The Gray Zone

A NOVEL

DAPHNA EDWARDS ZIMAN

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press
Austin, Texas
www.gbgpress.com

Copyright ©2011 Daphna Edwards Ziman

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

Distributed by Greenleaf Book Group LLC

For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Greenleaf Book Group LLC at PO Box 91869, Austin, TX 78709, 512.891.6100.

Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group LLC
Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group LLC
Cover photograph by Motty Reif

LCCN: 2011922462

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60832-231-2

Ebook Edition

This book is dedicated with all my love to my beautiful daughters,
Ashley Abriana Ziman and Michele Samantha Ziman.

“Go back to bed,” he commanded. “Don’t move an inch.” The timbre of his voice, deep with intensity, demanding obedience. The light from the hallway made it impossible for her to distinguish his features, but she remembered his form blocking the entire doorway, he appeared so big.

She covered her head with the blanket, knowing she would never forget the guttural sound that echoed in her ears.

An agonizing cry … A body crashing on the landing … Footsteps of someone running … Then silence. Broken by the sound of ambulance sirens.

The little girl rolled off the bed and crawled to the door, pushed it open. Her eyes pulled in some light from the hall window.

On the floor, a black puddle.

“Mama?” She reached out a finger and touched the liquid. It was warm and sticky. Her mind screamed, but her throat
was mute. A nightmare. But the blood was real. She inched forward and laid her head on her mother’s unmoving stomach.

Commotion. Paramedics. Pairs of white shoes. Needles penetrating her skin. A warm wave enveloping her. She was falling, falling down. Sleep, deep and lovely …

“Kelly? Kelly?”

Her body jerked slightly as she came back into the present.

“Kelly? Five minutes, honey. You’re on in five minutes.”

“Thanks, Candi. My mind was a thousand miles away, I guess!” Kelly said with a self-deprecating smile.

The ten o’clock show on Monday nights was usually dead, but from behind the curtain, Kelly could hear a lively, boozy murmur overlaid by the metallic trill of the betting machines. She took a deep breath and held it, closing her eyes. Her last performance. She scrolled through the next few hours in her mind, scene by scene, as if fast-forwarding through a DVD. Finish the show. Visit Porter at his suite at the Venetian. Say a quick good-bye. Then make a run for it. Her bags were in the car. Her kids were ready, as she instructed Betty, her usual nanny, when she called her before rehearsals. Only one person could complicate her plan, and she prayed, as she did every night, that this wouldn’t be the night he would show up.

The lights dimmed and the drummer tapped a syncopated beat. Kelly tugged at her wig and whispered to herself, “I am Marilyn. He can’t see me.” Taking a last look in the backstage mirror, she saw once again that the costume was perfect. A dark-brown beauty mark rode the crest of her Ferrari-red lips. A platinum blonde curl fell across her forehead. Her dress plunged between her breasts, slid around her hips, and dropped into a pool of red satin over her stiletto heels.

All of a sudden the curtain was drawn and Kelly moved into the spotlight, taking the mike in her black satin gloves. For a suspended
instant, the audience sat hushed as if mesmerized. She heard a woman’s voice murmur, “… looks just like Marilyn.”

Kelly was pleased by the effect. She began to sing, keeping her voice soft and sultry and training her eyes on the floor. For the first few bars of Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” she moved her hips just barely with the beat. Once her eyes had adjusted to the spotlight, she peered up through her false lashes and scanned the audience.

The usual. Salesmen, a few tourists, locals. The convention nerds were easy to spot, with plastic name tags hanging from their necks. Two women—ex-showgirls or hookers—sat at the end of the bar, chatting, their eyes following Kelly.

At the dark fringes of the audience, two men each sat alone. One was football-player huge, slumped back in his chair, appreciatively taking her in. A few tables away, white-haired and wearing golf clothes, the other man stared at her ravenously, like a dog on a chain eyeing a bone just out of reach.

Then Kelly ended the song, bowing low during the applause.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” she breathed into the microphone, glad the first number was over.

But as she straightened up, an icy chill seized her gut.

At the bar stood a tall man with his back to her. His dark suit jacket tapered from broad shoulders to a fit waist. The back of his expensive haircut was flecked with gray.

