I didn’t want the story to begin on the Internet. Planting a seed on the World Wide Web was like conceiving a child on Three Mile Island. Who knew what kind of mutated freak I’d end up with?
But at least the Net worked fast, and on Wednesday I needed speed. My backup leak was The Smoking Gun, an online rag that regularly served up telling documents and court records, all legally obtained through freedom-of-information statutes. The site was a celebrity publicist’s nightmare, filled to the brim with big-name divorce petitions, arrest reports, civil claims, and ludicrous contract riders. One such proviso revealed that Britney Spears, a well-paid Pepsi endorser, secretly demanded a six-pack of Coke in her dressing room at every stop on her 2000 world tour. Oh, the scandal!
So, in electronic disguise, I pointed the way to the L.A. County superior court clerk’s office, where a nice fat CH-100 was waiting to be discovered. Obviously, the good folks at The Smoking Gun were just as hot to nab Hunta as everyone else. So you could imagine their delight in learning that Mr. Never-Hurt-a-Woman had come this close to getting slapped with a temporary restraining order. And just last month, too.
Over the next six hours, the seed became a sprout, the sprout became a plant, the plant bore fruit, and the fruit tasted funny. That’s what I got for using the Internet.
________________
“Goddamn it!”
Madison looked up from her work. “What?”
It was four o’clock. While I surfed the Web from the couch, Madison sat lotus-style on the living room floor, surrounded by a sea of online printouts. To my relief, she had finally deep-sixed the junior-executive wear and simply came to work as a junior.
“The Smoking Gun,” I told her. “They just posted a restraining order request that some woman filed against Hunta.”
“Oh shit. Who is she?”
“I don’t know. They grayed out her name. Everywhere it’s mentioned.” I scrolled through the digital pages. “They even grayed out her lawyer’s name. I don’t get it! They almost never gray out names! Why this one? Why now?”
Madison cocked her head. “Well…isn’t that sort of good?”
“No. I need to know who we’re up against. I need to hear her name.”
Thanks to The Smoking Gun, the world just learned that somebody was allegedly abused by Hunta at the Mean World Christmas party, and somebody was allegedly mad about it. That did me absolutely no good, considering that somebody could still be Lisa Glassman.
“Goddamn it.” I leaned back and eyed Madison. “This is your fault.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because you work with the Internet and the Internet sucks.”
“Oh, act your age.”
I managed to simultaneously laugh and yawn, which triggered a successive laugh and yawn from Madison. For the fourth time today, I went upstairs to my bedroom, closed the door, and made a private call from my spy phone.
“Did you talk to her?” I asked Alonso.
“I talked to Ms. Steiner,” he replied. “I gave her all the information and confirmation she could have ever possibly hoped for. She was very pleased, to say the least.”
“And you gave her permission to use Harmony’s name?”
“I assured her that neither Harmony nor I would make a fuss if she revealed the victim by name. Will you be making a liar out of me?”
“Pretty much.”
He chuckled. “Oh well. One less person to buy my novel.”
“When did you finish the call?”
“About fifteen minutes ago.”
I checked my alarm clock. “She’ll never make her deadline.”
“She’ll make it.”
She better. Ten minutes later, I went back downstairs. Along the way, I got the bird’s eye view of Madison’s work. She was adrift in a sea of highlighted articles.
“Jesus,” I said. “They really don’t like him, do they?”
With a tired sigh, she capped her marker. “No. No, they don’t.”
The minute she’d arrived at my place, I put her to work. I’d printed the natterings of thirty different columnists, each one offering their own postmortem analysis of Hunta’s appearance on 48 Hours. Madison’s task was to go through them with a pair of colored highlighters. Every word that benefited Hunta — positive modifiers, supportive quotes, mentions of his wife and child, and so on — was to be marked in green. By contrast, every word used to cast Hunta in a less flattering light was to be marked in orange. By four o’clock, her work looked like a pumpkin patch.
“God, Scott, you were right about the adjectives. Most of the articles refer to him as the ‘lascivious’ rapper, with his ‘libidinous’ style of rap music. They also use ‘lecherous,’ ‘licentious,’ ‘lewd,’ and ‘libertine.’ ‘Libertine’ is bad, right?”
“In this case, it is.”
“Shit, they call him everything short of a horn dog. And the only three songs of his they keep mentioning by name are ‘Chocolate Ho-Ho,’ ‘Keep Ya Head Down,’ and of course ‘Bitch Fiend.’ But I looked up the album on Amazon. He has at least six other tracks with perfectly respectable titles, including a sweet one called ‘Dear Papa.’ Funny how no one listed that.”
I smiled. “Are we learning?”
“We are freaking.”
“I do notice a couple of green words in the mix.”
“Oh yes,” she replied with perfect wit. “Apparently he’s quite buff.”
I searched my junk drawer. “Okay. You’re doing a great job. So now I’ll throw in one more color.”
With that, I tossed her a pink highlighter. She caught it. “What’s this one for?”
“All the mentions of Annabelle Shane.”
“I see. And what will I learn from this?”
“That pink is worse than orange.”
She yawned again. “All right.”
With an old man’s moan, I hunkered down on the sofa. I barely had a chance to get comfortable before the red phone rang. Crap. I didn’t want to take it all the way back upstairs. Screw it. I’d just talk around Madison. I’d be fine as long as I didn’t call Harmony by name.
“Scott Singer.”
Harmony spoke in a panicked whisper. “Scott. It’s me. I think I’m in trouble.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Some reporter guy just called for me…”
“Andy Cronin?”
“Yeah. But I was out at the store when he called. One of my roommates took the message. Now they asking me all kinds of questions. What should I say?”
“What did you say?”
“I said I couldn’t tell them nothing.”
“That’s fine. Just keep saying that. But listen, the more nervous you act around them, the more nervous they’ll get. So the next time they corner you with questions, deal with them confidently. Say, ‘Look, I love you guys but I’m not ready to talk about it.’”
I could see Madison’s mind working to process the conversation. Who does he keep talking to? Is it business? Pleasure? Both?
“But what happens when the story breaks? What do I say then?”
“You say good-bye,” I told her. “I just talked to our mutual friend. He’s getting you out of there tomorrow. You’ll be set up somewhere nice.”
She squeaked something inaudible.
“I’m sorry. I can’t hear you.”
“I said I don’t want to lose my roommates. They the only family I got.”
I casually eyed Madison as she worked. “They may freak out a little, but they’ll get over it. When this is all over, they’ll understand. Trust me. These are the kinds of things that only make a friendship stronger.”
God, that was trite, not to mention bullshit. I knew that as soon as the tabloids started waving around the cheddar, all bets were off. I really should have prepared her for the possibility that one or more of her friends would sell her out for cash. I really should have taken the phone upstairs.