7. MAKAVELI, MADISON
“Is this some kind of joke?”
That was Byron “Judge” Rampton: former car salesman, former VP of Columbia Records, founder and president of Mean World Records. If Buddha were black, impeccably dressed, and determined to show off his wealth through the bling-bling of expensive ornaments, he’d look just like the Judge. He eyed me from one of the many couches in the living room of L’Ermitage Suite 511. He insisted on being here for the meeting, even though I didn’t need him for what I had planned.
“You want to save Jeremy from one slanderous charge by hitting him with another.”
That was Doug, sitting next to the Judge. Once again he looked ready for the courtroom in his Fruit of Islam wear. Didn’t someone tell him it was Saturday?
“No,” I replied. “I want to save him from one slanderous charge by missing him with another. That’s the key difference.”
I paced around the room, high on caffeine and inspiration. The entourage was gone. My audience consisted of six people…six and a half if you included baby Latisha. Even she seemed incredulous.
“The name of the game is ‘full public exoneration,’” I told them. “Lisa herself isn’t the threat. Her impending civil suit isn’t the threat. It’s the media we need to worry about. This is sweeps month. They’ll cast Hunta in whatever light it takes to keep things interesting. On the upside, they won’t care where their story comes from. So I say we preempt Lisa’s drama with ours. At least that way we have control over how it develops and, more importantly, how it ends.”
“But why that?” asked Simba Shange. “Why swap one fake rape for another?”
“Because if we go with any other story, there’s nothing to stop the press from placing Lisa’s allegation on top, like a cherry on a sundae. They don’t cancel each other out.”
“Neither do two rapes.”
That was Maxina, on the third couch. She was clearly in a motherly mood, judging from the way she rocked Latisha in her beefy arms.
I smiled. “You’re right. Two different accusations only serve to strengthen each other. But two of the same accusation? Uh-uh. Then you’ve got a problem.”
Behind Simba’s couch, a shirtless and sweaty Hunta hung from a portable chin-up bar. When the meeting began, he’d been in the middle of an impressively long set of lifts. Now he was too stunned to do any thing but dangle.
“There were a lot of other women at that Christmas party,” I continued. “If we get just one of them to beat Lisa to the press with the exact same charge and the exact same story, down to the minute, then Lisa will be jammed forever. What’s she going to say? ‘No, Hunta didn’t sexually abuse that woman that night. He was too busy sexually abusing me’? Nobody would take her seriously. She’d be a copycat. A shameless opportunist. She’d barely get a mention.”
Big Bank, the last person in on the conspiracy, stood next to Hunta. He chewed on my idea. “But if we use our own woman, what’s to stop Lisa from joining in and saying Jer messed her up some other night?”
“Nothing. She could do it. So could fifty other women. But as far as the press is concerned, it’s not who’s right, it’s who’s first. If we get there first, our woman will be the tentpole. She’ll be the one the reporters rally around. And once she goes down, everyone goes down with her. It’s like fruit from a poisonous tree. That’s why it’s really important that we work fast and get our decoy out there first.”
Big Bank nodded in amazement. I also caught the sun rising on Doug’s face. Two down.
Simba remained firmly rooted in skepticism. She looked damn good in clothes, even though there was more cotton to be found in aspirin bottles than in her white baby T.
“I don’t understand, “ she said. “You’re going to have one of these dancing skanks come forward, frame Jeremy, and then what? Admit it was all a lie?”
“Yes, but not hers. That’s the best part. She’ll tell the world she was offered a lot of money by some unnamed source, some shadow conspirator with an anti-rap objective. The press will eat it up. They’ll do a total 180 and go after all the people who were going after Hunta. How’s that for payback?”
I turned to Hunta, still hanging. “Not only will this silence Lisa, not only will this turn you from monster to martyr, but it’ll weatherproof you against all future accusations. For the rest of your life, you’ll have the benefit of the doubt. You’ll have precedent.”
His expression morphed from disbelief to abject wonder. Dare he dream?
Maxina, naturally, wasn’t as easy to sway. “That’s very ambitious, Scott. A few problems, though. First off, if this woman — this patsy of yours — admits she made it up, that’s a straight guilty plea for fraud and extortion. She could get thirty years in prison. Are you planning on mentioning this when you hire your actress? Or are you just going to let her find out the hard way?”
I shot her a crooked grin. Uh-uh. Not tonight, toots. My shields were at full capacity.
“Nobody’s going up the river. Not if we pick our actress carefully. We need someone sympathetic and telegenic. Someone with a dramatic reason to need the money. Sick mother. Sick child. Brother in dutch with loan sharks. Anything, as long as the audience understands why she lied for cash. Plus, if she comes forward on her own, if she makes the moral choice and decides she won’t slander a fellow human being for any dollar amount, forget it. She’ll come out of this with a slap on the wrist and a book deal.”
Maxina still wouldn’t budge. “You can’t say that for sure. Manipulating the media is one thing. Manipulating the legal system is quite another. I’m not saying your plan isn’t clever. It is. But when it comes to gambling with the lives of innocent people, it has to be foolproof.”
Hunta finally dropped back to the ground. “Besides, what’s to stop this woman from giving us up if the police start putting the heat on her and shit?”
“She wouldn’t even have to know we were involved,” Doug replied, with gawking awe. “As far as she’ll be concerned, there was a white conspiracy behind it.”
“Well, that’s not exactly—”
The Judge cut me off. “But what if somebody else gets to her? Somebody who offers her more money not to absolve Jeremy? I mean we’re putting a lot of power in this woman’s hands.”
“That’s why I’ll record my initial conversations with her,” I stressed. “If she goes rogue on us, we’ll simply leak a tape that exposes the plot to frame Hunta, but not the plot to absolve him. Either way, she gets outed and we’ve got our asses covered.”
Speaking of covered asses, my so-called Palm Pilot was once again capturing the moment from the warmth of my shirt pocket. The sound chip was going into my safe the second I got home.
Maxina shook her head. “I don’t like it. There are too many things that could go wrong. Even if your girl comes forward and says she lied, what’s to stop people from thinking that Jeremy’s guilty anyway? That someone paid her off or threatened her into saying it never happened?”
Hunta nodded along. “Right. Yeah. I don’t wanna be the next O.J.”
I counted off fingers to him. “Okay, one: you won’t be fleeing in any Broncos. Two: there’s much more motive to frame you, a hot young rapper, than him, a washed-up football star. And three: if Nicole Brown Simpson suddenly showed up in front of the cameras and confessed that she faked her own death to screw the Juice, I think we’d all be changing our tune about him. You agree?”