The most amazing part is that Clarke admitted in the last paragraph of the article that the whole thing was a gag. Apparently, no one read that far.

  But when it comes to mass deception, nobody—and I mean nobody—holds a candle to William Randolph Hearst.

  The son of an obscenely wealthy California senator, Hearst used his family fortune to become a newspaper magnate. His endless lust for sensationalism, plus his obsessive competition with rival Joseph Pulitzer (no angel himself), caused him to sink his numerous papers into new depths of putrescence. But I’ll give the man credit. Like no one before him, Hearst understood the winning elements of a good public drama. Moreover, he knew how to slip his personal agendas inside each tasty little distraction.

  In 1897 one such agenda was the liberation of Cuba from Spain. It infuriated Hearst that the United States wasn’t intervening on our neighbor’s behalf. He tried for months to drum up public outrage through blood-curdling tales—mostly exaggerations and fabrications—of Spanish cruelty. This time his readers weren’t biting. They knew that outrage would lead to pressure, pressure would lead to war, and nobody wanted war. Nobody but Hearst.

  That was when he learned of Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, the lovely nineteen-year-old daughter of an elite Cuban family who was arrested on suspicion of aiding revolutionaries and sentenced to twenty years in a Moroccan prison. Bad news for her. Good news for Hearst. If anyone knew the marketing power of a tragic young hottie, it was him.

  Quicker than you could say “Rosebud,” he turned her into a national crusade. He devoted over four hundred columns of text to his “Cuban girl martyr” and dispatched two hundred reporters to gather fifteen thousand signatures in a petition to free her. True to form, the public became engrossed in the plight of poor Evangelina, who had only fought to defend her virtue from a lecherous Spanish colonel and was now due to be sent to a North African penal colony filled with murderers, thieves, and ravishers, all of whom would compromise her virtue on a daily basis.

  [Actually, she was arrested for seducing/distracting a prison guard during the escape of three rebels, and furthermore, it was unconfirmed that any sentence had been passed down on her at all.]

  Despite Hearst’s best efforts, Evangelina continued to languish in a Cuban holding cell. The story began to die from lack of development until suddenly, bang! evangelina escapes prison! Hearst’s papers broadcast the amazing tale of Charles Duval, a stalwart man who, with little more than a chivalrous heart and a sturdy ladder, daringly rescued the pretty young maiden from her impending fate and smuggled her out of Cuba by disguising her as a boy.

  [Actually, “Charles Duval “ was none other than Hearst’s trusted reporter, Karl Decker. And his daring rescue consisted of bribing every guard and his co
usin. But the part about the boy disguise was true.]

  Hearst couldn’t have been happier with the outcome. Evangelina was hailed as a hero upon her arrival in New York, where an extravagant hundred-thousand-person rally (funded by you-know-who) was held at Madison Square Garden. Later, she traveled to Washington, met President McKinley, and addressed Congress about Spanish oppression in her homeland. It wasn’t until her testimony that the government authorized the deployment of a thousand troops to Cuba, plus one battleship. That ship was the U.S.S. Maine, which eventually exploded and sank in the port of Havana. After that, armed conflict was a no brainer. America was all set for the Spanish-American War, furnished by none other than William Randolph Hearst.

  It wasn’t the first time a pretty face had launched a thousand ships, and it wasn’t the last time a compelling young girl would be used to lure Congress toward military action. A group of Washington publicists pulled a similar trick in 1990. If you want that story, just go on the Web and search for “Gulf War” and “Nayirah.” You’ll get quite a tale.

  I wasn’t part of that particular endeavor, but I knew one of the perpetrators quite well. In fact, I adored her. She was ruthless, brilliant, sexy and utterly unstoppable. Or so I thought at the time. That was the job that took Drea down. That was the gig that destroyed her from the inside out.

  But all of that is history. Ancient history. My thoughts were aimed at the future. I was about to add a bold new chapter to the Big Book of Media Tricks. Nobody had ever attempted a two-layer deception like mine before. Nobody had ever dared to fake a hoax. But that’s just to my knowledge. After all, the best tricks are the ones that don’t make the Big Book at all. The best gags are the ones that, even centuries later, we have yet to catch on to.

  11

  SECRET NAME

  On Monday morning, Annabelle Shane was laid to rest. The media presence at her funeral was paltry: two photographers, one from AP, the other from Reuters. They captured her burial through telephoto lenses and then quietly slipped away. Sometime over the weekend, the collective shock at her killing spree had worn off. The public eye was now officially fixed on the abominable Bitch Fiends.

  Not that Annabelle minded. That was her plan all along. She didn’t want to be the show, just the opening act. She didn’t care if everyone loved her or not. She just wanted them to hate Bryan Edison.

  Believe me, sweetheart, they’re working on it. His funeral, by contrast, was a blue-ticket event. News crews from every major network waited patiently at a distance, like a murder of crows. Once the procession let out, they squawked their rapid-fire questions, one atop the other, in the vain hunt for a quote, a bite, anything airable. The press was just gathering filler, of course. They knew the next big plot point would be coming from the L.A. County sheriff’s office. Most of them even knew, from tales told out of school, what that next plot point would be. But journalists still had a few standards left. They wouldn’t report on the Bryan/Annabelle rape tape until it became an official police rumor.

  Either way, Bryan’s name was in for a solid trampling. Whether the odium was accurate or not, few would know and few would care. I, however, was a devil’s advocate by nature. Maybe he never molested Annabelle. Maybe he was simply a colossal jerk who had wooed her into sex, filmed it, and then replayed it for all his fellow Fiends. Maybe the humiliation of that was enough to send her over the edge. Or maybe he really was a monster.

