Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

“That’s unusual?”

“Every time somebody come talk to him about Manny he calls me from a pay phone and tells me what they look like and when they were there. Lam don’t talk about Manny to just anybody. Especially if that anybody is a cop.”

“Ex-cop,” I corrected.

“Once a cop, always a cop.”

I laughed and felt the whiskey spreading mildly over my brow.

“Okay, Mr. Ex-cop,” Miranda said. “What did you want me to talk about?”

“A Free Man.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I have heard that there was a conspiracy against him and all the Blood Brothers and there are still people working to make sure his story is silenced.”

The beautiful woman looked toward the window.

She turned back to me and said, “Your mustache is comin’ loose. Up on the left side. Not that much right now, but people will be able to tell after a while.”

I touched the side she mentioned and felt the looseness.

“You want me to touch it up?” she asked.

“Say what?”

“That’s what I do. I’m a makeup artist. After Manny freed me, the Blood Brothers asked me what I wanted to do an’ sent me to school.”

Without further discussion she went to a closet near the front door, pulling out what looked like a fisherman’s box and a collapsible stool. She set up in front and to the right of me, putting the box on the green-glass coffee table.

“Move your head back.”

I did and she studied the false hairs.

“Somebody did a pretty good job of this. Your girlfriend?”

I explained the class I took and the reason I took it.

“That’s really smart for a straight man,” Miranda said. “You know most men only know about tits and ass. They couldn’t even tell you the color of somebody’s eyes.”

“Detectives do it for a living.”

“What you wanna know about Manny?” she asked as she went to work on the semidetached lip hair.

“Lamont says that Mr. Man pulled you out of a bad situation.”

“Not only me.”

“I’m talking to you, though.”

“Yeah.” She dabbed a strong-smelling ointment across the top of the mustache. “I was deep in it and one day Manny walked in a room and took me out. That was it.”

I was slowly becoming a reluctant fan of Leonard Compton / Free Man.

“And it wasn’t just me,” she repeated. “There was a hundred children at any one time doin’ all kinds’a shit for them.”

“Who?”

She had to take a breath before saying, “Valence and Pratt.”

“Were there others? I mean others working with them.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know their names.”

“Policemen?”

“I’ont really know.” She concentrated on the hairs a little more and said, “They had this piece’a paper with a price list for sixty-seven things we had to do if they paid for it. Nasty things. Anything.”

“So they were full-out pimps and Mr. Man took you away from that,” I said.

“Not only pimps. They killed people too. Murdered ’em.”

“You mean the Blood Brothers.”

“Them... kids tried to run and family wanted to free ’em and anybody got in their way.”

“These murders are on record?”

Miranda pressed against my whole upper lip with at least six fingers, then she sat back in her chair. She took in a deep breath and watched me with eyes that, like her skin, were not quite brown.

After maybe three minutes she said, “You know I love Lamont. He treated me like a real woman and never even once tried to take advantage. You know a girl like me make men wanna take advantage and we hardly even know it.

“I love Lamont and I can’t even tell you how much I feel about Manny. I was in the back room of a massage parlor on Thirty-Ninth with this white man got his fist up my ass felt like all the way to his forearm and A Free Man come in with a gun. Shit! That white man messed himself and ran like some kinda dog. And nobody has done nuthin’ to me I ain’t said yes to since that night.

“Now Manny’s up on death row and I cain’t do a damn thing to help him. He won’t even let me come visit ’cause he don’t want me to get in trouble.

“All that and I’m still scared shit to talk to you.”

My temporary phone beeped and I took it out. Mel had texted me a name and an address.

“Thanks for the cosmetic work,” I said. “How much I owe you?”

“You don’t owe me nuthin’. I offered.”

I stood up and said, “Thanks for your help, Miss Goya. I’m sorry to bring up such painful memories.”

“That’s it?” she said.

“Yeah. I’m going to try and prove the things you said, but I can’t promise that someone might not figure out if you told me things that nobody else knows. I never met Mr. Man, but I don’t think he’d appreciate me trading your life for his.”

Her eyes opened wide as if she’d remembered something.

“Burns,” she said.

“Huh?”

“He was with me that day Manny busted in. Manny took him outta there too.”

“His name is Burns?”

“They call him that but his real name is Theodore.”

“Why they call him Burns?”

“He had a client liked to burn him after every time they fucked. And he fucked Theodore once a week. He got all these scars on his face and left arm.”

I’m pretty sure that that was the turning point for me. It might have been what Miranda had experienced in the massage parlor. Maybe if I had not heard what happened to her there I could have overlooked Theodore’s experience. I don’t know. But from that moment on I wasn’t merely solving one case or another... I was as serious as a slave who said no more to his chains.

“What about Theodore?”

“Before Manny got us, he used to work with Valence and Pratt pretty close. I mean, they had him fuckin’ people too, but sometimes he helped them with the heavy lifting.”

“Can you tell me anything else about him?” I asked. “A last name?”

“He only goes by Burns.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“He’s on heroin,” the beauty said with an ugly sneer. “He don’t wanna give it up. He says the only way he stays alive is to be high.”

“You try to get him some help?” I asked. I don’t know why.

“No,” she said, flat and low.

“Why not?”

“ ’Cause he right,” she said, her tone a dialect sliding all the way back to that massage parlor. “Gettin’ straight would kill him for sure.”

As I was leaving the actors’ co-op, my head was as light as a helium balloon, and my feet felt as if they were forged from lead. There was an abscess of evil out in the world and for some reason that was my responsibility if not my fault. A Free Man was on death row. No cop, judge, or average Joe was going to put up their hand and say, “I have a doubt.”

Before that afternoon I had often wondered how men and women became traitors. How could they one day wake up and say, “Everything I believed was wrong and now they have to pay.”

I never even considered for one moment that Miranda Goya was lying; me, a man who didn’t even trust his own clients, a man who had experienced betrayal on almost every level.

I walked down to Port Authority and stood on the corner of Forty-Second and Eighth trying to feel my way back to Montague Street and its mild indictments of big business and human nature. I wanted the worst problem to be my daughter’s choice of dresses or some traumatized white man thinking that I was abusing A.D.

“You okay, sir?” someone asked. The words were friendly, but the tone was not.

It was a beat cop who patrolled the sidewalks surrounding the giant bus station. I didn’t recognize him. I did wonder how he picked me out of all the junkies, pickpockets, prostitutes, and runaways.