The Flaming Motel

XIV


We were there to talk about Tiffany Vargas, but my mind kept returning to Pete Stick, the kid making the phone call, and what the hell it could possibly mean. Brianna sensed my distraction and smiled at me over a glass of pinot grigio.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Did you know Pete Stick very well?”

She thought for a second and then said, “Pete was around a fair amount, the last couple of years. But he was the kind of guy that you never really got to know. Well, Don knew him. They went way back.”

“Did you know he’d been in prison?”

“I’d heard that.”

“Why do you think Don put up the money for Pete’s business?”

“I never really thought about it. Don was that kind of guy. He would help people out.” She took another sip of wine and glanced out over the waves as they rolled in against the beach below us. “Don’t get me wrong. Don wasn’t a philanthropist or anything. He always expected something in return. He was big on favors. He helps you, you help him. A lot of debts were cancelled when Don died.”

“Did Pete ever do anything for him like that? Repay a debt?” I watched her face in the soft light of the outdoor patio. I’d brought her to Malibu because it was unlikely I’d run into anyone I knew there, unlikely it would ever get back to Liz. I’d told myself this was all about business, but even I didn’t believe that. With the water and the breeze coming off of it, with the propane fueled heat lamps taking the chill out of the air and the waiters sneaking around in the shadows, speaking softly to tables filled with huddled couples, there was no way to convince myself it was all about business.

“So you brought me here to pump me?” she said, enjoying the entendre. I must have looked startled, because she laughed and added, “For information, I mean.”

I shrugged and leaned back, trying to at least look relaxed, even if I didn’t feel that way. “I’m just trying to put some things together. That’s all.”

“You think about your work a lot, don’t you?”

“You ever meet Dave Daniels? A kid that worked for Pete, had red hair and a scraggly beard?”

She laughed and brought the back of her hand up to her mouth, hiding her grin. “I guess that answers my question,” she said, and then added, “I think I saw him around. I didn’t know his name, but a guy that looked like that used to deliver stuff to the sets sometimes. Props and things.”

“So you don’t know what the deal was between him and Pete?”

“What’s your obsession with this? I thought it was your job to stop Tiffany from inheriting everything.” She kept smiling. The waiter brought a scallop appetizer and she picked at one with her fork. Her shoulders were bare, and I watched the muscles flex as she moved her arm.

With a scallop of my own, I said, “Don’t you think it’s weird that Don gets shot when Pete is the only one there and then Pete hangs himself a day later? You must, you called me right after you found out.”

“Sure, it’s odd. But Pete seemed like a troubled guy. Moody. He and Don used to get in these wild fights.”

“About what?”

“From the little I heard of them, they seemed to be talking about money, but it always sounded like a code for something else.”

Her phrasing struck me. It came out natural, but seemed carefully chosen by a quick, precise mind. “What do you mean by code?”

“There was a lot of history between these guys. A lot of the things they said to each other seemed to be loaded. You know, inside jokes. Or maybe not jokes, but there was a subtext to their conversations that only the two of them understood.”

“Subtext?”

“You know, like a meaning hidden below the surface of—”

“I know what the word means,” I stopped myself before I said anything else.

She looked at me and smirked, popping a bite into her mouth. “What? I read. I’m not an idiot.”

“I never said you were.” I didn’t mean it to sound defensive, and I hoped it came out right.

“No, but you’re surprised to learn I’m not.”

“I have a feeling there are a lot of things about you that are surprising.”

She shrugged, “I’m just trying to get somewhere in the world, like most people. Nothing too surprising about that.”

“Where are you trying to get?”

She thought about it as she finished the last of the scallops, looking out over the water as she chewed. Down the beach behind her a group of people were barbecuing at the back of a house. Colored lights were strung around a patio. Tiny shadowed figures milled about at the edge of the light.

“Same place everyone else is trying to get, I suppose. Somewhere I’ll be happy. Maybe it’s an impossible destination.”

“You seem to be doing alright.”

“I make money,” she shrugged. “But money can be lost as fast as it can be made. Even faster, as Ed is finding out. I guess I mean getting to a place in my life where I don’t have to worry about disaster.” She finished her glass of wine and said, “But we weren’t talking about me. We were talking about subtext.”

She made me laugh. I poured more wine and asked, “So if you had to guess, what do you think was going on between Don and Pete?”

“If I were just guessing, I’d say that Pete knew something about Don. Or maybe each knew something about the other that they used to keep each other in check.”

“You mean like blackmail?”

“I don’t know about that. You’re the lawyer. I guess it was more like a détente. Mutually assured destruction? You know, I won’t say anything if you won’t. But they would hint to each other about it.”

It was an interesting choice of words. “How?” I asked. “What kinds of things would they say?”