It can’t be him
, she told herself, willing the man to turn around, but praying he wouldn’t.
You’re safe
, she reassured herself.
It’s not your husband, not here, not tonight.

Her eyes darted over to the drummer, whose sticks were raised, waiting for her cue. Impatiently he shrugged, unaware of the danger she was in.

But it’s not safe
, her instinct insisted.
Leave now
. She took a
breath.
But if I leave the stage, that would draw even more attention to me.
Kelly regarded the audience once more, and her eyes fell on a salesman in the second row. His cheeks flushed from drink, his mouth hard, he seemed to challenge her to begin another song. It snapped her back into her persona. Strutting across the stage, she slid a leg through the slit in her dress and sang Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields’s “Big Spender.”
I
am
Marilyn
, she thought,
and even if it is him, he can’t see the real me.

The number went on forever as Kelly watched for the man at the bar to turn around.

Then she held the last note, closing her eyes. When she opened them, the man’s eyes were locked on hers. He leaned back against the bar, a half smile pulling up one side of his mouth.

Kelly’s dread instantly drained away. It wasn’t her husband. Relaxing into the next number, she rehearsed her plan again. It was a good one. It would work. She just had to finish this show. When it was over, she’d be only one painful step away from making her final escape from Vegas.

With relief washing through her, Kelly glanced again at the man at the bar and with a jolt realized who he was. What was Jake Brooks doing here? For weeks this man’s face had been on TV, making the case for Jeanette Pantelli, the so-called Platinum Widow, as an abused wife. Brooks had managed to paint his client as a damsel in distress rather than a greedy woman who had hired a hit man to kill her husband. With all the publicity, his celebrity was a certainty.

Jake Brooks gave her a full-blown smile. Kelly pulled her gaze away. On TV, the man was handsome; in person, he was magnetic. Even from across the room, Kelly felt a rush. She went through the remainder of her act feeling her performance charged by his attention—until, in the middle of the next-to-last number, she saw Jake Brooks’s eyes drop to her feet and move appraisingly up her body, as
though cataloguing each part of her. Reaching her eyes, he stared with a challenging, yet questioning, grin. His joke evaporated the magnetism, and Kelly’s defenses shot up.
Not in this lifetime,
she thought.
I don’t care who you are
. She was one song away from the end of her last show on this stage, just minutes away from the hardest thing she would ever do in her life. Before she quit, she would show this cocky lawyer what she thought of him and his profession.

Kelly cued the drummer for her finale, Marilyn’s “Let’s Make Love,” and stepped off the stage. As she moved through the tables, she noticed that the owner of the nightclub, Shrake—a mobster whose cherubic face masked his cruelty—had taken the barstool next to Brooks. He was speaking urgently, a briefcase open on his lap. Kelly paused at a table of frat boys and poured on the Marilyn, singing to each one as if he were the only man in the room. Running her finger along one guy’s lips, she gave his neighbor a shake of her ass. She ruffled the third guy’s hair, then slid into the last guy’s lap, breathing the lyric, “Let’s make love.”

She sashayed toward Brooks, and the electricity of his attention intensified, dangerous and predatory. The club owner leaned into Brooks and whispered something, jerking his head toward the briefcase. Without a glance toward the other man, Brooks pushed the briefcase closed with his elbow. Kelly could just hear his cocky, offhand rebuff: “I don’t represent bill-collecting hit men.” The shorter man scowled, snatched the briefcase, and stalked away.

Kelly slid back up to the stage, timing her arrival to the climax of the song. Jake Brooks was still grinning as though he owned her. With her voice riding the last note, she raised her arm toward her head. As the drummer bashed the last beat, she grabbed a handful of silvery-blonde hair and, in a flash, whipped off the wig and held it in front of her like a severed head. She heard the audience gasp, felt the cool air on her scalp and her own hair slicked back with bobby
pins, winked at Brooks, and sauntered unexpectedly along the catwalk that pierced through the crowd. Moving closer and closer to him, leaning forward until her lips touched his ear.

“It’s all an illusion,” she whispered.

For a fraction of a second, Brooks just stood there, stunned. Then he threw his head back and—while the audience broke into scattered applause—laughed.

Kelly bowed one last time, calmly exited the stage, and raced to her dressing room, her mind darkening with what was to come.