Slick (63 page)

The recording would premiere at noon Eastern, nine Pacific, but the network spilled enough details to get the nation’s juices flowing. CNN and MSNBC followed suit with their own pre-reactive chatter.
Professor, do you think this alleged tape could be for real? Could Harmony Prince be lying? Could this whole thing be a sinister hoax? And if it is
[slobber slobber]
, who does the other voice belong to?

I spent a good thirty minutes under the showerhead, staring down at my feet as hot steam cleared my nasal passages. I couldn’t hold on a thought for more than a second. By the time I shut off the water, all the panicked voices in my head united to scream one name: Madison. There was no way to prepare her for this, no way to make her understand. I feared that once the pain of my betrayal went away, and her hot tears dried up, she’d close herself forever. The walls would rise up ninety feet high, and there’d be no getting past her formidable defenses.

It was enough to make a grown man weep, but I couldn’t even seem to do that. Everything else was failing on me—my clock, my phone, my body, my schemes—but the practical engine inside of me just kept chugging along. It pushed me through the rest of my morning routine: into my clothes, out of the apartment, into the car, onto the road. Always thinking, never reacting. Never, ever reacting.

 

 

The moment I left the garage, I experienced the strong and sudden urge to drive to Madison’s school. I knew where it was. I could be there in ten minutes. I could scour the halls, peeking into every classroom until I found her. Then I’d kneel on the floor, gazing up at her as I squeezed her shoulders.
Look, there are going to be some things on the news today. Things about me. Don’t believe them, okay? It’s not the way it looks. I can’t explain it just yet, but...God, just hold on, Madison. Don’t give up on me.

No, that would only freak her out, and it would yank her into the crisis sooner than necessary. The problem wasn’t the recording itself, it was me being identified as the second voice. There were only two women with the power and the incentive to rat me out: Miranda and Harmony. If I cut them both off at the pass somehow, I could survive this. There was just one woman with the power and the incentive to help me: Maxina. She would be at Doug’s house. Okay. Stick to the original plan. Go to Doug’s house and talk to Maxina. She’ll help you out of your jam.

Your
jam?

Three lights later, I finally realized the horrible nature of my schemes. I was trying to cut the rope that Harmony had around me. She was falling hard, and I was desperately fighting to make sure I didn’t go down with her.

“Jesus Christ.”

I swerved into a loading zone and stopped the car. My eyes were wide and my breaths were quick shallow. My fingers clenched like steel hooks around the steering wheel.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay...”

It took a dozen more “okay”s to defuse me. I’d never been this close to a meltdown before. I was a man of few griefs but the few I had, I muddled through. When my father died. When my mother died. When Drea fell. When Gracie left. I always held myself together. Now I was just a stiff breeze away from structural collapse.

There’s no excuse. There’s no excuse for a man like you
.

Except Harmony didn’t know what kind of man I was. She didn’t know that I tried. I tried to make everything work for everybody. I was a man who tried. I was a man who failed. At the very least…

“I meant well.”

Yes, and what a fine comfort that was. Maybe I could yell that to Harmony as she plummeted into darkness. Maybe she’d forgive me on the long way down.

 

 

I parked a block away from Doug’s house, just in case someone followed me. I rang the doorbell and was surprised to see Big Bank. I blinked at him in stupor.

“Oh. Hey. What are you doing here?”

He looked around. “Just get in.”

I entered the house quickly. He closed the door behind me. “It was stupid of you to come here.”

“I was asked to come.”

“Yeah, well, it was stupid for them to ask.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not radioactive yet.”

“Yeah? What happens when the TV starts throwing your name around?”

“Then I start glowing.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “That’s why I came here.”

He studied me, expressionless. “You have a hickey on your neck.”

“What?”

I examined myself in the foyer mirror. Jesus. He wasn’t kidding. There was a blemish the size of a quarter at the base of my throat, a silly mishap from last night’s affections. It pulled me out of the future so fast, I laughed with dizzy inertia.