She thought about it for a solid minute. I watched the people in the distance as they stood around an outdoor fire, sipping cocktails. I wondered what kind of people had a barbecue on the beach in Malibu on a Monday night in November. People with time on their hands, I guessed. Time and money. And then I thought about Brianna’s line: people who weren’t worried about disaster.

She said, “I guess the time that stands out was a couple of months ago. We were out on the deck one night. Don was grilling some steaks and I was talking about the fires they were having out by Big Bear. I’d read some article in the paper about how the coals could smolder in the ground for days, or even weeks after they thought they’d put it out. I remember Don making some generic comment like, ‘Yeah, you gotta be careful with fires,’ and then Pete saying something like, ‘Some fires can smolder a helluva lot longer than that; I’m talking years, ain’t that right, Don?’”

Brianna stirred the residue on the scallop plate with the tines of her fork, filling the air between us with a soft scraping sound. Then she said, “I think that’s right, actually. I read somewhere that when a coal mine catches on fire it can burn underground for like fifty years. But Pete’s voice had an edge to it when he said it. Don was quiet for a second and then said something like, ‘Yeah, I guess that’s right.’ But there was clearly some tension there.”

Then she added, smiling, “That house has had a lot of tension in it lately.”

“You mean Ed and Tiffany?”

“Sure, they got in a screaming match just a few hours ago. It was entertaining for awhile, then I thought they were going to kill each other.”

“What was it about?” The answer was obvious, but I wanted to hear her describe it anyway. Besides, we were supposed to be talking about Tiffany.

“I’m not sure how it started,” she said. “But I heard Ed tell her that he’d hired you guys to sue the shit out of her.” She smiled over her glass. “You can imagine that went over well.”

“How well do you know Tiffany?”

“We’ve never been close.”

“But you live there.”

“Only because Don wanted me to. Tiffany never wanted me there in the first place.”

“Has she told you to leave?”

“Not yet. We’ve hardly spoken since Don died. It’s surprising, really. I would have assumed kicking me out would have been the first thing on her list. But she’s been very quiet.”

“She’s not quiet normally?”

“She’s careful.” Brianna was being careful in her description too. Thinking over her choice of words before she spoke.

“In what way?”

“She does what Don wants. At least, she did. She didn’t want me living there, for example, but she never said a word about it to Don. She didn’t want to rock the boat. Or maybe that’s the wrong metaphor. It was more like she didn’t want to derail the gravy train.” Brianna smiled.

“You think she was a gold digger?”

This time she couldn’t stifle her laugh. I noticed several heads at other tables turning to look at her. “Are you kidding? Of course she is. And a damned good one too. She knew she’d hit the mother lode and she wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize her claim.”

“That’s quite a metaphor.”

“So like I said, whatever Don wanted, Don got. She’d do anything for him, including tolerating me. But she was scared to death of me. I could tell from the minute I got there.”

“What do you mean by scared?”

“She thought I was there to steal Don from her just like she stole him from his first wife. When she looked at me she saw herself, only ten years younger.”

“Was that ever something you thought about doing?”

Brianna shook her head, a look of near disgust on her face. “Tiffany Vargas and I are alike in a lot of ways. But the main difference is that she wanted to steal a fortune and I would rather earn one.”

“Steal?”

“She married him for his money and she didn’t want to lose it. That’s not theft, I guess. It just is what it is. It’s no more dishonest than lots of marriages.”

“That’s pretty cynical.”

“Tiffany and I know the score. We’re two poor girls who happened to hit the jackpot. If it wasn’t for winning the genetic lottery and getting the big tits and the blonde hair, we’d both be working shitty jobs somewhere, probably falling in and out of abusive relationships with a bunch of drunks, or worse.”

The waiter brought our dinner, and I realized for the first time how incredibly slow the service was. When he was gone, Brianna leaned over her pan-seared halibut and said, “Tiffany saw her shot at Don and took it. I don’t blame her for that. She was cold to me because she had to be. She was protecting her turf. I don’t blame her for that either. There’s no love lost between us, but I don’t dislike her. How can I? We’re practically the same person.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“We both manipulate men for a living. She focused on just one. I spread it around. But at the end of the day, it’s the same thing. It’s no different from most women, really.”

“How so?”

“Every woman controls a man with something. Sex, usually. Tiffany did it. I do it. Every housewife in America is trading blowjobs for a steady paycheck and a roof over her head. The only difference is skill and ambition.”

“I’m sure you’d make a lot of feminists proud with talk like that.”

“A lot of women who call themselves feminists are totally out of touch with reality. When you grow up like Tiffany and I did, you do what you have to do to get by.”

“What did she tell you about how she grew up?”

“Nothing, she didn’t have to. I could see it in her eyes. And she could see it in mine. We knew the score. We each knew where the other was coming from.”

“And where was that?”

“I don’t know about her, but I grew up in Reseda. She was from the Valley too, but I’m not sure what part. But when we looked at each other, it was like looking at a reflection. She didn’t have to say anything, and neither did I.”

