Slick (54 page)

“I said no.”

The studio was silent. The camera remained fixed on Harmony. She wiped her eyes and saw the world dead on.

“I said no, and he didn’t listen...”

Madison and I both leaned back against the couch. In the reflection of the TV screen, I could see Jean behind us, still running her nimble fingers through Madison’s hair. She was watching with us, but she didn’t seem to be watching Harmony. Through the television, through the reflection in Harmony’s face, she was watching me.

On TV, the tears kept coming, stronger and stronger, as Harmony sealed tomorrow’s headline.

“I said no. And he didn’t listen.”

 

 

That pretty much finished the show. Larry segued to a commercial. By the time he came back on, it was 6:59 and he was alone. He told us, in sympathetic fashion, that Harmony Prince and her attorney have left the studio. She’s okay. Boy, it’s never easy though, is it? She’s a brave woman. A brave woman. He then plugged tomorrow’s guests, a standby panel of experts who’ll talk and argue about—who else?—Harmony Prince. Hope you’ll join us.

By the end of the hour, I was already in my bedroom, Bat-Phone in hand. As I had made my way upstairs, Madison threw me a simple but poignant question: “Scott, what does this mean?” The subtext of her concern was obvious:
Scott, what if she’s telling the truth?

She wasn’t, but the fact that Madison began to wonder meant big trouble for everyone. If Harmony could put doubt in the mind of Hunta’s most zealous defender...

Sorry,
second
-most zealous. Congratulations, Simba. You just made the biggest public fuck-up since
dewey defeats truman
. You just scored a place in the High Hall of Well-Intentioned Bunglers, right next to Ralph Nader. You just became our iceberg.

From her own lovely face, Jean had a different inquiry.
What are you not telling us?

She had seen me in the reflection of the TV screen. Surely she suspected by now that my attitude toward Harmony was somewhat less than adversarial.
But what does that mean, Scott?

She’d just have to wonder. For now, I had higher priorities. This was the part where the ship began to sink. This was the part where everybody got loud.

 

 

“How is she?”

“What the hell is going on?”’

“Alonso, how is she?”

“She’s not talking to me! She’s not talking to anyone! She’s in the bathroom right now, crying, screaming and calling everybody a motherfucker!”

I tried to call her, but she didn’t answer her phone. I was hoping she’d at least be fuming from the inside of a limousine.

“Get her out of there,” I demanded. “I don’t care how. Get her out of there and get her back to the hotel.”

“Scott, she’s not listening to me! She thinks I was part of the ambush! She thinks we all set her up!”

“Keep your voice down! Be careful!”

“I’m in the senior producer’s office. Don’t worry. I’m alone.”

“You’re still in the CNN building, for Christ’s sake! Use your head!”

He snorted scornfully. “Ah yes. Ever the vigilant one. No wonder things are progressing so smoothly.”

I clenched my teeth. “You know I had nothing to do with that.”

He lowered his voice to a hiss. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if you hadn’t started that pissing match with Maxina.”

“
She
had nothing to do with that. It was all Simba.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Maxina wouldn’t be so stupid.”

Alonso exhaled. “This is bad, Scott.”

Stop. Using. My. Goddamn. Name. “We can still salvage this.”

He spoke in a harsh whisper. “How? If she confesses now, after that emotional scene, everyone will think she’s demented. She’ll freak people out. To be honest, she freaked me out a little.”

“Alonso, were you ever raped?”

“Of course not.”

“Me neither. But Harmony was, many times, by her stepfather. We have no idea how that... Look, we’ll get some experts to explain that she was channeling an earlier trauma. She never mentioned Hunta by name.”

He thought about it. “I don’t know. That might satisfy some people—”

“We’ll make it satisfy everyone. The bigger issue right now is that the anti-Hunta sentiment is about to reach critical mass.”

“So what are we supposed to do about it?”

I rested my back against the wall, running my hand through my hair. Damn it.

