Slick

by Daniel Price

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Keep looking straight ahead. I’ve got at least fifty yards to myself.”

  “Is that you waving your hand?”

  “Hi there.”

  She screamed with laughter. “Oh my God! I can barely see you! You’re like a dot!”

  “I’m still bigger than you.”

  “What the hell you doing out there? You trying to charm your way up to my room or something?”

  I scanned the other incognitos on the beach. “No. That’s not part of the plan.”

  “Good. Because I told my boys not to let you in for any reason. I told them to get rough if they had to.”

  “Now why would you go and do a thing like that?”

  “Because I don’t want you pulling your tricks on me.”

  “Why would I do a thing like that?”

  “Because all you care about is saving your client. You made that clear enough.”

  “Harmony, be honest with me. Who do you think I like better? You or Hunta?”

  “It ain’t about like. It’s about money.”

  “Shows how much you know,” I taunted. “I just forfeited my fee.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  I laughed and walked, drenching my shins in ice-cold seawater. “I know. The guys at Mean World thought it was a trick too. Fortunately, Maxina knew better. She knew exactly what I was doing.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Giving away my money.”

  “To who?”

  “To you.”

  For once, her disbelief was enjoyable. “You’re such a liar.”

  “As we speak, Doug Modine’s cracking open the piggy bank he set aside for me. We’re going to get you eighty thousand in cash today and then deliver the other half tomorrow. We’ll send a courier to rendezvous with one of your roommates. I assume you can trust them to deliver the money.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m dead serious.”

  “What is this? A setup?”

  “It’s a not a setup.”

  “So you’re bribing me then.”

  “It’s not a bribe. It’s proof.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “Proof of me.”

  Sadly, my scheme hadn’t done much to stop the “Scott loves Harmony” rumors. Even Maxina saw fluttering hearts around my head. When I first presented my idea, she immediately asked to speak to me alone. She was strung up in her hotel bed, zonked out on painkillers, but she was lucid enough to explore the angles. Scott, are you sure you know what you’re doing?

  I kicked up arcs of water as I walked. “It’s funny. You think I’m all brain and no heart. They think I’m all heart and no brain. And you all seem to think I’m double-crossing one for the other. Harmony, Jeremy. Jeremy, Harmony. So allow me to tell you what I told them: screw you. Maybe I want to do what’s right for both of you. Maybe that’s more important to me than a silly paycheck. Maybe, just maybe, I’m a warm conniving bastard. You ever think of that?”

  “No.”

  “I know.” I sighed. “That’s why you and I would never work. Fortunately, my plan will. And if I can’t earn your trust, I can at least buy your lack of distrust.”

  “What makes you think a bribe will change my mind?”

  “I told you. This isn’t a bribe. It’s a token of faith. I’m giving up the one reason I’d have to screw you over. I don’t care who gets the money. I’d tell them to keep the money, but then you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Scott, why do you even think this is about you? Maybe I’m doing this for me!”

  “So am I!”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Why would I lie to you now? What would I have to gain from it now? Prestige?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe they threatened your career. Maybe they threatened your life. Maybe they threatened your girlfriend’s life. I don’t know what’s really going on. All I know is that you want me to throw myself at the mercy of the media, and all I see is they don’t got any.”

  “I told you—”

  “I know what you told me, goddamn it. I heard you. And I don’t agree. If you ain’t lying, then you’re just wrong.”

  My left shoe fell out of my grip. Cursing, I rolled up my sleeve and retrieved it from the ocean. I didn’t leave my shoes on the beach because I thought someone would steal them. Another bad idea. Son of a bitch. I just gave up my entire paycheck. I just sacrificed $160,000 and one shoe in order to clear this fatal blockage and it didn’t do a damn thing.

  “You think I’m stupid, Scott.”

  I closed my eyes. “I don’t think you’re stupid.”

  “Well, you think you know more about the world than I do.”

  “No. I just think I know more about the media.”

  “You probably do. But maybe someday you’ll go on this ride yourself instead of pushing someone else through it. Maybe then you’ll understand why it’s so hard to do what you’re asking me to do.”

  My pant cuffs were soaked. I started to get a chill from the water, but I kept splashing through it.

  “Harmony, victims come and go. They’re a dime a dozen. If you keep going this way, people will run out of ways to praise you. They’ll get tired of empathizing. Worse, they’ll resent you—not the media, but you—for filling one too many headlines. And once they turn away, that’s it. You’re a blip. You’re pop trivia. You think I’m lying? I can give you a list of twenty names that’ll sound vaguely familiar to you. Twenty names of people who rode and fell off the victim track, just like you’re doing.”

  “Well then I’ll just have to jump to a better track,” she countered. “I’ll use this time to make something better of myself. I was hoping you’d help me, but I guess that ain’t happening.”

  “No,” I replied with a heavy breath. “I guess it ain’t.”

  “You just love talking down to me, don’t you?”

  “No. I hate it. But you’re giving me no other choice.”

  “So what happens now? You guys come after me with all you got?”

  “Of course we do. What do you think I’ve been trying to prevent? Why do you think I just gave up my whole goddamn fee?”

