Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  “I love your apartment,” Serena told her. It was small but warm, with an oldfashioned feel, nothing metal or modern. The wood furniture looked antique but beautifully kept, and Serena wondered if Claire had done the restoration herself. There were collectibles everywhere, inlaid wooden boxes, glass angels, and stone animals.

  “Can I get you some wine?” Claire asked.

  “No, I don’t drink,” Serena said. She added deliberately, “Once I start, I can’t stop.”

  “I understand. I’m sorry. How about some mineral water?”

  “Sure.”

  Claire disappeared into the kitchen, and Serena sat on the love seat. She knew she was playing a dangerous game. She was volunteering information, spilling secrets that gave up who she was. That was her strategy. Claire liked her. If she could balance their relationship on a high wire, close but not too close, Claire might do what she wanted. Call Boni.

  But. she knew that high-wire artists sometimes took a long fall. She remembered what a divorced friend had told her about having an affair. You want to see how close you can get to the line without going across, and then one day you look back and realize the line is half a mile behind you. Serena wondered if she had made a mistake, believing she could get what she wanted from Claire and still hold on to herself.

  Claire came back and offered her a champagne flute, filled with bubbling water. She had also refilled her own wineglass. Claire sat back down on the sofa and pulled her legs underneath her. She was relaxed and comfortable in her body, like a cat. She wore worn-out blue jeans and a black satin V-neck top. Her feet were bare.

  “I owe you an apology,” Claire told her.

  “Oh?”

  “For coming on to you like I did. It’s not like me to be so forward. I must have seemed like a shark, and that’s not me.”

  Serena wondered if that was true or if this was just phase two of the seduction. “You caught me unprepared, that’s all.”

  “I’m sorry. Blame it on my romantic imagination. I thought there was something between us.” All the time she was talking, her blue eyes never left Serena and never even seemed to blink. Her voice, too, was mellow and inviting, like warm sake that went down smooth and washed away your defenses.

  The ball was in her court, Serena knew. To say something. To deny it. Instead, she danced closer to the line. “You didn’t imagine it.”

  Claire didn’t look surprised. She took a sip of wine. “I’m glad.”

  “But nothing will ever happen between us,” Serena added.

  “No?” Claire asked, giving her a mock pout.

  “No.”

  “Too bad.” She studied Serena thoughtfully, drumming her wineglass idly with her fingers. “Who was she?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The girl I remind you of,” Claire said with a knowing smile. “Somewhere in your past, there has to be a girl. I don’t flatter myself that I’m so stunning that straight women suddenly climb the fence when they see me.”

  “Okay, yes, there was someone else,” Serena admitted. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  Serena took a breath. This was what she wanted, the chance to draw Claire into her story, build a kinship between them-but it was easy to lose track of where her strategy ended and where her own catharsis began. She had wanted to talk about Deidre to someone for years, but she never had. Not to her therapist. Not even to Jonny. She had told him a little bit, but never the whole truth.

  Serena put down her champagne glass, and the words spilled out. The memories were vivid, despite twenty years in between. She told Claire about meeting Deidre, who was two years older, at a diner in Phoenix where they were both waitresses. As the abuse from her mother and the drug dealer named Blue Dog became more horrific, Deidre became her lifeline, giving her a place where she could escape. Deidre held her hand when she got the abortion, an ugly one, far too late. They had talked about going back and killing them, her mother and Blue Dog, but freedom sounded better. Escape, go, get away. The two of them ran to Vegas and lived together, working and partying. They were best friends, and eventually more than friends.

  Lovers. She had found ways to rationalize it over the years or pretend it was something other than what it was, but they were lovers. Serena realized, as she was telling the story, that she wanted to feel some of that sexual power again. She wanted to be the one to arouse Claire, and she knew, watching Claire shift her limbs on the sofa, that she was turning her on. She could have this woman. She could make Claire do anything to her. She could get back anything that she wanted.

  It was a heady sensation, as if she were drinking again.

