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 in 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.