Games Divas Play (A Diva Mystery Novel) (2 page)

“Miss Bullock, I’m here to allow you to collect your things from your desk and then escort you out of the building,” said the security guard who was normally stationed in the lobby. I always told MJ that he reminded me of Stanley from
T
he Office
.

“What’s going on, MJ?” I asked, ignoring him and turning my attention to my
assistant.

“Girl, I guess we both been fired,” said MJ, chewing loudly on his favorite watermelon-flavored Bubble Yum as he tossed the contents of his desk into a large cardboard box. “While you were in with Kris, I got called to HR, and they dropped
the bomb.”

I felt my blood pressure rising. My face was suddenly hot again. It was one thing for Kris to fire me to cover her own laziness, but messing with MJ was quit
e another.

MJ was the best assistant I’d ever had, and we had been a team for the past five years. A former cosmetology school dropout who had been working at the Platinum Scissors salon in Inglewood, he won me over after a brief conversation at the shampoo bowl. When I complained to him that I was having difficulty getting a quote from Angelina Jolie for a story I was doing on the rise in female action heroes, he whipped out his cell phone and called a friend who does her daughter Zahara’s hair. “You know they had to come to the hood to show them how to do that child’s head,” he had quipped while waiting for a callback from his
homegirl.

Within ten minutes I was on the phone with Angelina and had my quotes. As fate would have it, I had just been promoted to senior editor and was in need of an assistant. I was sick of the résumés of children of studio execs being passed to me, so I hired Marquis Vaughn Jackson on the spot after a twenty-minute conversation when I realized he was connected more than I was in the Hollywood underground world of stylists, makeup artists, and assistants. He got up to speed quickly and made frenemies in a backstabbing
Hollywood Scoop!
office that at first didn’t know what to make of the five-foot-ten black man with a spiky Mohawk and a rainbow assortment of skinny jeans (before they were all the rage). Loyal and plugged into all things pop culture, MJ had proven himself indispensable to me over the years. And with the requisite gay man’s taste for fashion
and
drama, he also felt it was his duty to dress me for high-profile interviews and award shows and to counsel me on my rocky relationship with my live-in boyfriend, Eric. His only fault? A borderline stalkerish obsession with Beyoncé. But he was so good at his job that all could be forgiven, even the daily Queen Bey who-what-where-when news alerts he felt compelled to share with me and anyone walking past his Beyoncé-plastered cubicle and on his popular personal blog Beyoncelicious247. And since he was the only other black employee at the
Hollywood
Scoop!
Plantation, as we jokingly referred to our day jobs, I knew boyfriend always ha
d my back.

I was just sorry that today I didn’t
have his.

“Ms. Bullock, we were told to escort you and Mr. Jackson from the building. Please step into your office and quickly collect your things. You have ten minutes,” the guard said curtly as he stepped aside and gestured with his fat arm into t
he office.

“Ten minutes? I can’t even load my contacts and files from my computer in that time,” I replied. And goodness knows MJ couldn’t take down all his beloved Beyoncé memorabilia and deflate the life-size blow-up doll of the singer that I got him for his last birthday in that little bit of tim
e, either.

“Ms. Bullock, I must inform you that your contacts, company files, and computer are all property of Hollywood Scoop Media, so you are only allowed to take the items that are clearly visible on top of your desk, personal items in your desk drawers, but absolutely nothing off your computer’s ha
rd drive.”

This joker must be crazy. I had spent years busting my butt to build a database of the most coveted e-mail addresses, cell phone numbers, birthdays, rehab hideouts, doctors, lawyers, bail bondsmen, and personal notes that crisscrossed all levels of Hollywood’s who’s who labyrinth. It was my lifeline. Without it, I couldn’t do anything as a journalist, and it would be next to impossible to re-create. MJ’s Spidey senses must have started tingling, because he seemed to know exactly what his girl needed at that moment: a
diversion.

“First of all, mall cop . . . ,” MJ said loudly, staring down the offending guard while grabbing his best friend, Bey. He knocked his box of belongings on the ground in the process, causing them to spill out all over the floor of his cubicle. “Who in the Blue Ivy hell are you calling Mr. Jackson? Mr. Jackson is my daddy, and as far as I can tell, he ain’t the one getti
ng fired!”

Now, if there is one thing straight men don’t know how to deal with, it’s an angry gay man clutching a blow-up Beyoncé doll. And these two were completely flummoxed. As MJ launched into a full-on tirade about his rights being trampled on and how he was going to launch a complaint with the National Association of Black Journalists and the EEOFG—the fake Equal Employment Office for Fabulous Gays that he threatened to call on me at least twice a week for some perceived slight—the two guards tried to placate him and help him pack up his things, so I slipped into my office and closed the door. Sitting down at my computer, I quickly plugged a flash drive into my Mac and began dragging files over to the d
rive icon.

“Come on . . . ,” I said to the computer, tapping my foot nervously. I then accessed MJ’s computer through the network and began copying his file
s as well.

“Don’t you touch Beyoncé! Don’t nobody know where your hands have been, mall cop,” I could hear MJ screech haughtily. I laughed and shook my head as I imagined the guards trying to help MJ pack but not realizing they were taking their own lives into their hands by manhandling Sas
ha Fierce.

As the final files loaded onto the flash drive, I rummaged through my desk, throwing folders into the box. Then I grabbed my journalism awards from the top shelf of my bookcase and added them to the box, covering the folders. I heard one of the guards turn the knob to the door of my office, so I turned and quickly snatched the flash drive out of the computer and slipped it into my fro
nt pocket.

“Are you ready, Ms. Bullock?” Stan asked, exasperation in his barit
one voice.