Big Bank eyed me cynically. “The deaf woman?”

“Yeah. You want to hear all about it?”

“No.”

“Good,” I said, while adjusting my shirt collar. “So is Jeremy here? Or did they just bring you over to kill me?”

I knew Hunta had a new secret hideout. I just didn’t expect it to be Doug’s place. The move was pure fiscal pessimism on the Judge’s part. On some level, he figured this was a lost battle, which meant he’d have to drop Jeremy from the roster, which meant there was no future revenue to deduct all those hotel expenses from. It was record-label dharma: if you can’t bill the artist, it’s probably not worth paying for.

Since I last saw him nine days before, Hunta had lost a little weight, a lot of sleep, his wife, his daughter, his faith in humanity, and any fondness he may have had for me. I could see it all on his face as I entered the living room. He stretched out on the long couch, decked out in nothing but an open robe and a pair of red silk boxer shorts. For once his opiates were legal. He tapped a cigarette into an ashtray on the floor, right next to a half-empty bottle of sloe gin.

“Slick,” he muttered. “Get the fuck over here.”

I sat down on the wooden coffee table, between him and the big-screen TV. The bold text overlay stretched all the way across the Fox News banner:
harmony prince claim a hoax?

Before I could say anything, Hunta grabbed my sleeve. His eyes were cracked with deep red veins.

“Just tell me it’s over, man. Tell me this fucking nightmare is over and I’ll forgive you for everything.”

I caught Doug and the Judge in the corner of my eye. The two of them were pacing the porch—flailing, fretting. Like me, they were waiting for more data. They were waiting for Maxina.

“It looks like the nightmare’s over,” I told Hunta. “At least for you.”

“I didn’t ask what it looks like! I asked what it is!”

“I don’t know what else to tell you. We’re just going to have to wait and see.”

He sat up and hunched forward, his ring-laden hands pressing deep into his cornrows.

“They all saying she
might
be lying. She
might
be full of shit. But no one’s saying I might be innocent.”

“That’s not how they work. They only have two modes: attack and ignore. If you want vindication, you’re going to have to fight for it. You’re going to have to get in everyone’s faces, with middle fingers blazing, and say, ‘Fuck you. You got me all wrong.’”

I thought that might pick him up some, but he continued to brood. I plopped down next to him, slouching into the cushions.

“Or you can just attack the evil white men who framed you,” I said.

“Yeah? Can I mention you by name?”

“I don’t think you’ll have to.”

Hunta vented a smoky sigh, then matched my languid pose. We looked like a couple of wasted stoners.

“Forget it,” he said. “What I been through, I wouldn’t wish on anybody. And it don’t matter anyway. Even if I got the whole world kissing my ass, it won’t mean a damn thing. Not anymore.”

“I’m sorry about Simba.”

“Yeah. So am I.”

He took a long swig of gin, then offered me the bottle. I waved it away. I didn’t need his depressant, and he certainly didn’t need my flu germs.

“I fucked up,” he said. “And you know what the sad part is? Even if she came back right now, even if I apologized all day and all night, I’d only fuck it up all over again.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, soon enough I would.” He took another swig of liquor. “Soon enough I’d have to.”

I studied the bottle in his hand. It idly occurred to me that the words “gin” and “Jean” would look very much the same to a deaf lipreader. So would “medicine” and “Madison.” The bizarre revelations nearly triggered an ill-timed chortle. All I needed was gin and medicine. I could survive all this with just a little gin and medicine.

“See, we ain’t like them, Slick. There’s a kind of love in women, most women, that we ain’t got in us. A kind of love we can’t handle. That’s why so many marriages end up falling apart.”

“That simple, huh?”

“Some things are just that simple, man. It’s people like you who make shit more complex.”

“Well, you ever rap about it?”

He gave me a jaded look. “Fuck you. I bet you think I haven’t.”

“Have you?”

