Gradually, however, as she and Elliot went through the standard rites of courtship, the indirect sexual thrusts and parries of a budding relationship, albeit at an accelerated pace, the familiarity of the games reassured her. Amazing that it should be so familiar. Maybe it really was a bit like riding a bicycle.
After dinner they adjourned to the den, where Elliot built a fire in the black-granite fireplace. Although winter days in the desert were often as warm as springtime elsewhere, winter nights were always cool, sometimes downright bitter. With a chilly night wind moaning at the windows and howling incessantly under the eaves, the blazing fire was welcome.
Tina kicked off her shoes.
They sat side by side on the sofa in front of the fireplace, watching the flames and the occasional bursts of orange sparks, listening to music, and talking, talking, talking. Tina felt as if they had talked without pause all evening, speaking with quiet urgency, as if each had a vast quantity of earthshakingly important information that he must pass on to the other before they parted. The more they talked, the more they found in common. As an hour passed in front of the fire, and then another hour, Tina discovered that she liked Elliot Stryker more with each new thing she learned about him.
She never was sure who initiated the first kiss. He may have leaned toward her, or perhaps she tilted toward him. But before she realized what was happening, their lips met softly, briefly. Then again. And a third time. And then he began planting small kisses on her forehead, on her eyes, on her cheeks, her nose, the corners of her mouth, her chin. He kissed her ears, her eyes again, and left a chain of kisses along her neck, and when at last he returned to her mouth, he kissed her more deeply than before, and she responded at once, opening her mouth to him.
His hands moved over her, testing the firmness and resilience of her, and she touched him too, gently squeezing his shoulders, his arms, the hard muscles of his back. Nothing had ever felt better to her than he felt at that moment.
As if drifting in a dream, they left the den and went into the bedroom. He switched on a small lamp that stood upon the dresser, and he turned down the sheets.
During the minute that he was away from her, she was afraid the spell was broken. But when he returned, she kissed him tentatively, found that nothing had changed, and pressed against him once more.
She felt as if the two of them had been here, like this, locked in an embrace, many times before.
“We hardly know each other,” she said.
“Is that the way you feel?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.”
“I know you so well.”
“For ages.”
“Yet it’s only been two days.”
“Too fast?” he asked.
“What do you think?”
“Not too fast for me.”
“Not too fast at all,” she agreed.
“Sure?”
“Positive.”
“You’re lovely.”
“Love me.”
He was not a particularly large man, but he picked her up in his arms as if she were a child.
She clung to him. She saw a longing and a need in his dark eyes, a powerful wanting that was only partly sex, and she knew the same need to be loved and valued must be in her eyes for him to see.
He carried her to the bed, put her down, and urged her to lie back. Without haste, with a breathless anticipation that lit up his face, he undressed her.
He quickly stripped off his own clothes and joined her on the bed, took her in his arms.
He explored her body slowly, deliberately, first with his eyes, then with his loving hands, then with his lips and tongue.
Tina realized that she had been wrong to think that celibacy should be a part of her period of mourning. Just the opposite was true. Good, healthy lovemaking with a man who cared for her would have helped her recover much faster than she had done, for sex was the antithesis of death, a joyous celebration of life, a denial of the tomb’s existence.
The amber light molded to his muscles.
He lowered his face to hers. They kissed.
She slid a hand between them, squeezed and stroked him.
She felt wanton, shameless, insatiable.
As he entered her, she let her hands travel over his body, along his lean flanks.
“You’re so sweet,” he said.
He began the age-old rhythm of love. For a long, long time, they forgot that death existed, and they explored the delicious, silken surfaces of love, and it seemed to them, in those shining hours, that they would both live forever.
THURSDAY JANUARY 1
Chapter Fifteen
Tina stayed the night with Elliot, and he realized that he had forgotten how pleasant it could be to share his bed with someone for whom he truly cared. He’d had other women in this bed during the past two years, and a few had stayed the night, but not one of those other lovers had made him feel content merely by the fact of her presence, as Tina did. With her, sex was a delightful bonus, a lagniappe, but it wasn’t the main reason he wanted her beside him. She was an excellent lover — silken, smooth, and uninhibited in the pursuit of her own pleasure — but she was also vulnerable and kind. The vague, shadowy shape of her under the covers, in the darkness, was a talisman to ward off loneliness.
Eventually he fell asleep, but at four o’clock in the morning, he was awakened by cries of distress.
She sat straight up, the sheets knotted in her fists, catapulted out of a nightmare. She was quaking, gasping about a man dressed all in black, the monstrous figure from her dream.
Elliot switched on the bedside lamp to prove to her that they were alone in the room.
She had told him about the dreams, but he hadn’t realized, until now, how terrible they were. The exhumation of Danny’s body would be good for her, regardless of the horror that she might have to confront when the coffin lid was raised. If seeing the remains would put an end to these bloodcurdling nightmares, she would gain an advantage from the grim experience.
He switched off the bedside lamp and persuaded her to lie down again. He held her until she stopped shuddering.
