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“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.”

27.

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.”