Daniel Price - Slick

Obviously Dateline wasn’t a bastion of journalistic integrity, either, but their producers were comparatively easy to bend. Once Maxina miraculously got the video across enemy lines, she strong-armed Jim Donnell — whose wife I’d recently boned — into running the clip with a date stamp. So at 8:20 p.m. (7:2 °CMT), eight million viewers got to hear Hunta’s defense and know that it was made several months before Annabelle Shane’s bloody rampage. In other words, it wasn’t just desperate knee-jerk spin. Given what was coming, Hunta needed every morsel of credibility he could get.

Maxina’s feat took a level of skill and clout that few mortals possessed. It still may not seem like great shakes to you, but to me it was like watching Superman stop a runaway train. I was in awe of this woman, which made her praise all the sweeter. Here it is again:

“You were right. I was wrong. Your plan is ingenious. I see it now.”

I’d spent twenty minutes filling her in on Harmony’s dramatic history. Compared to Eddie, I was the far better storyteller, but the material alone would be enough to send Toni Morrison into a blue funk.

“My God…”

Maxina had two ways to go from there. She could have fallen into a fit of simplistic, hackneyed Parade -magazine-style morality and insisted I keep my sleazy white-devil mitts off of poor Harmony, who’d clearly suffered enough. Or she could have looked beyond all the weltschmerz and examined the situation on a more intrinsic level.

Props again, Maxina, for picking Choice B. From the beginning she’d believed my plan would serve its function, but only at the cost of an innocent young woman. Her concerns were actually quite valid. But Harmony was the battery that would last and last and last. In a land that thrived on high drama, political correctness, and sweet-young-victim chic, she made Elián González look like a tapeworm in a fat man’s ass. Even when the jig was up, she would not only remain impervious to media and political scorn, but to prosecution.

“They’d never touch her,” Maxina said. “You were right. Even if she admitted to fraud, the law would never touch her.”

And only because the law felt bad about running her over. In their endless quest to heal their tattered public image, the LAPD was forced to err fifty miles this side of caution when it came to high-profile black people. And considering that the city mowed her down in a crosswalk, bandaged her skull, and sent her on her merry way without so much as a fruit basket, it was obvious that any public figure who called for Harmony’s head would soon have his own handed back to him by the liberal furies. In short, Harmony would become the ultimate L.A. paradox: a red-hot celebrity sensation who couldn’t get arrested in this town.

“She has no criminal record,” I stressed while pacing my living room carpet. “No history of substance abuse. No children, legitimate or otherwise. She’s never applied for any kind of government aid. And if that’s not enough to make her a conservative’s wet dream, the poem she wrote? The one that won first prize in the regional competition? It was all about abstinence.”

“Unbelievable.”

That was when I told Maxina the best part. Not only did Harmony come standard-equipped with a great face and a monstrous past, but she was also available with a documentary feature — one hundred hours of raw footage just waiting to be cooked, sliced, and tossed, hibachi-style, into the open mouths of hungry news directors. Granted, it was a bit of a side quest to hack through the legal red tape of Jay McMahon and Sheila Yorn’s creative-property dispute, but if anyone could do it…

“I’ll do it,” said Maxina, just as I’d hoped. “This is incredible. Absolutely incredible. Tell me, Scott. Were you amazingly brilliant in discovering this woman, or just amazingly lucky?”

“I’ll never tell.”

“Well, I’ll certainly say this…”

I was right. She was wrong. My plan was ingenious. She saw it now. Don’t worry, that’s the last time you’ll hear it. For the most part, that was the last time I’d hear it.

________________

“No. No. No!” the Judge barked from atop his porcelain throne. “That’s a dangerous idea! That’s a shitty idea! I’m not going to let it happen that way!”

After talking to Maxina, I phoned Doug to fill him in on the latest. He insisted we conference in the Judge, who was currently relaxing with the wife and kids at their home in Pacific Palisades. I could tell from the succession of background sounds — a television, a radio, a juicer — that the Judge was working his way through the house. By the time I finished my second rendition of Harmony’s tale, the noises were gone, and his “Jesus Christ” had the padded, echoey lilt that could only come from a man on the crapper.

It wasn’t Harmony herself that made the Judge nervous. After getting the whole story, he and Doug were in hearty agreement that she was the perfect foil to Lisa Glassman, maybe even the perfect foil to Annabelle Shane. It was my proposed method of hiring and managing her that caused the argument.

“I think what the Judge is trying to say, Scott—”

“I know what you’re both trying to say.”

Simply put, they didn’t want Harmony to know who she was really working for. As far as she was concerned, I really would be a member of the political anti-rap conspiracy. On the plus side, she’d have plausible deniability when the shit hit the fan, and thus could never implicate Mean World when put under the heat lamps. On the minus side…

“It would never work,” I said. “This entire plan hinges on one thing: Harmony’s confession. It has to be made in just the right way at just the right time. Now how can I get her to do that if she thinks I’m working against Hunta?”

“You manipulate a confession out of her,” the Judge yelled. “That’s what we hired you to do! Manipulate!”

“Maybe you can pretend to have a change of heart yourself,” Doug suggested. “That way you could sort of, you know, switch sides together.”

I must have died and gone to Screenwriter’s Hell. Suddenly I was trapped in a bubbling lava pit with uncreative executives and their awful script notes.

“Guys,” I said in a forcibly even tone, “in order for Harmony to do what we want her to do, she and I need a relationship based on trust. That means I plan on lying to her sparingly, if at all.”

“But—”

“Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. And I don’t have the patience to deal with your micromanagement. Either let me do my job, or I walk right now.”

“Scott, come on.” That was Doug. The Judge’s response, I imagine, was all excretory.

“Look, my ass will be hanging out there in the wind right alongside yours. Now given that, don’t you think I’ll do everything in my power to ensure that Harmony doesn’t screw us over?”

“We don’t doubt your intentions.” Doug again.

“Okay, well then you doubt my abilities. If that’s the case, why did you even hire me?”

“We didn’t,” the Judge growled. “Maxina did.”

“Good. Then call her. Because she knows exactly what I have planned, down to the very last detail. And she likes it. She likes it a lot. So if you have issues, bother her. Just let me do my goddamn job!”

I hung up for dramatic emphasis. I wasn’t really mad. In fact, I could totally understand their point. But sometimes I had to play the prima donna card just to reinforce the notion that I was a black belt at this, which of course I wasn’t. There was an occasional downside to not having a defensive ego. For starters, it was much harder to convince myself that I knew exactly what I was doing. I mean, objectively, how could I say for sure that this whole thing would work? I’ve never built a machine this big before, much less run one. This was massive.