Games Divas Play (A Diva Mystery Novel) Read Free

wanted to do the same as I passed the framed cover blowups on the wall. George Clooney’s humanitarian trip to Darfur? My exclusive. Julia Robert’s long-awaited Pretty Woman sequel? Absafuckinglutely mine. Jennifer Lopez’s implosion? All mine. Of course, none of the stories I wrote on black Hollywood made the walls. No Tyler Perry. No Wayans Brothers. No Steve Harvey. And not even the black Oscar-winning elite like Denzel Washington or Halle Berry was good enough for Kris’s precious wall of fame. As she would always say in our editorial meetings, “It’s not me. I’d love to put more black stars on the covers of Hollywood Scoop! , but black talent just doesn’t sell m agazines.”
    I managed to suppress the overwhelming urge to jump up on the nearest desk and point out my obvious and meaningful contributions to this bullshit publication and the injustice of it all.
    As I neared my office at the end of the hallway, I saw MJ standing outside his cubicle. He was dressed in his favorite black skinny jeans, hot pink V-neck shirt, and fitted black blazer with the sleeves pushed up to his bony elbows. A large man in gray slacks and a blue blazer watched him put items into a box. Another similarly dressed man was stationed outside my office door. It then dawned on me that I was now to suffer further humiliation by being thrown out of the building by a wa nnabe cop.
    “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