  Even when she told her about leaving Deidre, and the destructive cycle that led to Deidre’s death, she no longer felt close to tears, as she usually did. She was strong, because she had to be.

  “That’s a lot of guilt to carry around,” Claire said, when Serena was finished. “But I forgot, you’re tough.”

  “I was cruel.”

  “Do you think you can make it up to Deidre by making love to me?” Claire asked. She was too smart to be fooled. “Because you can’t. I don’t want that”

  “What do you want?” Serena asked.

  Claire didn’t miss a beat. “I want you to fall in love with me.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Serena said, although the fact that Claire could say it so calmly almost took her breath away. “I wasn’t in love with Deidre. We were lovers, but I was never in love with her.”

  “I’m not Deidre.” Claire tossed her strawberry blond hair back, but it fell across her face anyway, covering one eye. “What do you want, Serena?”

  “I want you to get me and Jonny in to see your father,” Serena said. “That’s what I want. That’s all I want.”

  Claire looked like she had known that all along. “What if I do? Would you spend the night with me?”

  Serena thought about Jonny and poker. She kept a stone face, even though a flutter of wind would have knocked her off the high wire and into Claire’s arms. “No. Besides, you said that’s not what you want.”

  “I think maybe you’re not so tough,” Claire said. “I think if I kissed you now, we’d end up making love. You’re hoping I don’t try to find out.”

  They were playing a game of chicken, and Serena tried to steel herself and not blink.

  “I want you to call Boni,” Serena repeated.

  Claire reached languidly down to the coffee table, and Serena saw a cell phone there. Claire flipped it open, tossed her hair again, and looked at Serena long and hard. “Do you know what a big deal this is for me?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You’ll never know what he did to me. How he betrayed me.”

  “I understand. Maybe someday you’ll tell me.”

  Claire punched one button on the phone. She still had Boni on speed dial. It was after midnight, but her father answered immediately. “It’s Claire,” she said, still staring at Serena on the opposite sofa. “I need you to do something for me.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  An express glass elevator-smoked windows, bulletproof glass-took them to the rooftop suite in the northernmost building of the Charlcombe Towers. To Boni’s lair.

  Stride thought about MJ as they shot upward, watching the earth recede below them at a dizzying speed. MJ had lived in the same complex as Boni Fisso and looked out on the same casino where his father’s life had been destroyed. Where Walker Lane ’s lover had died under the glow of the Sheherezade sign. Stride wondered if MJ had ever met Boni, if he had even a glimmer of the titanic conflict between Boni and his father. It was little wonder that Walker was so desperate for his son to move.

  He looked at Serena, who was quiet, staring out at the Strip. All the way home, listening to the hum of the Gulfstream’s engines, he had asked himself how he felt about her and Claire. He still didn’t know. He had half expected her to be gone, but she was in their bed, awake, when he arrived home in
the middle of the night. Without him asking, she had blurted out that nothing happened. Then she made love to him, as intensely and passionately as he could ever remember, and he couldn’t help wondering if some of her attraction to Claire was spilling over into their bed.

  Not that he was complaining about it right then.

  The elevator doors slid open.

  They stepped out into a small, brightly lit foyer. A whitewashed wall blocked the way, with mammoth double oak doors in the center. The floor, too, was white marble, shiny and spotless. Stride noted a total of four original paintings lining the wall on either side of the door, all of them done by realist painter Andrew Wyeth, from the Helga series. He guessed it was meant to soothe visitors while they waited for admittance to the inner sanctum-and perhaps to send the message that Boni was about class, not just money. If Steve Wynn could put Picassos at the Bellagio, Boni could build a gallery, too.

  Stride had heard the stories about Boni, although it was hard to know which were true and which were spin. Like the rumor that he used to keep a rat, trained to chew the balls off casino cheats. Then he made the would-be thieves eat the droppings when the rat shit. Stride thought that one smelled like an urban legend. Or the story that half the politicians in the state had worked in his casinos when they were young and ambitious, and that Boni owned their souls. He figured that one was probably true.

