“Hello, Paris,” Loretta said. “How are you?”

“Fine, Loretta.” I proffered a bunch of dahlias that I’d bought from a florist on Century Boulevard.

“Oh,” she said with light in her deep eyes. “Thank you so much.”

Milo never brought Loretta flowers or chocolates or even a paper cup of coffee—that wasn’t a part of their mythology.

“He’s back there. Go right on in,” she said. “I’ll put these in water.”

The hallway, from the front room to the back, was exactly two and a half paces. On the way you passed the door to a toilet on the right. That was where Loretta would get her water.

The back room was larger than the front, but it seemed smaller because of the eight file cabinets that Milo had against three walls. In those archives he had the records of his days as a lawyer—before he was disbarred—and as a restaurant owner, bookkeeper, and car insurance salesman. He’d also been a fence and a bookie, but I doubted if those records were still intact.

“Paris,” Milo shouted. It was his normal voice, but even Milo’s whisper was loud. “Have a seat.”

“Thank you, Milo,” I said.

He was sitting behind a maple desk, in a red leather recliner, under a naked hundred-watt bulb dangling from bare black cord. The chair in front of the desk looked like some sort of starved four-legged animal. I was afraid that even my few pounds would be the last straw.

But I sat anyway. The legs strained but held.

“What can I do for you?” Milo asked.

Milo’s skin color wasn’t as dark as Fearless’s, but it was close. He was a couple of inches taller than I and a few inches shorter than Fearless. His feet and hands belonged on someone who was much larger, and his body was naturally powerful. But Milo wasn’t a physical man. He was a thinker, a reader, a man who understood power but who was forever blocked from holding its reins.

Milo could quote passages from a thousand poems, do problems in calculus and trigonometry, but if you waved a stack of hundred-dollar bills under his nose he would forget his own name.