Slick (64 page)

“No,” I responded. “I guess you shouldn’t have.”

 

 

By eight-thirty, the Mean World men sat gathered in the living room. They spread ourselves out among the three leather sofas. Hunta sat between Big Bank and Doug. It would take eight Harmonys to match their combined weight, but the one on TV loomed large enough to balance them out.

The Judge and I faced each other from matching love seats, locked in our own strange counterpoise. He swore to me that he wasn’t the one who leaked the audiotape. I assured him I had no intention of taking anyone down with me. We didn’t believe each other, but who cared? We were too nervous, too clobbered, too weary to start another fight now. All we could do was wallow in the din and blather of Fox News until something pulled us out of our stasis.

As expected, that something was Maxina. At a quarter to nine, she joined our little powwow, shattering the casual equilibrium we had established. Her hair was unwashed. Her untucked blouse was misbuttoned by one. She took a wincing perch on an end table, then muted the TV.

“My copy of the audiotape has been sealed inside my suitcase,” she informed us. “Nobody else knew where it was. Not even my staff. Doug?”

“Like I told Scott, our copy was locked in the office safe. Only the Judge and I have the combination.”

The Judge sighed with forced patience. “I swear on the life of my children that I did not leak that tape.”

“We had no reason to,” Doug declared. “As soon as we learned that Harmony was confessing, we practically threw a party. Why would we screw that up?”

I flinched my shoulders in a listless shrug. “My guess? You got antsy. You didn’t think Harmony would actually go through with it and you didn’t want to waste another moment.”

Doug waved me off. The Judge simply glared. “Yeah? And what about your original? How secure was that?”

“Locked in my safe,” I said.

“You said you have an intern.”

“She’s thirteen, she doesn’t have the combination—”

“And she don’t know the whole story anyway,” Hunta griped.

That was pretty much what I was going to say. But I was idly flattered, on Madison’s behalf, that Hunta not only remembered her from their brief conversation but continued to give a crap about her opinion of him. In that respect, he had little to worry about. By the time Madison checked the news, she’d know for sure that he was innocent. She’d know for sure I wasn’t.

“I am completely stumped, then,” Maxina said. “But it doesn’t matter who leaked it. We have to deal with the fallout.”

Hunta scratched his cheek in bother. “What’s the problem? Why is this bad for us?”

“It’s bad for Harmony,” Doug replied. “And she can make it bad for us.”

Maxina cleaned her glasses with her shirt flap. “She was up all night working on her speech. I read the final draft. It was wonderful. Too bad we didn’t get a single word of it on camera. Once she found out about the Fox News story, she stopped cooperating with us.”

She threw me a quick, poignant glance. The message was clear enough:
She blames you
. Of course Harmony blamed me. Why wouldn’t she? I was the root of all evil.

“So what?” asked Big Bank. “What can she do? Deny it?”

Doug shook his head. “She can try, but the voice analysts will nail her. She’s essentially screwed. The problem is that there’s nothing stopping her from telling the press all about us.”

The Judge aimed his fury at me. “That’s because she
knows
all about us! I told you from the start it was a bad idea! Now she’s going to bury us!”

“She’s not going to bury you,” I said impatiently. “She’s going to bury me.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, he’s right,” said Maxina. “She’s going to bury Scott.”

Try as they might, the others couldn’t make the leap. I let Maxina explain it.

“All the tape proves is that there’s a plot to frame Jeremy, not a plot to save him. If Harmony tries to reveal the rest, the press won’t buy it. It’s too far-fetched. Too self-serving. And she won’t have any credibility left anyway. The story would flutter around the mainstream for a day or two, then fade away.”

Meanwhile, back on Fox News, a split-box graphic floated over the news anchor’s shoulder. One side had an unflattering shot of Harmony. The other side had a generic male silhouette with a question mark in it. My heart thundered at the sight of it.

Maxina gestured at me. “Unlike us, Scott is linked to the story through hard evidence. If Harmony wants to take him down with her, she can. And make no mistake: Harmony wants to take him down with her.”

Hunta gawked at me. “Wait a second. You saying I’m saved and you’re fucked?”

“Yeah,” I said, through the blackest of smirks. “Enjoy the twist.”

