Daniel Price - Slick

“But… I’m confused. I thought you wanted—”

“Trust me. Send her off and call me back.”

“Okay.”

I had only gotten six hours of sleep. It wasn’t fair. I needed at least seven hours to be functional. Eight to be clever. Of course it was being clever that got me into this mess in the first place. Jean made cleverness a contact sport. I wound up playing until 3 a.m. That wasn’t clever at all.

________________

Gail Steiner was lagging way too much for my comfort. I had expected her to call Harmony sometime last night, soon after talking to Big Bank. Didn’t happen. Maybe it was the demands of motherhood, or maybe she had simply lost her edge after eight months away from the beat. Whatever it was, I may have backed the wrong horse.

After a shower and coffee, I initiated Plan B. Cradling the phone on my shoulder, I logged on to the Hotmail website and created a pseudonymous account.

“All right,” I told Harmony. “Let me explain where you’re coming from. Officially, you don’t like or trust the media.”

“I don’t?”

“No. You believe this is between you and Hunta. It’s nobody else’s business. All you want, besides some compensation, is for Hunta to acknowledge what he did to you and to apologize for it. Not to the world. Just you. In fact — and I want you to say this often — you wish your lawyer had settled the case back in January, before the whole Bitch Fiend mess. Oh, by the way, you don’t think Hunta’s responsible for that.”

“I don’t?”

“Do you?”

“Wouldn’t I?”

I flipped through a thin stack of legal papers until I found a copy of the CH-100 judicial form. This was the pre-notarized version, but I had scribbled down the official court docket number in the upper right-hand corner.

“A lesser person would,” I explained, while composing a message through Hotmail. “But you are going to ride the moral high ground all the way to the twist ending. That’s why you’re never going to look like you enjoy the publicity. That’s why you’re never going to take pleasure in Hunta’s public crucifixion. And most important, that’s why you’re never going to take a dime from anybody but Alonso.”

Oof. That didn’t come out right at all. Her silence was piercing.

“I mean just until you recant,” I stressed.

“You said I’d be getting all sorts of money.”

“And you will. Once you clear Hunta’s name, you can go crazy. Sell your autobiography. Endorse Revlon. Pose nude for Penthouse . Believe me, they’ll offer. It’s all up to you. But until that happens, you can’t do anything that’s even remotely self-serving. The name of the game…”

I clicked and sent the e-mail.

“… is credibility.”

Harmony was still frosty. Shit. Things were so much easier when I was handling her from the driver’s seat of my car.

“I’ll be honest, Scott. I’m lost again. You just lost me.”

With Plan B now in motion, I pushed away the laptop and stretched out on the couch.

“Well, then let’s go over it again,” I said. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

________________

I didn’t want the story to begin on the Internet. Planting a seed on the World Wide Web was like conceiving a child on Three Mile Island. Who knew what kind of mutated freak I’d end up with?

But at least the Net worked fast, and on Wednesday I needed speed. My backup leak was The Smoking Gun, an online rag that regularly served up telling documents and court records, all legally obtained through freedom-of-information statutes. The site was a celebrity publicist’s nightmare, filled to the brim with big-name divorce petitions, arrest reports, civil claims, and ludicrous contract riders. One such proviso revealed that Britney Spears, a well-paid Pepsi endorser, secretly demanded a six-pack of Coke in her dressing room at every stop on her 2000 world tour. Oh, the scandal!

So, in electronic disguise, I pointed the way to the L.A. County superior court clerk’s office, where a nice fat CH-100 was waiting to be discovered. Obviously, the good folks at The Smoking Gun were just as hot to nab Hunta as everyone else. So you could imagine their delight in learning that Mr. Never-Hurt-a-Woman had come this close to getting slapped with a temporary restraining order. And just last month, too.

Over the next six hours, the seed became a sprout, the sprout became a plant, the plant bore fruit, and the fruit tasted funny. That’s what I got for using the Internet.

________________

“Goddamn it!”

Madison looked up from her work. “What?”

It was four o’clock. While I surfed the Web from the couch, Madison sat lotus-style on the living room floor, surrounded by a sea of online printouts. To my relief, she had finally deep-sixed the junior-executive wear and simply came to work as a junior.

“The Smoking Gun,” I told her. “They just posted a restraining order request that some woman filed against Hunta.”

“Oh shit. Who is she?”

“I don’t know. They grayed out her name. Everywhere it’s mentioned.” I scrolled through the digital pages. “They even grayed out her lawyer’s name. I don’t get it! They almost never gray out names! Why this one? Why now?”

Madison cocked her head. “Well…isn’t that sort of good?”

“No. I need to know who we’re up against. I need to hear her name .”

Thanks to The Smoking Gun, the world just learned that somebody was allegedly abused by Hunta at the Mean World Christmas party, and somebody was allegedly mad about it. That did me absolutely no good, considering that somebody could still be Lisa Glassman.

“Goddamn it.” I leaned back and eyed Madison. “This is your fault.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because you work with the Internet and the Internet sucks.”

“Oh, act your age.”

I managed to simultaneously laugh and yawn, which triggered a successive laugh and yawn from Madison. For the fourth time today, I went upstairs to my bedroom, closed the door, and made a private call from my spy phone.

“Did you talk to her?” I asked Alonso.

“I talked to Ms. Steiner,” he replied. “I gave her all the information and confirmation she could have ever possibly hoped for. She was very pleased, to say the least.”

“And you gave her permission to use Harmony’s name?”

“I assured her that neither Harmony nor I would make a fuss if she revealed the victim by name. Will you be making a liar out of me?”

“Pretty much.”

He chuckled. “Oh well. One less person to buy my novel.”

“When did you finish the call?”

“About fifteen minutes ago.”

I checked my alarm clock. “She’ll never make her deadline.”

“She’ll make it.”

She better. Ten minutes later, I went back downstairs. Along the way, I got the bird’s eye view of Madison’s work. She was adrift in a sea of highlighted articles.

“Jesus,” I said. “They really don’t like him, do they?”

With a tired sigh, she capped her marker. “No. No, they don’t.”

The minute she’d arrived at my place, I put her to work. I’d printed the natterings of thirty different columnists, each one offering their own postmortem analysis of Hunta’s appearance on 48 Hours . Madison’s task was to go through them with a pair of colored highlighters. Every word that benefited Hunta — positive modifiers, supportive quotes, mentions of his wife and child, and so on — was to be marked in green. By contrast, every word used to cast Hunta in a less flattering light was to be marked in orange. By four o’clock, her work looked like a pumpkin patch.

“God, Scott, you were right about the adjectives. Most of the articles refer to him as the ‘lascivious’ rapper, with his ‘libidinous’ style of rap music. They also use ‘lecherous,’ ‘licentious,’ ‘lewd,’ and ‘libertine.’ ‘Libertine’ is bad, right?”