Aces and Knaves

didn't admit it. She told me she had a hotel room booked. I did too, but not at the same hotel. She said she would work at her hotel tomorrow and meet me here at seven when the casino opened.
    I got a receipt for my chips and we walked toward the stairs. James came over to us from some people he was talking to and said, "Arrow, I don't know whether I'm glad or sad that you showed up. I'm glad to see you again, but you obviously have a steadying influence on Karl. He plays better with you here."
    "Why don't you just let him cancel the bet?" Arrow said. "He's proved he can be cool under fire."
    "Not now," I said, heatedly. "I'm going to win."
    "Besides, I couldn't do that," James said with a smirk. "Then I'd never find out what question you want to ask me." He turned to Arrow. "And now that I know you're as feisty as you are beautiful I wish I'd made you part of the package and insisted that you work for me if Karl loses."
    "In your dreams."

    Chapter 31 FLORA
    There was nothing like walking the hills of San Francisco to clear the head. When all your energy is required just to get to the top of a hill where the cars parked perpendicular to the street tilt so much that the slightest touch will tip them over you don't have any energy left for negative thoughts.
    Such as what would happen if I lost the bet and actually had to go to work for James. That thought had come to me during the night and I was trying to expel it now.
    I finally sat down in a small park to rest, fearful that I would exhaust myself so much I wouldn't be at my best at the blackjack table. I watched two hummingbirds play tag in the air and reviewed the last few weeks.
    The day my peaceful world had turned upside down was the day my father had come to me for help. That was the day Ned had been murdered. Since then, I had been told by my father and others not to try to solve the murder. But here I was doing just that, more to save my own skin than anything else.
    If I knew James had ordered Ned’s murder, somehow I thought that would free me of any obligation to James, such as the money I owed him or my agreement to obtain Elma's proxy. Even if I couldn't prove it in a court of law. But it was naive of me to think that James would actually tell the truth, even if I won the bet.
    So what else could I do? There was at least one string that hadn't been explored, I was sure, by the police. That was the mysterious Chinese lady who had Ned's gun in her possession. She and Ned must have been old friends. Or were they more than friends?
    It occurred to me that the woman with James at Ned's funeral could have been Chinese. I hadn't gotten a good look at her, but she definitely had Asian features. Was this another case of James and Ned sharing a woman? There was certainly precedent for it.
    Suddenly, I wanted to find and talk to this woman. But how? I remembered that I had passed an Internet cafe a few blocks back. Sip cappuccino and check stocks and email. I got up and headed in that direction.
    ***
    I bought an iced tea at the counter and headed for an available personal computer. It took me only a few seconds to access the Tartan corporate website. I looked at the site index. There were pages listed with the information you would expect: financial reports, recent acquisitions, profiles of James and other corporate officers. What wasn't there was what I was looking for: a sub-index with names and addresses of clients and other people and organizations important to Tartan and James.
    Of course this was confidential information and wouldn't be made available to the world. But I knew it was on the website because the night Ned was murdered James had accessed the telephone numbers of Ned's hotel and the police from it. I had been looking over his shoulder when he did it.
    Then he had made another phone call he had later denied making. Was that call to the Chinese lady? From James' side of the conversation I had gathered that the caller had seen Ned that evening. My recollection was that James didn't look up her phone number on the website; he knew it by heart. But still, it could be there.
    What had James done to get to the private part of the website? He had gone to a certain page and entered a password. That page wouldn't be in the index but now I could remember James entering the Tartan URL and the word "private."
    I typed in the Tartan URL followed by a slash and "private." The page I remembered seeing came up, containing a place to enter a password. What was