At nightfall Lola invited us to a club she knew called Venus Cove, an intimate nightspot that had only nine tables.

No one questioned a white woman accompanied by two black men being guided up to the front. We had steaks and bourbon with baked potatoes and broccoli cooked so long that you could have mashed its green stalks with a fork.

After dinner and four rounds of top-shelf whiskey, Lola’s defenses started to lag behind her words.

“Women don’t have it easy in this world, Mr. Jones,” she said.

They don’t have it easy and most of them loved Fearless.

“Ain’t that the truth,” my friend agreed, patting her forearm. “From birthin’ babies to buryin’ their men.”

Lola took the hand and squeezed it.

“You think anybody cares about a woman or a girl gets dragged by her hair and fucked or beat up just so a man could pretend he’s a man?”

Fearless was too well-mannered to answer that question.

I sipped on my whiskey and waited.

“You wouldn’t let that happen, now, would you, Mr. Jones?”

Fearless clasped her hands in his. She looked up at him with moist eyes and I knew that at least her feelings were for real.

“You know we’re trying to do right by you, Miss Kilian,” he said softly.

Lola pressed her forehead against Fearless’s steel-band fingers.

That’s why I had brought my friend. He worked for the detective agency from time to time. Fearless was the best bodyguard money could buy. But it was his power and the honesty in the eyes of most women that I hoped would solve the riddle of Craig and his mother. Lola could sense that Fearless would protect her no matter the odds. And in the face of those odds he was most likely to come out victorious.

“I know you are, Mr. Jones. I know you are,” she said. “I don’t deserve it. I did introduce my baby boy to that woman. She was just like me. I’d look at her and see myself.”

Fearless lifted her chin with a finger and asked, “What did she do?”

“Women like us don’t do things,” she confessed. “Not really. We motivate the men that mistreat us, make them do things.”

“Like what?” Fearless asked.

“Rob and steal and, and kill.”

“She made somebody do all that?”

“That Alonzo stole an armored car along with all’a Donata’s money and hid it in a garage somewhere.”

I knew Fearless would open Lola up. I could never tell if he understood that he was part of the interrogation. But that hardly mattered.

The lights went down and as they did Lola leaned forward to give Fearless a gentle kiss on the lips. I felt a pang of jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted to kiss Lola but that Fearless was the kind of man who women wanted to taste the moment they saw him.

“Got my tweed pressed,” a man’s amplified voice crooned. I turned as he sang, “Got my best vest.”