Slick (37 page)

I’d never done
this
kind of stuff before, but that wasn’t the thing to tell her.

“They knew I loved my job. They knew I was good at it. They were just happy with that, I guess.” I switched beats. “Although they had a good friend. A rabbi. He gave me a hard time. I remember once he pulled me aside and said, ‘Scott, what you do is not a good living. It may be a job. It may be a well-paying job. But you’re playing tricks on people, and that’s not a good living.’”

“Damn. What’d you say to him?”

“I simply looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Silly rabbi! Tricks are for kids!’”

Harmony screamed with laughter. “You didn’t really say that!”

“No. But I would have.”

“If?”

“If any of that actually happened.”

She screamed again. “You set me up?”

“And you walked right in,” I crowed. “I’m still the tricksta. Still the slicksta.”

“You’re terrible!”

“Anything to get a smile out of you.”

“You’re too much.”

I checked the clock. “Listen, sweetheart, you’re done for the day. I want you to rest and enjoy your new digs, okay? Take a nice long bath. Order a huge meal. Spoil yourself. You’re a celebrity now. Besides, you need to recharge your phone. I don’t want to lose you to a low battery.”

She took a deep breath, then let out a stretching moan. “Maybe I’ll take a nap. If I can.”

“Good. Recharge your own battery.”

“Thank you, Scott.”

“For what?”

“For making me feel better, like always.”

I looked out the window, beaming. “Harmony, I’d move heaven and earth for you. You know that.”

“I know,” she said softly. “You the only one I trust.”

That lit me up in dangerous ways. As my feelings and senses were heightened, so were my urges. I wanted to devour a huge rack of lamb, even though it was only breakfast-time. I wanted to sprint down the street, even though I was barefoot. Now I wanted to hug Harmony, hard. I wanted to envelop her, to wrap myself around her so tight that I wouldn’t be able to tell her heartbeat from mine. Although the feeling was hot, my reasons were shamefully cold. This was a woman who, just by leaving the apartment, had managed to upstage the twenty-million dollar opening to a hundred-million-dollar theme park. This was a woman who, in just forty minutes, had scored at least thirty million dollars’ worth of comparative ad exposure. Oh, Harmony. I liked you from the moment I met you, but now—God help me—you turn me on.

 

 

Once the nation’s newest celebrity disappeared inside the Miramar, the networks reluctantly returned to scheduled programming. The cable news channels, however, continued to squeeze every last drop out of Gail Steiner’s peach. They paraded an endless list of experts, authors, lawyers, pollsters, professors, prognosticators, the whole Goya beanery.

And yet as cerebral as these people were meant to seem, their conclusions were jam-packed with masturbatory drama. This new development has HUGE implications! For Hunta. For the entertainment industry. For the victims of Melrose, their families, their families’ lawyers. For all of us! God, yes! This affects all of us!

Surprisingly, very few of the strokes were devoted to Harmony herself. To the media, she was still just a stamp-sized pinup, a thumbnail tease. You could practically hear the news editors howling as they launched their flying monkeys out the window.
Go, my pretties! Find me everything you can on this girl! Go! Go!

Fortunately, one of the minions had been given a head start. Hell, I’d slipped Andy Cronin the key to Harmony’s whole life story. By now, of course, he knew exactly where it fit in. By now, he was typing as fast as he could.

 

 

I had just finished showering when she left the message. I knew there’d be some kind of emergency status meeting, but this seemed eerily formal. Why the change of venue? Why the fancy meeting room? Who else was coming?

At a quarter to ten, I arrived at the Beverly Hilton. Maxina had been staying there for the past week, courtesy of the Recording Industry Association of America. She wasn’t taking a dime from Mean World’s coffers. They couldn’t afford her. But Maxina wasn’t in this for the money. Like the RIAA, she remained focused on the larger battle. Why else would she leave her beautiful home in Atlanta? Her husband and sons. Her orthopedic chairs. To save one measly rapper? No way. In her mind, in her heart, she was fighting to save music.

