Daniel Price - Slick

That was when I said — disingenuously — that I didn’t know she had an album. Sure, I could have used my inside knowledge and pretended that her fame preceded her, but that just wasn’t me. Out of the many flavors of bastard out there, I couldn’t bear to be a patronizing one.

For the next few minutes she gave me a first-person account of the miseducation of Simba Shange. What wasn’t mentioned on her one adoring fan page was that her manager at the time had also been her lover. The man was twice her age and, when all was said and done, left her for his next big discovery. I’d tell you her name — trust me, you know it — but I’ve already had enough legal troubles to last me a lifetime. Suffice to say she made it further than Simba. Further than Hunta, even.

“I’m tired of being angry about it,” she told me. “Tired of being mad at where I ended up. And I’m definitely tired of being angry at Jeremy. He really isn’t a bad man, Scott. As much as I complain about him, he’s the furthest thing from a rapist. If there’s anything I know for sure, it’s that.”

“I believe it.”

She turned to me and put her hand on my leg, a strange reminder of a night that never happened. “Then promise me you’ll do what’s best for us. I know we’re not the ones paying your bill, but I can tell you know right from wrong. So no matter what the Judge or Doug or even Maxina says to you, promise me you’ll do what’s right for me and Jeremy.”

Softly, she squeezed my thigh. Ah, there it was. The hook. All throughout the car ride, I’d been nagged by the vague sense that she was angling for something. For a disturbing moment I thought she was going to hit me up for a loan. But as soon as she touched my leg, she confirmed my first instinct. It was nothing more than a loyalty play. All she wanted to do was charm some extra allegiance out of me.

I was disappointed. More so, I was insulted. Did she really think a few rounds of flirting would turn me into her lovestruck champion? How stupid. How amateur. Suddenly, I got the flipside image of her relationship with the Judge. Lord knew how much she had to touch and caress him in order to squeeze out the latest stipend. All I knew was that I wasn’t as easy to beguile.

“Simba, I can’t guarantee success, but I promise you I’ll do everything in my power to get you and Jeremy out of this mess. My real goal is to get you both out of this mess better than when you came in. That’s extra-credit work. That’s the real challenge. And I’m only doing that because I like you guys.”

No, I’m not above playing fake. In this case, all I had to do was tell her what she wanted to hear. It worked. She squeezed me one last time and then moved out of my personal space.

“Just keep going down this road,” she said, grinning. “We’re almost there.”

________________

Okay, I might have overreacted to that whole scene. I might have read too much into her actions. Being an insanely beautiful woman (or man, I suppose) is like a having an extra muscle. Sometimes it’s used on purpose, for good or for evil, and sometimes it’s just reflexive. Simba, for understandable reasons, felt helpless in the grand scheme. Maybe she had to stretch that muscle just to convince herself she was doing something.

Ordinarily, I would have realized this right away and not taken her actions personally. I could have saved myself a good twenty minutes of smoldering indignation, filled with grumbling thoughts about the nature of my species. Like I said, I was having an off day.

Thank God again for Harmony Prince.

By the time I finished my follow-up phone call with Eddie Sangiacomo, I had forgotten all my petty grievances. That was Harmony’s real power. It wasn’t enough for her to be blessed with a face you could fall into. She was also cursed with a backstory that — even in its driest form — made Anne Frank look like a spoiled JAP.

“Sweet Jesus, Scott. Where did you find this woman?”

He called at me at five o’clock. Ever since I’d gotten home, I had little to do but read e-mail and wait. I was tempted to do my own research on Harmony, but alas, the cyber pathways Eddie traveled went much further than mine. With just a social security number, he could piece together an entire life through stored records, both public and private. The vast majority of this information could be obtained easily, legally. As for the rest of it… let’s just say a good PI has a lot of file clerks for friends.

I suppose I should have told him right off the bat that Harmony was young, black, and not exactly a member of the gold-card elite. But he found that out soon enough by digging up her birth certificate. When you’re an investigator and your target is a kid from the ‘hood, there are three smart sources to tap: the hospitals, the police stations, and the courthouses. Of all three, only the courts were closed today, but the Lexis database picked up the slack by leading Eddie to a whole slew of family-court dockets.

As with all cases surrounding minors, the records were sealed, but Eddie was able to crack them open wide enough to get the name Sherry Greenleaf. She was a county social worker who played a supporting role in many of Harmony’s family crises.

By one o’clock, Eddie was knocking at the door of Sherry’s home in Culver City. Although he’d brought three hundred (reimbursable) dollars of incentive in his pocket, it turned out Sherry was willing to talk for free. In fact, by the time she was done she had sacrificed two hours of her life and about a dozen Kleenex.

Harmony Miesha Prince was born on January 21, 1982, in the nearby town of Inglewood. Her mother, Aasha Harris, was a fifteen-year-old orphan and ward of the county. The father, Franklin Prince, was the thirty-eight-year-old patriarch of Aasha’s foster family. When Harmony was two months old, Aasha and Franklin took their love child and fled upstate to Modesto to live happily ever after. It didn’t last. Soon Franklin left Aasha for someone even younger. She had little choice but to take Harmony back to Inglewood and throw herself at the mercy of Social Services. They put her in a group home for young mothers.

Aasha eventually moved in with her new beau, a twenty-eight-year-old mechanic named Umberto Ortiz. Although his eye didn’t wander as far as Franklin’s, his parenting skills left a lot to be desired. In April 1984 a neighbor caught him whipping Harmony with an extension cord. That led to Umberto’s arrest and Harmony’s first appearance in family court. She was two.

Once Umberto was out of the picture, Aasha moved on to John M. Jackson, a forty-two-year-old music producer with an unruly afro and a shepherding role in the brief forgettable career of the eighties funk band Picadilly (you might remember them from such cheesy tunes as “Watch Me Watch You” and “Phone Call”). Although not a millionaire, John did get Aasha and Harmony out of Inglewood and into a lovely three-bedroom house in West Hollywood.

And here their real troubles began.

For both Harmony and Aasha, the years 1985 to 1993 were a nightmarish string of abuse at the hands of Jackson. At the age of five, Harmony was sent to the ER for numerous fractures and contusions caused by a ball-peen hammer. When she was seven, she and her mother were treated for second-degree scald burns. The next year Aasha nearly died from multiple stabbings with a corkscrew. Each time the assaults were blamed on freak mishaps or anonymous attackers. Each time the social workers were left wary but helpless.

It all came to a tragic head in December 1993, when eleven-year-old Harmony was hospitalized for internal distress that was soon revealed to be — are you ready for this? — a miscarriage.

I know what it’s like to be sexually abused , I pictured Harmony telling the press. I was taught to stay quiet about it. To let him get away with it. Well, I will not be quiet about this one. And I will not let Jeremy Sharpe get away with it.