Diamond Life Read online

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR . . .

  Set in the highest ranks of the music industry’s fame machine, Diamond Life is an intoxicating story of love, sex, ambition, money, betrayal, and the surprising realities of making it big.

  Alex Maxwell’s career as a journalist and celebrity ghost writer is taking off, despite the slightly embarrassing authorship of hip-hop supergroupie Cleo Wright’s memoir. And while Alex’s star is on the rise, it pales in comparison to her husband Birdie’s multiplatinum debut and world tour. Slowly but surely, everything they swore would never happen begins to come true, like leaving Brooklyn for a mansion in suburban Jersey and letting a reality TV crew into their home. Birdie is confronted time and again by the sexy groupies who pursue famous rappers like heat-seeking missiles and he’s forced to make some life-changing choices.

  Meanwhile, aging rapper Z, in recovery from drug addiction, is too busy trying to repair his marriage to leave much time for his son Zander, newly signed to Z’s label and struggling to maintain his appeal in the wake of a domestic violence scandal with his diva girlfriend Bunny.

  Record label president Jake is trying to deal with the death of his wife, multiplatinum R&B artist Kipenzi Hill, by drowning his sorrows in alcohol and women. When he meets Lily, a beautiful, quiet waitress, he can’t get her out of his head. But Lily has her own problems to handle and she wants nothing to do with the fame, drama, and baggage that Jake carries with him.

  This juicy follow-up to Aliya S. King’s Platinum is a scintillating roman à clef that takes readers behind the curtain once again for the real scoop on the biggest players in the hip-hop game—and the first ladies who hold them together.

  Praise for PLATINUM

  “A juicy ride through love in the hip-hop fast lane.”—ERICA KENNEDY, AUTHOR OF BLING

  “An entertaining mix of sex, betrayals, high drama, and tragedy.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “A steamy, gossipy beach read.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  © LUIS ANTONIO THOMPSON

  ALIYA S. KING is an award-winning journalist and the author of Platinum. She is the coauthor of Original Gangster and the New York Times bestseller Keep the Faith. Her work has appeared in Vibe, Giant, Uptown, Essence, King, Ms., Us Weekly, and Teen People, among others. Please visit her at www.aliyasking.com.

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  THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS

  COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: WOMAN: JUPITER IMAGES; CITY: ISTOCKPHOTO

  ALSO BY ALIYA S. KING

  Platinum

  Touchstone

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Aliya King

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Touchstone trade paperback edition February 2012

  TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Akasha Archer

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  King, Aliya S.

  Diamond life / Aliya S. King.

  p. cm.

  “A Touchstone Book.”

  1. African American women—Fiction. 2. Sound recording industry—Fiction.

  3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Urban fiction I. Title.

  P53611.15713D53 2012

  813'.6—dc23 2011034704

  ISBN 978-1-4516-2554-7

  ISBN 978-1-4516-2556-1 (ebook)

  For Erik . . .

  For loving me, underneath it all

  Thank you for purchasing this Touchstone eBook.

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Acknowledgments

  Touchstone Reading Group Guide

  The brick office building had just one lone car in the parking lot. Jake’s driver pulled the white Maybach up to the door and made arrangements to pick him up in an hour. Along with Boo, his bodyguard, Jake eased out of the car and walked toward the front doors of the building.

  Head down, shielded against the bitter, whipping wind, Jake stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and kept in step behind Boo. At over six feet tall and nearly two hundred pounds, Jake didn’t need a bodyguard. For today’s destination, Boo’s purpose was to hide him, not protect him.

  He didn’t really need Boo to hide him either. Jake looked nothing like he did a few months before, and it was very unlikely that anyone would recognize him. Under a dingy hat, his hair was a misshapen, uncombed afro. His eyes were blood red (concealed by sunglasses), and he was wearing a full beard.

  Boo held the door open, and Jake slipped inside. He took the steps two at a time, stopped at the office door, and took a deep breath. He knocked once and then began to turn the knob.

  The doctor had her back to Jake, standing at her desk and making notes on a pad.

  “Come inside and have a seat,” she said, without turning around.

  Jake flopped on the couch, lifted his baseball cap, scratched his head, and then pulled his hat back down over his eyes. He took a Poland Spring bottle out of his jacket pocket and set it on the nearby table.

  “How are you?” the doctor asked.

  “Is that the best you can do? How are you?”

  “I’m just starting the conversation, Jake.”

