“Manny,” she said. It might have been a mantra. “How did you get here to me?”
“I got your name from a court document,” I said. “But before I came here I met with Lamont Charles. He sent me to see Miranda Goya and she pointed the way to a guy named Theodore.”
“Who?”
“Burns.”
“Oh.” A twinge of sadness crossed her features. “That kid was a sad case. How is he?”
“So high he could peek into heaven.”
The phrase brought a smile to her face. She sat back in the chair and assessed me.
“What you want?”
“Can you give me anything that might put a bright light on what Valence and Pratt were up to?”
“Not if I evah wanna see my little girl again.”
“Um…”
“Cecilia,” Lana said in a rolling Spanish lilt. “She’s four now and with my mother. Yollo Valence told Billy Makepeace that if I stayed quiet I’d get outta here before she gets to high school.”
“Valence is dead.”
“Yeah, but him an’ Anton had connections that want all that shit they did kept quiet.”
“Can you tell me who?”
“I don’t know no names, but even if I did I wouldn’t be sayin’ ’em.”
“Who’s this Billy Makepeace?”
“A cop I was bangin’.”
“He was your lover?”
Lana smiled at me.
“If it was nothing, then why would he help you with a dangerous man like Valence?”
“He couldn’t come with a condom on and sometimes we’d get a little high so maybe I’d let him.”
“And then came Cecilia.”
“Manny didn’t want me seein’ no cop, but I needed things that Billy wanted to give me. He paid my rent half the time and fooled himself to think he was in love with me. After I had the baby he had the test done and he didn’t want his daughter’s mother killed.”
“He knew about what Valence and Pratt were doing?”
“Everybody knew,” she said, as disgusted with the human race as Laur had been with men.
“You think he’d consider making some kind of testimony about that?”
“Would you?” she sneered.
It was such a good question that I fell out of my role as investigator for a moment or two. In order to be a cop, a good cop, you have to be ready to put your life on the line at any moment. Most cops had families and futures to think about. They acted as if those who broke the law had put themselves in jeopardy. But that wasn’t the case with me. Melquarth could tell that; so could my daughter.
“They don’t have no cameras in here,” Lana said.
“The assistant warden told me.”
“You wanna do it sittin’ in that chair?”
The question on my face made her smile. She stood up, sat on the table, and spread her trousered legs.
“We could do it like this if you want?”
“I’m old enough to be your father,” I argued in spite of the sweat at the back of my neck.
“You could be my baby daddy too.”
“What about Billy?”
“He ain’t here.”
“I don’t have a condom.”
“They got this thing called the Family Centered Program at Bedford Hills. If I get pregnant I get nine months’ care and then get to spend at least a year with my baby. Cecilia need a little brother or sister. After that I be out in less than two years.
“Billy’s marriage went dry,” Lana coaxed. “He cain’t say nuthin’ ’bout me gettin’ laid. Shit. Do you know what it’s like up in here?”
I certainly did. My breath came funny and I was certainly aroused. But the thought of Aja kept my zipper up. I was old enough to be Lana’s father—and I would act the part. I took seven hundred dollars of Augustine Antrobus’s money and handed it to the young woman.
“I have a daughter,” I said in answer to the confused frown on the Blood Sister’s face. “I love her more than this life or the next.”
“We could do somethin’ else if you want.”
“How about telling me how to get to Billy Makepeace.”
31.
“Mr. Makepeace,” I said when he answered the phone.
I was seated in the last row of the bus in a solitary seat across the aisle from the toilet.
“Who is this?” a man said. “How did you get this number?”
“Lana wondered if you had gone to see Cecilia.”
“Who is this?” William Makepeace demanded.
“A friend of A Free Man.”
I imagined that in the barrier of silence Billy was wondering if he should just hang up.
“Tell me who this is.”
“I want to know if you’re willing to testify against two dead men, set the mother of your child free, and maybe keep an innocent man from getting executed.”
Another spate of silence.
“Whoever you are,” he said, “I am an officer of the law and your threats constitute a crime.”
“Not if you know about a private graveyard maintained by Officers Valence and Pratt. Not if there’s even a shred of a suspicion that you knew what they were up to.”
“Who is this?”
“Like I said, a friend of Manny’s.”
“What about Lana?”
“She asked me to ask you about your daughter when I said I wanted to know why she wasn’t dead like the rest of her friends.”
“I don’t know anything about what you’re saying,” he said flatly. Then he hung up.
I pulled up the window and threw the phone onto the highway.
There’s a liquor store five blocks from the underground bunker on Seventy-Third Street where I was hiding. There I bought a liter of Hennessy, extra old, and then I made my way into the sleeping crypt.
On a shelf in the studio I found a turquoise plastic drinking glass that held maybe three ounces. I filled it with cognac, drained it, then filled it again.
After four drinks, my lips and fingertips were tingling. I stumbled up the stairs and out of the hideaway into the street.
I walked, almost without a misstep, down to the Theater District, where I found an electronics store that sold disposable phones. I bought three of these.
At a popular coffee shop chain store I ordered a huge cup of dark-roast coffee, which I had no intention of drinking. I jiggered one of the temporary phones to life and started making my late-night calls.
“Hello?” Aja-Denise Oliver said in a tremulous, sleepy tone.
“It’s me.”
“Daddy.”
“You okay?”
“Uh-huh. Tomorrow we’re gonna go to Disney World and Coleman says we could all go fishin’ if we want.”
I was relieved that she was so far away.
“You aren’t calling your friends, are you?”
“No.”
“Nobody?”
“This one guy I met at the roller rink in Dumbo called my real phone. I told him I was down with relatives in D.C. for two weeks. Nobody knows I know him, though.”
“I love you, girl.”
“Mama’s here. She wanna talk to you.”
There was a rustling sound and then: “Joe?”
“Hey, Monica.”
“Are you all right?”
Rage sparked at a place very near my dinosaur brain. There was a time when my wife could have shielded me from the terrors of Rikers. She could have put up the money and I might have escaped the brunt of my late-night terrors.
“Joe?” she asked again.
“I’m fine.”
“Can you tell me what’s going on? Did my call really bring all this down?”
“Not completely. I mean, I could’a become a plumber,” I said. I just didn’t want her angry with me. There was no need to torture her, no matter how deep my pain.
“Why are you calling?” she asked.
“Because my little girl’s voice is like penicillin for my wounds.” I felt a little eddy of giddiness twist through my mind. The alcohol was increasing its hold.
“We’re fine,” Monica said. “Coleman is protecting us.”
I sent two texts after saying good night to Aja. Twelve minutes later my temporary phone rang.
“Hey, Effy.”
“Joe?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s this phone?”
“I’m in a little trouble.”
“You need me?”
There was something in the tenor of her question that sent a chill through me. It was something beyond love all the way back to when humanity was a group animal connected by experience deeper than any memory.
“I been thinkin’ about you,” the cognac in me said.
“What?”
“You don’t owe me anything, Ef.”