Or should that be Thompsonesque? Whatever. The banality of evil flourishes here as it does everywhere, but as Hunter S. Thompson fearlessly, loathingly and indelibly illustrated, Las Vegas is also world headquarters for the banality of weirdness; like its friend Los Angeles, there's something eerie and unsettled about the place, always has been. And anyone who really understands the business of Vegas (not that it's especially tough to grasp), knows that badness -- banal or not -- is just as important to this town as bright lights and big weirdness. Never mind the P.R. drivel the visitors bureau spews, the City of Light Bulbs is the Madonna of metropolises: The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

These days, all buffed up and theme-park cheerful, Vegas seems like that nice suburban house, with the nice suburban Freeling family, in 1982's "Poltergeist." The Freeling's movie home was a sunny, happy place built, as it unpleasantly turned out, on top of graves, and the restless ghosts just could not let things be. Perhaps Las Vegas isn't built over corpses (then again ...), but its history is a sordid, murky one, which repeatedly brings agitated spirits to the surface no matter how hard the city's cheerleaders try to promote it as a wholesome family resort. The place's most magnetic quality is still its dark, dark soul; the thing that will never leave Las Vegas. And from a marketing perspective, who'd want it to? Darkness is irresistible.

At the moment, the great caliginous light of the desert is shining on former socialite Margaret Rudin -- dubbed "the Black Widow" by Court TV -- in a garish murder trial that is currently one of the best floor shows in Vegas. Michael Amador, Rudin's lead defense attorney, has called his client's predicament "the single most complex and intriguing case in Las Vegas history," and he wasn't just spouting lawyerly hyperbole (he saved that for later). For sheer tawdriness and salacious details nothing has lit up cineplexes in recent memory that can match this drama -- except maybe the trial that preceded it. (The two combined have -- for years now -- kept crime journalists immersed in plots worthy of Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy or Tony Soprano.)

The Rudin story is being featured in newspapers as far away as London, and here in the U.S., the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Las Vegas Sun and Court TV (both on the air and on the Web), among others, are providing exhaustive coverage of the daily proceedings as well as archived articles, photos, facsimile documents, diary excerpts and transcripts.

The essential facts of the case go like this:

In December 1994, Ron Rudin, a multimillionaire real estate developer, disappeared. It took his wife Margaret (it was the fifth marriage for both of them) two days to report him missing. In January 1995, his decapitated, charred body and skull (with four .22 caliber bullet holes) were found near Lake Mohave outside of Las Vegas, along with the burned remains of an antique trunk. Margaret, owner of an antique shop, did not attend her husband's funeral. In 1996 a .22-caliber pistol fitted with a silencer, which Ron Rudin, who was also a gun dealer, had reported missing in 1988, was discovered in Lake Mead. The defense and the prosecution agree that it's the murder weapon. In April 1997, Margaret Rudin was indicted for murder, but by then she'd disappeared. In Nov. 1999, after being featured on the "America's Most Wanted" TV program, Rudin was arrested in a small town in Massachusetts, where she was living in a dingy apartment with a retired fireman. After unsuccessfully fighting extradition, she was brought to Nevada, where she attempted, but failed, to have the charges dismissed. The trial commenced with each side's opening statements on March 2.

It's been moving ahead -- more or less -- all this month, a fine mess that gets finer and messier by the day. (So messy that the indefatigable Peter O'Connell, who's covering the trial for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, published a crib sheet of the cases' main events last Sunday under the headline "Rudin trial can get confusing" to help those of us who are following it -- or trying to -- keep things straight.)

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