Chapter Nineteen

Zena Hunter rolled over in her bed and looked at her fiancé, who slept with half his face buried in the puffs of pillows. After confirming that the ringing phone hadn’t awakened her future second husband, Zena turned back over and clicked a button on the mobile phone cradled in her right hand.

“Boy,” she said in a harsh whisper, “do you know what time it is? It’s one in the morning. You know we have to get up for work at 6:30.”

“Ma,” her son replied with reverence and exasperation, “I have no idea what time he goes to work, but I know when you do and I’m sorry. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Zena, registering the strange tone in her son’s voice, rose out of bed, put her feet into her warm, fluffy, powder-blue slippers, and shuffled into her bathroom. After she shut the door, she sat on the edge of the tub and asked, “Okay, did you have that dream again?”

“No. Not tonight. I just missed you.”

Zena wanted to smile. It was nice to hear that from him, but she knew Dervin hadn’t called to woo her at this hour.

“So I heard you were on TV today walking arm in arm with the little white girl.”

“Yeah. I think I ended up in a couple of shots. There was a commotion. Nothing serious. I handled it.”

“You always do, D. You’ve always been good about that,” she said, and then failed to stifle a yawn.

Zena pushed the door open a little wider to gaze at her bedmate’s walnut-colored back in the dim light.

“I met Adrian Dukes’s wife tonight, Ma.”

“Is that right? She must be older than me.”

This observation made D laugh, and for the first time in the conversation, Zena noticed the faint sound of drums and bass in the background. She didn’t ask where he was. Ever since college he’d been around music—a club, a concert hall, a studio, that crypt he called an apartment. She didn’t blame her baby boy for being a little weird. Nor did she blame herself. When life intervenes all that other stuff (plans, parenting, philosophy) don’t mean shit.

“D, I love you, but I can’t have this conversation right now. Okay?”

“If you can’t, you can’t.” He didn’t try to hide his disappointment. “It’s late. We can talk about all this when you’re awake.”

“That’s right, D.” She stood up and stepped into the bedroom. “Call me this afternoon. Love you, son.” Then Zena clicked off the phone and returned to bed, fitting her body against her fiancé’s back, his warmth removing her chill.

D flipped his cell phone closed and gazed out through the glass that separated the control room from the studio where Night sat talking excitedly to a drummer, bassist, and keyboardist. D picked up his can of Coke, sipped a bit, and belched. Got to give this shit up, he thought. He didn’t drink coffee, cappuccino, or any other caffeine-based beverage, but he’d always had a fondness for carbonation and artificial flavoring. Lately, however, his stomach had been getting acidy. He knew he really shouldn’t have been guzzling that sugar water. It was bad for him. But damn, he thought, I’ve denied myself so much else I need to get a little sweetness from something. So he tried to blame the Coke for his stomach problems. Life had gotten fizzy all on its own. He crushed the can in his huge brown hands, digging his fingers into the soft metal and then squashing the top and bottom into each other.

“Yo, dog, you look tense as a motherfucker!” Night entered the control room with a fat Phillie blunt in his right hand. “Normally I wouldn’t share this fine, expertly wrapped, smooth-burning package of illegal medication with someone so tightly wound. I’ve just never seen anybody who needed a hit more than you.”

Night thrust the blunt into D’s hand and flopped onto the leather sofa next to his friend.

D said, “You know bodyguards are not supposed to get high on the job.”

“When you’re with me, you’re just D, my friend, and my friends get lifted when I do.”

D acquiesced, letting the smoke flow down into his lungs and rise high into his brain. He thought of the night he had met Night. They were hanging at the bar at Cheetah with Bovine Winslow, who’d introduced them. Both had taken shots at these two bodacious mahogany sisters from Newark. D had gone down in flames with the sour older sister (within three minutes), while Night had established a beachhead with the nicer, younger one. Turns out the sour sister pissed off some very nasty young Nubians on her way out. They followed Night and the sisters from Newark to their car. Words got exchanged and things got hectic. The gigolo was in the process of catching a critical beat-down when D interceded, leaving the nasty Nubians bloody and carting Night to the St. Vincent’s emergency room. Now D pulled on the joint and marveled at how Night had truly turned his life around.

“Play that back for me, Dan,” Night said to his engineer. The sound of raunchy, old-school funk burst out of the speakers, with Night riding the groove as if he were Sugarfoot of the Ohio Players. “I’m bringing it back to the root,” he crowed, and began singing along with himself.

D just nodded to the beat, took another hit, and luxuriated in the moment.

“Yo, D,” Night said, “I’ma overdub this thing to death like Michael Jackson on ‘Rock with You.’”

Again D nodded and was in the process of filling his lungs when Bridgette Haze, Jen, and Rodney Hampton entered the studio. Bridgette and Jen were chatting about a color of MAC foundation, but when Bridgette heard the music, she began bopping her little head and gyrating her lithe body. “Oh, we getting funky in here,” she said, and then, without hesitation or forewarning, plucked the blunt from D’s hand and dropped her butt into his lap. “My hero,” she said, and hugged him.

Night watched this and decided to withhold comment. Jen and Rodney had taken up positions next to the control board, seemingly wanting to say something but laying back to see what developed. If either one had anything to ask D (and both did), Bridgette’s embrace of the bodyguard had silenced them for now.

“You like this?” Night asked about his track.

“Oh yeah. Sounds like the Neptunes,” she said.

“Fuck the Neptunes.”

“Whoa, let me finish,” she said. “But it’s more organic, more real than what they’d do.”