  “You know how I am,” Jake said, his voice flat. “Same as last week and the week before.”

  “How is your sleeping? Are
you still having the dreams?”

  Jake grimaced. Each night, he relived the horror of hearing the news about his wife Kipenzi’s plane crash. It was a flight he should have been on. (And one he would gladly climb aboard if he could go back in time and the outcome would be the same.)

  As soon as he dropped off to sleep, he was standing in the hallway of their penthouse. Just as it happened in real life, Kipenzi was rushing off to catch a flight to Anguilla for a photo shoot and to check on his boy Z, who was about to get out of rehab. Just like in real life, Jake planned to go. But then, he got a last-minute phone call about signing a singer named Bunny to the label. He went to Harlem to meet with the singer and chartered a plane to follow Kipenzi to Anguilla in the morning. And just as in real life, he never saw her again.

  That night, he’d gone to bed, fully packed and ready to fly out to see Kipenzi in the morning. The phone rang in the middle of the night and his boy Z was on the other line. He just kept saying yo over and over again. Something in his voice told Jake that whatever he couldn’t get out of his mouth was going to change his life forever. He hung up on Z without hearing a single word. He called his mother. She answered the phone by screaming out, “Is it true, Jake?!” and he knew immediately that something had happened to Kipenzi.

  After making it out of the drug game unscathed, Jake always believed that it was just a matter of time before he would have to pay the price for the dirt he’d done. The pregnant women he’d sold crack to, the weak junkies he exploited, the communities he’d helped to destroy. Ten years after selling his first vial of crack, there had been no retribution from the gods. And then the music industry came calling—an entirely different world of sin. Ten years in and he hadn’t paid the price for those crimes either. Until a year ago everything had been coming up roses.

  “I should have never let my guard down,” Jake said, more to himself than the doctor. He swigged from his water bottle and kept his eyes fixed on the view outside the window.

  The therapist scribbled and nodded.

  “That’s where I went wrong. I stopped looking back and had the nerve to start planning my future,” said Jake. He finally looked the doctor in the eye.

  “I was trying to get my wife pregnant. All my life I said I never wanted to be a father. I’d seen too much. Done too much. I couldn’t see me being anyone’s dad. Kipenzi changed all of that. I wanted to have a baby with her. You know how vulnerable you have to be to try and get someone pregnant . . . on purpose?”

  The doctor nodded. Jake realized that his voice was getting high-pitched again. It was the warning that he was about to cry, something he’d been able to control, slightly, for the past few weeks.

  “Have you thought about taking a break from work to sort of—”

  “A break? Have you listened to anything I’ve said in the past six weeks?”

  The doctor flipped back a few pages in her notebook.

  “I know you said you were trying to close a deal for a set of headphones . . .”

  “Yeah,” said Jake. “And I’m running a record label with twenty different artists who all want something from me. I own apartment buildings, a restaurant, a clothing line . . .”

  Jake let his voice trail off and took another swig from his bottle.

  “Take a break,” he said under his breath.

  Jake leaned over and grabbed a magazine from the stack the doctor kept on the table between them. He flipped through it absentmindedly and froze when he got to a full-page cosmetics ad featuring Kipenzi. Jake tossed the magazine to the floor as if it had burned his hand.

  “I’m sorry, Jake,” the doctor said. “I can try to make sure that—”

  “That what?” Jake said. “That you scrub this office of any trace of my wife? Can you delete all of her songs from the playlist in your waiting room? Let’s start there.”

  Jake got up and walked over to a window near the doctor’s desk.

  “And while you’re at it, call the billboard company that owns that sign right there. Some days, I think I’m doing okay. Then I see a fifty-foot billboard of my wife’s face staring down at me . . .”

  “That has to be difficult.”

  “You can also contact the editors of every magazine on the newsstands and tell them to please stop publishing memorials of my wife to sell a few issues. Be real helpful to be able to walk down the street and not see her face or the scene from the crash.”

  The doctor motioned for Jake to sit back down and he did, letting out a rush of breath as he slumped on the couch.

  “My wife is everywhere except where I need her to be,” said Jake. “And that shit pisses me off. Her fans still have her. They have all of her that they ever had. Does that makes sense?”

  The doctor nodded.

  “I mean, they can still listen to her music, watch her videos, look at her pictures . . . whatever. I don’t have a substitute for my wife. But everywhere I go, she’s there.”

