“Wow. So are we talking a big-money Hunta-style hotel or, like, Motel 6?”
I smiled. “Somewhere in between, closer to Hunta-style.”
Speaking of Hunta style, he continued to defend himself with intelligence and poise. Maxina had done a great job coaching him. Too bad he had to ride the interview couch alone. In the end, Maxina relegated both Simba and Latisha to the B-roll. From what Doug had told me, Simba remained in highly uncooperative spirits, enough to trigger some closed-door emergency sessions between the Judge and Maxina. I assumed it was simply a matter of time before she’d become my problem too.
“Speaking of big money,” I added, giving Harmony her cue to thank me.
“What about money?”
“Uh, did you happen to check the rest of the package I gave you?”
“What? You mean the box with the phone in it?”
“Yes. That box.”
“Wait. You saying there was money in it?!”
I paused. “Yes. Fifteen hundred dollars. Do you still have it?”
“No, Scott! I threw it out! Why the hell didn’t you tell me?!”
I kept silent as I analyzed the data. Just from the slight bump in her voice, I wagered a good eighty percent chance that she was just messing with me.
Soon enough, she cracked up. “No, I’m just messing with you. I got the money. Thank you.”
I played the dupe anyway. “Don’t do that to me.”
She laughed triumphantly. “I got him! I tricked the tricksta! I slicked the slicksta!”
“You know, I’m starting to think I’m a bad influence on you.”
“You a terrible influence on me.”
Hunta slowly grew within the confines of the TV screen. The close-up meant he was about to say something important.
“Whoa. Quick. Turn up your TV,” I told her.
“Why? What’s he gonna say?”
“Just trust me.”
“I know I got a responsibility,” Hunta declared with dyed-in-the-wool candor. “I mean as an artist. And I take it very seriously, you know what I’m saying? I never hurt a woman in my life. I never forced a woman into sex. And I never, ever told anyone they should do that stuff. Never said it. Never wrote it. Never rapped it.”
“There it is,” I said.
“There what is?”
“The dinner bell,” I replied, shamefully excited. “He just put himself on a plate and rang the dinner bell.”
________________
When Hunta assured the nation that he had never forced a woman into sex, the publicists of America collectively winced. Goddamn, you just don’t say that, even if it’s true. And to understand why, one would only have to look to the journalists of America, who collectively drooled. See, if you’re a reporter and you’re looking to bite into a piping-hot celebrity, it’s a far better thing to yell “au contraire” than “j’accuse.” In the media world, catching someone in a seeming contradiction is just as good as catching them in the act.
So on Wednesday, February 7, the gold rush began. The news brigades stepped all over each other, swinging their pickaxes high and low in the search for even the tiniest nugget of evidence that Hunta had indeed protested too much. I, of course, knew the location of two rich deposits. My urgent goal was to steer the press toward one and away from the other. I knew that today would be the last leg of the race between Harmony and Lisa Glassman. By midnight at the very latest, one of them would be discovered.
I woke up at nine to the ringing of the red phone.
“Hello?”
“Scott! I got a reporter woman on the phone! What do I tell her?”
“Harmony?”
“She’s waiting on the other phone! She wants to talk to me! What do I say?”
“Get her number,” I said. “Call her back.”
“Okay…”
Finally, I came back to reality. What the hell was I talking about? “Wait. Harmony? Is that Gail Steiner from the L.A. Times?”
“Yeah. She’s waiting!”
I sat up. “Okay. Tell her you’re not supposed to talk to anyone. If she has any questions, she can call your lawyer.”
“That’s all I’m supposed to say?”
“Just that,” I urged. “She’ll try to ask you questions anyway. Don’t answer a single one. Don’t give her anything even close to an answer. Just keep telling her to call Alonso Lever. Repeat it like a mantra if you have to. And if she asks for the number, tell her to look it up.”
“But… I’m confused. I thought you wanted—”
“Trust me. Send her off and call me back.”
“Okay.”
I had only gotten six hours of sleep. It wasn’t fair. I needed at least seven hours to be functional. Eight to be clever. Of course it was being clever that got me into this mess in the first place. Jean made cleverness a contact sport. I wound up playing until 3 a.m. That wasn’t clever at all.
________________
Gail Steiner was lagging way too much for my comfort. I had expected her to call Harmony sometime last night, soon after talking to Big Bank. Didn’t happen. Maybe it was the demands of motherhood, or maybe she had simply lost her edge after eight months away from the beat. Whatever it was, I may have backed the wrong horse.
After a shower and coffee, I initiated Plan B. Cradling the phone on my shoulder, I logged on to the Hotmail website and created a pseudonymous account.
“All right,” I told Harmony. “Let me explain where you’re coming from. Officially, you don’t like or trust the media.”
“I don’t?”
“No. You believe this is between you and Hunta. It’s nobody else’s business. All you want, besides some compensation, is for Hunta to acknowledge what he did to you and to apologize for it. Not to the world. Just you. In fact — and I want you to say this often — you wish your lawyer had settled the case back in January, before the whole Bitch Fiend mess. Oh, by the way, you don’t think Hunta’s responsible for that.”
“I don’t?”
“Do you?”
“Wouldn’t I?”
I flipped through a thin stack of legal papers until I found a copy of the CH-100 judicial form. This was the pre-notarized version, but I had scribbled down the official court docket number in the upper right-hand corner.
“A lesser person would,” I explained, while composing a message through Hotmail. “But you are going to ride the moral high ground all the way to the twist ending. That’s why you’re never going to look like you enjoy the publicity. That’s why you’re never going to take pleasure in Hunta’s public crucifixion. And most important, that’s why you’re never going to take a dime from anybody but Alonso.”
Oof. That didn’t come out right at all. Her silence was piercing.
“I mean just until you recant,” I stressed.
“You said I’d be getting all sorts of money.”
“And you will. Once you clear Hunta’s name, you can go crazy. Sell your autobiography. Endorse Revlon. Pose nude for Penthouse. Believe me, they’ll offer. It’s all up to you. But until that happens, you can’t do anything that’s even remotely self-serving. The name of the game…”
I clicked and sent the e-mail.
“… is credibility.”
Harmony was still frosty. Shit. Things were so much easier when I was handling her from the driver’s seat of my car.
“I’ll be honest, Scott. I’m lost again. You just lost me.”
With Plan B now in motion, I pushed away the laptop and stretched out on the couch.
“Well, then let’s go over it again,” I said. “We’ve got nothing but time.”
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