“We have to end it,” I said. “We need to end this thing fast.”

Alonso wasn’t happy about it either. “She doesn’t seem ready to come clean now, does she?”

“We’ll get her ready.”

“Frankly, I don’t think it’s in her best interest anymore.”

“There’s nothing else to do,” I replied. “There’s no alternative.”

“Actually, that depends.”

“On what?”

“On whatever measures you and Maxina have established to prevent there from being an alternative,” he said pointedly.

I fell quiet, quiet enough for me to hear the footsteps coming up my stairs. That wasn’t a pressing concern. Madison was too deferential to step within earshot of a private conversation and Jean didn’t have an earshot at all.

“In other words, you’d like to know what’s stopping the three of us, or maybe even the two of you, from going all the way. Past the second star on the right and straight on till morning.”

“I’m talking about the death of quid pro quo,” Alonso replied. “Deny it if you like but we are rapidly approaching a situation where someone’s going to win and someone’s going to lose.”

“I don’t want to hear this shit.”

“I’m just giving you the reality of the situation. If you truly cared about Harmony—”

“Hold on a second.”

I opened the door, startling Jean. She was writing me a sticky note, but now she simply held up her hands.
I come in peace!

I held up a finger, then turned away from her. I didn’t want her reading my face or lips for this one.

“Sorry. You there? “

“Yes. I’m here,” he said. “All I’m asking—”

“I know exactly what you’re asking. And here’s my answer. You want to know what’s stopping us?
I
am. You want to know how averse I am to the idea of screwing over Jeremy?
Very
averse. So averse, in fact, that if I catch you planting alternative ideas in Harmony’s head, I will dedicate my life to killing your novel. And by ‘life,’ I mean ‘afternoon.’ You’d be amazed how easy it is to keep a bad book down.”

Say what you will about Alonso, the man had skin of iron. From the way he laughed, I might as well have thumped him with a wiffle bat.

“Self-righteousness does not become a man of your résumé, my friend. And save your threats. There’s nothing you or Maxina can do to me now that Harmony can’t do with a single well-placed quote. She’s the one with the power. So while I won’t actively steer her toward one outcome or another, I’m telling you now that I will go where she goes. Take that as you will. And call me when you’re feeling more constructive.”

He hung up. I lowered the phone, counted to five, and then turned around with a chirpy grin. “Hi.”

With a cautious wince, Jean flashed me a pair of neatly scribbled stickies, one in each palm.

He wasn’t a friend anymore. “That’s fine.”

She wrote a new note.
Are you OK?

“I’m okay. Better than my client, anyway.”

“No. I’ll be all right. Thank you, though.”

She wasn’t buying the brave act at all. She amended her message.
Do you
want
Madison to stay?

“I want you both to stay.”

The words didn’t hit her well, but her bad reaction was like sunlight to me. She rolled her neck, she grimaced, she chafed and whined through a
What are you doing to me?
look, as if she were on a diet and I just offered her a big block of chocolate.

And what a dense block I was. This whole time I was analyzing her like an alien dispatch. She was so damn strong to me, so damn clever, that I just assumed she was pulling me along some Byzantine path toward... something. It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t figure it out, but at long last it occurred to me that she had absolutely no idea what she was doing. Worse, she might have thought she was following me. No wonder she was so frustrated.

With a lovely sigh, she thumped her forehead against my chest. Once, twice, three times. I gently rubbed her back. Yeah. I know, Jean. You never set out to infect me, but you did. I never set out to escalate, but here we are on the second floor. I would have loved to address this, but given events, I didn’t even have time to ask “What now?”

She pulled away. After fixing her hair, she wrote a quick blurb on an other sticky note, then pressed it on my upper back. I was about to reach behind and grab it, but she stopped me, shaking her head.
Not yet
, she told me.
Wait.

It would have to wait anyway. The phone in my hand rang. I groaned, then answered it.

