“No, but this toilet is. So unless you get a nice big couch in here, I’m moving this meeting to a more comfortable room. Besides, I’m getting tired of looking at your skinny body.”
Reluctantly, Simba nodded. “All right. Get out of here.”
Doug and I stood up. As I moved toward the door, Hunta grabbed my pants leg with his dripping right hand. “Yo. Hold up. What’s your name again?”
“Scott. Scott Singer.”
“Well, Scott, Scott Singer, let me tell you something. Ever since the movies / Ho’s try to do me / If they can’t screw me / They find a way to sue me.”
“Nice,” I lied, scanning my inner rap dictionary. “Was that a freestyle?”
He chuckled. “Naw, man. They ain’t even my words. They were Tupac’s. Just remember them, all right? I don’t want it happening to me what happened to him.”
“It won’t,” I promised. I’d assumed he was making a figurative reference to the drive-by shooting that had killed the infamous rapper in 1996. Turns out I was wrong. I really had a lot more research to do.
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L’Ermitage was just a hop away from San Vicente Boulevard. So was my apartment. However, the ride home wasn’t as simple as one would think. The Beverly Hills San Vicente had nothing to do with the San Vicente in Brentwood. They were connected only by name. Connecting them physically would require bisecting UCLA and a major golf course. Nobody wanted that.
Once again, I was forced to ride Wilshire Boulevard, the one street that linked both San Vicentes. I hated taking Wilshire through Beverly Hills. A dense array of traffic lights turned a two-mile stretch into a twelve-minute series of angry spurts. To make matters worse, I was now forever bound to equate Wilshire with the secret menace of deaf drivers. I still had to take my car in for an estimate, but that wouldn’t happen anytime in the next twenty-four hours. I had a lot of thinking to do. When Maxina said I might get a little dirt on my hands, she meant definitely. And when she said a little dirt, she meant just enough to bury someone.
________________
“There was an incident,” Doug told me, just moments after exiting the bathroom. He, Maxina, and I reconvened around the master bed. Simba’s icy turn had already clued me in to the nature of Problem B, and the nature of my problem-to-be.
“Her name is Lisa Glassman. She was a production assistant for Mean World who started with us last summer. We put her under Kevin Haggerty, the producer on Hunta’s second album.”
I nodded. Get to the damn incident already.
“Since September she’d been working closely with Jeremy and Kevin, doing really great work. She’s young. She’s pretty. And it was clear that she… Look, I won’t mince words. Jeremy enjoys women. And vice versa. His marriage with Simba is very…”
“Clintonesque,” Maxina said, with obvious derision.
“Sort of. Anyway, they managed to finish a rough master of the new album right before our label’s Christmas party, so they had double reason to celebrate. At the party…I don’t know. Things got out of hand. People were drinking, smoking, having a good time. All of a sudden, the following Monday, Lisa quits and tells us that she’s going to press rape charges against Jeremy.”
“So why hasn’t she yet?”
“We’ve been negotiating with her all through January,” he said. “Trying to come to some sort of compromise. Look, this is nothing more than extortion, Scott, plain and simple. I know Jeremy. He’s a good man. He goes to church every week. He reveres his father, spoils his daughter. He may not be the most faithful husband, but he’s never forced himself on a woman in his life. He’s never had to.”
Maxina rolled her eyes.
“Well, if she’s extorting him,” I asked, “why were you willing to negotiate with her? What else does she have on him besides an accusation?”
“She’s a woman and he’s a rapper. What else does she need?”
“Legally? Quite a bit.”
“If this were just a legal issue, Scott, I wouldn’t be worried. You’re a publicist. You know the stakes involved. Jeremy has his whole career ahead of him. He’s got the looks and the talent to become a huge crossover hit, maybe even the next Will Smith. The problem is that the studios won’t touch him if he has all this dark smoke around him, even if he’s proven innocent. We all agreed that it would be cheaper and safer to keep Lisa quiet.”
“But now…,” Maxina segued.
“But now all this Melrose shit has happened. She’s got us over a barrel. Her lawyer could file as early as next week. Once that happens, Jeremy’s screwed and we’re screwed. We’ll be like a cash machine to every woman who ever brushed hands with him.”
Maxina seemed less than verklempt over Mean World’s financial plight. Although she had understated it earlier, artistic free expression was a fierce crusade with her. When President Reagan insinuated that “obscene” music didn’t deserve constitutional protection, she went postal. When the state of Oregon made it illegal for retail stores to display ads or even photos containing rapper Ice Cube, she went ballistic. And there’s no word violent enough to describe her reaction when they started arresting record-store executives for selling 2 Live Crew’s explicit albums.
Once again, it seemed, the recording industry needed her rage. Within the last decade, sanctimonious lawmakers had gotten smarter in their attempts to suppress the material they found objectionable. The way around those First Amendment whiners, they knew, was to implement severe marketing and trade restrictions on all naughty stuff. It’s not censorship, they say. Just keeping it out of the hands of kids (and everyone else). The password was “financial disincentive.” Sure, you have the right to release an NC-17 film. We just won’t let you advertise it or show it in ninety-five percent of the nation’s venues. Sure, you have the freedom to put out a stickered album. We’ll just pressure the major music retailers like Wal-Mart to stop carrying it. For the media giants of the world, it all came down to a simple decision: the Wite-Out or the red ink. Not much of a f****** choice now, is it?
And there was more correction fluid coming. Riding the wave of fear and blame that came about from Columbine, senators such as Joe Lieberman and John McCain had been able to open the door to even tighter reform. Now the Melrose situation could very well blow it off its hinges.
“The bottom line,” said Maxina, “is that we’ve got to get Hunta and his music out of this whole equation. We’ve got to lift him up above it. But we won’t have a shot in hell of doing that if Lisa Glassman gets to tell her story.”
“Her fictional story,” Doug stressed.
“That’s the key, Scott. We can’t afford her a moment of credibility. We have to stack the deck before she even plays her first card. Now Doug is doing everything he can to stall her lawsuit, but you’re still on a seriously tight schedule. You’ve got to strike hard and fast. Are we painting a clear picture here?”
“Like El Greco.” I did not like this.
They both smiled. Doug opened his briefcase and retrieved a thin manila folder. “We hired a private investigator to look into Lisa’s background. This is all we have on her. I won’t lie. She’s pretty clean. You’re going to have to get crafty.”
As soon as the file touched my hands, I was officially sucked into the maelstrom that Annabelle started. The one Hayley wouldn’t come within a mile of. It was easy to see why. After all the Sturm und Drang, it turned out Hunta was right. All they needed was an assassin.