Slick (25 page)

[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 cousin. 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.

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?

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.”

Of course she was. And from everything said, it was clear that I was only making it worse. I was trying too hard to prove what a genuinely swell guy I was. By overdoing it, I was only reinforcing her suspicion that I was being disingenuous, even when I wasn’t. In the media world, we call that the Al Gore Effect. The corrective course was to play down the fairy-godmother bit and start cozying up to her cynicism. Modern-day advertising was built on this foundation.

“You want to know why you’re really tripping?”

Harmony smirked with mocking humor. “Why am I really tripping?”

“Because no matter how much I comfort you, no matter what I promise, you know that in the end, my job is to help Hunta. Not you.”

Her eyes lit up. “Yes! See? That’s exactly what it is!”

“Right. Of course. He’s the one paying me. I never hid that. What, you think I’m doing this because I’m a rap fan?”

She shook her head, amused but not relieved.

“I’m getting paid a lot of money to save his ass,” I said. “If I don’t deliver, I’ll probably never see a dime. So yeah, that makes me his loyal soldier. That’s great for him but I can see why it raises troubling issues for you.”

“That’s right.”

“Like what’s to stop me from sacrificing you in order to save him?”

“Right...”

The poor thing. My new tack was throwing her for a loop. But I was going somewhere with this.

“If you want the answer to that one,” I teased, “then touch my face.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just poke it, real quick. Wherever you want.”

She hesitated, confused.

“It’s okay. I don’t have anything contagious.”

After another brief pause, she reached over and gently prodded my cheek.

“Okay,” I said. “Now tell me. Does it feel like I’m wearing a mask?”

“No.”

“Right. That means you know what I really look like.”

Shifting in my seat, I retrieved my wallet and dropped it on her lap. “My license is in there. Take it. Study it. Then you won’t just know my face, you’ll know my full name and address.”

She opened my wallet, but only gave my ID a cursory glance.

“I may be loyal,” I added, “but not enough to go to jail for him. The problem is that you’ve got an invisible lasso around me now. So if you go down, all you’d have to do is give it a tug and...yoink. I go down with you.”

“Unless you take me out.” She was only half kidding.

“I’m just a publicist, hon. Forget the moral argument. If you die by any means, there’ll be a cloud of suspicion hanging over me and my clients for the rest of our lives. We don’t want that. Trust me. The cheapest, easiest, safest way to keep you quiet is to keep you happy. Just think about it.”

At last, she could see me through the darkness. She took my advice and retreated inside her own head, checking my equations.

By the time we exited the UCLA campus, she came back for more numbers.

“How much?” she asked.

“How much what?”

“How much you making from all this?”

“You really want to know? Because I’ll tell you.”