Slick

by Daniel Price

  “I meant well.”

  Yes, and what a fine comfort that was. Maybe I could yell that to Harmony as she plummeted into darkness. Maybe she’d forgive me on the long way down.

  ________________

  I parked a block away from Doug’s house, just in case someone followed me. I rang the doorbell and was surprised to see Big Bank. I blinked at him in stupor.

  “Oh. Hey. What are you doing here?”

  He looked around. “Just get in.”

  I entered the house quickly. He closed the door behind me. “It was stupid of you to come here.”

  “I was asked to come.”

  “Yeah, well, it was stupid for them to ask.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not radioactive yet.”

  “Yeah? What happens when the TV starts throwing your name around?”

  “Then I start glowing.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “That’s why I came here.”

  He studied me, expressionless. “You have a hickey on your neck.”

  “What?”

  I examined myself in the foyer mirror. Jesus. He wasn’t kidding. There was a blemish the size of a quarter at the base of my throat, a silly mishap from last night’s affections. It pulled me out of the future so fast, I laughed with dizzy inertia.

  Big Bank eyed me cynically. “The deaf woman?”

  “Yeah. You want to hear all about it?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” I said, while adjusting my shirt collar. “So is Jeremy here? Or did they just bring you over to kill me?”

  I knew Hunta had a new secret hideout. I just didn’t expect it to be Doug’s place. The move was pure fiscal pessimism on the Judge’s part. On some level, he figured this was a lost battle, which meant he’d have to drop Jeremy from the roster, which meant there was no future revenue to deduct all those hotel expenses from. It was record-label dharma: if you can’t bill the artist, it’s probably not worth paying for.

  Since I last saw him nine days before, Hunta had lost a little weight, a lot of sleep, his wife, his daughter, his faith in humanity, and any fondness he may have had for me. I could see it all on his face as I entered the living room. He stretched out on the long couch, decked out in nothing but an open robe and a pair of red silk boxer shorts. For once his opiates were legal. He tapped a cigarette into an ashtray on the floor, right next to a half-empty bottle of sloe gin.

  “Slick,” he muttered. “Get the fuck over here.”

  I sat down on the wooden coffee table, between him and the big-screen TV. The bold text overlay stretched all the way across the Fox News banner: harmony prince claim a hoax?

  Before I could say anything, Hunta grabbed my sleeve. His eyes were cracked with deep red veins.

  “Just tell me it’s over, man. Tell me this fucking nightmare is over and I’ll forgive you for everything.”

  I caught Doug and the Judge in the corner of my eye. The two of them were pacing the porch—flailing, fretting. Like me, they were waiting for more data. They were waiting for Maxina.

  “It looks like the nightmare’s over,” I told Hunta. “At least for you.”

  “I didn’t ask what it looks like! I asked what it is!”

  “I don’t know what else to tell you. We’re just going to have to wait and see.”

  He sat up and hunched forward, his ring-laden hands pressing deep into his cornrows.

  “They all saying she might be lying. She might be full of shit. But no one’s saying I might be innocent.”

  “That’s not how they work. They only have two modes: attack and ignore. If you want vindication, you’re going to have to fight for it. You’re going to have to get in everyone’s faces, with middle fingers blazing, and say, ‘Fuck you. You got me all wrong.’”

  I thought that might pick him up some, but he continued to brood. I plopped down next to him, slouching into the cushions.

  “Or you can just attack the evil white men who framed you,” I said.

  “Yeah? Can I mention you by name?”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to.”

  Hunta vented a smoky sigh, then matched my languid pose. We looked like a couple of wasted stoners.

  “Forget it,” he said. “What I been through, I wouldn’t wish on anybody. And it don’t matter anyway. Even if I got the whole world kissing my ass, it won’t mean a damn thing. Not anymore.”

  “I’m sorry about Simba.”

  “Yeah. So am I.”

  He took a long swig of gin, then offered me the bottle. I waved it away. I didn’t need his depressant, and he certainly didn’t need my flu germs.

  “I fucked up,” he said. “And you know what the sad part is? Even if she came back right now, even if I apologized all day and all night, I’d only fuck it up all over again.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t.”

  “Yeah, soon enough I would.” He took another swig of liquor. “Soon enough I’d have to.”

  I studied the bottle in his hand. It idly occurred to me that the words “gin” and “Jean” would look very much the same to a deaf lipreader. So would “medicine” and “Madison.” The bizarre revelations nearly triggered an ill-timed chortle. All I needed was gin and medicine. I could survive all this with just a little gin and medicine.

  “See, we ain’t like them, Slick. There’s a kind of love in women, most women, that we ain’t got in us. A kind of love we can’t handle. That’s why so many marriages end up falling apart.”

  “That simple, huh?”

  “Some things are just that simple, man. It’s people like you who make shit more complex.”

  “Well, you ever rap about it?”

  He gave me a jaded look. “Fuck you. I bet you think I haven’t.”

  “Have you?”

  “Second album, motherfucker. First track. ‘Love Is Real.’”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  He extinguished his cigarette and stared at its last wisps of smoke.