“Second album, motherfucker. First track. ‘Love Is Real.’”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

He extinguished his cigarette and stared at its last wisps of smoke.

“It’s a sequel,” he told me. “It’s all about that guy from ‘Bitch Fiend,’ except here he finally deals with his problem. He finally sees that if he keeps spreading himself out over all these different women, there’ll be nothing left of him to spread. And he finally finds a woman he can put all of himself into. Not just that one part of him. You understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded wistfully. “I do. It sounds really good.”

“It’s better than good, man. Best song I ever wrote.”

“Simba must have loved it.”

He bloomed a wistful sneer. “Nah. I wrote it for her, but I didn’t write it
with
her. That was the problem. I had help on that one. And then I fucked the help.”

Ah, yes. Lisa Glassman. How quickly she’d dropped off my radar screen. It felt like months since I’d thought about her. Months since I’d even wondered what the truth was.

“Jeremy, can I ask you something?”

He snorted a laugh. “You asking now?”

“Might as well.”

“What the fuck does it matter now?”

“Because I’d like to know what really happened that night.”

Hunta lit another cigarette. “It’s funny. She called me last Thursday. Right as that bitch of yours was getting her face put everywhere. I never expected to hear from her again, but there she was on the phone, wondering what the hell happened. How this one lie started this other lie and everything got so out of hand.”

“So she admitted she was lying.”

“Shit, yeah. It wasn’t even a question of that. We were both there that night. She only said yes. She said it like a thousand times.”

He dropped his head back and puffed smoke at the ceiling fan. “I never raped a woman, Slick. But if lying was a crime, if using women was a capital offense, I’d have gotten the chair a long time ago.”

Just from her impressive background, Lisa Glassman had struck me as a woman of skill and resolve. A true creative professional. I could only imagine that despite her attraction to Hunta, she had initially put up quite a roadblock when he started making advances. Oh, the wonderful things he must have said to her that night. The powerful lines he must have used to bind her better judgment. If that was indeed a crime, and if the system wasn’t nicer to white men, I’d surely be on death row myself.

“You know what the saddest part is?” Hunta asked. “She never asked for money. She never even asked for an apology. All she ever wanted was that damn song she helped me write.”

I rubbed my nose. “That’s all she wanted? The rights to that song?”

“Not even the rights, man. She just wanted a written promise that I’d take the song off the album and then never sing it again. She said I didn’t deserve to sing it. It was too good for me. She felt so strong about it that she was willing to lie to get what she wanted.”

There was definitely a poetry at work there, considering that he had lied to get what he wanted.

“So why didn’t you just give it to her?” I asked.

Hunta let out a belly laugh, one loud enough to stop the Judge and Doug on the patio.

“I didn’t want to. It’s just that simple. It was the title track of the album. The
best
track of the album. If she wanted to quit her job, call me names, call my wife, that was her business. But she didn’t deserve to take that song from me. Not because she let me fuck her.”

He let out a tired sigh. “Once that Melrose shit happened, though, I changed my mind real fast. I was ready to give her anything she wanted. But then Maxina came along and said it would look bad to be making that kind of deal. And then you came along and...Shit, you were the man.”

“I was the man,” I said weakly.

“You were the man with the plan that was gonna fix everything. And you wanna know what the real sad part is? She told me she would’ve never come forward.” He laughed again. “She was only fronting like she was gonna make noise. Just to sweat us out. This whole time we’re all racing to stop her, and it turns out it was for all nothing.”

Now Fox showed a clip of Harmony and Alonso exiting the CNN building, right after their tumultuous appearance on
Larry King Live
. Although Harmony tried to shield herself from the unrelenting cameras, it was easy to see the pitch-black look on her face. She was vengeful, hateful.

Hunta watched along. “All these lies. All this drama. All for what?”

“I don’t know.”

He lit another cigarette, then watched the hot end smolder. “We should’ve never listened to you, Slick.”