Slick (18 page)

Desperate times, desperate measures. If she couldn’t shake the “exotic” label, her last-ditch effort was to ride it all the way. Soon after her eighteenth birthday, Kelly—who had never been to Africa in her life—changed her name to Simba K. Shange, an awkward mix of Zulu and Swahili that aurally translated to “the lioness who walked like a lion.” On the aesthetic advice of her manager, she eventually dropped the “K,” but in Swahili, “ke” was a feminine suffix. So not only was she left with an inappropriately masculine moniker, but she was now officially “the lion who walked like a lion.” To a native Kenyan, the name would sound as nutty as Bucky McDeerhop. Her manager quickly reminded her how very little her future success rode on the approval of native Kenyans.

Using the same demo tape, Simba got a record deal with one of the very labels that had rejected Kelly Corwin. The songs were rerecorded with a world-beat flair, and by December 1998 the album was on the shelves of record stores everywhere. Well, the East and West Coast. Actually, Seattle and New York. But it was well received by the scholarly Afrocentric population of both cities, even if they were perplexed by her name.

In the end, the album tanked. The label went bankrupt. Her manager moved on to lighter pastures. And Simba settled for life in the background, earning a semi-decent living as a studio backup singer. On the plus side, she got to work with some interesting talent. One of them she married.

While her husband had more than nine dozen fan sites devoted to him, somewhere in the corner of the Internet there was a single typo-ridden Web page that lovingly chronicled the all too brief career of the artist formerly known as Kelly Corwin.

I had discovered this at 7:30
a.m.
, on the gray Sunday morning of February 4. Already I knew I was in for one of those existential off days, the kind where you wake up a little bit wrong and don’t completely reacclimate yourself to reality. In my dreams, I’d spent the night with Simba. Nothing carnal. It was more Lifetime than Cinemax. We were curled up in my bed. She was talking. I was listening. But after her long diatribe about something (I couldn’t remember what), I interrupted her with a question that had been nagging me for some time. “What do you do?”

That was when I woke up. Poorly. I still had my dream goggles on, so much so that it wouldn’t have surprised me to find Simba in the kitchen, in my shirt, cooking eggs for two. Sometime over the course of my shower, I found my way back to this plane of existence.

Obviously, I felt bad for her, to be held back by such a narrow mindset in this day and age. On the other hand, I knew that—like it or not—she was about to get plucked out of limbo, and soon. I wasn’t sure which way things would turn for Hunta and his stand-in accuser, but Simba “Rodham” Shange would come out of this shitstorm smelling like a garden. Hell, it might just resurrect her career, even if her husband’s dies on the vine. Wouldn’t that be a Hollywood twist?

But I was getting ahead of myself. The scandal still needed its Monica. She’d be the star of the show, and I needed to find the perfect actress to fill the part. I was like Botticelli in search of his Venus. Of course, unlike the great master, I had only forty-eight hours to find the woman, talk her out of her clothes, and get her onto the clamshell.

 

 

The secret Patsy Selection Committee, as no one called it, met in the living room of Doug’s bohemian Hollywood home. I’d assumed the panel would simply be me and Doug, but the Judge and Simba quickly arrived to complicate matters. The Judge insisted he was crucial to the process because he had extensive knowledge of virtually everyone who worked for his label. Simba was there to represent Hunta’s best interests, a not-so-subtle finger-shake at the people handling this crisis.

Almost instantly I was reminded why I was so much more effective as a solo operative. My co-conspirators wasted forty-five minutes squabbling over the inadequacies of each other’s selections. Turns out all three leads were terrible. The Judge’s favorite video vamp, Giselle Thomas, had been hit with three different restraining orders from three different men. Simba’s choice, Monique Plana, had partied it up with Hunta’s posse several times since Christmas. And Doug’s proposed
j’accuser
, whose name I forgot the moment I heard it, was notorious for fellating every male recording act from Aaron Neville to ZZ Top. Doug seemed almost hurt by the news.

