“Hello, Mr. Minton,” Milo’s secretary, Loretta Kuroko, said from the desk on the right. She’d been Milo’s secretary since his lawyer days. She stayed with him after he’d been disbarred, imprisoned for three years, and then when he went through a series of professions. She was a hostess when he had been a restaurant owner, a bookkeeper when he’d tried car insurance sales. Even in Milo’s brief stint as a fence Loretta answered his phone and ran interference with the fiercest of clients.

They had never been lovers as far as I knew, and that was odd because Loretta loved Milo and she had a kind of perpetual beauty, thin and elegant with no wrinkles or lines. She was Japanese-American, a victim of America’s little-publicized Japanese internment camps during World War Two.

“Loretta,” I replied.

“Hey hey, Paris,” Milo growled from his desk to the left. He sat in a haze of mentholated cigarette smoke, smiling like a king bug in a child’s nightmare.

Milo was always the darkest man in the room, except when he was in the room with Fearless. He was taller than I but not six feet. He had big hands and long arms, bright white eyes and teeth and the complexion of polished charcoal. His short hair was always loaded with pomade and combed to the right. He knew the definition of every word in the dictionary and every once in a while managed to beat me at a game of chess.

“Milo,” I hailed. “How’s it goin’?”

“Must be good for somebody, somewhere. Must be. But don’t ask me where.”

I sat down and submitted to the scrutiny of those bright eyes.

“What’s wrong, Paris?”

“Who said anything was wrong?”

“Your eyes is red. Your head is hangin’. You don’t have a chessboard or a book under your arm, so you must be here on bidness.”