Slick (20 page)

Harmony had just stepped into the crosswalk at La Cienega and Arbor Vitae when the cop car turned a sharp corner and rammed her. Had the driving officer been even less attentive, Harmony would have been rendered to pieces. As it was, the policeman spotted her with just enough time to skid into her at thirty five miles an hour. In the span of a second, she was thrown into the windshield, flipped over the siren, and then spiked down to the ground like a touchdown ball. Her body rolled twenty feet before coming to a stop.

Obviously this was California’s problem. The incident caused a major row between the city of Los Angeles, which was financially liable for the LAPD, and the county of Los Angeles, which was financially responsible for Harmony. Eddie had to sift through two hundred pages of bureaucratic hair-pulling just to find out what happened to her.

After three days in a coma, she emerged with all her memories intact but left behind her ability to read, write, and speak. It took thirteen months of rehabilitation in a Watts convalescent home to bring her back to ninety percent of her old self. By then she was no longer a minor, and thus no longer California’s problem. Worse, at ninety percent functionality, she didn’t qualify for state disability benefits. Had she the mind or the will to hire even a crappy lawyer, she probably would have scored a high-five-figure settlement from the government, possibly more. But all she got was $212 of “good luck” money and a few references for private group homes.

Thus, on January 25, 2000, Harmony Prince was set free into the world, left to God’s good graces. Fortunately, God seemed to be done with her.

I guess that made it my turn.

Life has not been good to me
, I pictured a tearful Harmony telling the press.
I know that’s no excuse for what I did. And I can’t apologize enough for what I put Jeremy and his family through. But in the end, I was tired. I was tired of doing everything the hard way. And when that white man offered me money to tell a lie, I did it. I was weak. I was wrong. And I am sorry.

I took out the photo, the cruddy little Polaroid that had captivated me earlier that day. There was no doubt left. She was my Venus. And I knew the only way I could move forward without my nagging conscience tripping me up was if I convinced myself, once and for all, that Harmony Prince would finish this tale better off than when she started. When’d she tell the world she was sorry, it would be nothing but a happy lie. Just the latest in a long string of words, my words, coming out of her mouth.

“You were right. I was wrong. Your plan is ingenious. I see it now.”

Those words came directly from the mouth of Maxina Howard. They had to travel through five miles of fiber optics, but they reached their intended source. Pinch me, Simba. I may be dreaming again.

At 9
p.m
on Sunday, I called Maxina at her hotel. My main goal was to tell her all about Harmony, but I also wanted to give her mad props for the
Dateline NBC
coup. Ever since Thursday, she’d been chipping away at BET’s video archivists, trying to get a copy of last year’s
106 & Park
clip in which special guest Hunta described “Bitch Fiend” as a morality tale. Not only did Maxina succeed in shaking the footage loose, but she managed to get it to NBC’s midtown Manhattan office right under the wire. That may seem like no big deal to the average person, but then the average person can’t fathom the great corporate gorge Maxina had to jump. You see, BET was the recent three-billion dollar acquisition of media giant Viacom. Viacom owned CBS. CBS ran
60 Minutes
. And
60 Minutes
wanted a lock on that video, even though they weren’t sure if they were going to use it. Even if they did, Maxina knew they wouldn’t include the all-important caption indicating when the clip originally aired. That would have given their fourteen million viewers the false but dramatic impression that Hunta had been making his comments recently, in response to the Melrose shooting.

Obviously
Dateline
wasn’t a bastion of journalistic integrity, either, but their producers were comparatively easy to bend. Once Maxina miraculously got the video across enemy lines, she strong-armed Jim Donnell—whose wife I’d recently boned—into running the clip with a date stamp. So at 8:20
p.m.
(7:20 CMT), eight million viewers got to hear Hunta’s defense
and
know that it was made several months before Annabelle Shane’s bloody rampage. In other words, it wasn’t just desperate knee-jerk spin. Given what was coming, Hunta needed every morsel of credibility he could get.

