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“And this is now,” I argued.
“My new husband has given me a daughter,” she said with a friendly look on her wide features. “And as many times as I imagined you when I was with George, I’d never upset Cynthia’s applecart.”
I nodded and stood.
“No one will be watching or listening in on you and Lana,” Lauren assured me.
Moving as slowly as it did, I couldn’t tell if the lift was taking me up or down. But when the door opened I found myself facing a riveted metal portal guarded by two women, both of whom were equipped with sidearms and batons. One was brown and the other near black.
“You here for Ruiz?” the darker-skinned guard asked.
“Yes.”
The questioner’s partner unlocked the metal door and pulled it open. I walked through into a room similar to Lauren’s “meeting cell.” The only furniture was a solitary table and two chairs.
A young woman in a gray uniform was looking out the barred window, over the tops of trees.
She turned, saw me, and frowned.
“What is this?” she asked.
“My name is Joe Oliver,” I said. “I’m a private detective investigating the conviction of A Free Man.”
“You think they could kill him two times?”
“I’m trying to prove that Detectives Valence and Pratt had targeted the Blood Brothers of Broadway and finally got killed trying to bushwhack Mr. Man.”
Lana was five five with dark brown skin and hair that was straight and coarse due to hard water and substandard hair products. She was handsome the way beautiful women get after they pass the age of forty. But she was a young woman, in her late twenties, aged by prison and a life that charged more than it gave back.
“Come have a seat,” I offered.
She sneered and then wondered, finally taking one of the battered wood chairs at the sad and slender table.
Sitting down across from her, I noticed that she’d bitten her nails. She saw what I did and put her hands in her lap.
“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.”
