I was having a fine time. That’s never a good thing on the job.

“I’m surprised that Bo told you anything about me,” I said, trying to get back on track.

“Azalea’s seven,” Mona replied. “Her mother’s twenty-three.”

I was feeling a bit light-headed. Dean Martin, I realized, was singing on the sound system and the different hues of red that decorated the room seemed to swirl, like confetti caught up in a dust devil. There was something synthetic about me and Mona sitting there in a room of scarlet fabrics and white faces.

“A white man came in one night with his date,” Mona said. It felt like she was throwing a rope down into that hole I was in. “The room was fully occupied. So he came up to me and asked if I was sitting here. I didn’t answer because he had eyes.

“He asked me again and I didn’t answer. So then he put a hand on my shoulder. I’m a woman alone and so you know I can protect myself if I have to. But this is a nice place and I didn’t want to strain my welcome with some random white man’s blood.” She stopped there and smiled.

“So what happened?”

“His date was his undoing,” Mona Strael said. “She had gone to the bartender to see if there was someplace else they could sit. The white man had just whispered to me, ‘Answer me, bitch,’ and Bo put a hand on his shoulder and leaned in just as close. I don’t know what he said but the white man and his date left.

“Later on that night Mr. Felton, the bar and restaurant manager, came up to me and apologized. A few days after that Bo told me that he used to look down on black people but then one saved him when he didn’t have to, when everybody but his mother had abandoned him.”

My dizziness was gone. Mona shifted on the banquette and looked into my eyes.

“It costs a hundred dollars to sit here with me,” she said. “Five hundred if you need me to get up.”

“Did Kirkland Larker have that kind of cash?”

The sinewy suppleness went still in an instant. She sat up a little straighter and her eyes tightened a millimeter or two. The smile faded, but not for long.

“He’d raise it now and then,” she said, impressing me with her resilience.

“You seen him lately?”

Her deepening smile was the rebuttal of the transparent duplicity of my question.

“No,” she said at last.

“What about Donata Delphine?”

“Who?”

“Roxanna Coors.”