The Eyes of Darkness

Chapter Fourteen

Elliot Stryker lived in a large, pleasant, contemporary house overlooking the golf course at the Las Vegas Country Club. The rooms were warm, inviting, decorated in earth tones, with J. Robert Scott furniture complemented by a few antique pieces, and richly textured Edward Fields carpets. He owned a fine collection of paintings by Eyvind Earle, Jason Williamson, Larry W. Dyke, Charlotte Armstrong, Carl J. Smith, and other artists who made their homes in the western United States and who usually took their subject matter from either the old or the new West.

As he showed her through the house, he was eager to hear her reaction to it, and she didn’t make him wait long.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Stunning. Who was your interior decorator?”

“You’re looking at him.”

“Really?”

“When I was poor, I looked forward to the day when I’d have a lovely home full of beautiful things, all arranged by the very best interior decorator. Then, when I had the money, I didn’t want some stranger furnishing it for me. I wanted to have all the fun myself. Nancy, my late wife, and I decorated our first home. The project became a vocation for her, and I spent nearly as much time on it as I did on my legal practice. The two of us haunted furniture stores from Vegas to Los Angeles to San Francisco, antique shops, galleries, everything from flea markets to the most expensive stores we could find. We had a damn good time. And when she died… I discovered I couldn’t learn to cope with the loss if I stayed in a place that was so crowded with memories of her. For five or six months I was an emotional wreck because every object in the house reminded me of Nancy. Finally I took a few mementos, a dozen pieces by which I’ll always remember her, and I moved out, sold the house, bought this one, and started decorating all over again.”

“I didn’t realize you’d lost your wife,” Tina said. “I mean, I thought it must have been a divorce or something.”

“She passed away three years ago.”

“What happened?”

“Cancer.”

“I’m so sorry, Elliot.”

“At least it was fast. Pancreatic cancer, exceedingly virulent. She was gone two months after they diagnosed it.”

“Were you married long?”

“Twelve years.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Twelve years leaves a big hole in the heart.”

He realized they had even more in common than he had thought. “That’s right. You had Danny for nearly twelve years.”

“With me, of course, it’s only been little more than a year since I’ve been alone. With you, it’s been three years. Maybe you can tell me…”

“What?”

“Does it ever stop?” she asked.

“The hurting?”

“Yes.”

“So far it hasn’t. Maybe it will after four years. Or five. Or ten. It doesn’t hurt as bad now as it once did. And the ache isn’t constant anymore. But still there are moments when…”

He showed her through the rest of the house, which she wanted to see. Her ability to create a stylish stage show was not a fluke; she had taste and a sharp eye that instantly knew the difference between prettiness and genuine beauty, between cleverness and art. He enjoyed discussing antiques and paintings with her, and an hour passed in what seemed to be only ten minutes.

The tour ended in the enormous kitchen, which boasted a copper ceiling, a Santa Fe tile floor, and restaurant-quality equipment. She checked the walk-in cooler, inspected the yard-square grill, the griddle, the two Wolf ranges, the microwave, and the array of labor-saving appliances. “You’ve spent a small fortune here. I guess your law practice isn’t just another Vegas divorce mill.”

Elliot grinned. “I’m one of the founding partners of Stryker, West, Dwyer, Coffey, and Nichols. We’re one of the largest law firms in town. I can’t take a whole lot of credit for that. We were lucky. We were in the right place at the right time. Owen West and I opened for business in a cheap storefront office twelve years ago, right at the start of the biggest boom this town has ever seen. We represented some people no one else would touch, entrepreneurs who had a lot of good ideas but not much money for start-up legal fees. Some of our clients made smart moves and were carried right to the top by the explosive growth of the gaming industry and the Vegas real- estate market, and we just sort of shot up there along with them, hanging on to their coattails.”

“Interesting,” Tina said.

“It is?”

“You are.”

“I am?”

“You’re so modest about having built a splendid law practice, yet you’re an egomaniac when it comes to your cooking.”

He laughed. “That’s because I’m a better cook than attorney. Listen, why don’t you mix us a couple of drinks while I change out of this suit. I’ll be back in five minutes, and then you’ll see how a true culinary genius operates.”

“If it doesn’t work out, we can always jump in the car and go to McDonald’s for a hamburger.”

“Philistine.”

“Their hamburgers are hard to beat.”

“I’ll make you eat crow.”

“How do you cook it?”

“Very funny.”

“Well, if you cook it very funny, I don’t know if I want to eat it.”

“If I did cook crow,” he said, “it would be delicious. You would eat every scrap of it, lick your fingers, and beg for more.”

Her smile was so lovely that he could have stood there all evening, just staring at the sweet curve of her lips.

* * *

Elliot was amused by the effect that Tina had on him. He could not remember ever having been half so clumsy in the kitchen as he was this evening. He dropped spoons. He knocked over cans and bottles of spices. He forgot to watch a pot, and it boiled over. He made a mistake blending the salad dressing and had to begin again from scratch. She flustered him, and he loved it.

“Elliot, are you sure you aren’t feeling those cognacs we had at my office?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then the drink you’ve been sipping on here.”

“No. This is just my kitchen style.”

“Spilling things is your style?”

“It gives the kitchen a pleasant used look.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to McDonald’s?”

“Do they bother to give their kitchen a pleasant used look?”

“They not only have good hamburgers—”

“Their hamburgers have a pleasant used look.”

“—their French fries are terrific.”

“So I spill things,” he said. “A cook doesn’t have to be graceful to be a good cook.”