The Eyes of Darkness

Golden Pyramid Hotel, waited for her.

She stopped first at the booth next to Mainway’s. Joel Bandiri was with Eva, his wife of eight years, and two of their friends. Eva was twenty-nine, seventeen years younger than Joel, and at five foot eight, she was also four inches taller than he was. She was an ex-showgirl, blond, willowy, delicately beautiful. She gently squeezed Tina’s hand. “Don’t worry. You’re too good to fail.”

“We got a hit, kid,” Joel assured Tina once more.

In the next semicircular booth, Charles Mainway greeted Tina with a warm smile. Mainway carried and held himself as if he were an aristocrat, and his mane of silver hair and his clear blue eyes contributed to the image he wished to project. However, his features were large, square, and utterly without evidence of patrician blood, and even after the mellowing influences of elocution teachers, his naturally low, gravelly voice belied his origins in a rough Brooklyn neighborhood.

As Tina slid into the booth beside Mainway, a tuxedoed captain appeared and filled her glass with Dom Perignon.

Helen Mainway, Charlie’s wife, sat at his left side. Helen was by nature everything that poor Charlie struggled to be: impeccably well-mannered, sophisticated, graceful, at ease and confident in any situation. She was tall, slender, striking, fifty-five years old but able to pass for a well-preserved forty.

“Tina, my dear, I want you to meet a friend of ours,” Helen said, indicating the fourth person in the booth. “This is Elliot Stryker. Elliot, this lovely young lady is Christina Evans, the guiding hand behind Magyck!”

“One of two guiding hands,” Tina said. “Joel Bandiri is more responsible for the show than I am — especially if it’s a flop.”

Stryker laughed. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Evans.”

“Just plain Tina,” she said.

“And I’m just plain Elliot.”

He was a rugged, good-looking man, neither big nor small, about forty. His dark eyes were deeply set, quick, marked by intelligence and amusement.

“Elliot’s my attorney,” Charlie Mainway said.

“Oh,” Tina said, “I thought Harry Simpson—”

“Harry’s a hotel attorney. Elliot handles my private affairs.”

“And handles them very well,” Helen said. “Tina, if you need an attorney, this is the best in Las Vegas.”

To Tina, Stryker said, “But if it’s flattery you need — and I’m sure you already get a lot of it, lovely as you are — no one in Vegas can flatter with more charm and style than Helen.”

“You see what he just did?” Helen asked Tina, clapping her hands with delight. “In one sentence he managed to flatter you, flatter me, and impress all of us with his modesty. You see what a wonderful attorney he is?”

“Imagine him arguing a point in court,” Charlie said.

“A very smooth character indeed,” Helen said.

Stryker winked at Tina. “Smooth as I might be, I’m no match for these two.”

They made pleasant small talk for the next fifteen minutes, and none of it had to do with Magyck! Tina was aware that they were trying to take her mind off the show, and she appreciated their effort.

Of course no amount of amusing talk, no quantity of icy Dom Perignon could render her unaware of the excitement that was building in the showroom as curtain time drew near. Minute by minute the cloud of cigarette smoke overhead thickened. Waitresses, waiters, and captains rushed back and forth to fill the drink orders before the show began. The roar of conversation grew louder as the sounds ticked away, and the quality of the roar became more frenetic, gayer, and more often punctuated with laughter.

Somehow, even though her attention was partly on the mood of the crowd, partly on Helen and Charlie Mainway, Tina was nevertheless aware of Elliot Stryker’s reaction to her. He made no great show of being more than ordinarily interested in her, but the attraction she held for him was evident in his eyes. Beneath his cordial, witty, slightly cool exterior, his secret response was that of a healthy male animal, and her awareness of it was more instinctual than intellectual, like a mare’s response to the stallion’s first faint stirrings of desire.

At least a year and a half, maybe two years, had passed since a man had looked at her in quite that fashion. Or perhaps this was the first time in all those months that she had been aware of being the object of such interest. Fighting with Michael, coping with the shock of separation and divorce, grieving for Danny, and putting together the show with Joel Bandiri had filled her days and nights, so she’d had no chance to think of romance.

Responding to the unspoken need in Elliot’s eyes with a need of her own, she was suddenly warm.

She thought: My God, I’ve been letting myself dry up! How could I have forgotten this!

Now that she had spent more than a year grieving for her broken marriage and for her lost son, now that Magyck! was almost behind her, she would have time to be a woman again. She would make time.

Time for Elliot Stryker? She wasn’t sure. No reason to be in a hurry to make up for lost pleasures. She shouldn’t jump at the first man who wanted her. Surely that wasn’t the smart thing to do. On the other hand, he was handsome, and in his face was an appealing gentleness. She had to admit that he sparked the same feelings in her that she apparently enflamed in him.

The evening was turning out to be even more interesting than she had expected.

Chapter Five

Vivienne Neddler parked her vintage 1955 Nash Rambler at the curb in front of the Evans house, being careful not to scrape the whitewalls. The car was immaculate, in better shape than most new cars these days. In a world of planned obsolescence, Vivienne took pleasure in getting long, full use out of everything that she bought, whether it was a toaster or an automobile. She enjoyed making things last.

She had lasted quite a while herself. She was seventy, still in excellent health, a short sturdy woman with the sweet face of a Botticelli Madonna and the no-nonsense walk of an army sergeant.

She got out of the car and, carrying a purse the size of a small suitcase, marched up the walk toward the house, angling away from the front door and past the garage.

The sulfur-yellow light from the street lamps failed to reach all the way across the lawn. Beside the front walkway and then along the side of the house, low-voltage landscape lighting revealed the path.

Oleander bushes rustled in the breeze. Overhead, palm fronds scraped softly against one another.

As Vivienne reached the back of the house, the crescent moon slid out from behind one of the few thin clouds, like a scimitar being drawn from a scabbard, and the pale shadows of palms and melaleucas shivered on the lunar-silvered concrete patio.

Vivienne let herself in through the kitchen door. She’d been cleaning for Tina Evans for two years, and she had been entrusted with a key nearly that long.

The house was silent except for the softly humming refrigerator.

Vivienne began work in the kitchen. She wiped the counters and the appliances, sponged off the slats of the Levolor blinds, and mopped the Mexican-tile floor. She did a first-rate job. She believed in the moral value of hard work, and she always gave her employers their money’s worth.

She usually worked during the day, not at night. This afternoon, however, she’d been playing a pair of lucky slot machines at the Mirage Hotel, and she hadn’t wanted to walk away from them while they were paying off so generously. Some people for whom she cleaned house insisted that she keep regularly scheduled appointments, and they did a slow burn if she showed up more than a few minutes late. But Tina Evans was sympathetic; she knew how important the slot machines were to Vivienne, and she wasn’t upset if Vivienne occasionally had to reschedule her visit.

Vivienne was a nickel duchess. That was the term by which casino employees still referred to local, elderly