This was going nowhere. I tuned the others out and leafed through the assortment of employee files on Doug’s coffee table. For my purposes, several of the candidates were perfectly suited to play the role I was casting. And for the media’s purposes, they would rally around any woman prettier than Paula Jones, especially when she said such explosive things like “Yes, Hunta sexually abused me,” “No, I’m not a lying opportunist,” “Okay, yes, I’m a lying opportunist, but some shady white man offered me a lot of money to say that Hunta sexually abused me.” In the end, the press was only as strong as their sponsors, the sponsors were only as strong as their audience, and for the audience’s purposes, they needed a woman who gave good face. A face that could divert them from their unfulfilling lives. A face they could believe in, even when it admitted to lying.

By that token, it was kismet that I came upon the face and file of Harmony Prince.

“I got it,” I said, a mere four seconds after laying eyes on her photo. “I found her.”

The photograph itself was crud: a faded two-by-three Polaroid with rumpled edges and a coffee stain on the lower right corner. Unlike the other Mean World booty-shakers, Harmony didn’t have a professional head shot in her file. She didn’t have representation from any of the prime booty-shaker talent agencies. All she had was a handwritten application and a casual photo taken during some low-rent picnic event. With her elbows on the table and her chin on her fists, she gave the camera a tight, weather-beaten smile that brimmed with effortless sincerity. But it was the touch of sadness in her eyes—the undeniable hint of hard-earned wisdom—that cut through every one of my prickly defenses. She was painfully real, and instantly compelling.

I was sure it was just her well-toned body and light cocoa skin that had paved the way for her part-time gig as hip-hop eye candy. What a shame that such a terrific face was being wasted as background filler, as extra flesh in some rapper’s video harem.

That needed to change, quick. With my help, Harmony Prince could be forever yanked out of the scenery and into the annals of cultural history. In my hands, she would be molded and forged into a weapon of mass distraction.

Doug peeked over my shoulder. “Who’d you find?”

“This one,” I said, holding up the file. “Harmony Prince.”

As soon as I voiced her name, I knew it was a winner. Not only was it mnemonically friendly, it rolled off the tongue like a sonnet. I hadn’t heard a name that catchy since Tawana Brawley.

And yet all three of my associates were forced to take pause as they scanned their memory banks.

“Chocolate Ho-Ho,’” said Simba finally.

“Right. Right,” said Doug. “The girl in the second set.”

“That one of Hunta’s videos?” I asked.

“Yeah. We shot it in Glendale last April. About a month before ‘Bitch Fiend.’”

“Oh, I remember her now,” the Judge added. “The quiet one.”

“Good,” I said. “Now before I get my hopes up, are you sure she was at the Christmas party?”

“Apparently so,” Doug replied. With a little embarrassment, he held up a pay stub.

I nodded knowingly. “Ah. And just to be clear, she was hired to dance.”

“Of course. If she was a hooker, she wouldn’t have a W2 with us.”

Well, there were people hired to dance, and then there were people hired to “dance.” Know what I mean? But it wasn’t worth pressing the issue. All would be revealed in the background check.

“So tell me everything you know about her,” I said. “Does she have a drug problem? Criminal problem?
Any
disqualifiers?”

The Judge shook his head. “Nothing I heard of. She was really quiet.”

“I don’t think she has any kids,” Simba said. “We had a little day-care thing set up at that video shoot. I don’t remember seeing her there.”

“She’s not one of our regulars,” said Doug. “But we fish from the same pool as Aftermath Records. She might have done some work for them.”

“That’s okay. I’ll find out. But my last big question for now is how did she and...At the video shoot, how did she get along with Jeremy?”

“You mean did they fuck?” Simba asked, then threw a sharp look at the Judge. “I don’t know. Did they?”

“I have no idea,” he replied indignantly. “I don’t keep tabs on that stuff.”

“Well, maybe someone should.”

I closed Harmony’s file and isolated it. “All right. We seem to have one good candidate here. But I don’t want to stop until I have at least three names for the private investigator. Who’s next?”

The rest of the session was just a cautious formality. I knew I’d found my catch in Harmony. Of course only an idiot was a hundred percent sure of anything. That’s why God invented vetting. After another half hour of useless committee blather, I decided to get a jump start on the process. I slipped away to Doug’s bedroom and made the first call from my new anonymous cell phone.