To his surprise, her fear rapidly changed to desire. They fell easily into the pace and rhythm that had earlier best pleased them. Afterward, they slipped into sleep again.
* * *
Over breakfast he asked her to go with him to the afternoon party at which he was going to corner Judge Kennebeck to ask about the exhumation. But Tina wanted to go back to her place and clean out Danny’s room. She felt up to the challenge now, and she intended to finish the task before she lost her nerve again.
“We’ll see each other tonight, won’t we?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll cook for you again.”
She smiled lasciviously. “In what sense do you mean that?”
She rose out of her chair, leaned across the table, kissed him.
The smell of her, the vibrant blue of her eyes, the feel of her supple skin as he put a hand to her face — those things generated waves of affection and longing within him.
He walked her to her Honda in the driveway and leaned in the window after she was behind the wheel, delaying her for another fifteen minutes while he planned, to her satisfaction, every dish of this evening’s dinner.
When at last she drove away, he watched her car until it turned the corner and disappeared, and when she was gone he knew why he had not wanted to let her go. He’d been trying to postpone her departure because he was afraid that he would never see her again after she drove off.
He had no rational reason to entertain such dark thoughts. Certainly, the unknown person who was harassing Tina might have violent intentions. But Tina herself didn’t think there was any serious danger, and Elliot tended to agree with her. The malicious tormentor wanted her to suffer mental anguish and spiritual pain; but he didn’t want her to die, because that would spoil his fun.
The fear Elliot felt at her departure was purely superstitious
. He was convinced that, with her arrival on the scene, he had been granted too much happiness, too fast, too soon, too easily. He had an awful suspicion that fate was setting him up for another hard fall. He was afraid Tina Evans would be taken away from him just as Nancy had been.
Unsuccessfully trying to shrug off the grim premonition, he went into the house.
He spent an hour and a half in his library, paging through legal casebooks, boning up on precedents for the exhumation of a body that, as the court had put it, “was to be disinterred in the absence of a pressing legal need, solely for humane reasons, in consideration of certain survivors of the deceased.” Elliot didn’t think Harold Kennebeck would give him any trouble, and he didn’t expect the judge to request a list of precedents for something as relatively simple and harmless as reopening Danny’s grave, but he intended to be well prepared. In Army Intelligence, Kennebeck had been a fair but always demanding superior officer.
At one o’clock Elliot drove his silver Mercedes S600 sports coupe to the New Year’s Day party on Sunrise Mountain. The sky was cerulean blue and clear, and he wished he had time to take the Cessna up for a few hours. This was perfect weather for flying, one of those crystalline days when being above the earth would make him feel clean and free.
On Sunday, when the exhumation was out of the way, maybe he would fly Tina to Arizona or to Los Angeles for the day.
On Sunrise Mountain most of the big, expensive houses featured natural landscaping — which meant rocks, colored stones, and artfully arranged cacti instead of grass, shrubs, and trees — in acknowledgment that man’s grip on this portion of the desert was new and perhaps tenuous. At night the view of Las Vegas from the mountainside was undeniably spectacular, but Elliot couldn’t understand what other reasons anyone could possibly have for choosing to live here rather than in the city’s older, greener neighborhoods. On hot summer days these barren, sandy slopes seemed godforsaken, and they would not be made lush and green for another ten years at least. On the brown hills, the huge houses thrust like the bleak monuments of an ancient, dead religion. The residents of Sunrise Mountain could expect to share their patios and decks and pool aprons with occasional visiting scorpions, tarantulas, and rattlesnakes. On windy days the dust was as thick as fog, and it pushed its dirty little cat feet under doors, around windows, and through attic vents.
The party was at a large Tuscan-style house, halfway up the slopes. A three-sided, fan-shaped tent had been erected on the back lawn, to one side of the sixty-foot pool, with the open side facing the house. An eighteen-piece orchestra performed at the rear of the gaily striped canvas structure. Approximately two hundred guests danced or milled about behind the house, and another hundred partied within its twenty rooms.
Many of the faces were familiar to Elliot. Half of the guests were attorneys and their wives. Although a judicial purist might have disapproved, prosecutors and public defenders and tax attorneys and criminal lawyers and corporate counsel were mingling and getting pleasantly drunk with the judges before whom they argued cases most every week. Las Vegas had a judicial style and standards of its own.
After twenty minutes of diligent mixing, Elliot found Harold Kennebeck. The judge was a tall, dour-looking man with curly white hair. He greeted Elliot warmly, and they talked about their mutual interests: cooking, flying, and river-rafting.
Elliot didn’t want to ask Kennebeck for a favor within hearing of a dozen lawyers, and today there was nowhere in the house where they could be assured of privacy. They went outside and strolled down the street, past the partygoers’ cars, which ran the gamut from Rolls-Royces to Range Rovers.
