Slick (28 page)

“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?”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

“I don’t mind telling you. It’s just that I ain’t so good at explaining it sometimes. It starts like...okay. In the story there’s this country, all right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And in this country, every woman has a secret name. There’s the name they was born with, and a secret name they pick for themselves. They ain’t supposed to give that name to anyone except the man they fall in love with and marry. You see what I’m getting at here.”

“Yeah. I do. That’s pretty clever.”

“Well, that’s the setup. That ain’t the story. See, in that country, that’s the way things are
supposed
to work, but it don’t work like that no more. Now the women are giving up their secret names to every man that asks for it, to the point where it ain’t even a big thing these days. But there’s this one woman who decides not to do that. She ain’t a princess or nothing. She’s just this country girl who says no to one too many guys. And she starts to get a reputation for it. Her friends think she’s crazy, and the men...well, you know how men are. Once the word gets out, folks from all over come to see her. Princes and barons and dukes and all that. They’re all convinced that they the ones who can get her to give up her secret name. They offer her diamonds and rubies and castles. Some of them even offer to marry her, like in the old days. But she still don’t give it up, because by this point she knows how famous she is, and she know that none of them are trying to get her secret name for any of the right reasons.”

I nodded. “Okay. So what happens?”

“Well, this traveling man comes along. Just some drifter guy. He didn’t even come to town for this girl. He was just working his way through. But the minute he sees her, without even knowing what she’s famous for, he makes a promise to her that no one else can. He promises to ask her everything
but
her secret name. He says he’ll take her all over the world with him, asking everything about her, learning everything about her. It don’t matter how long it takes, or how many questions he has to ask, he promises not to ask her secret name until that’s the very last thing he don’t know about her.”

I smiled. “I assume she takes him up on his offer.”

“Yeah. Of course. The way I see it, they end up crossing the planet ten times before he finally runs out of things to ask her. And by then she ain’t even famous. Nobody else cares about her secret name except this guy. But by then she knows he’s the real deal. So she finally tells him and...you know. It’s all really sweet. And it’s all really cheesy. It’s a kid’s book.”

I shook my head. “No, don’t sell yourself short. That’s smart. That’s a really clever idea.”

She bit into another dumpling. “Well, I still got to draw the thing.”

“Then draw it already. I think it’s great. I think it could be really successful.”

“You ain’t just saying that?”

I lowered my fork. “Sweetheart, haven’t I convinced you by now that
I’m
the real deal?”

Harmony laughed. “No.”

“Well, then I’ll just have to keep trying. In the meantime...” I raised my water glass. “A toast.”

With a soft smile, she lifted her own glass. “To what?”

“To the sweet smell of success.”

“I hear that.”

We clinked glasses, drank our water, and got back to our food.

I noticed a small flock of people gathering in the bar, all looking up at the hanging television set. Though I couldn’t hear it, I saw a press conference fill the screen, garnished by a big, bold
breaking news
overlay.

Unless a plane had crashed, it was safe for me to assume that the dam finally broke with the Bitch Fiend sex tape. By late afternoon, the nation would be flooded with all-new speculation and implications. By dinner time, the parents and critics and pundits and cynics would finally unite in their most delicious conviction: that Annabelle Shane was a victim of rap.

“Oh boy,” I said. “Here we go.”

Harmony turned around. “Here we go with what?”

I thought about Lisa Glassman. I never met the woman and she never met me, but we were now officially locked in a frantic race to get to the media first. God help us if she won.

“Here we go with you,” I said, before taking a good long drink.

On Tuesday, the first shot was fired.

At 8:30
a.m.
, a lanky young courier named Mick (not his real name) stepped into the antiseptic clerk’s office of the Los Angeles Superior Court Building, Central District, and joined one of the many lines. Once he advanced close enough to the service wall, he caught the knowing eye of Jimmie (not her real name), who waved him over to an empty window.

After exchanging their innocuous friendly greetings, Mick presented Jimmie with a stack of papers for filing. Among those in the pile: Judicial Form CH-100, “Petition for Injunction Prohibiting Harassment”; Judicial Form CH-110, “Response to Petition for Injunction Prohibiting Harassment”; and Judicial Form 982(a)(5.1), “Notice of Entry of Dismissal and Proof of Service.”

Now a normal clerk would question the completeness of this package. It would be like filing a birth certificate, marriage certificate, and death certificate all at once for the same person. Fortunately, Jimmie wasn’t a normal clerk. Once Mick presented a different stack of papers (the smaller, greener kind), Jimmie put her stamp on each and every form. It wasn’t a normal stamp either. Like Marty McFly’s famous DeLorean, it was meticulously calibrated to go back in time.

Thus, officially, the first shot was fired on Thursday, January 4, a full four weeks ago. That was when Harmony Prince filed for a temporary restraining order against Jeremy Sharpe. So much for their retroactive friendship. It just hit a retroactive skid.

 

 

“Publicity is...”

On Monday, while the news of the Bitch Fiend sex tape continued to break over the nation’s collective head, I stretched out on my couch and bounced a tennis ball off the ceiling. Like a therapist, Madison watched me from the easy chair, notepad in hand. Her long blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She wore a man’s oxford, tucked into pressed black slacks. She was adorable. You’d think this was her first day at Charles Schwab.