  Jake took another swig from his water bottle and then let his head fall back against the couch cushion. He closed his eyes tight.

  “We talked about vulnerability last week,” said the doctor. She turned a new page over in her notebook. “It’s something I think we need to explore.”

  “Do you ever cure people?” Jake asked, his eyes still closed.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you ever say, ‘My job here is done’ and then tell someone not to come back?”

  “Psychotherapy is not the kind of thing—”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Jake. “Nice hustle you got going. People pay you three hundred dollars a week to talk. And they never get better. Gangsta.”

  “Are you saying you think you’re never going to get better?”

  “I’m saying that if I do, it won’t be because of you.”

  “What’s going to help you, Jake?”

  Jake sat up and reached for the water bottle. He swished the liquid around in his mouth, and swallowed hard.

  “My wife had just retired before she died,” Jake said. “She wanted to enjoy what she’d worked for. Sometimes I think I should do the same.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  Jake waved a hand.

  “It’s just a thought. You asked me what would help. I probably need some time off.”

  “I’ll tell you what you don’t need,” said the doctor, taking off her eyeglasses and sitting up in her chair.

  “What’s that?”

  The doctor gestured to Jake’s water bottle.

  “Vodka’s not gonna do it, Jake.”

  Jake leveled his eyes at the doctor and drained the bottle.

  “When’d you realize it wasn’t water?” he asked.

  “First time you brought it in,” said the doctor. “I figured I’d let you tell me in your own time.”

  “But I didn’t say anything.”

  “It’s been long enough, the smell was driving me crazy. Vodka’s not actually odorless, in case that’s what you thought.”

  “I’m done for the day, doc.”

  “Next week, try bringing real water. It might help us get some work done.”

  Jake stood up and stretched. He made a show of picking up his empty water bottle, getting into basketball-shooting position, and then tossing the bottle toward the trash basket near the doctor’s desk. He missed by a foot.

  “Alcohol messes up your coordination,” said the doctor, picking up the empty plastic bottle and dropping it into the basket.

  “What do you think you can do for me?” Jake asked.

  “I can help you start grieving.”

  “Start grieving?”

  “You heard me,” the doctor said. “As long as you’re drunk every minute of the day, you’re not grieving. You’re just numb. When you deal with your wife’s death head-on, we can make some progress. Not until then.”

  Jake burped. He wanted to be polite and cover his mouth, but he was too drunk to care.

  Kipenzi always said he was a boor when he was drunk. For a year
he’d thought she meant he was boring.

  “Next week,” said Jake, pointing at the doctor. “No vodka.”

  “I hope you’re going home now to sleep this off . . .”

  Jake stood up straight and adjusted an imaginary tie.

  “Of course not,” he said. “I’m going to work. I’m a big-time executive, you know. You’re looking at the president of a major record label! I have acts to sign, deals to make, budgets to approve. You might not know it, but I’m kind of a big deal.”

  Jake winked and made his way to the door. He stumbled only once.

  Three hours later, at a business dinner at Peter Luger’s, Jake was only half-listening to Dominic Carerra, his longtime business manager. He was trying to get the attention of the waitress to get a refill on his drink. Holding an empty glass was not a good feeling.

  “The headphones deal is just a matter of paperwork right now,” said Dominic. “They’ll be in stores next Christmas.”

  “It’s a new year, Dominic,” said Jake. “What are you going to do differently?”

  Dominic was taken aback and sputtered.

  “My job is the same every year. Make you more money than the year before.”

  They both laughed and the sound finally caught the attention of the tiny woman who had taken their orders.

  “Let me get a—” Jake said.

  The young woman placed a Jack and Coke on the table. Jake wrinkled his eyebrow and looked up at her.

  The young woman shrugged.

  “Made it already,” she said. “I was pretty sure you’d want another.”

  Jake sized her up. She had her hair pulled back in a bun. And there was a flower tucked behind her ear. Her body was absolutely perfect, almost too perfect. She had small but perky breasts, a tiny waist, and a full ass. And although her body had his mouth watering, it was the eyes that drew him in. Almond-shaped and jet black, her eyes locked with Jake’s, and he felt his heart thump harder in his chest. He guzzled his drink to tamp down the feeling and gather his thoughts.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lily.”

  Jake pointed to the petals peeking out of her bun.

  “What kind of flower is that?”

  “Guess.”

  “Lily?”

  “Smart boy.”