We ate for a few minutes in relative silence. It was not my intent to insult her, and I didn’t think I had. Her voice was pragmatic and flat. She was stating the facts of the world as she knew them. Finally, between bites of fish, she said:

“Most girls learn to control men with sex very early. They either learn how to do it, or they get destroyed.” She shrugged and added, “I don’t know, maybe we all get destroyed either way.”

I wanted to hear about her, about how she became who she was, but I didn’t want to ask outright. So I just prodded her along, hoping she would get there. And she did. After her third glass of wine, she got into it.

“I’ve always controlled men with sex,” she said. “Men are so stupid when it comes to sex. I remember my old man used to ‘accidentally’ walk into the bathroom when I was getting out of the shower when I was like fourteen. He was such a f*cking pervert. I was only a kid, but I knew what he was doing.”

Her eyes looked over the table and through me, as though she was watching a movie of her life, suspended in the darkness behind me. “The summer I was thirteen, my life changed. These breasts seemed to poke out of me overnight.” She brushed over them with her hand, as though I wouldn’t know what she was talking about otherwise. “All of a sudden,” she went on, “men started paying attention to me. Older men. My dad’s friends. Suddenly, I noticed their eyes following me across the room. But my old man was the worst.”

I didn’t want to hear about it, but I did. I averted my eyes to look at the barbecue at the beach house in the distance. I hoped by averting my eyes, it would make her feel like she had more privacy.

She said, “I used to hate having any friends over to the house. My dad used to make me nervous. Then, one night I had this friend, Theresa, staying over. She was a cute little Mexican girl. We were like fifteen. My dad started letting us drink beer while we were watching a movie. Pretty soon we were both drunk and I remember seeing my dad sitting on the couch next to Theresa, talking to her all quiet, like he was hitting on her. And all the sudden it was clear as a bell. I just realized what was about to happen. And I remember thinking I had to stop it somehow. But my dad could get violent; I sure as hell couldn’t get in a fight with him.”

“So what’d you do?” I had a sick feeling in my stomach as I asked the question.

“I took him aside and told him I’d suck his cock right then if he’d just leave Theresa alone.” I watched her run her finger along the lines in the checkered tablecloth. She seemed to be studying the pattern, as though some meaning lay hidden within it, and then she looked up and said, “He left her alone.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, but I didn’t want to not say anything. So I asked, “Is that why you left home at eighteen? On your birthday?”

“It was a lot more than just that. I figured it was stupid to just use manipulation as a survival skill when I could use it to earn a living. But there’s nothing unusual about me. Girls are abused all the time. Most of them don’t become porn stars.”

It was the first time she’d referred to herself that way. It was her first direct acknowledgment to me that that was what she did. It was obvious from everything, and I knew it intimately, but somehow having her say it made it real in a way it hadn’t been before.

“You know,” she went on, “working in porn actually has a lot of great things about it. Most people think it’s this terrible industry, and there are parts that are bad, for sure. But I have a great life. But you know what the worst part is?”

She was looking directly at me now. Right in the eyes. It was a serious question that I was in no way able to answer. I just shrugged and shook my head.

“The worst part isn’t diseases or anything. Everyone’s so careful about that stuff these days. That’s not the problem. The problem is that a lot of men won’t touch you. They’ll jerk off to a picture of me, but if I ever came near them they’d run for the hills. The nice guys anyway.”

She sipped her wine and kept her eyes on me. I could see a glassy reflection in them. It was my own image, stretched and warped across the surface of her retina.

Then she said, “I guess it’s the fact that I’ve been with so many guys. Every man I meet knows I’ve been with someone bigger, or better, or whatever it is they think. They think that because I’m in porn I must have some completely f*cked up idea about sex. But I think it’s everyone else whose ideas are f*cked up. If there’s anyone who knows that love is about more than just sex, it’s gotta be someone like me, right?”

I couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t want to. I felt an urge come over me to protect her from the outcome of her own life, as though I could save her from herself, somehow. It was a ridiculous feeling, and I had no idea where it came from. But there it was, nonetheless.

I struggled to say something, but just as I did there was a scream from somewhere down the beach. Everyone on the deck turned to look. There was movement in the colored lights of the party—a rushing of bodies—but there was no more noise. Slowly, everyone went back to what they were doing.

Brianna smirked, the giggle returning to her voice and the humor glinting in her eyes. “Maybe someone had a heart attack over a plate of baked beans.”

Maybe so. As we left the restaurant and drove back to the city, a cluster of police cars and an ambulance were gathered out front of the houses along the narrow edge of the PCH. “I guess you were right,” I said. “Someone choked on a chicken wing.”

Brianna shrugged. “There are worse ways to go,” she said. “Like getting shot by the cops in your own house.”