“Okay. Let me ask you this. How many planets are there in our solar system?”

“Nine,” she said, humoring me.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know for sure. It’s just what I’ve been taught.”

“But you heard it from more than one source, right?”

“Right.”

“How do you know?”

She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

“You got it from your teachers. Where did they get it from? Probably their textbooks. Where did the textbooks get it from? Probably other textbooks. This information has been passed on and on since...shit, maybe Galileo started it. I don’t know. I’m not accusing him of lying. All I’m saying is that there’s a big sky out there. When’s the last time anyone checked for themselves?”

The ball bounced off the arm of the couch and rolled away. I looked to Madison. I wasn’t exactly blowing her mind.

I sat up and grabbed the remote. “All right. Let’s bring this back to earth.”

“What are we doing?”

“You are going to watch the news,” I said, “and I am going to ruin it for you.”

 

 

On Tuesday, the first hint was dropped.

Andy Cronin returned from lunch to find a thin white envelope on his office chair. It had been delivered via messenger from an unidentified source. He sat down and examined the contents.

Nestled between two pieces of card stock was a single sheet of inkjet paper. Printed on the paper was a slightly pixelated photo of a handsome young black man who by now was easy to recognize. From an ornate living room, he innocuously smiled with some pretty little cupcake. Her head had been circled in red marker.

It wasn’t until Andy shook the envelope that a slip of paper the size of a bookmark fluttered down to his desk. The typeface was big and bold.

 

It was the opinion of more than one person that Andy and I were cloned from the same German DNA. We were both six and a half feet tall, quietly brainy, emotionally distant, and annoyingly pragmatic. Unlike me, Andy was a journalist with the Associated Press. Unlike Miranda, Andy had no pretense of a higher purpose. He knew he was being fed by someone with an agenda, most likely nefarious. He didn’t care. If it had to do with Hunta, it was worth looking into.

On the back of the slip were two phone numbers: one for Jay McMahon, the other for Sheila Yorn. I figured at least one of them would be willing to tell Andy all about this mystery woman. Of course, neither would admit to sending the envelope, since they hadn’t. Nor would they explain why Harmony Prince was about to become very important, since they couldn’t. Like everyone else, they’d have to read about it in the paper. Even Andy. In truth, he wasn’t meant to get to Harmony first. But if he played his cards right, he’d have her whole dramatic backstory ready, right when the Bitch demanded it.

 

 

“My main function,” I told Madison, “is to influence the news. Their main function is to catch the collective eye of a demographically desirable audience and hold it there long enough to show them the advertisements. The only way to support my function is to support their function. And the only way to do that is to understand how they operate.”

She sat next to me on the couch, taking copious notes. I grabbed her notebook and chucked it.

“Hey.”

“Don’t write,” I said. “Just watch. What do you see on TV?”

“The local news.”

“What are they covering?”

“I don’t know. You keep talking over them.”

I muted the television. “Don’t listen. Just watch. What do you see?”

“A photo of that guy from Melrose. What’s his name? The Bitch Fiend.”

“Bryan Edison,” I said.

“Right. Him.”

“And who are they showing now?” I asked.

“Annabelle Shane. I’m so sick of hearing about her. Did you know at my school—”

“Whoa, whoa. Wait. Shut up. Did you notice any difference between the way they were just shown?”

Madison gently grimaced. “Uh, I guess not.”

“When they flashed that picture of Bryan, it was an extreme close up. Enough to see the pores on his nose. He wasn’t smiling. And there was some weird darkness around the edges, making him look even more sinister. With Annabelle, it was just the opposite. The shot they used of her was bright and smiley and a little bit blurry, giving her this distant and angelic quality. And if you think that’s a fluke, wait and watch.”

I flipped to another local newscast. Within seconds, images of Bryan and Annabelle were presented again. Different photos. Same motif.

“You see?”

She saw. “Jesus.”

“Yup. It used to be old-school journalists who produced and edited the news. Now they’ve all been replaced by these Gen-X vid kids. They work cheap, they work fast, and they know all the great film-school techniques to spice up the drama.”

Madison took the remote out of my hand and did her own surfing. “Damn. I can’t believe I never noticed this before.”

“It’s almost impossible to catch on your own, especially with the sound on.”

“Huh. That’s probably why my mom never watches TV.”

I thought about it. “Oh yeah. That’s right. I guess she would see stuff like this all the time. That’s kind of cool.”

“My mother’s the polar opposite of cool. Wait! There it is again! Holy shit! Does everyone do this?”

“Everyone who wants to stay in business.”

“But why does it work?”

I shrugged. “If I knew that, I’d be in advertising.”

“Come on.”

“It’s human nature. We like a good distraction. The more extreme, the better. Not only that, but most of us are so overwhelmed by the complexities of modern life that we’re secretly relieved when the newscasts squeeze reality into a familiar storytelling construct. Don’t just give us information. Tell us a tale. Who’s the victim? Who’s the villain? How does it end? What’s the moral? Of course if it’s presented
too
dramatically, we can’t accept it as reality anymore and we turn away. That’s why they have to be subtle. It’s really not easy to please us.”