Slick (11 page)

With a grand gesture, Maxina presented me. “Jeremy, Simba, this is Scott Singer. Put your trust in this man. He can spin straw into gold.”

“Let’s hope so,” said the woman, extending a wet hand. “I’m Simba Shange. The dutiful wife.”

She had the darkest skin of anyone I’d ever met, the color of walnut. Although her name and her features were both exotic, her dialect was as American as mine. I had no idea what her story was, but I could research her later. My immediate goal was to avoid ogling. When isolated from the family picture, she was a glistening feast for the eyes. Everything about her was long and sculpted: her wet hair, her lithe arms, her flat stomach, even her protruding toes. Fortunately, my lascivious peepers were still snowblind from Keoki Atoll.

With a warm, chaste smile, I greeted her. “A pleasure. Who’s the little one?”

“This is Latisha,” she said, squeezing her daughter. “She’ll be one next month. Baby, say hi to the tall man.”

The girl was adorable and somewhat scared of me. In lieu of waving, she shyly bit her fingers. It intrigued me that her ears were already pierced, decorated with fat gold studs. I questioned the wisdom of puncturing your kid before she learned how to say “ouch.”

Throughout all of this, the star of the show kept his eyes on the wall TV, currently tuned to NBC. He only gave me a cursory glance. I couldn’t help but scrutinize. The man had the face of a model, the body of a superhero, and...honestly, I didn’t look every where. I didn’t
have
to look. Jeremy Sharpe had enough sexual confidence to make me cower in the corner of my mind. Even while sitting in a tub watching
Providence
, he radiated more manly eros than twelve of me ever could. I had the sinking feeling that if he’d taken Miranda to my bed last night, she’d still be there now—still naked, still gasping, and now utterly convinced that she’d wasted years of her life on effete and cerebral white men.

“So you the hired assassin,” he said, without looking away from the TV.

“I don’t kill people. Just scandals.”

He finally turned to me. “Yeah? Well what you do when a person is the scandal?”

Maxina shut off the TV, then sat down on the closed toilet. “All right. Enough of that. Time’s short. Scott, take a load off.”

For lack of space, I had to sit on the edge of the tub. This wasn’t the best room for a kickoff meeting.

Maxina slapped her heavy thighs and began proceedings. She focused entirely on me.

“Okay. I assume you already know most of what we’re dealing with here. Before yesterday, Hunta was a rapper on the rise. Now he’s the gangsta who inspired a rape which inspired a school shooting.”

Hunta’s face twisted in a seething scowl. “That’s bullshit.”

“We’re not talking facts here, Jeremy. Just the press angle. This Bitch Fiend subplot is going to hatch wide open and take center stage over the killings. Annabelle, God rest her troubled soul, basically gave the authorities a paint-by-numbers account of what’s been going on at that school.”

“What
has
been going on at that school?” I asked.

“Pretty much what everyone’s guessed,” Doug replied. “Bunch of boys used hidden cameras to videotape their sexual encounters. Then they watched it with each other on weekends. It’s not a competition, like that Spur Posse shit. It’s just a club.”

“
Just
a club?” asked Simba.

“You know what I mean.”

I yawned. Fortunately, the only one who noticed was Latisha, who yawned back.

“I assume all these guys have trashed their home movies by now,” I said.

Maxina shook her head. “Bryan Edison wasn’t exactly alive enough to run home and burn his collection. This morning the police got a warrant and seized everything in his bedroom. According to our source in the Bitch Fiends—”

“I told you, stop calling them that,” Hunta snapped.

“And I told you, you better get used to it, because it’s not going away. Anyway, our source confirmed the worst: that Annabelle’s on one of those sex tapes. Reportedly, she was having such a bad time that even Bryan’s fellow Fiends got scared when they saw it. They strongly suggested he erase the evidence.”

“Are we sure he didn’t?”

“Pretty sure. It seems Bryan was a big fan of his movie. He thought it’d be easier just to intimidate Annabelle. To threaten her into staying quiet. You can see how well that worked out.”

Simba scoffed. “As far as I’m concerned, he got what he deserved. I hope the rest of them get their sorry asses thrown in jail.”

“That’s just what they saying about me,” Hunta groused.

“You better get used to that, too, my dear. Because believe me, they haven’t even begun.”