  “It’s a sequel,” he told me. “It’s all about that guy from ‘Bitch Fiend,’ except here he finally deals with his problem. He finally sees that if he keeps spreading himself out over all these different women, there’ll be nothing left of him to spread. And he finally finds a woman he can put all of himself into. Not just that one part of him. You understand what I’m saying?”

  I nodded wistfully. “I do. It sounds really good.”

  “It’s better than good, man. Best song I ever wrote.”

  “Simba must have loved it.”

  He bloomed a wistful sneer. “Nah. I wrote it for her, but I didn’t write it with her. That was the problem. I had help on that one. And then I fucked the help.”

  Ah, yes. Lisa Glassman. How quickly she’d dropped off my radar screen. It felt like months since I’d thought about her. Months since I’d even wondered what the truth was.

  “Jeremy, can I ask you something?”

  He snorted a laugh. “You asking now?”

  “Might as well.”

  “What the fuck does it matter now?”

  “Because I’d like to know what really happened that night.”

  Hunta lit another cigarette. “It’s funny. She called me last Thursday. Right as that bitch of yours was getting her face put everywhere. I never expected to hear from her again, but there she was on the phone, wondering what the hell happened. How this one lie started this other lie and everything got so out of hand.”

  “So she admitted she was lying.”

  “Shit, yeah. It wasn’t even a question of that. We were both there that night. She only said yes. She said it like a thousand times.”

  He dropped his head back and puffed smoke at the ceiling fan. “I never raped a woman, Slick. But if lying was a crime, if using women was a capital offense, I’d have gotten the chair a long time ago.”

  Just from her impressive background, Lisa Glassman had struck me as a wom
an of skill and resolve. A true creative professional. I could only imagine that despite her attraction to Hunta, she had initially put up quite a roadblock when he started making advances. Oh, the wonderful things he must have said to her that night. The powerful lines he must have used to bind her better judgment. If that was indeed a crime, and if the system wasn’t nicer to white men, I’d surely be on death row myself.

  “You know what the saddest part is?” Hunta asked. “She never asked for money. She never even asked for an apology. All she ever wanted was that damn song she helped me write.”

  I rubbed my nose. “That’s all she wanted? The rights to that song?”

  “Not even the rights, man. She just wanted a written promise that I’d take the song off the album and then never sing it again. She said I didn’t deserve to sing it. It was too good for me. She felt so strong about it that she was willing to lie to get what she wanted.”

  There was definitely a poetry at work there, considering that he had lied to get what he wanted.

  “So why didn’t you just give it to her?” I asked.

  Hunta let out a belly laugh, one loud enough to stop the Judge and Doug on the patio.

  “I didn’t want to. It’s just that simple. It was the title track of the album. The best track of the album. If she wanted to quit her job, call me names, call my wife, that was her business. But she didn’t deserve to take that song from me. Not because she let me fuck her.”

  He let out a tired sigh. “Once that Melrose shit happened, though, I changed my mind real fast. I was ready to give her anything she wanted. But then Maxina came along and said it would look bad to be making that kind of deal. And then you came along and...Shit, you were the man.”

  “I was the man,” I said weakly.

  “You were the man with the plan that was gonna fix everything. And you wanna know what the real sad part is? She told me she would’ve never come forward.” He laughed again. “She was only fronting like she was gonna make noise. Just to sweat us out. This whole time we’re all racing to stop her, and it turns out it was for all nothing.”

  Now Fox showed a clip of Harmony and Alonso exiting the CNN building, right after their tumultuous appearance on Larry King Live. Although Harmony tried to shield herself from the unrelenting cameras, it was easy to see the pitch-black look on her face. She was vengeful, hateful.

  Hunta watched along. “All these lies. All this drama. All for what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He lit another cigarette, then watched the hot end smolder. “We should’ve never listened to you, Slick.”

  “No,” I responded. “I guess you shouldn’t have.”

  ________________

  By eight-thirty, the Mean World men sat gathered in the living room. They spread ourselves out among the three leather sofas. Hunta sat between Big Bank and Doug. It would take eight Harmonys to match their combined weight, but the one on TV loomed large enough to balance them out.

  The Judge and I faced each other from matching love seats, locked in our own strange counterpoise. He swore to me that he wasn’t the one who leaked the audiotape. I assured him I had no intention of taking anyone down with me. We didn’t believe each other, but who cared? We were too nervous, too clobbered, too weary to start another fight now. All we could do was wallow in the din and blather of Fox News until something pulled us out of our stasis.

  As expected, that something was Maxina. At a quarter to nine, she joined our little powwow, shattering the casual equilibrium we had established. Her hair was unwashed. Her untucked blouse was misbuttoned by one. She took a wincing perch on an end table, then muted the TV.

  “My copy of the audiotape has been sealed inside my suitcase,” she informed us. “Nobody else knew where it was. Not even my staff. Doug?”

  “Like I told Scott, our copy was locked in the office safe. Only the Judge and I have the combination.”

  The Judge sighed with forced patience. “I swear on the life of my children that I did not leak that tape.”

  “We had no reason to,” Doug declared. “As soon as we learned that Harmony was confessing, we practically threw a party. Why would we screw that up?”

