The Flaming Motel

XIII


I told myself two things as I drove out of the Hollywood Hills. First, I didn’t know for sure that it was the same kid that made a phone call from the gatehouse. There were twenty million people in the Los Angeles area and lots of them had red hair. Second, I didn’t really know who he called.

I tried to imagine a conversation with Detective Wilson, and I could hear his gruff voice asking those same questions. How do you know this? How do you know that? And the fact was, I didn’t know. I only suspected.

But I was driving fast in no particular direction and I was sure there had to be something to it. There simply weren’t any coincidences in life. Or maybe the whole damned thing was one big coincidence, human existence wriggling its way up from the muck of history for a few million years in the sun before we managed to kill each other off. Maybe that was an accident, but the Vargas murder sure the hell wasn’t.

My brain stuck on the word. Murder. It hadn’t really been used until that moment. Pete Stick was a suicide. Wilson was adamant about that. And the Police Chief was calling Don Vargas’s death a justifiable homicide. I wasn’t so sure. Nothing about it seemed right. But nothing about it seemed overtly wrong either. It seemed like, a coincidence. And there I was again, going round and round and round. What I needed was to talk to the kid. And if he wouldn’t come to me, I’d go to him.

The warehouse on Gower looked a lot different in the daytime. The mustard colored stucco seemed to absorb the sunlight and glow a little. This time there were no cars on the street, so I parked right out front.

The door was open and I went into the dreary front office. There was no one there, which I was beginning to suspect was the norm. I stood in the silence for a few seconds before it struck me just how silent it was. On Friday, there had been warehouse noises coming from behind the wall, but today there was nothing.

I looked for a bell to ring, but there wasn’t one. I waited for a moment more and then went around the counter and poked my head through a door that opened into the warehouse. It was a large space with rows of shelves and a high roof of exposed beams. I wondered which one Pete Stick had hung himself from and the thought turned my blood cold.

I called out to see if anyone was there, just to fill the silence with something. Then a commotion came from behind some shelves and a forty-something blonde guy who looked like a surfer gone to seed appeared from behind a shelf full of pink flamingoes and lawn gnomes.

“Hey,” he said, with no hint of customer service to his voice.

“You guys open?”

“Yeah, well, kind of. The owner died suddenly, last Friday. So things are a little up in the air. Fortunately, we didn’t have anything big scheduled for today.” He looked around the warehouse like the mere sight of it was overwhelming.

“I’m looking for a guy who works here. Young guy, red hair, red beard.”

“Dave?” The guy looked around again and patted at the pockets of his pants, as if Dave might be in there. Then he said, “He didn’t come in this morning. There’s usually only three of us in the warehouse anyway. Bobby’s on vacation, and Dave didn’t show. The owner’s dead, so that leaves me.” The facts seemed to frighten him. “Man, I sure hope nothing happens.”

“Did he call in sick?”

“No, he just didn’t show.”

“Did you call him?”

He looked stunned, like the thought had never occurred to him, as though he’d just awoken in a world where he was all alone and there was nothing he could do about it, like a bad science fiction movie. I would have guessed he was stoned, but his movements were too jittery for that.

I said, “You got a phone number for him? Maybe you could call him. I’d really like to get a hold of him.”

The man’s eyes seemed to focus on me again, for the first time. “What are you? A cop or something?”

“Why do you think a cop would be looking for Dave?”

The question shocked him and I could see his brain racing to figure out if he’d just f*cked up, and if so, how bad. Then a kind of defeat showed in his eyes. It looked natural there. Then he said, in a glum voice, with shoulders sagging, “His phone number and address are in the office.”

He wrote the information down and handed it to me. I looked it over to make sure I could read it before I left. Then I thanked him and turned to go. He seemed surprised and took a step toward me, asking, “So now what?”

I smiled and shrugged and said, “Nothing.”

I left him standing in the wreck of an office, alone and studying the walls like they where covered with absurd, post-modern art.

I stopped at the In N’ Out at Sunset and Orange for lunch. I called the number he gave me on my cell and got an answering machine with a woman’s voice. I left a message and mowed my way through a burger and fries while I studied the piece of paper.

The kid’s name was David Daniels. His address was on Huntington Drive, which I vaguely recognized as an address in East LA. It was a part of town I never had any need or desire to visit, but I suspected I might have to if the kid didn’t return my call.