“Absolutely,” I said, grabbing the box of
my
belongings and marching past him with my head held high. “Let’
s go, MJ.”

“Right behind you, boss,” MJ said as he slipped on his tinted Gucci shades, tucked Sasha Fierce under his arm, and grabbed his box while humming Beyoncé’s “Irrep
laceable.”

Assuming that HR tool, Mario, would forget to cancel my corporate American Express card for at least another day or so, I agreed to spring for “we’ve just been fired” drinks. MJ and I were going to meet at Coltrane’s after we dropped off
our stuff.

Truth be told, I also wanted to go home, see my boyfriend, Eric, and cry to him about the injustice of it all. Maybe I could convince him to go with us for drink
s as well.

Eric, a struggling website developer, worked out of our cramped West Hollywood apartment. We were introduced by a mutual friend at an old-school skating party, and I fell hard for the six-foot web geek with ebony skin, a blinding white smile, and a wicked sense of humor. Eric and I had been together for nearly two years—with no ring in sight as my mother was fond of reminding me every chance she got. He claimed he wanted to get his business on solid footing before we got married, but I was starting to think there was more to it. And recently things had gotten so strained between us as we each worked around the clock to build our respective careers that we had little time for quality interaction, let alone sex. We seemed to fight more often than have meaningful exchanges. He had also been staying out later than usual with his friends, or seemed to always be going off to some tech conference to
“network.”

Slipping my key into the lock of our third-floor apartment, I walked in and dropped my sad little box with what was left of my journalism career and the black Marc Jacobs purse I splurged on last week to celebrate my twenty-ninth birthday on the worn leather sofa. Biting my lip, I wondered if I could take the purse that I had maxed out my credit card for back to Neiman Marcus. Money was going to be tight until I found a new gig, and I knew Eric couldn’t cover all the bills. The coffee table overflowed with copies of
Hollywood
Scoop!
and other magazines and an ashtray full of Eric’s cigarette ashes. I dumped out the contents of my box and then swept the pile of magazines into it, dumped the ashes on top, and placed it by the front door for Eric to take out with
the trash.

As I made my way to the back of the apartment, I heard a high-pitched giggle coming from our tiny second bedroom that Eric adopted as his home office. He must be Skyping with a client, I thought, so I walked softly along the worn hardwood floors to the door and pushed it open. I could see the back of his head as he sat in front of his three-screen monitor setup. The middle screen was partially obscured, but as I came closer, I could make out the image of two naked women sitting
on a bed.

“Oh, daddy, is that how you like it?” cooed a buxom woman with long blond curls as she got into a kneeling position and rubbed a large black dildo between her breasts and then pushed it up to her pouty red lips. The other woman, an equally large-breasted brunette with a short pixie cut and heavy black eye makeup, positioned herself behind the blonde, massaging her breasts and then moving her hands down the wom
an’s body.

“Yeah, baby,” Eric moaned. “That’s it. Do it for big daddy.” Suddenly I noticed Eric’s arm moving up and down in his lap and heard a squishy noise as he leaned toward the large computer screens. He twisted his body and used his free hand to push a button on his keyboard, and the other two monitors came alive with the images of the naked women as the sound of their moans echoed around the small room. He then quickly dipped his hand into my Crème de la Mer moisturizing cream, which sat on his cluttered desk next to the keyboard. The brunette roughly turned the blonde’s face toward hers, jammed her tongue down her throat, and kissed her roughly as her hand dove between the woman’s thighs. Eric groaned deeply, and his body bega
n to jerk.

“What the fuck . . . !” I yelled as I came up beside Eric and saw his erection covered in my $300 face cream. Startled, Eric swung around in the direction of my voice so quickly that he knocked the jar of the luxurious Parisian cream onto the hardwood floor, cracking the jar. I pushed him hard in the chest away from the computer, and the wheels of the chair jerked out from under him as he fell back onto the floor. Startled by the noise, Eric’s playmates on-screen looked up into the
ir webcam.

“Are you OK, honey?” asked the pouty blonde. “We can’t see you anymore. Did yo
u climax?”

I picked up the cracked jar of my favorite face cream and threw it at Eric’s chest as he tried to stuff himself back into his jeans. He then got up on his knees and quickly punched a few keys on the keyboard, causing the three screens to
go black.

“Is this what you do all day while I’m at work?” I screamed. “What the hell is this? You’re jacking off to Internet porn with my face cream? Do you know how much this stuff costs?” In that moment I wasn’t sure if I was more offended by his cyber cheating or his jerking off with my favorite bea
uty treat.

“Nia, it’s not what you think. They are clients!” Eric stood up in front of me, wiping his greasy hands on
his pants.

“A client? Muthafucka, how stupid do you think I am?” This broke-ass Negro had the nerve to think I was going to believe these cybersluts wer
e clients?

“No, really!” he said, rummaging through a stack of papers on the side of his desk. “Look, here’s the name of their company: DoMeBaby.next.” He shoved an invoice at me. I scanned the heading and saw there was indeed a company called DoMeBaby.next that had engaged Eric to develop a virtual
sex site.

“Uh . . . OK, but what’s that got to do with you jerking off with my three-hundred-dollar face cream? What are you doing? Test-driving
the site?”

Eric fell back on the futon shoved up against the wall and dropped his head into
his hands.

“Look, I’m not proud that you found me this way. And of course I wasn’t testing the site. Damn, a brother was horny as hell because it ain’t like you’re giving it up these days.” Was he actually trying to blame this pathetic shit on me? I thought we were just going through a rough patch and this relationship had to be going somewhere after I had invested nearly two years, my credit score, and my heart. But maybe those weren
’t enough.