Kennebeck listened with interest to Elliot’s unofficial feeler about the chances of getting Danny’s grave reopened. Elliot didn’t tell the judge about the malicious prankster, for that seemed like an unnecessary complication; he still believed that once the fact of Danny’s death was established by the exhumation, the quickest and surest way of dealing with the harassment was to hire a first-rate firm of private investigators to track down the perpetrator. Now, for the judge’s benefit, and to explain why an exhumation had suddenly become such a vital matter, Elliot exaggerated the anguish and confusion that Tina had undergone as a direct consequence of never having seen the body of her child.
Harry Kennebeck had a poker face that also looked like a poker — hard and plain, dark — and it was difficult to tell if he had any sympathy whatsoever for Tina’s plight. As he and Elliot ambled along the sun-splashed street, Kennebeck mulled over the problem in silence for almost a minute. At last he said, “What about the father?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.”
“Ah,” Kennebeck said.
“The father will protest.”
“You’re positive?”
“Yes.”
“On religious grounds?”
“No. There was a bitter divorce shortly before the boy died. Michael Evans hates his ex-wife.”
“Ah. So he’d contest the exhumation for no other reason but to cause her grief?”
“That’s right,” Elliot said. “No other reason. No legitimate reason.”
“Still, I’ve got to consider the father’s wishes.”
“As long as there aren’t any religious objections, the law requires the permission of only one parent in a case like this,” Elliot said.
“Nevertheless, I have a duty to protect everyone’s interests in the matter.”
“If the father has a chance to protest,” Elliot said, “we’ll probably get involved in a knock-down-drag-out legal battle. It’ll tie up a hell of a lot of the court’s time.”
“I wouldn’t like that,” Kennebeck said thoughtfully. “The court’s calendar is overloaded now. We simply don’t have enough judges or enough money. The system’s creaking and groaning.”
“And when the dust finally settled,” Elliot said, “my client would win the right to exhume the body anyway.”
“Probably.”
“Definitely,” Elliot said. “Her husband would be engaged in nothing more than spiteful obstructionism. In the process of trying to hurt his ex-wife, he’d waste several days of the court’s time, and the end result would be exactly the same as if he’d never been given a chance to protest.”
“Ah,” Kennebeck said, frowning slightly.
They stopped at the end of the next block. Kennebeck stood with his eyes closed and his face turned up to the warm winter sun.
At last the judge said, “You’re asking me to cut corners.”
“Not really. Simply issue an exhumation order on the mother’s request. The law allows it.”
“You want the order right away, I assume.”
“Tomorrow morning if possible.”
“And you’ll have the grave reopened by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Saturday at the latest.”
“Before the father can get a restraining order from another judge,” Kennebeck said.
“If there’s no hitch, maybe the father won’t ever find out about the exhumation.”
“Ah.”
“Everyone benefits. The court saves a lot of time and effort. My client is spared a great deal of unnecessary anguish. And her husband saves a bundle in attorney’s fees that he’d just be throwing away in a hopeless attempt to stop us.”
“Ah,” Kennebeck said.
In silence they walked back to the house, where the party was getting louder by the minute.
In the middle of the block, Kennebeck finally said, “I’ll have to chew on it for a while, Elliot.”
“How long?”
“Ah. Will you be here all afternoon?”
“I doubt it. With all these attorneys, it’s sort of a busman’s holiday, don’t you think?”
“Going home from here?” Kennebeck asked.
“Yes.”
“Ah.” He pushed a curly strand of white hair back from his forehead. “Then I’ll call you at home this evening.”
“Can you at least tell me how you’re leaning?�
��
“In your favor, I suppose.”
“You know I’m right, Harry.”
Kennebeck smiled. “I’ve heard your argument, counselor. Let’s leave it at that for now. I’ll call you this evening, after I’ve had a chance to think about it.”
At least Kennebeck hadn’t refused the request; nevertheless, Elliot had expected a quicker and more satisfying response. He wasn’t asking the judge for much of a favor. Besides, the two of them went back a long way indeed. He knew that Kennebeck was a cautious man, but usually not excessively so. The judge’s hesitation in this relatively simple matter struck Elliot as odd, but he said nothing more. He had no choice but to wait for Kennebeck’s call.
As they approached the house, they talked about the delights of pasta served with a thin, light sauce of olive oil, garlic, and sweet basil.
* * *
Elliot remained at the party only two hours. There were too many attorneys and not enough civilians to make the bash interesting. Everywhere he went, he heard talk about torts, writs, briefs, suits, countersuits, motions for continuation, appeals, plea bargaining, and the latest tax shelters. The conversations were like those in which he was involved at work, eight or ten hours a day, five days a week, and he didn’t intend to spend a holiday nattering about the same damned things.
By four o’clock he was home again, working in the kitchen. Tina was supposed to arrive at six. He had a few chores to finish before she came, so they wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time doing galley labor as they had done last night. Standing at the sink, he peeled and chopped a small onion, cleaned six stalks of celery, and peeled several slender carrots. He had just opened a bottle of balsamic vinegar and poured four ounces into a measuring cup when he heard movement behind him.
The Eyes of Darkness Page 11