Daniel Price - Slick

“Doug, I’m not forming any opinions. I just need to know what’s going on in Lisa’s head.”

Now he chuckled. “Thoughts of revenge and a whole lot of dollar signs. That’s all that matters. I’ll see you at six.”

He hung up. I couldn’t blame him for getting testy. He was right. As far as presumed guilt went, young black rappers had it worse than anyone. They were like flypaper to even the most frivolous charges. As the label’s head lawyer, Doug had to deal with that crap eight days a week.

At the same time, he wasn’t giving Lisa enough credit. If this had just been about greed, she would have simply raised her asking price instead of stopping the negotiations. And if this was just revenge, well, I think Annabelle Shane conveniently took care of that for her.

This was something more. This was a woman who lived, loved, and breathed a style of music that wasn’t exactly known for loving women back. She spent her life forgiving it. Defending it. Even improving it. And in the end it dissed her and dismissed her like she was just another bitch.

Lisa Glassman wanted respect.

Now I knew. And now I had less than eight hours to figure out how to keep her from getting it.

________________

The thinking wasn’t going well, so I made stops for errands. I went back to my favorite West L.A. spy shop and bought an untraceable mobile phone. The device itself was nothing fancy. The seller, however, was quite unique in that he took cash and asked for no ID. I now had four thousand minutes of anonymous call time. For a few hundred dollars more, I could have gotten the Drug Dealer Special. It had a microchip inside that made it virtually impossible for the feds to monitor or track by location. I politely declined. Nothing like a little perspective to make me feel better about my own line of work.

I kept driving, but I wasn’t getting any ideas. Stacking the deck against Lisa was impossible if she was holding all the cards. Even the dreaded smear campaign wasn’t a viable option. You couldn’t just pull dirt out of thin air. You had to take an actual smudge from the person’s past and turn it into an oil spill. Lisa was spotless, and there was nothing the news loved more than a spotless victim.

That was the other problem. As far as the press was concerned, it was always more interesting to favor the accuser over the accused, especially when the accused is a celebrity, and especially when he’s a celebrity in the middle of another hot controversy. The slightest allegation from an other woman, any woman, would make Lisa’s case ten times stronger. There would be no shortage of former bedroom buddies willing to hang Hunta out to dry in exchange for a few minutes in the spotlight.

Shit.

I made my next errand a comic-book run. Since I was near Culver City, I stopped at Comics Ink, a small but friendly store that was short on back issues but always well stocked in recent releases. I was a sucker for the Marvel mutant titles. When I started collecting back in the early 1980s, there was only one monthly X-Men comic: The Uncanny X-Men . In 1985 it spun off into The New Mutants , a team of junior X-Men, and then X- Factor , a team of senior X-Men. Seeing substantial profits thanks to fools like me, Marvel Comics exploded the franchise to a ridiculous extent. Currently gracing the stands were Uncanny X-Men, Ultimate X-Men, X-Men Forever, X-Men Unlimited, X-Men: The Hidden Years, X-Force, X-Man, Mutant X, Generation X , and plain old adjectiveless X-Men , which would soon be rechristened as New X- Men and then joined by X-Treme X-Men . The fact that I could keep track of this made me wonder how I ever got laid at all.

There were over three dozen fine-looking women at that party who would have fucked Jeremy for the price if a smile.

There was an idea stuck in the back of my mind, like a caraway seed. It was maddening because I could feel the shape of it, enough to know that it was something good. There was a solution. There was a way to thwart Lisa’s attack without even having to draw blood. I just couldn’t shake it loose.

I bought my comics, stopped for a California Roll, and then continued to amble about town. The clock was down to five and a half hours, and my teasingly brilliant idea was only getting more elusive.

There was something in Tupac’s rape case, something I needed to know. I drove straight home and got back on the laptop. Thanks to Nexis and a scandal-hungry media, I had access to a ton of articles that detailed Ayanna Jackson’s accusations against the great but controversial artist known as Tupac Amaru Shakur.

She’d met him at Nell’s, a downtown New York nightclub. They dirty-danced. They kissed. She fellated him right there on the dance floor, according to Tupac and his character witnesses. Frankly, that part smelled a little like spin to me, the kind of discrediting tactic a desperate and uncreative lawyer would use. Then again, I wasn’t part of that world. I didn’t personally know any women that friendly, but it wasn’t hard to believe that a man who looked and rapped like Tupac did.

What was established is that they had sex later that night in his hotel room. That ended fine. The trouble happened four days later, when she returned to pick up some of her belongings. Still mutually fond of each other, they went back in the bedroom. She gave him a massage. They started kissing. And then three of Tupac’s crew entered and turned it into a party.

“Don’t worry,” Tupac reportedly said to her. “These are my brothers and they ain’t gonna hurt you. We do everything together.”

Proving his point, they fondled her, tore off her underwear, and sodomized her. At some point during all this, Tupac left to chill on the couch in the other room. His version was that she didn’t say a word in protest. Her version was that she said plenty, including the golden word “no.” She certainly had some choice phrases afterward, when she cried and screamed at Tupac: “How could you do this to me? I came here to see you! I can’t believe you did this to me!”

Tupac’s response, per Ayanna: “I don’t got time for this shit! Get this bitch out of here!”

Whether he said it or not, she was clearly looking for vengeance.

Within hours, the police, the press, and Tupac’s publicist were in the hotel lobby, along with Ayanna. She incriminated Tupac and his manager, Charles “Man Man” Fuller. Both were cuffed and led away to police cars.

En route, Tupac held his head up high to the paparazzi crowd. “I’m young, black… I’m making money and they can’t stop me,” he declared. “They can’t find a way to make me dirty, and I’m clean.”

Not according to the jury, who saw Tupac as the serpent in this tale. Although he and Fuller beat the rape and sodomy charges, they were convicted on three counts each of first-degree sexual abuse. The third accomplice pleaded down to a misdemeanor, and the fourth was never charged.

Tupac was sentenced to four and a half years at Rikers Island. He ended up serving eleven and a half months, until he was sprung on a $1.4 million bond posted by Suge Knight. Thus began Tupac’s infamous stint with Death Row Records, not to mention the last year of his life.

All along he proclaimed his own innocence, maintaining — like Hunta — that this was a setup. Shortly before the verdict, he was interviewed by Vibe journalist Kevin Powell. “It was all right with that police thing [in Atlanta],” he said. “But this rape shit… it kills me. ‘Cuz that ain’t me.”

“I love black women,” he told Powell. “It has made me love them more because there are black women who ain’t trippin’ off this. But it’s made me feel real about what I said in the beginning. There are sisters and there’s bitches.”