The Flaming Motel

Tuesday

November 5





XV


I almost missed it. I flipped through the paper without paying attention. I was distracted by the images of Brianna juxtaposed in my head. Her thoughtful, self-reflective face sitting across the table from me was interspersed in the video of her sweating, panting, and straining to brace herself against a fierce, sexual pounding. I had been awake half the night, watching her do things with other men right there in front of me. Things that she might have let me do, if only I had permitted them to happen.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not just because of Liz, but because of the desperation in her voice as she told me about her childhood. A childhood not that many years removed from the present.

Instead, I smelled her perfume all the way home. I marveled at the brightness of her eyes, felt the light brush of her shoulder against mine as we walked from the car to the bottom of the steps of the Vargas mansion. And then I stopped, holding myself back from following her inside. She looked up at me with a sweetness in her face that told me I was the first man in a long time who hadn’t come inside, and it only made her more willing to have me there. It made me one of the nice guys. But not one who was afraid to touch her. It wasn’t fear that restrained me, it was merely an unwillingness to do it. I simply couldn’t.

Instead, I drove home thinking of the hue of her skin in the lamplight. Instead, I sat in the darkness of the apartment, purchasing images of her, paying her to perform for me. Starting slow, watching still pictures of her nude on a bed, by the beach, in the shower, covered with bubbles. And then escalating to images of her masturbating, as I was, and then to watching her with another man, and another. Quickly moving on to videos of her being defiled by three and four men at a time, an erection in every orifice, one in each hand, everything undulating over and over and over in an endless loop of maddening, torrid, unhinged f*cking.

And then I slept, still haunted by her. She was with me again when I woke. And in the shower, and on the way to the office. The thoughts of her nearly kept me from reading the paper at all. They distracted me as I made idle talk with Ellen and poured myself coffee. I tried to shake them. Tried to focus on my job. Tried to tell myself that I’d done nothing wrong by having dinner with her. But there she was, creeping into the silences whenever the conversation with Ellen lagged.

When I returned to my desk and the newspaper, determined to focus, it leapt off the front page of the local section. The headline: Young Man’s Body Washes up on Beach. The picture beside it showed a smiling, slightly younger version of David Daniels, but even without the name, his wispy red beard was unmistakable. And more chilling still, as I read the article, I realized what the police cars on the side of the road in Malibu had been about.

“Three people are dead,” I told Jendrek. It was a simple fact that no one—not even Jendrek—could argue with. I didn’t say murder. I didn’t even say the deaths were connected.

But of course I had. That much was obvious from the fact that I was bringing it up. The newspaper article did not connect them. In fact, it had very little detail about David Daniels, other than the fact that his body had washed up on the shore at a dinner party in Malibu with two bullet holes in its chest.

“That’ll ruin your appetite,” Jendrek joked.

“So what do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think. Obviously there’s something going on, but I don’t have any idea what it is.”

“I think we should go to the police.”

Jendrek shrugged and asked, “With what? We don’t know anything.”

“We know Daniels made the call reporting the noise disturbance.”

Jendrek thought about it for a second and said, “Don’t you think the cops know that already?”

“I doubt it. Why would they? An anonymous call. But whether they know or not, what difference does it make? We know, shouldn’t we say something?”

“I guess so.” Jendrek rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I just hate getting involved in something like this. I don’t even want my name in a file somewhere. I hate cops. You can’t trust them.”

I groaned. It was a very Jendrek thing to say. “Come on. Not everyone in the entire world is corrupt.” Jendrek just raised his eyebrows and looked at me, as if to say, Oh yeah?

I got up and went back to my office. It took me a minute to find Detective Wilson’s number. When I called I got his voicemail and left him a message with no details. I told him only that I learned something about David Daniels yesterday and figured he’d like to know what it was, given that he now had three bodies on his hands.

It wasn’t long after that when Ellen came in with the original file I’d given her and the background checks on Tiffany Vargas. There was an inch thick stack of paper constituting all the digital connections the electronic universe could make between a few disparate pieces of information: a social security number, name, date of birth, current address, and driver’s license number. I was always amazed by what was out there, floating in the electronic ether.

I flipped through the stack. It was typical stuff. It showed her marriage to Don Vargas. It showed their obscenely expensive house on Mulholland Drive. Five foreign cars registered to the address. It reflected no employment for the previous nine years. It reflected no changes of address for the same period. She had never been sued. Never been convicted of a crime. Never divorced. No bankruptcies.

But what she had done was lived in Canoga Park, and presumably worked there too. And when she had been there, her name was Tiffany Long. I tried to picture where Canoga Park was, but I couldn’t. I knew it was somewhere in the Valley. But so were lots of things.

I noted that she was actually thirty-two years old, although she didn’t look it at all. Nine years ago she would have been twenty-three. It was likely the address was even older, given that the background just jumped from address to address, assuming—often incorrectly—that a person lived at the previous address up until the time a new one was reported. The records were notoriously fragmented. It was probably her parents’ address.

I tried to imagine where she had come from. I thought of Brianna’s story. I thought of Ed’s philosophy of pornography and the women it consumed. I had no idea where the address was, but I pictured a run down apartment building with discolored walls in the common areas and shoeless children in diapers running loose in the dirt outside. My own inner image of where porn stars came from.

On the outside of the file was the address Ed had written down for his mother. The address was in Encino. Also in the Valley. I would have to talk to her as well. In fact, it was the only thing I had to go on besides the address in Canoga Park.

I lingered in the office for a while longer, hoping Detective Wilson would return my call. I thought about the scream we’d heard on the beach the night before. I would never have thought a body had washed up on the shore. It didn’t sound like that kind of scream. Perhaps people in Malibu were more tolerant of horrors than I would be. Not that it mattered. I’d never be living in Malibu.

I checked my watch and realized the day was wasting. I couldn’t just sit around the office all day. I had to get to the Valley.