Simba, on the other hand, had no love for the business. Many were starting to wonder if she had any love left for her husband. But when Maxina summoned her to the Hilton, she arrived just as promptly as I did. She was standing in the elevator bank when I caught her dark and lovely scorn.

“Is it me,” she asked facetiously, “or have you gotten even taller?”

She was dressed in a loose black blouse and tight gray jeans. Her long hair was clipped back. She hid herself under a hat and dark glasses, but nobody seemed to recognize her. A hefty bodyguard flanked her left side, just in case someone did.

“Simba. Hey. I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

“Oh, and why not?”

“You want the real answer or the polite one?”

An elevator opened. The bodyguard escorted us in, then pushed back a plump tourist who tried to embark with us.

Simba removed her glasses. “Let me guess. You heard I was being a real pain in the ass.”

“Something like that.”

“That’s all right,” she replied as the doors slid closed. “I heard you were fucking Harmony.”

Shit. I knew there’d be a downside to chewing out the Judge, aside from his lifelong enmity. Shit, shit, shit. That was not a constructive rumor. And worse, it was the kind that denials only strengthened. I’d have to say something clever to counter the buzz. Whatever it was, I’d save it for the meeting.

“I was being a pain in the ass,” Simba admitted, three floors up. “I was sick of that hotel. Sick of Maxina telling me what to do. And I was definitely sick of Jeremy acting like he was the only one being put out.”

“But then?”

She bounced a glare through the mirrored doors. “Let’s just say I got a wake-up call this morning.”

“How’s he holding up?”

“How do you think he’s holding up?”

“It’s just medicine,” I assured her. “It may taste like crap but it’s going to make everything better again.”

“So you say.”

“Just stand by your husband. You can’t go wrong.”

The elevator stopped at the top floor. After sniffing for reporters, Simba’s bodyguard led us down the hall to our meeting place. A pair of hotel security guards blocked the entrance. They checked our IDs against their lists, then opened the double doors to a massive, sun-drenched room.

“For the record,” Simba added, “I don’t think you’re fucking Harmony.”

“Good to hear.”

She put her shades back on. “I’d like to think you have better taste than that.”

We stepped into the light.

 

 

In its heyday, L’Escoffier was the swankiest of swank places to dine, a place where you could rub shoulders with the Hollywood elite over a rich crème brûlée. Eventually Merv Griffin’s people shut the restaurant down and left a chamber in its memory. The place could comfortably seat three hundred people, but there were only twelve of us here. We formed a tiny cluster in the center of the room. None of us looked very comfortable.

“See, to me this personifies Los Angeles,” Maxina joked to her squinting guests. “Too much sun and too much space.”

And yet the loop was looking awfully crowded as of late. Lord only knew how many folks were in on the gag now. The white people at the table were all strangers to me. Four of them were from the RIAA. Two were from Interscope. The final two were from Universal, Interscope’s corporate parent. They weren’t mere envoys. They were all high priests of the music industry.

The Judge sat with the Interscope reps. He threw me a cordial nod. I assumed it meant détente, but it was hard to tell. The sun gleamed so strongly off his bald head, I could barely see him.

For the first time this week, Maxina wasn’t dressed like she was going to Denny’s. Decked out in a stylish gray power suit, she walked around the table introducing everybody. I didn’t bother remembering their names. I hoped to God they’d extend me the same courtesy. This was stupid. It was unnecessary. It was dangerous. Nothing good ever came out of a committee, especially one filled with such nervous and powerful people.

At 10
a.m.
Maxina sat down and began the meeting.

“All right. Let’s talk about Harmony Prince.”

It wasn’t long before the shouting began.

 

 

“They have every reason to be scared,” the Judge explained, as he cut into a veal medallion.

We dined at Trader Vic’s, an aggressively chic eatery next to the hotel. Our tête-à-tête lunch was his idea, but I gladly accepted. The Judge was the one paying my invoice. That made him my client more than Maxina, Harmony, even Hunta. But for me this wasn’t just about customer service. I needed a new friend on the inside, especially since I’d left the Beverly Hilton with a brand new enemy.