Most private investigators come from a law-enforcement background. Eddie Sangiacomo, a wiry, middle-aged ferret of a man, came from the clergy. The story of how he abandoned his calling and became a freelance gumshoe was surprisingly dull, at least the way he told it. But he was still a power Catholic at heart and treated his business like the confessional. Once the name “Harmony Prince” came back to him from every corner of the news, no earthly agent could get him to cough up the fact that I had something to do with it. I gave him Harmony’s social security number, wished him well, and sent him on the hunt.

During the call, my gaze had been captured by a series of snapshots that ran all around the inside frame of Doug’s dresser mirror. They were all of the same beautiful baby boy: eating, sleeping, bathing. Although there was no chronological order to the pictures, the subject seemed to stop aging at around four. Maybe I was still lost in deep photoanalysis mode, but the meticulous shrine-like nature of the collection led me to believe that the child was no longer among the living. I’ve noticed that dead people, especially children, have this retroactively ghostly quality in all their photos, as if they were haunting in advance.

But then again, maybe he was still alive and Doug just got the ass end of a custody agreement. Who knew? Everyone had their backstory, some more interesting than others. To this day, I never got Doug’s tale. He didn’t seem like the kind to open up, and I certainly wasn’t the kind to pry. At least openly.

 

 

“I didn’t know you had an album,” I’d said to Simba while driving. Of course that was a lie. I’d known since 7:30 that morning. As with Doug, I didn’t feel any particular need to inquire unless it was brought up.

Thirty minutes earlier, the committee had nailed down its third and final candidate and called it a wrap. Before I could leave, Simba asked if I was going west and, if so, could I give her a ride to her cousin’s house in Beverly Hills. She had come with the Judge. She didn’t want to go back with him. The first thing she did upon entering my car was explain why.

“He’s a fat, lecherous fuck,” she told me, lighting her twentieth cigarette for the day. Her daughter’s absence allowed her to revert to her natural state as a smokestack. “He’s always putting his clammy hands on my leg. And then he gives me this smile that makes me want to take a shower. The worst part is that ever since Thursday he’s been stepping it up, only this time he’s doing it under the pretense of consoling me. ‘It’s all right, babe. Everything’s gonna be all right.’”

I smirked in empathy. I must have still had some dream residue on me, because I felt a heightened but artificial sense of intimacy with her, like I had already explored the dark skin beneath her tight leather pants and tank top.

“I don’t trust him,” she added. “Him or Doug. If they could sacrifice Jeremy to save Mean World’s precious relationship with Interscope, they would. And if they could somehow find a way to make money off this shit at our expense, they wouldn’t hesitate. Not for a second.”

“Well, at least you have absolutely no doubts about me,” I quipped.

Simba laughed. “Shit. Am I that obvious?”

“No. Just stands to reason.”

“True. But we like you, though. Jeremy’s fascinated by you. Whenever he talks about you now, he just calls you Slick.”

“Really,” I said ambivalently.

“Hey, be flattered. When a black man gives you a nickname, it’s a sign of respect. Besides, there are some names that are just too white to come out of a nigga’s mouth, know what I’m sayin’? Like Scott. Who wants to say
Scott
? A nigga don’t sound hard when he say shit like ‘Yo, motherfucka. Where Scott at?’”

Smirking, I shook my head.

“Doesn’t mean we trust you all the way, though,” she said.

“I’d be surprised if you did.”

“The thing that makes us feel good about you is that you seem to be in it for the challenge more than anything else. Like you’re determined, just for pride’s sake, to haul Jeremy’s ass out of the fire.”

“And get everyone to kiss it afterward,” I added with pride.

She laughed and touched my arm. “Okay. So we were right about you. I just hope you can get one of these stupid skanks to play along.”

“I will.”

Her smile deflated over the next two blocks. “There are just too many of them, Scott. There are too many sisters out there waiting for the chance to degrade themselves. For money, attention, whatever. It’s just sad.”

“It’s not limited to sisters.”