Daniel Price - Slick

Maxina watched her pose with Hunta. “Your girl’s a real find, Scott.”

“She’s amazing.”

“You two certainly seem to have hit it off.”

“We have. The best part is that I haven’t told her a single lie.”

“I see. And how many truths have you actively withheld?”

I cracked a soft grin and mentally cursed her out. “Just two. Here’s one of them.”

I handed her a microcassette from my shirt pocket. She examined it. “Is this the whole conversation, or just the insurance part?”

“The insurance part.”

“Can I have a copy of the whole conversation?”

“Of course,” I replied, venting a thin jet of steam. “I can rush messenger a copy the second I get home.”

“No hurry, no hurry. Just curious.”

I didn’t tell Maxina about the fifteen-minute gap in the tape, the part where Harmony and I talked outside the car. That should make her real curious.

She pocketed the cassette. “So what’s the other creative omission?”

“Lisa Glassman.”

That was a judgment call on my part. The hardest thing Harmony would ever have to do was confess to her adoring public that she’d misled them. I figured if she knew about Lisa, it would be all too easy to convince herself that Hunta really was a sexual aggressor. And if she thought that about Hunta, then why save him? Why sacrifice her sweetheart status to deliver an absolution he doesn’t deserve? Harmony would have plenty of motivation to skip out on her mea culpa. I didn’t want to add more.

Maxina mulled it over. “Hmm. I don’t know if I would have played it that way. But I’ll trust you.”

The photo shoot was wrapping up. Hunta was still on his best behavior. He joked around with Harmony — teasing her, charming her, separating her from the role she was about to play. I couldn’t have asked for more. Despite his marital shortcomings, he seemed like a pretty decent guy. And despite Maxina’s fears, I was steadfastly determined to save his public image. Even more, I was obsessed with getting the job done right. Maybe I did take after Drea.

“So how is she?” I finally inquired.

“She’s good,” Maxina replied. “At first she was happy to be out of the game. Now she’s just happy.”

After failing to get a reaction, she looked to me. “Isn’t that nice?”

“What? Yeah. Of course. That’s fantastic.”

Like a child, I was being coy. I was just playing my own round of silly games. In truth, the news had warmed my heart. I just didn’t want to admit I had one.

________________

We finished at 1:30. It was a very productive meeting. I’d introduced Harmony to her new co-conspirators, met with all the people I wanted to meet with, and come away with a Zip disk full of maximum-quality JPEG photographs. Fifteen minutes later, she and I were safely smuggled out of the hotel. By then we were both starving. I took her to an upscale Chinese restaurant at the Beverly Center.

“You sure it ain’t bad for us to be seen together like this?” she asked.

“No. Not yet.”

“But it will be, I guess.”

Yes. Soon. Although I hesitated to tell her, tomorrow was probably the last day she’d ever see me. After that I’d be nothing but a voice in her ear, an invisible guide on her journey through the Ten Percent Nation. I figured we might as well enjoy the face time while we had it.

Our appetizer arrived, but instead of eating, Harmony rested her chin on her fists and gave me a warm smile. Just like her Polaroid.

“By the way, thank you.”

“For what?”

“For sticking up for me the way you did. He was threatening me, you know.”

I speared a dumpling. “Yeah. I’m sorry about that. The Judge isn’t very familiar with how these things work.”

“He said that if I ever betray Hunta or Mean World, he’ll ruin my life.”

“He won’t,” I told her through a full mouth. “I won’t let him.”

“I know.”

“But Hunta seemed to be treating you well, right?”

She finally dug in. “Yeah. He was great to me. He kept asking me about the police. He heard what happened to me and was all tripping from it, like ‘Yo, I can’t believe those motherfuckers ran you down.’ I told him it was an accident but he wasn’t hearing that. He said there ain’t no accidents with the LAPD.”

“What do you think?”

Harmony laughed. “I don’t know. I never believed in any of that conspiracy shit before. But then you came along.”

I smiled. “Just don’t get carried away with that kind of thinking. It’ll drive you nuts.”

“No. Don’t worry. I got the opposite problem. I don’t think anything happens for a reason. I don’t even believe in God no more. I think we all just here doing our shit, trying to find success for ourselves, and that’s that.”

“Yeah? So where would you like to find success?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what’s your big dream? You looking to carve your way through the music industry?”

She giggled. “Why you think that?”

“I don’t know. With a name like Harmony…”

“Nope. Can’t sing. Can’t play nothing. But I can dance. And I guess I look good doing it, so, you know, videos. That’s as far as it goes, though.”

“Okay. So then what’s your real ambition?”

She took a quick sip of water. “It don’t matter.”

“Oh, come on.”

With a jaded half-grin, she rummaged through her purse. “You know, I answered all these questions for Jay and Sheila.”

“And nobody’s asked since?”

“No,” she said, retrieving her pill bottle. “It’s a very white question.”

I laughed. Now my curiosity was really piqued. I figured a good eight seconds of expectant silence should shake her tongue loose.

It took twelve. She popped her pills, then rolled her eyes. “Children’s books, okay?”

“Ah. You want to write.”’

“And draw.”

“You good at it?”

She shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I used to be. I’m out of practice now.”

“I see. So what’s your message?”

“What do you mean?”

“Children’s books always have some kind of moral message embedded into the story. You know, don’t take candy from strangers. Never judge a person by his shoe size.”

Harmony shook her head at me, bemused.

“What?” I asked. “Another white question?”

She looked around covertly. “If I tell you what I had in mind—”

“I’m not going to steal it.”

“I know you ain’t gonna steal it. I just think you gonna laugh.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“Forget it,” she said, picking up her glass. “You just gonna have to guess for yourself.”

“Abstinence.”

She almost choked on her water. Coughing, she wiped her mouth. “Jesus!”

“Was I right?”

“Yes! Did you just guess that?”

“I put two and two together.”

She eyed me in astonishment. “That shit’s more than two and two. You freak me out, man. I think you was one of them government super-babies or something.”

“What I can’t figure out is how you plan to sell abstinence to a bunch of toddlers.”

Her humor slowly faded, enough to make me feel horrible for all the things I knew about her. My God, she had miscarried her stepfather’s baby at age eleven. That was hard enough to fathom when she was just a face in a file. I desperately wanted out of this thread, but there was nothing I could say without openly backpedaling.

“I was gonna do what you do,” she told me. “I was gonna go around through the back door. Sneak it in there. You don’t got to talk about sex. You just…”

With a tired sigh, she leaned back in her seat. “It’s kind of like a fairy tale, this story I have in mind. You sure you wanna hear it?”