“You just haven’t tried it, then.”
Maxina wasn’t amused. “Scott, I need to get back to my part of the project, so I’m simply going to say my piece and leave. I think that some cures are worse than the disease. Apparently, I’m in the minority, but it’s not my dime. If your scheme achieves everything you say it will, you’ll be our secret savior. And I’ll be right there with the best of them, whispering your praises. But if you destroy an innocent woman in the process, I will be your bane. Your karma. Your comeuppance. You understand me? Whoever this girl is, I’m not going to let you use her and throw her away like Kleenex. I want you to do everything in your power to protect her.”
“That was my plan from the beginning.” And may I remind you that I’m doing all this to avoid destroying Lisa Glassman? Give me some credit, woman.
I had to hand it to Maxina, though. She was one of the few people who could see past my granite expression, straight on through to my surface thoughts. In very clear images, I told her she had me all wrong. With equal silent precision, she told me to prove it.
“All right,” she said. “Looks like we all have a lot of work to do. Someone help me up, please.”
Once again, Doug assisted her, all the way to the door.
“The minute the news breaks about the ‘Bitch Fiend’ tape,” she informed me, “the race is on. You’ll need to have your show ready to launch by Wednesday at the very latest.”
“We’ll be ready by Tuesday.”
“Good man,” she replied with cautionary emphasis. She said her goodbyes and left.
Doug closed the door behind her and settled down in her sunken place. “Despite what she thinks, the Judge and I agree that your plan is brilliant.”
“If it works,” the Judge added.
“If it works,” Doug echoed. “What do you need from us?”
“The lowdown on every woman who attended that Christmas party. Strike the ones who’ve worked with you anytime since then. Strike the ones who are married or close to married. Strike the ones who are known or rumored to be super-promiscuous. And definitely strike the ones who are known or rumored to have had sex with Hunta. Hopefully, that leaves a few.”
“More than a few,” said Doug. “If they worked for us even once, we’ve got a whole file on them.”
“Perfect. I’d like to see those files as soon as possible.”
“Fine. We can fax you what we—”
“No faxes. Just keep the papers at your place and we’ll review them tomorrow. The earlier the better. I want enough time to pick three good candidates and run a background check on each of them.”
The two men traded satisfied grins, as if they were working with the legendary Jackal.
“Anything else, Scott?”
“Yes,” I added, wishing I had a cigarette to pad their false impression. “It’s time we talked about money.”
________________
Between all the plotting, scheming, and fee-wrangling, I had very little time to process the personal ramifications of my proposal. I knew whatever solution I came up with would be deceptive, even underhanded. That was just the nature of the business. But it had finally hit me that my frame-within-a-frame, my secondhand smoke screen, went way beyond the definition of “publicity stunt.” I was orchestrating massive fraud. Before Hunta, my worst-case scenario always stopped at a civil suit. Now it kept right on going, all the way to jail time. That was a lot of risk for $160,000 and a rapper I’d never even heard of before Thursday.
Ira felt compelled to offer his blind advice: “Walk away. It’s not worth it.”
We sat on the deck of the Ishtar, eating take-out Chinese food and watching the calm black waters of the Pacific. It looked so peaceful out there in the open sea. I wanted to hoist the anchor and ride off into the night, just to enjoy some real quiet for a change. Of course, I’d have to get rid of Ira.
“Seriously. It’s futile. Whenever a white kid goes on a killing spree, someone has to take the blame. Remember Columbine? The politicians went after Marilyn Manson, despite the fact that the killers didn’t even like his music. The only thing that saved him in the end was obsolescence. I mean, who cares about an androgynous Goth freak when you’ve got all these bad-ass gangstas running around, singing about their bitches and AKs? So unless something even scarier than rap comes along, I’d say your man is hosed.”
I didn’t tell Ira anything about Lisa Glassman or my cure for her. I wasn’t sure why I kept my mouth shut. After all, I trusted him fifty times more than the people already in on the joke. Out of all of them, I was worried the most about Hunta himself. I got the nervous sense that once the heat got high — or he did — he was liable to spill everything.
“Annabelle Shane wasn’t white,” I corrected.
“What?”
“She was half-black, half-Thai. There wasn’t a drop of white in her.”
Ira took another forkful of lo mein. “Well, she looked white. And she was middle class. That’s all that matters. You’re pissing in a hurricane.”
I checked my watch. After thirty-two minutes with Ira, I was already starting to appreciate places like “elsewhere.” Really, he wasn’t a bad guy if you took him in fun-sized doses.
“I’m serious,” he said. “It’s not worth the grief. Besides, it’s not like you’re hard up for money.”
“How do you know? “
“Because you don’t exactly live the wild life.”
“No, but I do have a mess of dwindling tech stocks.”
He nearly spit out his food. “Still? I warned you to get your money out!”
It’s true. He did. Three years ago. This was the same guy who treated Y2K like an Extinction-Level Event. He took all his cash out of the banks, loaded up the boat with Ensure, and made damn certain he was at least a hundred miles off the mainland when the computers hit the big double zero. He even asked me if I wanted to join him on his safe getaway. No thanks. Even if society did crumble, I saw being stuck at sea with Ira as one of those post-apocalyptic futures where the living envied the dead. He ended up riding his ark alone, until he got bored enough to come back.
But he was right. I wasn’t hard up for money. In truth, only a minuscule portion of my nest egg was wrapped up in investments, and not because of Ira’s portent. I still remembered the painful lessons of October 19, 1987, the day the Dow tripped and fell a mile. On that awful Black Monday, I lost $7,200 of my hard-earned savings, everything I’d squirreled away since college. I didn’t exactly bawl over my bad fortune, but I did hurl some pissy words up God’s way. In retrospect I probably shouldn’t have taken it so personally. That was a bad day for a lot of people.
One notable exception was Jean Spelling, then known as Jean McKnight. That was the day her own investment finally paid off. It had taken nine long months of hard work and mood swings, but it was worth it. While everyone else cried over their losses, she ended the day with a six-pound, nine-ounce gain. She named it Madison.
________________
Madison told me the story herself, thirteen and a half years later, from my very own couch.
“I think it cursed me somehow,” she professed, with a rising inflection that made her statements sound like questions. “Being born on Black Monday. All my life, I’ve been like a business jinx. When my mom and dad were married, they put all their money into this sign language school that folded within a year. Then my mom and my stepfather started this company that sold special movie theater seats that let deaf people see captions. That went bust. Now he does captions for live TV events and even that’s not going well. And don’t get me started on my mom’s so-called web design business. Sometimes I really think it’s me. I’ve got this black-cat thing going on.”