The eyes of darkness

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 women whose social lives revolved around an obsessive interest in one-armed bandits, even though the nickel machines were pretty much ancient history. Nickel duchesses always played the cheap slot machines - nickels and dimes in the old days, now quarters - never the dollar- or five-dollar slots. They pulled the handles for hours at a time, often making a twenty-dollar bill last a long afternoon. Their gaming philosophy was simple: It doesn't matter if you win or lose, as long as you stay in the game. With that attitude plus a few money-management skills, they were able to hang on longer than most slot players who plunged at the dollar machines after getting nowhere with quarters, and because of their patience and perseverance, the duchesses won more jackpots than did the tide of tourists that ebbed and flowed around them. Even these days, when most machines could be played with electronically validated value cards, the nickel duchesses wore black gloves to keep their hands from becoming filthy after hours of handling coins and pulling levers; they always sat on stools while they played, and they remembered to alternate hands when operating the machines in order not to strain the muscles of one arm, and they carried bottles of liniment just in case.

The duchesses, who for the most part were widows and spinsters, often ate lunch and dinner together. They cheered one another on those rare occasions when one of them hit a really large jackpot; and when one of them died, the others went to the funeral en masse. Together they formed an odd but solid community, with a satisfying sense of belonging. In a country that worshiped youth, most elderly Americans devoutly desired to discover a place where they belonged, but unlike the duchesses, many of them never found it.