“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.
12. IT'S ON
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.