Baller: A Bad Boy Romance (16 page)

“Yeah, just give me some time. I’ll come up with something.”

“Quinn?”

“Yeah?”

“
You
still believe me, don’t you? You know I didn’t do anything. You know I’m innocent, right?”

She paused, and it was a few seconds too long for me to feel like she was going to tell me the answer that I wanted to hear.

“Quinn?”

“I believe you, Dante, but I’m not the one who needs to be convinced.”

I sighed. I thanked her and hung the phone up. I had just gotten up, but suddenly, I felt tired. I felt like I had just run a marathon. I knew I had to get a hand on the situation, damage control. I could have called back my agent and Fred, but I thought it was probably better if I just saw them in person.

Was it
, though? With a story like this, who was to say that the press weren’t trying to scale the perimeter wall to get to my house right now? They would be all over me. It was probably better to lay low. I turned the computer off and my phone too, just until after I had at least had coffee. I hoped Quinn would come up with something good. My career depended on it.

Quinn

This had to work
. I had asked him to trust me. I knew what I was doing, right? I was a professional, wasn’t I? I knew what I was doing.
Absolutely
. This would totally work.

I wanted to give him more on the phone when he had called me, but I had nothing. Literally, not a damn thing. When he called, I honestly wanted it to be that Daniel or someone else from my work had contacted him or his agent or his publicist or someone and wanted to hear about that picture of us from the club.

I had woken up to the same news that he had woken up to.

He had been so mad. I was so scared that he was going to ask me whether
I
had done it. I would never, but he had no real reason to believe or think that. Why did I care so much what he thought? It wasn’t misplaced, he and I weren’t friends or that
other
thing, but we were in a relationship of sorts. We had to be able to trust each other, and I needed to know that that was what he did.

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t released the story, someone
had,
and now he was in trouble.

I had called Daniel as soon as I had gotten off the phone with Dante. He had told me that he knew. Of course, he knew. What he was mad about was the fact that we didn’t break the story as well. There began the journey I would have to take defending the honor of Dante Rock. Daniel was convinced that Dante had done something. Even if he didn’t really think that, he didn’t like the fact that something was happening and we hadn’t reported on it.

I’d had to reason with him for him to get ahold of himself. It wasn’t what he thought.

“You’ve been talking to Rock this whole time and somehow this shit passed you by?” he had demanded.

“No, Daniel. It came up. Of course, it did, but I dismissed it because there was no story there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, there is
nothing
there. The accusations are false. He didn’t do anything.”

“Then we need to print
that
.”

“Just one rebuttal from one news source isn’t going to bail him out of trouble,” I said.

“Who cares about him being in trouble? I’m not trying to bail him out, I’m trying to sell stories.”

Because of Daniel’s insistence, I’d ended up putting together a piece with a few official statements from Dante’s people and an eyewitness account, my own, from the day that the woman had shown up at the locker room, accusing him, and the fact that he was completely baffled as to who she was. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Though it was something, it was not enough. I needed more.

I had to think. I had to do something. Dante was right. I
did
sort of owe him. It was not my fault that he was in this situation, but it was in my power to get him out of it. He had said that because he had been so honest with me, he deserved my protection. That was saying a lot. That was saying way
too much
. I didn’t think he deserved to be protected from anybody who wanted to come after him.

He didn’t
deserve
a pat on the back or trophy for being honest. That was literally the
least
that he could do. It was what was expected of him. What he
didn’t
deserve was character assassination…and that was what was happening. We were past the point of damage control. I didn’t know whether Dante’s people had been totally silent or what had happened, but I had been wracking my brain thinking about what to do.

I had Daniel’s support, which was key. All I had to do was come up with a plan and approach it head on.

Daniel loved a scoop.

What would he think about an interview? Not like the ones I had had with Dante already. A real live interview, one which would be broadcast?

I shouldn’t have talked about it with Dante before contacting his PR person first, but I did. It was Dante who was under attack, and if he liked the idea, the two of us would do a better job of compelling Daniel and the rest of his people that this was a good idea.

“So what do you think?” I had asked him over the phone. I had wanted to meet in person, but he was lucky if he was able to get in and out of his house without flashbulbs going off in his face. He and I, out in public together, would have been potentially disastrous.

“A live interview? Like on the news?”

“Not on the news, I was thinking about maybe doing it on
Inside the League
.”

“Doesn’t that show already have a host?”

“It does. Jock would do a great job.”

“No, I don’t want him. I want you to do it.”

I tapped the pencil I was holding against my desk.

“Dante, it doesn’t work like this.
Inside the League
is its own show. It will take meeting with Jock himself and their producers to swing that sort of thing.”

“Then do it.”

Then do it.
When did he get so bossy?

“I don’t know if you realize this, but you have something of a
time-sensitive
case. We don’t have all the time in the world to butter up Jock Winters enough to let us highjack his show.”

“It isn’t like it wouldn’t be
great
for ratings. People are going to tune in; they want to hear the truth.”