As the two singers discussed music, D sat with Bridgette in his lap. What a surreal day, he thought, and put his head back with his eyes closed. What else could happen?

* * *

The SubMercer was a tiny pocket club buried in the subbasement of SoHo’s Mercer Hotel, just two blocks from D’s office. There was a short bar, a minuscule DJ booth, and a couple of dark corners where one could drink inconspicuously in the shadows. It was in one of those corners that Bridgette, Jen, and D sat sipping champagne from the bottles in the bucket before them. Rodney stood a few feet away, discouraging any curiosity seekers, silently pissed that he was having to do security for a security guard. A track from Portishead’s Dummy was creating an atmosphere of intrigue in the club. It felt like a time for confidences and confessions.

“So,” Jen said after a sip, “you walked into a volatile situation. When Ivy brought you in we had no idea you would be so passionate about the job. Honestly, I just thought he’d hired you to spy on Bridgette and me.”

Bridgette piped in, “Unlike my sister, I knew you were a good guy from the start.”

“Anyway,” Jen continued, “we are seriously considering signing a management deal with Rodney, who’s been great in advising us on repositioning my sister.”

“But I’m not sure,” Bridgette said, glancing over at the publicist to make sure he couldn’t hear her. “It’s a big change. Then Night got kidnapped and it threw us. We’re not sure where that fits in.”

D sipped the champagne and wondered who he should sell out first—Ivy or Rodney. There was plenty of evidence to suggest Ivy knew everything about the kidnapping and was hiding that fact from his most important client. Yet if you followed the money it seemed clear that Rodney, an ambitious and smart man, could have set Ivy up. If he knew about the links between Ivy and Adrian Dukes’s wife and son (as he obviously did), why not break it to Bridgette himself? That info, coming from a bodyguard hired by Ivy, would surely result in Ivy’s exit and Rodney’s ascension.

“Listen,” D began, “Ivy’s a legend and a very well-connected man. He’s done a great job for you. Is he getting old? Does he have too many skeletons in the closet? No doubt. As for Rodney, he seems like a nice guy but I really don’t know him, other than it’s clear he’s got game.”

“That’s certainly helpful,” Jen said sarcastically.

“Well, there is one other thing. There’s a motorcycle posse out in Queens that may be behind all this. I passed along what I know to the police and they’re gonna follow up on it. If my hunch proves right, it may have some effect on your management decision.”

“Stop fucking with us, D,” Jen said. “What do you know?”

“I’m not gonna play any games with you, Jen. I could have it all wrong. So just be patient and let’s see what the police come up with.”

Jen was unsatisfied by D’s remarks and started to tell him so. But Bridgette cut her off: “Look, I came to New York to make changes. That was the plan. I guess we didn’t know the city had its own plans for me.”

Happy the subject was shifting, D said, “Why don’t you get out of the city for a few days? The Source Awards are at the end of the week. Go away and come back for that.”

“Good idea,” Jen said, “except that she has a video shoot with Bee Cole set for Tuesday and we want that video at MTV on Monday for airing on the Tuesday after the awards. Plus she has to do press for the taping.”

A thought occurred to D, and he decided to test it out. “Hey, Jen, why don’t you manage your sister?”

A flash of excitement filled Jen’s blue eyes, but her face remained stoic. D could see it was absolutely what she wanted, even as she tried to hide her desire from her sister. He suspected that was part of Rodney’s pitch and the reason for the intimacy he detected between them. “Well,” Jen said, trying to sound only half interested, “it’s come up. We just have to see what’s best for our family.”

D wondered what Bridgette thought, but now she was zoning out, as if all her vitality was being sapped out of her. Champagne didn’t usually make people withdraw.

“Maybe it’s time we all went home,” he suggested.

“Bridgette,” her sister said, “you do look tired.”

“I am tired,” Bridgette admitted, “but I like this place. It’s small. There’s good music and I’m having champagne with some of my favorite people, not a retailer or a program director or a reporter. No one is sweating me. I’m just a girl at a club having a drink. If we were back in Virginia, Jen and I would be sitting somewhere with some cute guys, though we’d be drinking Buds, wouldn’t we?” She leaned over and placed her head on D’s shoulder. She slipped her arms around one of his and got comfortable and closed her eyes. D looked at Jen, who shrugged, poured herself the last of the champagne, and walked over to where Rodney stood.

With her eyes still closed Bridgette asked, “Did you play football, D?”

“Only touch. I grew up in a basketball family. We didn’t want a mask to cover our pretty faces.”

“I lost my virginity to a football player.”

“When? Last week?”

“Ha ha ha,” she said without shifting. “His name was Tad Wilson. He was the center on my high school’s team. Everybody was trying to hook me up with the quarterback, but Tad was wide and very strong and had a great ass. I used to watch it all game long through my daddy’s binoculars. All the squatting, I guess. Had a better ass than me.”

“No way.”

“Oh yeah, D. I’m just keeping it real. You have a nice ass yourself.”

“Thanks.”

Bridgette opened her eyes and sat up to look at him. “Have I been making you uncomfortable?”

“Extremely.”

“You probably wouldn’t have crushed that guy today if I wasn’t all over you.”

“There’s something to that.”

“Well, good then.” She resumed her previous position. “My mother taught me never to let a man be too comfortable. I know she was right about that.”

“Shouldn’t you be dating Justin Timberlake or some VJ on MTV or maybe the guy from The O.C.?”

Bridgette ignored D’s question and fell asleep in the SubMercer with her head against his broad shoulder.