The man had every right to gloat at my downfall, but he was too gobsmacked to fit me into the equation. The Bitch had really worked him over these past two weeks, to the point where he couldn’t tell up from down, left from right, black from white. He was the world’s hostage. Whether he was rescued or merely exchanged for another prisoner, who the hell cared? It was an open door. Despite his earlier claims that it no longer mattered, it mattered.

“Don’t fuck me with now,” he said. “Don’t tell me this shit is over if it ain’t really over.”

“It ain’t really over,” Maxina dryly responded. “We’ve established that Harmony is Scott’s problem. What we don’t know is whether or not Scott’s going to be our problem.”

Naturally, everyone turned to me. I crossed my legs and rested my head against my fist, playing coy even as my gut wrenched.

“So that’s the sticky wicket, is it?”

“Don’t play games,” the Judge snapped. “What are you going to do?”

“What
can
he do?” asked Big Bank.

“Scott’s a thoroughly cautious man,” Maxina told them. “I have no doubt that he recorded at least some of our key meetings. He probably has each and every one of us on tape. What I can’t tell from his impassive young face is whether or not he plans to use it.”

She was right, as usual. Thanks to my Palm Pilot recorder and a life time of vigilant thinking, I had everything I needed to blow up the world. I even had some incentive.

“Well, I’ll be honest,” I said. “I’m not happy about that tape being leaked. Somebody screwed me over. Worse, somebody screwed Harmony over. The more I think about that, the angrier I get. I mean she had a chance. If she had just confessed, the press and the public would have given her a chance to redeem herself. She could have bounced her way back from all of this. But now she’s just another criminal caught on Fox. She’s fucked for life. And why? Because somebody in this room got nervous. That doesn’t just make me angry. That makes me cynical.”

Maxina sat forward. “Just from your glares, I can tell who your chief suspect is.”

“Yeah. You’re sharp that way.”

“It wasn’t me,” she insisted. “If it was me, I’d tell you. And I’d tell you why.”

“I already know why. You were afraid that Harmony and I were still in cahoots together. That we were secretly scheming to pull some last-minute trick that would screw you all and set us up for life. So you beat us to the punchline. You took a calculated risk. And you know what? It paid off.”

Maxina raised her palms. “That’s not what happened at all. Look, you’re upset right now—”

“You’re goddamn right I’m upset! You ruined her life and she thinks I did it!”

I’d famously yelled at the Judge before, but none of them had ever seen me like this. I was sliding down toward something ugly, and it was clear for everyone to see. I clenched my teeth and dug my fingers into the cushion. I would not break down. Not here. With these people, I’d stay mature and professional to my last spiteful breath.

In this case, it was a last spiteful sneeze.

“Bless you,” said Maxina.

“Thank you.”

I took a tissue out of my pocket and wiped my nose. “Don’t worry. I won’t be a problem. I know how the game’s played. If I leaked my own recordings, the press would just take it out on Jeremy, and I have absolutely no interest in seeing that happen. I’ve already pissed enough in his bed.”

I couldn’t help but draw a bead of solace from their wide-eyed looks of astonishment. It wasn’t often in life that I got to seize the moral high ground.

“So what are you going to do?” the Judge asked again.

The network continued to milk the last few minutes before the grand premiere of the audiotape. They were merely pumping up their numbers, hogging our precious eyeballs for as long they could. They showed us Harmony’s momentous first walk down the media gauntlet. For the thousandth time, Alonso escorted her from her front door to his shiny black Audi. Even in replay, her frightened face had a paralyzing effect. Her big doe eyes screamed their distress at me. They screamed my name.

“Scott?”

What could I do? I was plummeting into the depths right alongside Harmony. The fact that she hated me, the fact that she was falling, these were all things I couldn’t quite handle. By this point in the game, I needed more than forgiveness and she needed more than words. She needed rescue.

By this point, I was in a unique position to provide it.

“I’m going home,” I matter-of-factly announced. “I’m going to take a long, hot shower, until the steam clears me up and I sound like myself again. Then I’ll break out my handy voice recorder and make a confession.”

The Judge and Doug reacted in typical knee-jerk fashion. Maxina shushed them with a hand.