“This is Scott.”

“Scott, you know I had nothing to do with that.”

I’d never heard Maxina this stressed before. From her quick and heavy footsteps, she was clearly going somewhere fast.

“I know,” I said. “It’s not me you need to worry about.”

Jean backed away, throwing me a heavy look and a wave before disappearing down the stairs. God only knew what Madison was thinking.

“This is a nightmare.” Maxina wheezed. “All we need is one smart journalist to really analyze Simba’s comments.”

“We might get some crackpot conspiracies, but nothing in the mainstream. They wouldn’t dare accuse Harmony of anything. Especially not now.”

“I hope you’re right. How is she?”

“Not good. She’s furious at everyone. How’s Simba?”

“She’s a mess. She just left the hotel. We think she just left Jeremy.”

“What? That’s crazy.”

“No it’s not. I just got off the phone with Doug. She took Latisha and a suitcase.”

“Jesus Christ! She ended the call fifteen minutes ago!”

“Things are falling apart fast, Scott. Now, I don’t have time for bullshit. I need to know if you’re going to be a help to me or a hindrance.”

“What do you want?”

“I want this
over!
I want Harmony to recant no later than tomorrow morning.”

“You got it.”

Maxina’s footsteps came to a sudden stop. “You’re serious.”

“Dead serious. This show isn’t good for anyone anymore. I figure if you and I present a united front, we can talk her into cooperating.”

Maxina let out a shaky laugh. “Wow. I’m afraid to ask what your catch is.”

“My catch is that you stick to your word. Once I help you save Jeremy, you do everything in your power to help me save Harmony. That’s all I ever wanted.”

She started up again. “You got it. You got it. Oh, bless your heart, Scott. I knew you’d come around.”

“No you didn’t.”

“No. I didn’t. But you are now officially a man I love.”

I looked through the window and watched Madison and Jean cross the street. Without looking back at me, or even at each other, they both entered the SUV. I pulled the small yellow slip off my back.

“Scott? Are you there?”

“Yeah.” I met Jean’s glance through two windows and fifty feet of dark air. “Yeah. I’m here. What now?”

 

 

By eight o’clock I was in Beverly Hills. I parked my rented Buick on Doheny Drive, in front of a small Spanish-style house. I had dropped Simba off at this very place a little over a week ago, on that fateful day we (I) selected Harmony to be our media snare. Before leaving my car, Simba had reached over, squeezed my leg, and asked me to promise her,
promise
her that I’d do what’s right for her and Jeremy. I promised. Obviously she stopped believing me.

The door was answered by a striking woman in her late twenties. She was dark-skinned and nearly six feet tall. She was surprised to be looking up at me.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes. I’m Scott. I’m one of the smart, slick people your cousin’s been complaining about.”

She leered with grim humor. “She mentioned there was a white one in the bunch.”

“Can I please see her?”

“What makes you think she’s here?”

Hunta had an inkling, which was passed from Doug to Maxina to me. Also passed along was Hunta’s strong desire to see Harmony go under the wheels of a cargo truck. He reportedly had similar sentiments for me.

“I’m only working a few hours ahead of the reporters,” I stressed. “It’s in her best interest that I get to her before they do. Please.”

I didn’t ask to be here. I really wanted to minister to Harmony, but Maxina opted to handle that herself.
She’s too close to you, Scott. You’re only going to set her off.
I didn’t necessarily agree, but I liked the idea of Maxina taking the brunt of Harmony’s ill will for a change.

In the meantime, Maxina had another way for me to be useful.

Warily, the cousin let me into her living room and left me waiting for ten minutes. I spent most of the time studying the black-and-white photos on the walls, all artistic nudes of the cousin herself. I was impressed, not just with her lithe form but with the healthy amount of nerve it took to decorate her home with naked pictures of herself. In every shot, she sported a white plaster cast on her left forearm. There was a statement in there somewhere, but damned if I knew what it was.