“And you haven’t talked to Milo in two months?”

“Maybe three,” he said. “Last time I saw Milo was at The Nest. He was there with a nice-lookin’ woman. I think her last name was Pine.”

“What about Kit?” I asked. “Did you find out anything else about him?”

I had asked it all before, but I’d learned from long experience that Fearless didn’t have a straightforward way of thinking. He never remembered everything all at once. I asked him questions the same way the police questioned a suspect: with the hope of finding what wasn’t there rather than what was.

Fearless rubbed his hand over the top of his head. His ideas, though often deep and insightful, came from a place that he had very little control over. If you asked him, “How did you know that man was going to pull out a knife?” he might utter some nonsense like, “It was the way he lifted his chin when he saw me walk in the room.”

“Somebody said about the Redcap Saloon,” Fearless said.

“O’Brien’s Bar?”

“Yeah.”

“Who said about it?”

“It was that man Pete.”

“Dark-colored guy?” I asked.

“Naw. Yellah. High yellah at that. Him an’ Kit was friends. At least I seen ’em together more’n once. Pete’s got a hot dog cart over in MacArthur’s Park. I asked him if he’d seen Kit and he said about the Redcap Saloon.”

“Maybe we better go over there and see what we can see.”

Fearless grinned. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down, Paris. We connected at the hip, you an’ me.”

“Unless they put you up on the gallows, unless that.”

“It ain’t gonna go that far, Paris. Naw, man. It’s probably just some questions them cops want answerin’. ’Cause you know I ain’t even broke a sweat in over a month.”

“What about that white man lyin’ an’ lookin’ for you?” I asked.

“Who knows? Maybe he don’t have nuthin’ to do with it.”