“It’ll be pure fiction,” I assured them. “I’ll confess that I was hired by unnamed parties to frame Hunta. Our sole objective was to keep rap in the headlines until the U.S. Senate called for a new round of obscenity hearings. So I enlisted Harmony Prince. I met her at the Flower Club and promised her fame, fortune, the whole nine yards. Once I had her on board...Shit, we’re going to have to find a way to explain that restraining-order request. And we’ll have to exonerate Alonso. If not, he might—”

“We’ll work out the details,” said Maxina, her brow raised high in marvel. “Just go on.”

Unlike the others, she could see where I was going with this. I climbed to my feet and paced the room. I had to keep moving or I’d lose my nerve.

“Shortly after her debut, Harmony had second thoughts about the whole operation. She couldn’t deal with the fact that she was ruining the life of an innocent man. Obviously I couldn’t let her quit. Using the bodyguards, I kept her a virtual prisoner of the hotel. She screamed at me every day, begging me to let her go, threatening to go public with the truth.”

I stopped moving. I closed my eyes.

“So, to my own deep regret, I had no choice but to threaten her back. I let her know just how powerful my clients were, and just how short and difficult they could make her life. And the lives of her roommates.”

“Whoa, man,” said Hunta.

“That’s crazy,” said Big Bank.

“That’s why she broke down on
Larry King
,” I continued. “That’s why she didn’t confess when Simba implored her to. She wanted to desperately, but she knew there’d be consequences.”

“Scott, do you know what you’re doing?”

I turned to the Judge. “Yes. I’m sending the tape to Miranda Cameron-Donnell. She’s a reporter at AP who’s been sniffing after me. This won’t answer all her questions, but she’ll have no choice. She’ll have to run with what I give her.”

“But if you admit all this, you’re going to jail.”

I sat on the wing of the love seat, glancing out the sunny east window. “I’m not going to jail, Doug. I’ll just disappear and leave everything behind. My apartment. My car.” My gin. My medicine. “If I go off the grid, they’ll never find me. They won’t even spend that much time looking. I mean, crime-wise, I’m just a hoaxster with a guilty conscience. I’ll be fine.”

I let out a brief chuckle. “I’ll be Scott Free.”

The room was silent until Doug’s watch beeped in the new hour. It was nine o’clock. My voice was seconds away from hitting the nation. At best, I had six hours before my name and face followed. Six hours to tie up all the loose ends in my life and become a permanent specter. Jesus Christ. I was really doing this.

“There are other ways to help her,” Maxina told me. “Ways that are less extreme.”

“And less effective,” I replied. “You know how it works.”

“Still,” the Judge said, “you’re sacrificing your whole future for this woman. And not even to save her life, just to save her public standing. Why?”

I took a deep wet sniff, then shrugged again. “I’m the one who found her. I’m the one who got her into this. What kind of man would I be if I didn’t get her out?”

For a wonderful moment, I felt as brave and noble as I sounded. Then, as usual, I ruined it all by thinking. I ran myself through my own debunking devices. Thanks to whoever leaked the tape, my future was already sacrificed. All I was doing was dodging the scariest consequences. The long arm of the law. The long nails of the Bitch. The betrayal of Madison. The inevitable flameout with Jean. Better to run. Better to fly east, into the sunrise, and reincarnate myself on the opposite shore.

All things considered, I didn’t seem very brave at all. But for once, it must have looked great on the outside. For once, I’d play well in the theaters.

Maxina emitted a heavy sigh. “What can we do to help?”

The Judge’s watch beeped. So did Big Bank’s.

“Just make sure Harmony knows what I’m doing. She’s not dumb. She’ll know her best option now is to go along with the lie. But she’ll need a dedicated publicist to help her with the backlash. Maybe Kathy Oh. Or Jeff Hawn. He’s good. Oh, and make sure she gets the other half of my fee, please.”

“What can we do to help
you
?”

It was Maxina’s question again, but I found myself looking to Hunta. It occurred to me that if I gave him Madison’s phone number, he could tell her the whole story himself. She could hear straight from the horse’s mouth that he was never really betrayed by me. It was just a trick, a stunt, a media scam that blew up toward the end. But ultimately, Slick took the heat of the blast. He did right by everyone.