  Sadly, none of this would ever be explored. To the public, the content of the forthcoming videotape would be overshadowed by its soundtrack. To the media, Bryan Edison was just a bridge to greater controversies. He was simply the next and last stop on the road to Hunta.

  ________________

  I woke up at 8:30, much later than planned. I had a crazy list of things to do before picking up Harmony, not the least of which was house cleaning. Starting today, there would be an intern in my home every day for at least three hours. Never mind the vacuum. My sole mission was to gather up all the dirty laundry, literal and otherwise. Any financial records. Any personal records. Any loose credit cards. Anything a highly resourceful adolescent girl could use against me if she ever got pissed. It all went into the safe.

  Then there were the files of Lisa Glassman and her understudy, Harmony Prince. This was the one job where I could really use Madison’s help, and yet bringing some kid I barely knew into the conspiracy was about as smart as humping a beehive. The solution was limited disclosure. Madison was strictly on a need-to-know basis. And she didn’t ever need to know about my connection to these two ladies. Into the safe they went.

  After rendering my apartment inviolable, I conference-called Doug and Maxina and filled them in on the Harmony situation. Naturally they were both pleased with my success, not just in getting her but getting her on tape. And naturally, they each wanted a copy right away. Thus I replayed the useful portion of last night’s conversation into the mikes of two minicassette recorders. It was a pathetically low-tech solution, I’ll admit, but the crackly quality of the secondhand audio added an air of authenticity. That, and it obscured my voice. I was all in favor of that.

  By the time I fulfilled my basic human needs, it was already a quarter after ten. Before leaving home, I looked around one last time, trying to determine if there was anything else worth hiding. I was puzzled by my own anxiety. Just last week, an investigative reporter spent the entire night here. That didn’t bother me. Why was I getting all worked up now?

  Because, my friend, last week you weren’t planning to con an entire nation. And I’m not talking nude chicks and monk seals, bucko. You’re playing in the majors now.

  That would probably explain it. To drive the point home, I made another run to the spy shop and traded in my current untraceable cell phone for the Drug Dealer Special. It was brick red and as bulky as a cordless, but the shopkeeper assured me it was the ultimate stealth device. It couldn’t be hacked, tracked, cloned, or zoned (whatever that meant). You could even use it to threaten the president. I didn’t think my plan would extend that far, but I could certainly use a phone that the press couldn’t tap. In fact, I could use two.

  ________________

  At eleven o’clock I arrived at the UCLA Center for the Health Sciences, home of the dental school. It worked a lot like barber college. In order to get her free braces, all Harmony had to do was let some shaky neo-orthodon test his mettle on her teeth. I had to admire her resolve. I wouldn’t trust my pearly whites to someone who only recently stopped living in a dorm.

  But apparently they did right by her. She beamed a shiny smile as she emerged from the building, fifteen minutes later. She had just learned that this was her last tightening. The braces were coming off in May, four months sooner than expected.

  “It’s so good,” she told me. “It’s like early parole for my mouth. I can’t wait.”

  I smiled at her as she buckled her seat belt. “That’s great. You look very nice, by the way.”

  She lowered her head. “Thank you.”

  Harmony was dressed to impress, with a red one-shoulder top, wide-leg leather pants, and numerous sparkly adornments. Unless she had a crush on one of the dental students, she was all dolled up for Hunta and company. That was a good sign that she was at least a little bit ready to move forward with us.

  I backed out of the parking space. “This shouldn’t take long. I’ll have you home by two.”

  She gazed out her window. “Okay.”

  “Still nervous?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Absolutely. Tell me what I can do to help.”

  She fingered the metal on her upper cuspids. “I don’t know. I guess I need more explanation. I been up all night thinking about this...”

  “But not talking about it.”

  She emitted a dark chuckle. “No. Don’t worry. I didn’t tell none of my roommates. I couldn’t explain it even if I wanted to.”

  “What are you stuck on?”

  “Lots of things.”

  �
��For instance?”

  “For instance, what if people don’t believe me?”

  “What, that Hunta sexually abused you?”

  “Yeah.”

  I grinned. “Not a problem. The cards are stacked in our favor. All we need to do is convince the media of two things: that Hunta had the opportunity to abuse you, and that his people are scared shitless about what you might say.”

  “How you gonna prove he had the opportunity?”

  “Well, first there’s your pay stub, which proves you were at the Christmas party. Then there’s a hotel receipt, signed in Hunta’s name, which proves he got a room that night. The rest we’ll fill in through witnesses and pictures.”

  “Pictures?”

  “Not of the incident itself. Just of you and Hunta standing together before this whole thing happened. It’ll help establish a prior connection, and it’ll give the press something to use.”

  She was baffled. “There ain’t no pictures of me and him.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m taking you to see him.”

  “So you can take pictures. “

  “Uh-huh.”

  “From last year.”

  “You got it.”

  Perplexed, Harmony lit a cigarette and then opened her window. “This shit’s too much for me.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. If I had the time to ease you into it, I would. All I can say is keep asking me questions and try not to let the whole thing scare you. You’re in good hands.”

  She emitted a wry grin. “You know, I hate to say this but the nicer you are to me, the more scared I get.”

  “Well, in that case, up yours.”

  Harmony laughed. “See? That’s what I’m talking about. You being all sweet and funny. And you seem like you being straight with me, but... I don’t know. I guess I just seen too many movies, that’s all. I keep waiting for the part where things get ugly.”