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“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 aksed 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.