“You know how we got the Parental Advisory sticker in the first place, right?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Tipper Gore had a thing against Prince.”

“She got the ball rolling, but it was her husband who did the real damage. See back in ‘85, when they were having those rock-and-roll obscenity hearings, the music labels didn’t give a shit. Controversy only led to higher sales. What did hurt was the increasing number of kids who recorded songs off the radio instead of buying the albums in stores. So at the time there just happened to be a bill on the Senate floor that would tax all blank audiotapes and give the revenue back to the record industry. We’re talking a handout worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Who fostered that bill? Al Gore. Who sat on the panel at the obscenity hearings? Al Gore.”

“So the labels took the sticker.”

“Right. The RIAA gave in. Not for principle. For profit. And what really sucks, Scott, is that we’re in the same jam again.”

“How so?”

“Think about it.”

I did. “Napster.”

“Napster’s dying, but the problem’s still there. The labels despise the Internet. It terrifies them. What they want more than anything is for Congress to make life hard for all the song-swappers and webcasters. What Congress wants, as always, is to suck up to their soccer-mom constituents. And what do
they
want?”

“To protect their kids from the evils of rap.”

“As long as it keeps making the goddamn headlines,” said the Judge. “You saw those guys at the meeting. They’re pissing their pants. Once the heat turns up, the first thing they’ll do is turn on Mean World. They’ll cut us out like a tumor. I don’t know how familiar you are with the music business but without one of the Big Five behind me, I won’t get any albums into stores. I won’t get any pay-for-play with the radio stations. Without Interscope, Universal, Vivendi, I might as well board up the windows. Can you see now why I’m stressed?”

He threw his napkin down, then finished his second beer. The Judge had skimped down on the bling-bling today. That was fortunate. In that sunny room, he would have blinged us blind.

“You sure you don’t want a drink, Scott?”

“You know, maybe I will have one.”

The bar was only twenty feet away. The Judge and I both had a nice clear view of the hanging television, currently on CNN (your source for nonstop Hunta speculation). Once again, they showed that lightning fast clip from “Chocolate Ho-Ho,” in which a skin-baring Harmony pressed and shimmied against a shirtless Hunta. She was completely indistinguishable from the woman on Hunta’s other side. For clarity’s sake, the network had dimmed the picture, and then highlighted her head with a light bubble. It made her look angelic, tragic.

The Judge scoffed at the TV. “That song is crap. Half the album is crap. It’s not Jeremy’s fault. It’s mine. His material was all so heavy at first, full of street angst and family drama. So I made him balance it out with some fun tracks. ‘Sex it up,’ I said. ‘Once you carve a name for yourself,
then
you can do the soulful-artist thing. But in the meantime, you’ve got to think about the market.’”

He shook his empty beer glass at the waitress. “I’m just a businessman, Scott. I never claimed to be smart.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“Well, I was certainly worried about ‘Bitch Fiend,’” he admitted. “But only because I thought they wouldn’t play it on the radio. I spent a lot of money getting those sample rights. You know how goddamn expensive the Rolling Stones are?”

“He samples the Rolling Stones?”

The Judge eyed me like I just fell from space. “Yeah. ‘Shattered.’ You never heard the song?”

“I’ve heard ‘Shattered.’”

“But you’ve never actually heard ‘Bitch Fiend.’”

I smiled. “I’ve heard
of
it.”

“Damn, Scott. Do yourself a favor. Do me a favor. Buy the CD.”

Actually, now I planned to download the song off the Internet, but that wasn’t the thing to tell him.

“I kept my word,” he said somberly. “I let him do his second album his way.”

“So is it good?”

“It’s exceptional. Too bad it’s not what he’ll be remembered for. It’ll probably never even hit the shelves.”

I finished my chicken and sat back. Although I was enjoying the lunch and the company, I was still only half there. The other half was thinking about Maxina. I really pissed her off at the hotel. It felt shamefully good at the time, but now I was worried. And more than half-worried. I may have just made a fatal mistake.