Maxina certainly wasn’t much of a sugarcoater. Personally, I would have assured him that criminal charges would never be filed against him in this situation. Even in a civil suit, the burden of proof would be monstrous.

She kept illuminating me. “Here’s Problem A, Scott. In addition to the name connection, this little stag film of Bryan’s apparently has a familiar soundtrack.”

“You’re kidding.”

“We wish,” sighed Doug. “He was playing ‘Bitch Fiend’ in the background. For him, it was more than a name. It was a personal anthem. That’s very bad for us.”

Hunta pounded the water, splashing my leg. “What ‘us’? It’s bad for me! I’m the one they coming after! A white boy rapes her! He’s dead! So now they stringing me up in his place!”

Simba shielded Latisha. “Jer...”

He gathered himself, then rubbed his daughter’s head. “Look, y’all gotta find a way to kill that tape.”

“It won’t ever—”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Maxina, overriding me. “The tape will never hit the airwaves. The news of the tape, however, is going to be busting out all over. By Tuesday at the very latest. There’s no way in hell we can stop it. All we can hope to do is pull your ass out of this fire.”

She turned back to me. “Our main defense is that ‘Bitch Fiend’ is a morality tale. Both the song and the video are simply a story where Hunta plays a character.”

“A pathetic character!” he yelled. “That’s the whole point of it! This nigga’s so weak and so down on himself that he has to stick his jimmy in a different woman each night so he can feel like a man. He even tapes and watches his own sex because he’s like a spectator in his own life. It was some deep shit, man. I was using subtext.”

Simba eyed me with dark curiosity. “Does that surprise you? That it was a think piece instead of the usual tits-and-ass number?”

Yes. “No. But then I don’t speak for the moral crusaders. Sadly, they don’t see the difference between portraying something and endorsing it.”

“Unless you a white artist,” Hunta growled. “Nobody went after Clapton when that motherfucka said he shot the sheriff.”

Nobody went after Marley either, but this wasn’t the time to nitpick.

“Is there anyplace on record where you explain the lyrics?” I asked.

“I always explain where my words are coming from! But they always take that shit out! If I say we black people can’t keep shootin’ each other, they only play the part where I say, ‘Keep shootin’ each other.’”

“In answer to your question, yes,” said Doug. “Jeremy did an interview for BET last year where he defended the point of ‘Bitch Fiend.’ Maxina’s people are working to procure the footage.”

I guessed as much. The real stumper was what the hell they needed me for.

Maxina read my thought balloon and shot me a canny grin. “Scott, you need to know this stuff but you don’t have to worry about it. This is my part of the project. I’ve got a staff of thirty working around the clock. We brought you in for Problem B. It’s very important, very delicate, and it might get a little dirt on your hands. Are you okay with that?”

“Depends. I’m fine at digging dirt, but I’m not so good at throwing it. Especially at clean people.”

“This bitch ain’t clean,” Hunta muttered.

A crisp, tense air wafted into the bathroom. Most of it circulated around Simba, who could have frozen the whole tub.

“Okay,” said Maxina, getting up. “The dry folks can take it from here.”

Simba rolled her eyes. “It’s all right. I’m not made of glass.”

“No, but this toilet is. So unless you get a nice big couch in here, I’m moving this meeting to a more comfortable room. Besides, I’m getting tired of looking at your skinny body.”

Reluctantly, Simba nodded. “All right. Get out of here.”

Doug and I stood up. As I moved toward the door, Hunta grabbed my pants leg with his dripping right hand. “Yo. Hold up. What’s your name again?”

“Scott. Scott Singer.”

“Well, Scott, Scott Singer, let me tell you something. Ever since the movies / Ho’s try to do me / If they can’t screw me / They find a way to sue me.”

“Nice,” I lied, scanning my inner rap dictionary. “Was that a freestyle?”

He chuckled. “Naw, man. They ain’t even my words. They were Tupac’s. Just remember them, all right? I don’t want it happening to me what happened to him.”

“It won’t,” I promised. I’d assumed he was making a figurative reference to the drive-by shooting that had killed the infamous rapper in 1996. Turns out I was wrong. I really had a lot more research to do.

