Then she said, “You already run a successful business turning over houses.”

“Flipping houses,” I said. “And I’m just the paymaster. Jimmy and Carlos do the heavy lifting. Besides, they’re both moving into other things. Jimmy’s enrolled at Wayne State in electrical engineering, and Carlos has a running start on a heating-and-cooling business in Windsor.”

“And of course you’re funding both.” Elena issued the kind of sigh that only godmothers seem capable of, one that speaks leather-bound volumes of profound disappointment. It wasn’t that Elena disapproved of the way I spent my money. It was simply that she feared I might someday be living out of the trunk of my car, eating Lucky Charms from the box and waiting for a nice spring rain so I could shower.

“A fool and his money are soon parted,” my father used to say as he handed me my dollar-a-week allowance. “Don’t be that brand of fool, son.”

I’ve tried not to be.

Especially since my wealth came at the cost of a portion of my soul.

“Maybe it’s just time, Elena.”

With sad resignation, Elena nodded.

“What concerns me is why this Mr. Sloane would feel the need to introduce dirt on Mr. Ochoa as leverage so early in the negotiating.”

“I very much doubt there’s any ‘negotiating,’” Elena said. “More of a hostile takeover strategy. Maybe he thinks Mexicans know nothing about business and are easily intimidated.”

“He’d be wrong on both counts,” I said.

We were quiet for a moment. Then Elena said, “Maybe you could find out who this Mr. Sloane is? If he really represents Vic Bronson? Maybe reason with him? You’re very good at those things, Octavio.”

I smiled at Elena. “I don’t much like being handled. Even by exceptionally smart, extraordinarily beautiful, immensely savvy women. Are you trying to handle me, Elena?”

“Maybe,” she said with a quick, demur smile and an ingenue’s innocent shrug. “Un poco. Tatina seems to have had some success ‘handling’ you.”

“Ouch.”

When we stopped in front of my house, I said, “I’ll see what I can shake loose about this Mr. Sloane. But in all honesty, it sounds like this guy takes a lot of pride and extreme caution in being the ghost of an agent provocateur. I’m not very good at finding ghosts.”

“Maybe not,” Elena said. “However, it seems they’re very good at finding you.”

Before getting out of her miniature spaceship, I asked if Tomás was home. Elena said he might be by then, but the last she knew he had gone to the post office to see if there were any new collectable postage stamps he could put away for their granddaughter, June. He’d been collecting full sheets of special stamps since June’s birth six years earlier.