Ellen was playing solitaire on the computer when I got back to the office. She didn’t try to hide it or anything. There would have been no point. Jendrek and I were both well aware that we didn’t have enough work. She looked me over without interest when I came in.

I asked, “Where’s Mark?”

She shrugged. “Said he had a meeting out of the office. He left a couple hours ago.”

“Any calls?”

She laughed at me. “Are you kidding?”

Ellen was a funny one, sarcastic and clever. She had to be to survive so long with Jendrek. In her mid-forties, she was still single, had no children, and seemed to prefer it that way.

I handed her the file I’d gotten from Ed Vargas and she flipped through it quickly. “Yeah?”

“Can you order background checks on her? The social security number and everything else is in there.”

“Is this the woman who was in here this morning?”

I smiled at her. “Piece of work, huh?”

“The Vargas kid doesn’t want her to inherit the family fortune?”

“He’s got a little problem with the fact that he’s older than his mother.” We both laughed.

Then the door opened and Jendrek came in and looked us over. He eyed me in particular and said, “You’re looking a lot better than you did this morning. What did Ed have to say?”

I followed him into his office and gave him the highlights. The background checks would give us some addresses and maybe some prior employment information. In the meantime, I’d drop in on Vargas’s mother tomorrow and see what she had to say about her replacement.

I intentionally saved the best for last. “And there’s one more thing I learned up there,” I said. Jendrek raised his eyebrows, waiting. “It looks like that red haired kid that worked for Pete Stick, you remember him?” He nodded at me.

“Well,” I said, “it looks like he might have been the guy who called in the noise disturbance.”

I watched his face stumble through a half-dozen perplexed expressions as he put together exactly what that might mean. “How do you know that?” he asked in a voice loaded with caution.

“I don’t, for sure. But here’s what I do know.” I ran him through it. How I’d gone to the party, parked the car there, taken a taxi, and talked to the guard again this afternoon.

“And he described the kid?”

“The description matched.”

Jendrek thought about it some more. He combed his fingers through his silver hair and scratched at his chin. Finally, he just stated the obvious. “So you think there’s some kind of setup?”

“I don’t know what I think. It sure seems that way. But a setup for what?”

“To kill Vargas.”

“But why? The kid didn’t have anything to gain.”

“That we know of.”

“Well, let’s assume he didn’t. Let’s assume he and Pete planned something. Pete didn’t gain anything either.”

Jendrek thought about that. Then he said, “Maybe the shooting really was an accident. Maybe there was something else going on and the cops just got in the middle of it and f*cked it all up.”

I said, “But if the kid called the cops …”

“Maybe they wanted some cops there for some reason. Something else they had in mind, and then the cop did what he did and screwed it all up.” Jendrek shook his head and shrugged. “Besides, the alternative is too hard to put together. The alternative requires the cop to be in on it. If the cops were in on it, they’d have to be in on the whole thing. It would be hard to get a cop to commit a murder for you.”

I said, “And Pete wasn’t exactly friendly with the cops. So it would be even more unlikely.”

Then Jendrek smiled and said, “Yeah, but the police chief hates pornography so who knows? Maybe it’s all a giant conspiracy.” He leaned forward with a shiver in his voice, drumming his fingers in the air in mock terror. “Maybe they’re listening to us right now. Maybe the invisible helicopters are hovering above the office right now.”

“Okay, fine.” I nodded. “Laugh if you want. The kid obviously thought he had something important to tell us on Saturday, and I’m guessing it was that he was the guy who made the call.”

“And so now we know,” he said, “maybe there was something going on. Pete and the kid running some kind of scam. It could be anything. Who knows? But then the cops show up and, as cops occasionally do, they botch it. That’s probably all there is to it.”

I knew he was right. It was nothing but speculation. There were a million possibilities and almost none of them really worked. “Still,” I said. “There’s something weird about it.”

“Sure there is. But something weird doesn’t mean something evil. And look, the simpler story is almost always the right story. Sure, anything’s possible, but only a few things are likely. It had to be Pete and the kid doing something stupid because anything beyond that would require a bunch of other people to be involved. Every time you add another person to a conspiracy, the odds of it going wrong increase about a thousand percent. Big conspiracies never work.”

Jendrek leaned back in his chair and rocked slightly, thinking it over again. After a minute, he added, “Besides, that’s not what we’ve been hired to work on. Our job is to do what we’ve been paid to do. Investigate the wife.” Then he added, “It sucks being a whore.”

I couldn’t disagree with him.