Maxina’s feat took a level of skill and clout that few mortals possessed. It still may not seem like great shakes to you, but to me it was like watching Superman stop a runaway train. I was in awe of this woman, which made her praise all the sweeter. Here it is again:

“You were right. I was wrong. Your plan is ingenious. I see it now.”

I’d spent twenty minutes filling her in on Harmony’s dramatic history. Compared to Eddie, I was the far better storyteller, but the material alone would be enough to send Toni Morrison into a blue funk.

“My God...”

Maxina had two ways to go from there. She could have fallen into a fit of simplistic, hackneyed
Parade
-magazine-style morality and insisted I keep my sleazy white-devil mitts off of poor Harmony, who’d clearly suffered enough. Or she could have looked beyond all the weltschmerz and examined the situation on a more intrinsic level.

Props again, Maxina, for picking Choice B. From the beginning she’d believed my plan would serve its function, but only at the cost of an innocent young woman. Her concerns were actually quite valid. But Harmony was the battery that would last and last and last. In a land that thrived on high drama, political correctness, and sweet-young-victim chic, she made Elián González look like a tapeworm in a fat man’s ass. Even when the jig was up, she would not only remain impervious to media and political scorn, but to prosecution.

“They’d never touch her,” Maxina said. “You were right. Even if she admitted to fraud, the law would never touch her.”

And only because the law felt bad about running her over. In their endless quest to heal their tattered public image, the LAPD was forced to err fifty miles this side of caution when it came to high-profile black people. And considering that the city mowed her down in a crosswalk, bandaged her skull, and sent her on her merry way without so much as a fruit basket, it was obvious that any public figure who called for Harmony’s head would soon have his own handed back to him by the liberal furies. In short, Harmony would become the ultimate L.A. paradox: a red-hot celebrity sensation who couldn’t get arrested in this town.

“She has no criminal record,” I stressed while pacing my living room carpet. “No history of substance abuse. No children, legitimate or otherwise. She’s never applied for
any
kind of government aid. And if that’s not enough to make her a conservative’s wet dream, the poem she wrote? The one that won first prize in the regional competition? It was all about abstinence.”

“Unbelievable.”

That was when I told Maxina the best part. Not only did Harmony come standard-equipped with a great face and a monstrous past, but she was also available with a documentary feature—one hundred hours of raw footage just waiting to be cooked, sliced, and tossed, hibachi-style, into the open mouths of hungry news directors. Granted, it was a bit of a side quest to hack through the legal red tape of Jay McMahon and Sheila Yorn’s creative-property dispute, but if anyone could do it...

“I’ll do it,” said Maxina, just as I’d hoped. “This is incredible. Absolutely incredible. Tell me, Scott. Were you amazingly brilliant in discovering this woman, or just amazingly lucky?”

“I’ll never tell.”

“Well, I’ll certainly say this...”

I was right. She was wrong. My plan was ingenious. She saw it now. Don’t worry, that’s the last time you’ll hear it. For the most part, that was the last time I’d hear it.

 

 

“No. No. No!” the Judge barked from atop his porcelain throne. “That’s a dangerous idea! That’s a
shitty
idea! I’m not going to let it happen that way!”

After talking to Maxina, I phoned Doug to fill him in on the latest. He insisted we conference in the Judge, who was currently relaxing with the wife and kids at their home in Pacific Palisades. I could tell from the succession of background sounds—a television, a radio, a juicer—that the Judge was working his way through the house. By the time I finished my second rendition of Harmony’s tale, the noises were gone, and his “Jesus Christ” had the padded, echoey lilt that could only come from a man on the crapper.

It wasn’t Harmony herself that made the Judge nervous. After getting the whole story, he and Doug were in hearty agreement that she was the perfect foil to Lisa Glassman, maybe even the perfect foil to Annabelle Shane. It was my proposed method of hiring and managing her that caused the argument.

“I think what the Judge is trying to say, Scott—”

“I know what you’re both trying to say.”

Simply put, they didn’t want Harmony to know who she was really working for. As far as she was concerned, I really would be a member of the political anti-rap conspiracy. On the plus side, she’d have plausible deniability when the shit hit the fan, and thus could never implicate Mean World when put under the heat lamps. On the minus side...