  “And are you gonna help them, Scott? You gonna help them take me down?”

  A midsize wave broke a few yards ahead of me, drenching me up to my thighs. By now my legs were completely numb.

  “If it comes down to that,” I mused, “I’ll be blamed, which means I’ll be fired.”

  “Which means you wouldn’t get your money anyway.”

  “You know, you really are stupid.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I chuckled. “Fuck me. Right. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you hang up on me a twelfth time? Why don’t you kick me out of your life for good? Then you’ll find out which one of us is more fucked.”

  She paused but she didn’t hang up. Shit. Don’t make me do this.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about consistency. Since I truly am the smart and evil bastard you pegged me for—good catch, by the way—don’t you think I would have established a solid Plan B? Do you really think I could have sold my crazy idea to Hunta, Maxina, and all the others if I didn’t offer some kind of insurance policy?”

  She paused to mull it over. “Alonso said you’d have something up your sleeve.”

  “Alonso is a flaming jackass who just shot himself in both feet. But in this case, he’s right. I guess you decided not to trust him either.”

  “What’s your insurance policy?”

  “We have you on tape,” I informed her. “When I first drove you, when I liberated you from the Flower Club, I recorded our conversation.”

  “You taped me?”

  “Of course I taped you. I can’t believe you’re even surprised.”

  “But it don’t make sense! It’s all you! That ride was just you talking!”

  “Not just me. I did a lovely job describing the plan
but you contributed some nice tidbits yourself. ‘Wait. You want me to tell people he raped me? But it’s a lie. He never raped me. Hunta never even touched me.’”

  “You’re crazy! That gives up the whole game!”

  “No, no, no. Selective editing, my dear. I picked a nice two-minute chunk that covers only the plot to frame Hunta, not the plot to save him. See how smart and evil I am?”

  “Bullshit! If you play that tape, you go down with me!”

  “Wrong. In order to prove it was me, you’d need voice experts to match it to a second recording of me. Legally, there are only two ways for the authorities to obtain such a thing: A) if I cooperate, or B) if they pull it from the public domain. I have no intention of cooperating. And I don’t have my voice in the public domain.”

  “Then I’ll just say it wasn’t me on that tape either!”

  “Uh, maybe I should clarify the term ‘public domain,’ honey. It includes Larry King Live.”

  “You motherfucker! You gave me all this shit about having an invisible rope around you! That if I go down, you go down too!”

  “Yeah, well, turns out I had a safety line.”

  “You motherfucker! You goddamn motherfucker!”

  My lips began to quiver. My teeth chattered. The ocean was freezing me. I didn’t care.

  “Sweetheart, you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about yourself. See, once that tape is released, it’ll go to at least three independent audio experts who’ll compare the pitch, the tone, and the frequency of your voice on Larry King to your voice on the recording. Within hours, they’ll prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s really you. Then you’re in for a bad time. You won’t even have remorse to hide behind, because hey, you never bothered to confess. You were caught. Exposed.”

  “I’ll tell them everything! I’ll give them the whole story!”

  “Go ahead. Sing like a bird. It doesn’t matter. You’re stuck on the wrong side of Occam’s razor. Nobody sane is going to believe that you were trying to help Hunta all along, especially after the way you cried last night. And nobody credible would support your story anyway. Your roommates. Lisa Glassman. All people with dubious motives and zero evidence. The truth is just too crazy, too complex for the audience to handle. Hell, they couldn’t even handle Whitewater and that was just a land deal.”

  Sometime during my spiel, I crossed into the realm of fiction and just kept going. In truth, the recording would put me at huge risk with both the media and the authorities. If it was ever released, Harmony would have everything she needed to drag me straight down to hell. It would be a living nightmare. As if this wasn’t. As if her hot tears weren’t enough to damn me forever.

  “I’ll give you up! I’ll give them your name!”

  “Knock yourself out. But consider this: if I’m such a smart and evil bastard, what makes you think I even gave you my real name?”

  “You showed me your license!”

  I laughed. “Oh, well then I must be Scott Singer.”

  By now I was soaked to the waist and shivering all over. Harmony screamed her sobs.

  “You motherfucker! I hate you so much!”

  “I never wanted it to come to this! I did everything possible to keep it from coming to this but you just wouldn’t listen! You wouldn’t trust me!”

  “I HATE YOU!”

  “I did everything for you! I risked my career for you! I gave up my money! I put my heart and soul into you and you threw them right back in my face!”

  “You ain’t got a heart! You ain’t got a soul!”

  “I’ve got them. You just refused to see them.”

  “You motherfucker! You’re a sick motherfucker!”

  A large wave crashed down, knocking both shoes out of my hand. I didn’t chase after them. I was so cold, I could barely stand.

  “Harmony, shut up, stop crying, and listen to me very carefully. You have exactly one hour to call Maxina and tell her that you’re willing to cooperate. If she doesn’t hear from you, the tape goes out to the press. So use your head for once and do the smart thing.”

  She kept crying. “You are the saddest, most pathetic man I ever met in my life.”

  I couldn’t stop shaking. “Whatever.”

  “I don’t care what your real name is. I don’t care what happened in your life to make you this way. There’s no excuse. There’s no excuse for a man like you.”