No, people didn't want to hear the
truth
. They wanted scandal.
That
was why they would tune in. They were going to tune in in the hopes that they would hear Dante say something crazy, admit to beating that woman, or unveil this whole seedy, secret underbelly of a secret relationship that no one knew he had.

“Dante, the longer you wait, the worse this will get. Why don’t you talk to your PR people or something?”

“They want me to do a press conference, but I don’t want that. I asked them to release a statement, and once you okay this live interview or whatever, they can release another about that.”

“It's going to take longer if you really need me to be there and not Winters.”

“I don’t care how long. It’s what I want.
You
. You have to do it, or I don’t do anything at all.”

I would have hated to be part of the Charlotte Yellow Jackets’ PR team right about then. It was literally just a matter of time before endorsements started disappearing and brand deals went out the window, for both Dante and the team.

It had taken us doing everything short of begging to get Dante on
Inside the League
. It had taken straight
begging
to get the host to let me conduct the interview with Dante instead of him. The host, Joseph ‘Jock’ Winters was like, our Larry King. He was a total veteran and legendary in the business. He’d had his time as a professional player, and when he retired, he had been a pundit for a while then began his long-time reign as host of
Inside the League
. He didn’t have an investigative journalism background, but that was what the hired journalists were for. He had the charisma and presence to host a show like that and hold his own with the larger than life personalities a lot of the athletes he interviewed had.

He was not impressed when we came to him, basically groveling. He didn’t think that a young girl, he used the word ‘
girl’
was the person America wanted to hear interviewing Dante Rock.  What he meant was probably “
Who is this bitch and why isn’t she getting me coffee
?” Sports journalism and reporting, just like the sports that were being played, were very much a boys’ club.

I didn’t appreciate his baseless accusations, but it was the wrong time to let my pride get in the way of clearing Dante’s name. That was who this was about. Dante Rock and the future he either would or wouldn’t have based on what was said during that interview.

“Mr. Winters,” I had implored, “I’m doing a story series on Dante Rock. I was there when the woman showed up at the locker room and made her accusations. I have been having interviews with him regularly for the last month or so. I have been closer to Dante than any other reporter.”

“
So
,” he had said. “This is
Inside the League
. There’s a reason why
I
do the reporting. Just give me some of your stories, your reports, and I’ll handle it.”

“I think he’d be more
pliant
if he was talking to me. We have an understanding, and I could use this as part of my series. One of the many things that stand in the way of Dante finally getting his championship.”

“He’ll eat you alive,
kid
. This is Dante Rock we’re talking about. He doesn't respect anybody but the people who sign his paychecks.”

“Mr. Winters, think about it. I’m a
woman
. Don’t you think that talking to a woman—especially at a time like this when he is being accused of violence against a woman—ups the ante? Think about how it would look if we found out he was lying and it was
me
he tried to lie to.”

“He would be more comfortable lying to a man than to a woman,” Daniel had said, trying to help me out.

Jock Winters wasn’t so much convinced as he was probably interested in how it would all turn out. He would still be part of the episode, he would just introduce the interview, but I would do it. It was a rushed production. There was almost no time to run the appropriate advertising before the interview to get viewers ready to tune in, but time was not our friend in this situation.

Biding your time meant you were likely trying to put a defense together. You were trying to get a cover story in place, and basically, it made you look suspicious. Ideally, if you were telling the truth and you really had nothing to hide, you should be ready for an interview no matter what time it was. The woman had lied about Dante being her attacker and she had gone as far as telling the press. Who was to say that she wasn’t putting together an exposé with someone as well? Who to say that she didn’t have pictures or video? It would have been fake, of course, but just its presence would be a huge blow to Dante’s defense. If they were faked well enough, enough people would believe her and Dante Rock would be history. The message had to get out to as many people as possible because, in this case, Dante truly was innocent.

It was right to believe victims, but this victim wasn’t a victim. Not a victim of Dante’s in any case. Whatever had happened to her was terrible, but she had the wrong guy. Was there someone, some tall guy who looked like Dante, pretending to be him to get girls?

Something wasn’t coming out clear. There was something or somebody who was playing games, and I had to find out who it was because that would be the next question. If it wasn’t Dante, who was it?

Inside the League
had a late night show format but without the studio audience. It wasn’t a talk show. There were no comedy bits or
The Roots
giving us live musical interludes. It was like
Deadline
, or
On the Case
, but about sports.

Dante had shown up to the studio on time, and he had brought a woman with him. She was older, but the resemblance was uncanny. That was his mother. I saw in her the honey-colored hair and green eyes, which he had inherited. His height must have come from the other side of his family. The side that had abandoned him.

The thought suddenly occurred to me that I had to find a way to talk about the woman and how he didn’t do anything wrong without compromising the story that I was putting together. How the hell was I supposed to do that? I had been thinking about what to ask him. I didn't think that he would really want to go into all the details about what had happened to his mother when he was a kid on national television like that.  Did she even
know
that he had told me?