  Rex Terrell had done a long profile of Boni in LV a year ago. Bonadetti Angelo Fisso had been born in New York in the mid-1920s. His father made pennies driving trucks in Manhattan but managed to send his oldest son, Boni, to Columbia (with help, it was said, from the mob bosses). With degrees in law and business, Boni emerged from Columbia smart, polished, and clean. He ducked the draft with a 70 percent hearing loss in one ear and, in the boom following World War II, began buying and selling businesses up and down the East Coast. The rumors clung to him that his stakes were funded by the mob and that Boni’s companies were a laundry service for blood money, but several generations of FBI agents had devoted a lot of taxpayer money to proving Boni was dirty and wound up with nothing but wrist slaps for little fish in Boni’s empire like Leo Rucci.

  Boni arrived in Las Vegas in 1955. He took over a series of low-roller casinos, added hotel rooms, lavish shows, and half-naked cocktail waitresses, and turned them into profit machines. He also nurtured an image as a grand benefactor, building hospitals, landscaping park land, and paying college tuition for the children of longtime casino employees. In public, he was a saint, always with a smile and a joke. The hard stuff went on behind the scenes. Bodies disappeared in the desert. Teeth got yanked, bones broken. The rat got fat, if you believed that kind of thing.

  The Sheherezade was Boni’s jewel. It was the first property he had built himself from the ground up, and when it opened in 1965, it attracted the top-line entertainers of the era, along with the Sands and the Desert Inn. Boni had already figured out what later generations of Vegas entrepreneurs discovered-that the city had to be always new, always reinventing itself. So Boni never let the Sheherezade get stale. He found new shows, new stars. Like Amira and Flame. He found new ways to shock and tempt people. And the money flowed.

  Stride had seen photos of Boni’s late wife, Claire’s mother, with whom he had a short and tempestuous relationship. Eva Belfort was a beautiful, aristocratic blonde, a distant cousin to French royalty. Marrying her gave Boni an aura of European style. The truth was, like everything else in Boni’s life, Eva was bought and paid for. Her family owned a château in the Loire valley and was about to lose it for back taxes when Boni, on a tour of the wine country, met Eva. The family soon became rich again, and Boni had his trophy bride. It must have killed her, Stride thought, a wealthy child of the French countryside forced to live in a sand-swept version of hell. According to Rex Terrell, Eva was a spitfire, and she and Boni had argued ferociously over Boni’s penchant for affairs with his dancers. Stride wondered if Eva knew about Amira.

  It didn’t really matter, though. Their marriage, Boni’s only marriage, lasted just three years. Eva had lived only a few months longer than Amira. She had died in childbirth, and Boni was left with his one child, Claire.

  He and Serena waited almost ten minutes in the foyer of Boni’s suite before the double doors suddenly opened with a click and swung silently inward. An attractive woman of about twenty-five, with pinned-up brunette hair and a tailored business suit, was there to greet them.

  “Detective Dial? Detective Stride? Please come in. We’re very sorry to keep you waiting.”

  She waved them into a lounge that seemed to stretch the length of a football field. The north wall was completely made of windows looking out on the Strip, with views to the mountains on the west and east.

  “Mr. Fisso will join you in just a moment,” she told them. “We have breakfast set up here, so please, help yourself.”

  She left them alone, disappearing through a door in a leather-clad wall that led to the rest of the suite. Stride eyed the buffet and realized he was hungry. The spread on the mahogany bureau could have served twenty people. He took a plate, spread cream cheese over half a bagel, and layered it with pink lox. He poured a glass of orange juice and did the same for Serena.

  The room, which had a rough western feel to it, featured cowboy artists like Remington. There was sculpture, too, with a rodeo motif. Stride had a hard time imagining Manhattanborn Boni Fisso in a cowboy hat. He was about to make a joke to Serena, then was glad he hadn’t when he realized that Boni Fisso himself had made a silent entrance into the room.

