I regretted using my real name. In my business you wanted to leave as little a footprint as possible.

“Any idea where I might find him?” I asked.

“Sometimes he goes out of town for a few days, but then again he might be with his mama. She’s old and he helps her out now and then. He might not be a good man but he is a good son.”

“Something wrong with Reynolds?”

“Sometimes God ask the question and we give the wrong answer,” he said.

I pondered this reply for a moment or two. It made a great deal of sense though I couldn’t have explained why.

“Where does Mrs. Ketch live?” I asked.

“At the Poinsettia Court over on Hooper. Her name is Miss Lily Dasher.”

Poinsettia Court was another single-story courtyard of maybe twenty small apartments. Another maze with a different layout. Lily Evangeline Dasher was number eleven.

Half a dozen throwaway newspapers were piled at the threshold. And there was so much junk mail jammed into the slot of the door that some envelopes had fallen among and on top of the papers.

I was sure that no one was home but still I knocked out of deference and was surprised when a sixty-something black woman yanked the door open.

She was short and skeletal but there was life burning in those eyes, glistening off that black skin.

“Yes?” It was more an accusation than a question.

“Is he still breathing?”

“You’ont look like no cop.” That was back in the day when the word cop was a slur.

“No, ma’am.”

We measured each other. I was more than half convinced that she was armed with something. After an intensity that I don’t believe Big B Oldstein could have matched, the woman stepped aside and said, “Come on in, then.”

The living room was the size of the smallest cabin on a second-rate ocean liner. With all the shades and curtains pulled, it was dark enough to be below the waterline.

Miss Lily Dasher stood next to a recliner chair that was upholstered in cracked brown pleather. I had my back to the front door wondering if she was going to offer me a seat or whip out a gun and shoot me.

I wasn’t nervous, not exactly, but I had learned over time that because most women are physically weaker than most men, they, members of the fairer sex, were braver, forced to be more courageous and therefore more dangerous. A poor black woman knew that going up against a man was a life-and-death situation, so she had to be ready to risk it all. And there was something about Lily, her dark house, and the mention of the police. For her this was something serious and I didn’t know if she saw me as a possible friend or a definite threat. Because of all that I kept a close eye on my hostess’s hands.