Aces and Knaves

chair and looked me in the eye. He had an unblinking stare that was hard for me to meet, the mesmerizing stare of the predator before it strikes.
    He said, "As you know, Richard opposes my takeover of Dionysus. However, even though he's your father you can rationalize letting me take over because it's for his own good. But without the votes of the stock he controls, there is only one way I can do it. I need to have Elma's proxy."
    Suddenly, there wasn't enough air in the room. I abruptly rose and walked around, trying to get my breathing under control. I walked back to my chair, but I didn't sit down.
    James watched me but he didn't move. He said, "Two weeks ago I thought I had her proxy nailed down. Then you and Arrow went on your pilgrimage and now I find that she has defected—or at the least is seriously wavering. Your job is to get her back in my camp. For reasons we've already gone over, this won't make you a traitor to Richard."
    My brain was spinning, but I had sense enough to think of one thing. "If you can't convince her, how can I? She used to be your girlfriend..."
    "We know each other too well. And we know how far we can trust each other. I need the intervention of a third person to plead my case. You have more credibility than anybody with her, except perhaps Arrow. And I don't..."
    He stopped, but I could imagine the rest of the sentence: "I don't have anything to hold over Arrow at the moment."
    I tried again. "You're a sporting man, James. Let me play blackjack for my freedom. If I don't increase my initial stake by ten times, I'll help you with Elma."
    James laughed. "Too late. I've already given you the money for your card. You can't have it both ways. By the way, you've got two weeks to pull this off. That's when the Dionysus board meeting is."
    "What if I fail?"
    "You won't fail, Karl. Failure isn't in my vocabulary. And starting at this moment it isn't in yours."
    ***
    Grant Avenue was its usual busy self, teeming with people and odors, basking in the infrequent warmth of a sunny day with no foggy strings attached. The odors, some of which emanated from an open fish market, might have unsettled my stomach if I had lingered too long. The plastic-wrapped people of my generation weren't used to being so close to the origin of their food.
    I had made a quick change of clothes in my car so as to blend in with the tourists. I was just another sightseer strolling along with the crowds.
    I turned onto the side street where Ned had met his demise, searching for I don't know what. It looked like any of a dozen other streets in the area, with shops selling an eclectic array of goods, restaurants with exotic names and food to match. I'm not sure I found the actual alley where Ned was killed. Alleys have a sameness about them.
    I spotted the parking lot where Ned's car had been found and saw an attendant take money from an incoming customer and give him a ticket. A parking ticket. It occurred to me that Detective Washington had never mentioned that a parking ticket had been found in Ned's pocket.
    What if the killers had found the ticket, gone to the car, planted the cocaine and then returned the car keys but not the ticket to Ned's pocket? The whole operation could have been conducted in ten minutes. And the parking attendant would not have been on duty that late so nobody would have observed what happened.
    I turned several corners, at random, and found myself in a residential area—row houses that had seen better days. Fewer pedestrians here, not much auto traffic.
    On a street corner ahead three homeboys—is that what they were called?—stood, smoking cigarettes. The shaved heads, rings through every protruding piece of flesh, tattoos, baggy jeans with crotches down to the knees, could have been in LA, except that I hadn't seen Asians who looked like this.
    The sensible thing was to avoid them, go the other way. But I wasn't feeling sensible. Maybe because I was about to betray my father for a baseball card. Maybe because I was looking for a miracle to get me out of it.
    I walked up to them and said, "I'm not a cop, but I'd like to ask you something."
    They stared at me, coolly, insolently. One said, "Man says he ain't a cop."
    Another: "Fuckin' right he ain't a cop."
    The third: "We know all the cops. No cops we don't know. We know all the cars. We know everybody and everything in the hood."
    The first: "You come in here, you don't belong, we pick you up on the radar. You hang around, you better