Daniel Price - Slick

To give Harmony a taste of her own potential, Kathy brought a ready-made deal. On behalf of the Coca-Cola Company, she was authorized to offer Harmony fifty thousand dollars, all up front, in exchange for being seen with a can of Coke in her hand. Left or right. Diet or regular. The variables didn’t matter as long as the can was caught on the news. The arrangement was completely confidential, and it was valid whether or not Harmony signed with Kathy. She would return, with cash and paperwork, at 6 p.m. Think it over. Have a nice afternoon.

Naturally, the offer provoked much discussion among Harmony, her bodyguards, and her visiting roommates. Even her friends, who had each turned down tabloid money on principle, couldn’t find a problem with the Coke proposal. Neither could Harmony. The one thing standing between her and free money was the stern specter of me.

Circumventing me altogether, she called Alonso, the lenient parent, in the hope that he would bless the deal. No such luck. He simply told her everything I would have. Despite Kathy’s grand fancy, word of the arrangement would inevitably reach the press, and the press took a harsh eye to secret shills. Harmony was better off sticking to open endorsements, and not until after the twist.

But, sensing Harmony’s resentment, Alonso adjusted his spiel. Look, that’s just how Scott explained it. If it were up to me, I’d be having a Coke and a smile right alongside you. But this is his show. And we both know his take on this.

I didn’t learn about this until Sunday morning, when Maxina gave me the secondhand story. I had to laugh, not just at Alonso’s cheap evasion but at Kathy Oh’s resourcefulness. Like me, she was a freelance operative. Unlike me, she was renowned for her effective lack of subtlety.

Yet we were both minnows compared to Maxina. She was never one for the bikini trick, thank God, but she had her own way of getting things done. By the time she showed up at my doorstep, bearing news and gifts, she knew who was in the superior position. I couldn’t blame her for being smug. I couldn’t even blame her for being superior. I lost Harmony on my own, with only a little help from others.

________________

“She’ll come around,” Maxina assured me from the bottom of my front steps. “That thing with her father really threw her for a loop. You just got caught in it.”

She stood. I sat. She was clean and well rested. I still wore my clothes from last night, plus a new dark circle under each eye. I was miserable. She was not. But her joy had little to do with me. On Friday night, while in the lowest of low moods, she returned to her hotel room only to find her husband and sons waiting there, fresh from Atlanta. They’d conspired with her staff to surprise her, and it worked. Maxina told me she screamed so loud, she probably set off every car alarm in the area.

Currently, her three men — all big and burly fellows — waited patiently outside her rented Lexus. They were all about to take a nice, relaxing jaunt up the Pacific Coast Highway. Maxina only came by to deliver her latest coup, which I now held in my hands. It was a cardboard box the size of a toaster oven. There wasn’t a news director alive who wouldn’t club me for its contents.

“Well,” I admitted, “you certainly put me in my place.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You told her about Lisa Glassman.”

Expressionless, Maxina unwrapped a peppermint candy. “Yes. That I did.”

“Kind of like the scorpion stinging the frog, don’t you think?”

“It was a calculated risk.”

“It was your first bad move.”

She popped the candy in her mouth, then slipped the wrapper into her shirt pocket. “You had way too much power over her. Every time I talked to her, every other sentence out of her mouth was ‘Scott says this’ or ‘Scott says that,’ ‘Scott thinks this’ or ‘Scott thinks that.’” She laughed. “I mean you really won her over. I was trying to ride my way in on the surrogate-mother train, but you, you seduced her.”

Maxina brushed a ladybug off her shoulder. “Not literally, of course.”

I had the urge to become loud and nasty, but her family was just ten yards away.

“Ordinarily, that wouldn’t concern me too much,” she added. “Except that you yourself were getting a little too ‘Harmony this and that’ for my comfort.”

I lowered my head and laughed. Maxina didn’t share the humor.

“I’ve been in this game a long, long time, Scott. One of the reasons I’ve endured, I think, is because I’ve always kept an inch of space between me and my causes. It doesn’t stop me from fighting passionately. It doesn’t stop me from working eighty-hour weeks. It just stops me from losing myself in the mission. I’ve seen some bright and talented people burn up that way.”

She tossed me a meaningful glance. “So have you.”

I twirled the box in my hands. It didn’t make a sound. Whoever packed the tapes sure packed them tight.

Maxina sighed. “Okay, I have better things to do than stand here and annoy you. I just wanted to drop off the present. To be honest, I was hoping I could convince you to convince Harmony to end this sham tomorrow, but obviously—”

“She’s not even talking to me.’”

“She will . For God’s sake, it’s just a snit. If you weren’t so wrapped up in her, you’d see that.”

Try as I might, I couldn’t disagree. With Harmony, I didn’t have a shred of detachment left. Funny how just twelve hours before, another highly perceptive woman called me feeling-impaired.

“I am not here to meddle in your life,” Maxina declared. “Frankly, I couldn’t care less about whatever personal issues you’re dealing with. All I know is that this whole mess revolves around Harmony, and she, for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom, still revolves around you. That makes you crucial to me, to Jeremy, to Mean World, and to the entire music industry.”

She glanced back at her family, waving for more patience. “I need you for this. You’re the one who started it. You’re the one who has to end it. And if you just took a step back and just got some distance, you’d see that Larry King Live is a perfect place to end it.”

“It’s too soon.”

Maxina pointed to the box. “We’ve got the documentary now. We’ve got hours of sympathetic footage to help break her fall.”

“It’s still too soon.”

“You saying that out of spite?”

“I’m saying it out of reason. I’m talking about a few more days. Jeremy, Mean World, and the entire music industry can survive a few more days of Harmony, much more than Harmony can survive a confession tomorrow. She’s barely said a word to the public yet.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine. Obviously. If I was overcautious, I was overcautious. But I’m not going to be reckless to compensate.” I flashed her a facetious grin. “Not with my dear, beloved Harmony at stake.”

That was said out of spite. Maxina pressed her hands together, resting the tips of her fingers against her lips.

“I’m going up the coast,” she proclaimed in a demonstrably chirpy tone. “I’m going to spend the day with the men I love. At the moment, you are not a man I love.”

“That’s okay. I wouldn’t have fit in the car anyway.”

She dissected me one last time.

“Scott, do me a favor. Don’t watch those tapes right away. Take a day for yourself. Run some errands. Spend some time with your lady friend. Just take a break from the mission. Please.”