“It would never work,” I said. “This entire plan hinges on one thing: Harmony’s confession. It has to be made in just the right way at just the right time. Now how can I get her to do that if she thinks I’m working against Hunta?”

“You
manipulate
a confession out of her,” the Judge yelled. “That’s what we hired you to do! Manipulate!”

“Maybe you can pretend to have a change of heart yourself,” Doug suggested. “That way you could sort of, you know, switch sides together.”

I must have died and gone to Screenwriter’s Hell. Suddenly I was trapped in a bubbling lava pit with uncreative executives and their awful script notes.

“Guys,” I said in a forcibly even tone, “in order for Harmony to do what we want her to do, she and I need a relationship based on trust. That means I plan on lying to her sparingly, if at all.”

“But—”

“Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. And I don’t have the patience to deal with your micromanagement. Either let me do my job, or I walk right now.”

“Scott, come on.” That was Doug. The Judge’s response, I imagine, was all excretory.

“Look, my ass will be hanging out there in the wind right alongside yours. Now given that, don’t you think I’ll do everything in my power to ensure that Harmony doesn’t screw us over?”

“We don’t doubt your intentions.” Doug again.

“Okay, well then you doubt my abilities. If that’s the case, why did you even hire me?”

“We didn’t,” the Judge growled. “Maxina did.”

“Good. Then call her. Because she knows exactly what I have planned, down to the very last detail. And she likes it. She likes it a lot. So if you have issues, bother her. Just let me do my goddamn job!”

I hung up for dramatic emphasis. I wasn’t really mad. In fact, I could totally understand their point. But sometimes I had to play the prima donna card just to reinforce the notion that I was a black belt at this, which of course I wasn’t. There was an occasional downside to not having a defensive ego. For starters, it was much harder to convince myself that I knew exactly what I was doing. I mean, objectively, how could I say for sure that this whole thing would work? I’ve never built a machine this big before, much less run one. This was massive.

Thankfully, so was Maxina. Her strong new endorsement of my plan would be more than enough to get the Judge and Doug off my back.

She and I held a lengthy discussion about the best way to gain Harmony’s trust. We both knew I had my work cut out for me, being a slick white man and all. We agreed that the only way around it was to play it a hundred percent sincere. No wide-screen pretty pictures. No paper thin platitudes. I’d treat her like a trusted member of the team instead of expendable hired booty. And the only way to achieve that dynamic was to do exactly the opposite of what the Judge wanted. I’d tell Harmony everything, even the things she didn’t need to know, even the things she didn’t want to hear.

In the meantime, I was anxious to move forward. Doug called back a half hour later to give me the official green light. By that point I was al ready in my car, on the town, and out in search of Harmony.

As you can imagine, it’s not easy to engineer a grand-scale media hoax. For starters, what do you wear? Obviously a suit wouldn’t do much to combat the “corporate wolf” aura a guy like me emitted. And yet, overcompensating in the other direction would only make me look like a wolf in cheap clothing.

The middle ground solution was to go business casual, like I always did. Button-down black Gap shirt. Loose-fit khaki slacks. My oldest and second-least-expensive pair of boat shoes. But what about the face and hair? After all, I was about to be seen. If I could be seen, I could be identified.

Screw it. I’d just go as myself. Aside from my height, I was pretty nondescript, or so I’ve been told. One of Gracie’s old college friends was a police sketch artist. He told me that I had such a unique lack of distinguishing features that if I ever robbed a liquor store, I wouldn’t even need a mask.

Although he meant it as a casual barb, I took it well, considering the source. He had a terminally unrequited crush on Gracie and, might I add, a nose you could see from space.

Harmony had an address in Venice Beach, but she didn’t live there alone. The phone, gas, electricity, and cable bills were each registered to a different man. The lease itself was signed to a woman named Tracy Wood. That was quite a lot of inhabitants for a nine-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment. Before I left home, I tried calling Harmony but ended up getting one of her male roommates. The rap music on the other end of the line was so loud that I had a hard time telling the speaker apart from the song.