Slick (19 page)

“No, but they’ve cornered the market. I mean everyone shits on rappers for being sexist, but how can they not be when all they see are these chickenhead hos just lining up to be humiliated like—” She cut herself off with a wave of the hand. “Whatever. You probably think I’m the biggest hypocrite in the world for going all feminist on you.”

“Of course not. Why would I think that?”

“Because I keep standing by my husband even though he fucks everything that moves. Look, I’m not a street bitch. I wasn’t raised to put up with that kind of shit. But ever since I got involved in the music industry...Let’s just say I’m glad one of us in this car still has pride.”

She grew quiet again. I hoped she wouldn’t continue on what was becoming a deeply personal monologue.

“I fucking hate that he cheats on me,” she said. “But I stopped taking it personally. This is his shit, not mine. That whole player image thing is such a deep part of him, because of the way he grew up. In South Central, if you’re a nigga and you’re not wearing colors, you might as well be a woman. And if you’re crazy enough to be a gifted student, scoring all A’s like Jeremy did, you might as well be a
white
woman. So this is how he proves himself. He throws his dick and his money around like there’s no tomorrow. Of course the problem, another problem, is that right now he’s all dick and no money. Don’t let that hotel fool you. We already blew the advance on the second album, which wasn’t much to begin with. Now we only get whatever the Judge feels like fronting us. Even if the album goes triple platinum, we’ll probably still end up being in debt to Mean World.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah. It sucks. I liked it better when it was just white people screwing us over.”

She glanced out the back window. “Oh shit. You had to turn left back there. I’m sorry.”

“No problem.”

As I made a U-turn, Simba stared at the endless grid of well-kept houses.

“I had my own thing going on,” she said in a solemn tone. “My own plans. My own album. But now all I am is the wife of some rapper. The
cheated-on
wife of some rapper. That wasn’t part of the dream, Scott.”

That was when I said—disingenuously—that I didn’t know she had an album. Sure, I could have used my inside knowledge and pretended that her fame preceded her, but that just wasn’t me. Out of the many flavors of bastard out there, I couldn’t bear to be a patronizing one.

For the next few minutes she gave me a first-person account of the miseducation of Simba Shange. What wasn’t mentioned on her one adoring fan page was that her manager at the time had also been her lover. The man was twice her age and, when all was said and done, left her for his next big discovery. I’d tell you her name—trust me, you know it—but I’ve already had enough legal troubles to last me a lifetime. Suffice to say she made it further than Simba. Further than Hunta, even.

“I’m tired of being angry about it,” she told me. “Tired of being mad at where I ended up. And I’m definitely tired of being angry at Jeremy. He really isn’t a bad man, Scott. As much as I complain about him, he’s the furthest thing from a rapist. If there’s anything I know for sure, it’s that.”

“I believe it.”

She turned to me and put her hand on my leg, a strange reminder of a night that never happened. “Then promise me you’ll do what’s best for us. I know we’re not the ones paying your bill, but I can tell you know right from wrong. So no matter what the Judge or Doug or even Maxina says to you, promise me you’ll do what’s right for me and Jeremy.”

Softly, she squeezed my thigh. Ah, there it was. The hook. All throughout the car ride, I’d been nagged by the vague sense that she was angling for something. For a disturbing moment I thought she was going to hit me up for a loan. But as soon as she touched my leg, she confirmed my first instinct. It was nothing more than a loyalty play. All she wanted to do was charm some extra allegiance out of me.

I was disappointed. More so, I was insulted. Did she really think a few rounds of flirting would turn me into her lovestruck champion? How stupid. How amateur. Suddenly, I got the flipside image of her relationship with the Judge. Lord knew how much she had to touch and caress him in order to squeeze out the latest stipend. All I knew was that I wasn’t as easy to beguile.

“Simba, I can’t guarantee success, but I promise you I’ll do everything in my power to get you and Jeremy out of this mess. My real goal is to get you both out of this mess better than when you came in. That’s extra-credit work. That’s the real challenge. And I’m only doing that because I like you guys.”

No, I’m not above playing fake. In this case, all I had to do was tell her what she wanted to hear. It worked. She squeezed me one last time and then moved out of my personal space.

“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 biggest 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.