  “You don’t even know me, bitch.”

  I hung up, then closed the phone. By now my shoes had made it safely to shore. I picked them up, studied them, and then launched them back into the sea. They were both ruined forever. Not just my shoes, the ocean. Every time I’d look at the water now, I’d think of the time I forced Harmony Prince into doing something she didn’t want to do. I’d think of the time I pinned her down, had my way, and ruined her forever.

  ________________

  In a vacant glaze, I trudged back to my car and started it up. I didn’t like the way my bare foot felt against the brake pedal, or the way my wet pant legs felt against my thighs. And still I couldn’t stop trembling. Inside, I was caught between the urge to flee the scene of the crime and the realization that I was in no condition to drive anywhere.

  I turned on the heat and peered ahead at the flying seagulls until I finally stopped shivering. By now, my slacks were merely damp. My body and mind were almost thawed.

  I’d never called a woman a bitch before.

  “It’s done,” Maxina told me, from her hotel bed. “I just spoke with Harmony. She’s agreed to cooperate. She’ll record a videotaped confession for us tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow morning?”

  “Her condition. She wants to write the speech herself and she wants a whole night to prepare it. I tried to bargain with her but she was pretty inflexible. It’s all right. I’d still rather play her videotape tomorrow than our audiotape today.”

  I rested my head against the window. I wasn’t entirely lucid yet.

  “It’ll be okay,” Maxina assured me. “We still have final cut. There won’t be any bombshells. I supported your pseudonym story, by the way. Very clever thinking.”

  My stomach churned. “Any other conditions?”

  “She wants your money. All of it. I stuck to my guns on that one. Half now. Half on delivery.”

  “Any other conditions?”

  “Scott...”

  “Just say it.”

  Maxina sighed. “She doesn’t want to hear from you ever again. You knew that. You knew what you had to do and you did it.”

  I watched another photographer set up by the curb, waiting for that precious glimpse of Harmony.

  “Scott, I know it hurt like hell, but you did what we hired you to do. You saved Jeremy.”

  “Who’s going to save Harmony?”

  “I will,” she insisted. “I’ll hire a publicist tonight to be her new official handler, and I’ll coordinate everyone on this side of the effort. We won’t level a single bad word against her. All of our rage will be channeled at the conspiracy. Trust me. Your plan will work out nicely for all of us.”

  Funny how ridiculous it sounded when coming from someone else.

  “For the record,” she conceded, “I’m sorry I told her about Lisa Glassman. You were right. That was a mistake.”

  “That’s not what screwed things up and you know it.”

  “I know.”

  I felt uncomfortably hot. Turning off the air didn’t help. I was percolating, pulsating with pent-up energy I couldn’t quite release. I didn’t even know what form it would take. Screams. Tears. Maniacal laughter. Who could say? But I refused to let Maxina become the lucky earwitness to such a rare emotional event.

  “I didn’t mean for it happen like this,” I said. “I didn’t mean for us to get so...”

  “Listen, do you know how many singers and actresses get married to their agents? Their managers? Their publicists? Too many to count. That little dance between star and starmaker is as old as fame itself. Yo
u were just the latest pair to get caught in it. I knew there’d be trouble from the moment I saw you two together.”

  “But I never meant for it to happen. It was an accident.”

  “I know.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  Maxina emitted a motherly chuckle. “Of course not, Scott. You’ve never seen yourself through a young girl’s eyes. You’re a dashing tomcat, all suave and confident. In your world, there are no accidents.”

  “Apparently there are.”

  “I know. I’m not a young girl. I see them. But you know what? They were honest mistakes.”

  She was certainly in a magnanimous mood. Who could blame her? Twenty minutes ago, she was looking at World War III. Now she had the pleasure of calling all her cronies in the music business and telling them they can finally breathe again.

  “Go home,” she said. “Get some sleep. The best thing you can do now is distance yourself. I assume you’ve been careful in covering your tracks.”

  You’ve been a bad, bad boy. “I have. At least with Harmony. I mean, no one knows about my connection to her except the twelve thousand of you.”

  “Well, the twelve thousand of us have a very strong interest in keeping it quiet. You’ll be fine.”

  I’d never called a woman a bitch before.

  “Go home.”

  That part would follow me forever. I could have said so many other things. I could have even just said “You don’t even know me” and ended the call with a modicum of virtue (at least in my book). The fact that I’d garnished my last words to her, littered my very own message, only justified everything she said and felt about me. It was all the proof she needed.

  I didn’t return to Brentwood until shortly after four. The moment I got to my apartment door, I fixed my hair, adjusted my shirt, then summoned up a fresh batch of composure. I even came up with a good cover story for being barefoot.

  Madison sat cross-legged on the couch, shooting Internet articles from my laptop to my BubbleJet. She seemed a little anxious.

  “Hi, Scott.”

  “Hey. Sorry I’m late.”

  “I knocked several times like you told me. Then I used the key.”

  “That’s fine,” I told her. “Exactly why I gave it to you.”

  I dropped my wallet on the kitchen counter, then peeked at my answering machine. Exhaling, I collapsed to the easy chair.