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“Hello, Aurilia,” Mara Macintosh said.

And there she was, pulling out an empty chair at our table. Before that moment, I realized, I felt that she was a vision beyond touch or proximity.

My father was sitting up straight, exuding that power to enthrall.

But the lady looked into my eyes and said, “I saw you.”

“Um,” I mumbled.

Aurilia Fox gave me a strained smile, telling me that her life was the underside of jazz, the blues that sometimes made many of us stretch out, reaching for excellence, excellence or flight.

“Your, your singing, that song…” I spoke.

“It touched you?”

“It sure touched me,” Chief Odin said.

The jazz singer was thin but not bony; her color was what Curtis Mayfield called darker than blue. Her beauty was truly indefinable. Maybe it was just the song she’d sung, “Lost in Love with You.” Maybe it was how the fifty-plus years of life had sculpted her face into the exact image of my longing.

She turned to look at my dad, saw him, nodded almost imperceptibly at the power he was exerting on her—and then she turned back to me.

“I have one more set,” she said.

“That’s good for us.”

“Do you have a car?”

“It’s as small as you could get, but yeah, I do.”

She smiled. “I would like it if you gave me a ride home.”

The next set was both bombastic like Armstrong and sublime like Davis could be, at times. Big Billy was a red-faced white man who loved his ragtag band and Aurilia, the singer who brought them all together. She could sing anything: pop, interpretive rock, ballads, folk, and of course songs about love, especially when that love had been reduced to tatters.

While the band played, I talked with Mara, sporadically.

“Did you know Arman before you took Twyla in?” I asked during a purely musical interlude.

“Oh yes. We were lovers for a while and then friends.”

“So, you like him?”

“He means well, but he came up hard and has never been able to get very far away from that way of life.”

“Did you ever know a woman name of Dalia Shorts?” I asked after Aurilia had sung a rendition of “Strange Fruit.”

Mara smiled and then reached out to take my hand.

“She was a beautiful young woman. And her voice was high and made you smile. She could get a whole room of somber-looking people to stand up and dance.”

“I read an article that said Arman was suspected of murdering her.”

“No.”

“That’s what the Post said.”

“Arman wouldn’t do something like that,” she said and then, abruptly, went silent for a minute or two. “I mean, I have no doubt that he could have killed somebody—he probably did, that awful business he was in. But he was never weak or mean, and you would have to be one of those things to hurt a child like that.”

At another point I asked, “So you have no idea of where Twyla could be?”