I sat down facing Lola. Sammy jumped in my lap, dancing for our attention.

“How?” she asked.

That one-word question could have been Lola Thigman’s entire character profile. She was a realist. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand mothers would have asked, begged for me to tell them if their son was still alive. But Lola knew.

I had these thoughts while staying silent because I didn’t want to answer the question.

“Tell me,” Lola demanded after her second swallow of cheap liquor.

“Somebody shot him.”

She scrutinized me and then said, “In his apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Did he shoot back?”

“It doesn’t look like it. Did he own a weapon?”

“He brought back a rifle and a pistol from Vietnam. One time, when I had this boyfriend wouldn’t let go, he offered me the pistol—for self-defense.”

“You still have it?”

“Never took it,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s not a man alive could reduce me to that kind of fear.”

“I’m so sorry, Lola.”

For a dozen beats of a fast jazzman’s drum she was on the edge of tears. Then she took in a deep breath and asked, “Did somebody call the police? Is that how they found him?”

“I found him. He’d been dead two or three days.”

“And nobody heard it?”

“If they did they didn’t call the cops. Maybe, maybe whoever did it used a silencer. You know the more I looked into the case the more it looked like there was mob activity around the edges.”

There was something going on behind Lola’s dark eyes. Already I’d seen the despair and regret, but now there was a hint of guilt.

“I don’t have any more money, Easy.”

“I’m not asking you for it.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I have something to ask you.”

“What’s that?”

“In all the work you’ve done, have you come up with anything that would identify my son’s killers?”

Sammy had fallen asleep in my lap.

On September 19, I’d be entering my fiftieth year. Age doesn’t teach much, but the years leave enough breaks and bruises to cause a man to take a moment before leaping. Lola appreciated this fact, silently. She waited for my answer because she’d made more leaps than any Olympic gymnast or common grasshopper.

“Have you ever heard of a man named Eddie Brock?” I asked.

“No. Why? Who is he?”

I reached into a pocket for the photograph that Brock had given me, waited a moment, then pulled it out and laid it on the table.

“That’s Donata, Donata Delphine,” Lola said. “What about her?”

“Your son had me looking for the guy he might have killed. He said the name was Alonzo.”

“Did you find him?”

“I found a man named Alonzo.”

“And was he dead?”

I nodded.

“So Craig did kill him. Maybe this was revenge.”

“I doubt that.”

“Why?”