I shook my head. “Just because it uses a name that’s similar?”
“There’s a little more,” he said. “It’s about him working one night—”
“It starts off talking about his humble beginnings,” Rashelle interrupted. “He grew up poor in Chicago and he reallystruggled.” They both nodded sadly. “Then he meets a beautiful girl with dark hair and chocolate eyes, someone smart and driven, with a high-powered job in a big building downtown. He calls her Cameo. Like Camille!” They both pointed at me. “So he falls in love but she never really felt the same way—”
“What?” I interrupted, but then shook my head. “Please keep going.”
“Ok,” she said hesitantly, but as she continued, she warmed up and talked faster. “Anyway, Cameo and Jax eventually move to Detroit but then he finds out that she was cheating on him, and when he confronts her, she dumps him and steals his money and jewelry. Then she comes to the club where he’s working and tries to fight publicly to embarrass him, and she throws the beautiful diamond ring he gave her. But he’s a gentleman and he won’t do anything back and she gets tossed out by a bouncer. The end is him being with his friends and realizing that he’s better off without his ex because she’s so awful.”
It took a moment for me to find my voice again. “There’s a song about that?”
“It’s only popular in Detroit because the lyrics also talk about local stuff, like our sports teams and places we all know. That’s probably why it’s getting play here,” she explained. “It’s not the best song I’ve ever heard.”
“Definitely not,” Munir agreed. He started talking about several artists who were much better but I had to stop him.
“What’s the name of that song?” I asked. “I want to hear it.”
Rashelle already had it in her playlist. “It’s really not the best,” she repeated. “But, you know, it’s catchy.”
We stood in our boss’s driveway to listen and it was exactly what they’d said, the sad saga of a mistreated guy named Jax. But there were other details I picked up on as I got over my initial shock and I made Rashelle play it again, and then again. It talked about how Jax loved to dance and was so smooth, but his girl looked uncoordinated and awkward. Since those adjectives didn’t fit well in a song, the rapper said that at the club, she moved “like a baby hippo but with an ass that made his heart go.” Then the base thumped twice to imitate that beat. And it was true that Dax thought he was an amazing dancer and had made fun of me for being terrible.
“Did it just say that his mom’s name rhymes with…” I didn’t want to say that word in front of my coworkers.
“Yeah, and I was trying to think of what it could be!” Rashelle answered. “What girl name rhymes with ‘bitch?’” She shook her head sympathetically. “Poor Jax got treated so badly in their relationship, too. I’ll never be like that when I have kids!”
Dax and his mother had always acted awful to each other and from my perspective, it was mutual combat. She had come to stay with us for several weeks and it had been miserable. They had fought and called each other names, but he had also defended everything she had done—including when she’d taken money out of my purse.
And her name was Michelle, but people called her Mitch. It rhymed perfectly with the word they used in the song.
“We should probably leave,” Munir suggested, looking back at the castle-house. He reached over and stopped the music.
“Yes, you’re right,” I agreed. I had places to be. Specifically, I had to be at the place were Dax was because I needed to figure out what was happening! “I can’t believe this,” I muttered. “I can’t believe he did this.”
“So…it is about you?” Rashelle’s eyes were sparkling and I knew what that meant: she was thrilled by this major scoop of gossip. She was going to tell everyone, if they didn’t already know.
“No, it’s absolutely not about me,” I said distinctly. “And if anyone says that it is, I’ll make it my personal mission to sue them until they regret the day they were born. I’ll quit my job at Whitaker Enterprises so I have all the time in the world to go after them.”
“Wow, ok,” she said, and she had lost the sparkle. “I’ll share that with, uh, any people who may think that Cameo and Jax are Camille and Dax.”
There were probably no grounds for a lawsuit and I was perfectly aware of that. I wasn’t a litigator, though, and beyond some classes I’d taken, I wasn’t well-versed in defamation statutes. We said goodbye and I went right to the office to start researching. I read theMichigan Complied Lawsand I looked at applicable case law.
Then I went home to get dressed.
A few hours later, I was at the club. “Ah, Jesus Christ on a cracker. How the hell did you get in here?” Stone, Mr. Flip Phone asked me when I made my way to him. He was back toguarding the VIP area at Château Moderne, and I was back to hunting my former fiancé.
“The guy at the door wasn’t looking at my face,” I said, and both of us glanced down at where the doorman’s gaze had also fastened. I’d worn a bra that Dax/Jax had gotten for me, and it pushed my breasts almost up to my clavicles. It made them easy to focus on and distraction had been my goal. “Is my ex-fiancé here, the one who defamed me?”
“I guess you heard the song, Cameo.”
“Yes, I did.” I leaned to peer into the lounge behind his broad back. Château Moderne was busier tonight since it was Saturday, but there still wasn’t anyone pushing to get past this velvet rope, and there wasn’t much happening in the VIP. I certainly didn’t see Dax but I assumed that he was in one of the back rooms with his zipper down.
“Come on,” Mr. Flip Phone told me. He started to walk toward the rear of the club.
“Aren’t you supposed to be guarding this place?” I called.
“You know what? I don’t care if the whole damn club gets overrun by simulant aliens,” he said over his shoulder. He turned into a hallway with a sign that pointed toward bathrooms.
I moved a lot slower and by the time I joined him, he was waving impatiently for me to hurry. “It’s hard to walk in these shoes,” I said grumpily when I finally got there. “You should try it.”