 

 

L’Ermitage was just a hop away from San Vicente Boulevard. So was my apartment. However, the ride home wasn’t as simple as one would think. The Beverly Hills San Vicente had nothing to do with the San Vicente in Brentwood. They were connected only by name. Connecting them physically would require bisecting UCLA and a major golf course. Nobody wanted that.

Once again, I was forced to ride Wilshire Boulevard, the one street that linked both San Vicentes. I hated taking Wilshire through Beverly Hills. A dense array of traffic lights turned a two-mile stretch into a twelve-minute series of angry spurts. To make matters worse, I was now forever bound to equate Wilshire with the secret menace of deaf drivers. I still had to take my car in for an estimate, but that wouldn’t happen anytime in the next twenty-four hours. I had a lot of thinking to do. When Maxina said I
might
get a little dirt on my hands, she meant definitely. And when she said a
little
dirt, she meant just enough to bury someone.

 

 

“There was an incident,” Doug told me, just moments after exiting the bathroom. He, Maxina, and I reconvened around the master bed. Simba’s icy turn had already clued me in to the nature of Problem B, and the nature of my problem-to-be.

“Her name is Lisa Glassman. She was a production assistant for Mean World who started with us last summer. We put her under Kevin Haggerty, the producer on Hunta’s second album.”

I nodded. Get to the damn incident already.

“Since September she’d been working closely with Jeremy and Kevin, doing really great work. She’s young. She’s pretty. And it was clear that she... Look, I won’t mince words. Jeremy enjoys women. And vice versa. His marriage with Simba is very...”

“Clintonesque,” Maxina said, with obvious derision.

“Sort of. Anyway, they managed to finish a rough master of the new album right before our label’s Christmas party, so they had double reason to celebrate. At the party...I don’t know. Things got out of hand. People were drinking, smoking, having a good time. All of a sudden, the following Monday, Lisa quits and tells us that she’s going to press rape charges against Jeremy.”

“So why hasn’t she yet?”

“We’ve been negotiating with her all through January,” he said. “Trying to come to some sort of compromise. Look, this is nothing more than extortion, Scott, plain and simple. I know Jeremy. He’s a good man. He goes to church every week. He reveres his father, spoils his daughter. He may not be the most faithful husband, but he’s never forced himself on a woman in his life. He’s never had to.”

Maxina rolled her eyes.

“Well, if she’s extorting him,” I asked, “why were you willing to negotiate with her? What else does she have on him besides an accusation?”

“She’s a woman and he’s a rapper. What else does she need?”

“Legally? Quite a bit.”

“If this were just a legal issue, Scott, I wouldn’t be worried. You’re a publicist. You know the stakes involved. Jeremy has his whole career ahead of him. He’s got the looks and the talent to become a huge crossover hit, maybe even the next Will Smith. The problem is that the studios won’t touch him if he has all this dark smoke around him, even if he’s proven innocent. We all agreed that it would be cheaper and safer to keep Lisa quiet.”

“But now…,” Maxina segued.

“But now all this Melrose shit has happened. She’s got us over a barrel. Her lawyer could file as early as next week. Once that happens, Jeremy’s screwed and
we’re
screwed. We’ll be like a cash machine to every woman who ever brushed hands with him.”

Maxina seemed less than
verklempt
over Mean World’s financial plight. Although she had understated it earlier, artistic free expression was a fierce crusade with her. When President Reagan insinuated that “obscene” music didn’t deserve constitutional protection, she went postal. When the state of Oregon made it illegal for retail stores to display ads or even photos containing rapper Ice Cube, she went ballistic. And there’s no word violent enough to describe her reaction when they started arresting record-store executives for selling 2 Live Crew’s explicit albums.

Once again, it seemed, the recording industry needed her rage. Within the last decade, sanctimonious lawmakers had gotten smarter in their attempts to suppress the material they found objectionable. The way around those First Amendment whiners, they knew, was to implement severe marketing and trade restrictions on all naughty stuff. It’s not censorship, they say. Just keeping it out of the hands of kids (and everyone else). The password was “financial disincentive.” Sure, you have the right to release an NC-17 film. We just won’t let you advertise it or show it in ninety-five percent of the nation’s venues. Sure, you have the freedom to put out a stickered album. We’ll just pressure the major music retailers like Wal-Mart to stop carrying it. For the media giants of the world, it all came down to a simple decision: the Wite-Out or the red ink. Not much of a f****** choice now, is it?