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.