  I flinched my shoulders in a listless shrug. “My guess? You got antsy. You didn’t think Harmony would actually go through with it and you didn’t want to waste another moment.”

  Doug waved me off. The Judge simply glared. “Yeah? And what about your original? How secure was that?”

  “Locked in my safe,” I said.

  “You said you have an intern.”

  “She’s thirteen, she doesn’t have the combination—”

  “And she don’t know the whole story anyway,” Hunta griped.

  That was pretty much what I was going to say. But I was idly flattered, on Madison’s behalf, that Hunta not only remembered her from their brief conversation but continued to give a crap about her opinion of him. In that respect, he had little to worry about. By the time Madison checked the news, she’d know for sure that he was innocent. She’d know for sure I wasn’t.

  “I am completely stumped, then,” Maxina said. “But it doesn’t matter who leaked it. We have to deal with the fallout.”

  Hunta scratched his cheek in bother. “What’s the problem? Why is this bad for us?”

  “It’s bad for Harmony,” Doug replied. “And she can make it bad for us.”

  Maxina cleaned her glasses with her shirt flap. “She was up all night working on her speech. I read the final draft. It was wonderful. Too bad we didn’t get a single word of it on camera. Once she found out about the Fox News story, she stopped cooperating with us.”

  She threw me a quick, poignant glance. The message was clear enough: She blames you. Of course Harmony blamed me. Why wouldn’t she? I was the root of all evil.

  “So what?” asked Big Bank. “What can she do? Deny it?”

  Doug shook his head. “She can try, but the voice analysts will nail her. She’s essentially screwed. The problem is that there’s nothing stopping her from telling the press all about us.”

  The Judge aimed his fury at me. “That’s because she knows all about us! I told you from the start it was a bad idea! Now she’s going to bury us!”

  “She’s not going to bury you,” I said impatiently. “She’s going to bury me.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, he’s right,” said Maxina. “She’s going to bury Scott.”

  Try as they might, the others couldn’t make the leap. I let Maxina explain it.

  “All the tape proves is that there’s a plot to frame Jeremy, not a plot to save him. If Harmony tries to reveal the rest, the press won’t buy it. It’s too far-fetched. Too self-serving. And she won’t have any credibility left anyway. The story would flutter around the mainstream for a day or two, then fade away.”

  Meanwhile, back on Fox News, a split-box graphic floated over the news anchor’s shoulder. One side had an unflattering shot of Harmony. The other side had a generic male silhouette with a question mark in it. My heart thundered at the sight of it.

  Maxina gestured at me. “Unlike us, Scott is linked to the story through hard evidence. If Harmony wants to take him down with her, she can. And make no mistake: Harmony wants to take him down with her.”

  Hunta gawked at me. “Wait a second. You saying I’m saved and you’re fucked?”

  “Yeah,” I said, through the blackest of smirks. “Enjoy the twist.”

  The man had every right to gloat at my downfall, but he was too gobsmacked to fit me into the equation. The Bitch had really worked him over these past two weeks, to the point where he couldn’t tell up from down, left from right, black from white. He was the world’s hostage. Whether he was rescued or merely exchanged for another prisoner, who the hell cared? It was an open door. Despite his earlier claims that it no longer mattered, it mattered.

  “Don’t fuck me with now,” he said. “Don’t tell me this shit is over if it ain’t really over.”

  “It ain’t
really over,” Maxina dryly responded. “We’ve established that Harmony is Scott’s problem. What we don’t know is whether or not Scott’s going to be our problem.”

  Naturally, everyone turned to me. I crossed my legs and rested my head against my fist, playing coy even as my gut wrenched.

  “So that’s the sticky wicket, is it?”

  “Don’t play games,” the Judge snapped. “What are you going to do?”

  “What can he do?” asked Big Bank.

  “Scott’s a thoroughly cautious man,” Maxina told them. “I have no doubt that he recorded at least some of our key meetings. He probably has each and every one of us on tape. What I can’t tell from his impassive young face is whether or not he plans to use it.”

  She was right, as usual. Thanks to my Palm Pilot recorder and a life time of vigilant thinking, I had everything I needed to blow up the world. I even had some incentive.

  “Well, I’ll be honest,” I said. “I’m not happy about that tape being leaked. Somebody screwed me over. Worse, somebody screwed Harmony over. The more I think about that, the angrier I get. I mean she had a chance. If she had just confessed, the press and the public would have given her a chance to redeem herself. She could have bounced her way back from all of this. But now she’s just another criminal caught on Fox. She’s fucked for life. And why? Because somebody in this room got nervous. That doesn’t just make me angry. That makes me cynical.”

  Maxina sat forward. “Just from your glares, I can tell who your chief suspect is.”

  “Yeah. You’re sharp that way.”

  “It wasn’t me,” she insisted. “If it was me, I’d tell you. And I’d tell you why.”

  “I already know why. You were afraid that Harmony and I were still in cahoots together. That we were secretly scheming to pull some last-minute trick that would screw you all and set us up for life. So you beat us to the punchline. You took a calculated risk. And you know what? It paid off.”

  Maxina raised her palms. “That’s not what happened at all. Look, you’re upset right now—”