She wanted to lie but could see that I wasn’t having it.

“Okay,” she said. “Yes, I went to the Eye sometimes. It was the kind of a place where a man might buy you a drink and nobody looked down their nose at you. One night my car wouldn’t start and I didn’t have cab fare. I had to call Craig. He came and had a drink with me and Donata. After that he gave my car a jump.”

“Yeah, but, it’s not just her,” I said. “You knew Alonzo too, didn’t you?”

“He was a photographer,” she said, somewhat reluctantly. “He took a few pictures of me.”

“He also heisted an armored car.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

I took out the hundred-dollar bills she had given me, placing them next to her martini glass.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The money you gave me to pay for Craig’s investigation.” I was watching her closely.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

I sat there silently watching. But her confusion did not turn into fear.

“What?” she asked at last.

“The cops found a stack of hundreds like this in Craig’s apartment.”

She leaned away.

“When they ran the serial numbers they found them on a Treasury Department warrant,” I said. “From that armored car job in San Bernardino.”

The aggrieved mother looked down at the money and then up at me. It slowly dawned on her how she was implicated in her son’s death.

“If you don’t tell me about it, there’s no way that I can protect you,” I said.

“I don’t know anything about a robbery. All I know is that Donata got this windfall and then her boyfriend, that Alonzo, took her money and put it with his. That’s what Craig told me.”

“Put it where?”

“I don’t know. She said that he said he put it somewhere safe. But when she wanted to get at it he kept putting her off.”

“Was Craig involved with this, um, windfall?”

“He gave me the hundred-dollar bills, but that was a while before he got in the fight with that man.”

“Did he know Alonzo?”

Lola looked away and said, “Definitely not. I knew him like you said, but I didn’t want Craig to know how I made my extra money. My son thought Alonzo was the straight-haired man.”

Staring bullets at her I asked, “What do you think, Mr. Jones?”

“I believe her,” my friend testified.

That was good enough for me.

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