  Boni read his mind. “All men are cowboys at heart, Detective. Me, I’m an Italian cowboy. You’ve heard the term ‘spaghetti western’? That’s me.” He laughed, a loud, deep-throated bellow that echoed in the large room.

  He moved with remarkable grace and speed for a man in his eighties. He shook both their hands and maneuvered them toward the full-length windows, where he pointed with a sweep of his arms at the view. “Look at that city! God, what a place. You know what they say, every world-class city has a river running through it. Fuck ’em. We’ve got dust and yuccas and rattlesnakes running through ours. Only river here is money. I’ll take that over all the sewage and fish heads floating through the Missouri or the Hudson.”

  “You don’t miss the old days?” Stride asked him. “Everyone else from back then seems to think Vegas was better in the 1960s.”

  “Hell, no!” Boni exclaimed. “Sure, I wish I had the body and half the energy I did in those days. We all think that, right? I’ve lost a lot of friends, too. Everybody gets old. You know the saying. Tempus fuck-it. But that’s the beauty of this town. It’s always young. Bulldoze the past, and get on with it Magic is what you grew up with, Detective. I guarantee you, forty years from now, old people will be talking about how they miss Vegas in the 2000s.” Boni poured himself a glass of champagne from the buffet “Come on, you two, eat, eat. God, I sound like my grandmother.”

  There was no way around it. Boni was charming. Stride had to work to remind himself that the man wouldn’t think twice about ordering a homicide if it suited his purposes. He thought about Walker in the wheelchair, having been beaten nearly to death by Boni’s goons. About Amira and her crushed skull.

  Boni fixed him with sparkling blue eyes, and Stride thought that the man knew exactly what he was thinking. It was probably the same thing that everyone who came into this room and met the man for the first time thought.

  “Fill your plates, and then let’s sit down,” Boni told them. He took a red leather armchair for himself, and Stride noticed that it had been designed low to the ground, so that Boni’s feet lay flat on the floor. He was short, no more than five-foot-six. The chair itself was on a slight riser, higher than the sofas around it. His throne. Stride half expected a ruby ring to kiss.

  Boni was dressed all in black. He wore a turtleneck, a tailored ebony blazer, and creased black dress pants. His shoes were patent leather, shined to a mirror finish. He still looked very much like he did i
n the photos from decades ago, when he already had a balding crown of black hair. The hair was gray now, and his forehead was mottled with liver spots. He had sunken crescent moons under his eyes and a five o’clock shadow that a razor couldn’t scrape away. Despite his age, he was fit and strong, and his eyes were piercing and alert. He still had movie-star teeth.

  Assuming the movie was Jaws, Stride thought.

  “Mr. Fisso-” Serena began.

  “Oh, please. It’s Boni, Boni. Don’t make me feel so goddamn old.”

  Stride saw that Serena was uncomfortable being on a first-name basis with the man, but she struggled to spit out the name. “Boni, then. My name is-”

  Boni interrupted her again. “No need, no need. Serena Dial. You’re from Las Vegas by way of Phoenix, if my sources are correct.” His tone was light, but Stride had the feeling that Boni could have rattled off every detail of Serena’s past, maybe more than he could have done himself. “And you’re the new kid on the block,” he continued, turning to Stride. “From Minnesota? Lots of lakes there. I’d ask what the hell you’re doing in the desert, but that’s pretty obvious.”

  He winked at him and glanced at Serena, and it was clear that he knew all about their relationship. Stride wondered if it came from Sawhill.

  “I have to thank you,” Boni told Serena. “I haven’t talked to my daughter in years. It was good to hear her voice. Once upon a time, I thought she’d be living here, running my empire right beside me. Girl had a business sense like no one I’ve ever met. Hell, she must get it from her old man, right? I mean, Eva, her mother, she could cut you a new one, but her gift was spending money, not making it. No, my baby Claire, she’s the talented one in the family, I can’t hold a candle to her.”

  “Why are you estranged?” Serena asked.