The Flaming Motel

XVI


I didn’t know the Valley for shit. Once I passed the Getty Center at the top of the hill, heading north, I might as well have been in another country. The San Fernando Valley held a couple million people in a two hundred square mile sprawl of wall to wall humanity, but it never meant anything to me. I grew up in Riverside. I went to UCLA. Now I lived in Santa Monica. My reasons to cross the Hollywood Hills were few, and were often avoided when they arose.

Not that the Valley was a bad place. It was just unnecessary. It didn’t have anything the rest of the city didn’t have, and it was twenty degrees hotter. So why go? To interview the mother of your porn mogul client would be one reason. So there I was, battling traffic on the 405 at eleven in the morning, wondering if Detective Wilson would ever call me back.

I got off the freeway at Ventura Boulevard and turned west into Encino. Along the north side of the Hollywood Hills, the houses are just as fancy and only slightly less expensive as they are on the more famous south side. The cities of Encino, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Tarzana, and Woodland Hills are all pretty upper crust places to live, if you are south of Ventura Boulevard, up in the hills.

Which was where Colette Vargas, mother of Ed Vargas, first wife of Don, apparently spent her days by her swimming pool. I’d called her to arrange a meeting. She was more than happy to talk. But I had to get there first. After my left turn on Ventura, I was pretty much out of directions.

One of the problems with the Valley is that you never quite know where you are. Although it was just a giant grid, all the cities run together, making it impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins. So I drifted down Ventura, looking for signs, like a lost ordinate floating through a system with only superficial order.

It took me an hour to find it. The small stucco house with the red tile roof was tucked back on one of the hundreds of side streets that wound their way up through the gullies and washes running down from the tops of the hills. The trees were old growth and overhung the road in lush arches. The masonry wall along the street was covered with ivy, making it more difficult to spot the numbers on the house. The whole place looked like it had settled in long ago to let the world grow up around it and cover it.

The woman who met me at the door was the exact opposite of Don Vargas. Colette Vargas was a thin, attractive, fifty-something blonde, dressed in the casually conservative way that I imagined people looked when they stepped off a boat at Martha’s Vineyard. Placed next to the few images I had of Don Vargas, it was almost impossible to imagine them together.

“You must be Ollie,” she said. I detected a faint New England accent, maybe Boston.

She took me through the house and out onto a back patio with a small swimming pool. The hillside behind the house rose up steep and thick with trees and brush. No other houses were visible. “It’s quiet back here.”

She smiled and said, “It’s small, but it’s certainly quiet. That’s what I enjoy most about it.” She left me alone for a minute and returned with a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses. As she set them on the teak outdoor furniture, she said, “Eddie told me you would be coming by.”

“Did he tell you why?”

She spoke as she poured the tea, but glanced at me as she did. “He said it had to do with Tiffany and his inheritance. Or lack thereof, I should say.”

“He intends to challenge his father’s marriage to her as a fraud. It’s a tough claim to make. He said you were the best one to talk to because you were around when it all happened.”

She reclined in the chair opposite me and smiled as the past flickered across her face. She shook her head and said, “I was there alright.” There was no bitterness to her voice. She spoke with amusement more than anything else. “It’s strange watching your life unravel right in front of you. But it’s even stranger to realize, after the fact, that you’re not that upset about it.”

“Were you glad you got divorced?”

“I wouldn’t say I was glad.” She sipped her tea thoughtfully and added, “Ambivalent is probably a better word.”

“Ed seems to have a different opinion. He still seems angry about it after all these years.”

“Ed has had an easy life,” she grinned, the ice clinking in her glass. “For him, the divorce was the worst thing that ever happened to him, until now anyway.”

“And for you?”

She shrugged. “I’m getting old. I drink iced tea. I trim my roses,” she motioned to a cluster of bushes on the far side of the pool. “I’m just trying to wring the good things out of my life. Who needs to focus on the bad stuff?”

“How long were you and Don married?”

“He told me he wanted a divorce on our twenty-fifth anniversary.” She took another sip of tea and raised her eyebrows, “Don always had a flair for the dramatic.”

I smiled instead of laughing. She smiled too and added, “I had seen it coming, of course, but it made me pretty angry at the time. I remember I said to him, couldn’t you have waited another day?”

“Twenty-five years is a long time. How did the two of you meet?”

“We met in college. I’d come out from Boston, where I grew up, to go to Pomona. Don was there too, on a full scholarship.” My surprise must have registered on my face, because she said, “That surprises you. It would surprise most people, I guess. Especially those who met him later on. But Don was very intelligent and very different back then. He was two years older than me and unlike anyone I’d ever met before.”

“How so?”

“My father was a lawyer in Boston. We weren’t wealthy, but we were well off. I grew up in a pretty genteel environment. I had an uncle out here working in television. In Burbank. So I came out here to go to school. It seemed very exciting, California and all. This was the late-60s; 1968, right when the country was falling apart. I was just a girl from Boston who hadn’t yet given much thought about what her life might be like.”

She laughed at something inside herself and then shrugged it off. “It’s funny that the only point in your life when you really have time to plan, is when you’re young and have no ability to plan.”

I drank some tea and tried to relax a little in my seat. “Had you planned to stay in California?”

“Oh, heavens no. It was only supposed to be a little fun out west. I think my dad always intended me to move home and marry a junior partner in his firm. But here I am.” She laughed and held her arms up, making a display of herself. “I guess that means the fun lasted forty years.”

“I guess so.”

She leaned forward and poured more tea into both our glasses. “If only life were that simple,” she said, almost as an aside.

But I didn’t let it die. I asked, “So you stayed for Don. Is that it? Got married and all of that?”

“In a nut shell, I suppose. But it was more complicated than that. I fell in love with Don, but I was more practical than that. We talked for a while about moving back east, but Don was a real Californian. He wouldn’t hear of it. I remember we went back one Christmas, early on.” She leaned her head back, as though the past were just behind her somewhere and she could see it clearly if only she looked.

“It must have been ‘71. I remember it was Don’s first time on an airplane. We got to Boston and he thought that was alright. But when we drove out into the country all Don could say was, ‘I can’t believe how many people there are. It’s way too crowded.’ Funny, coming from an LA boy.”

She paused for a second, and then added, “It was probably 1970 because I remember Dad making all these remarks about how Kent State taught all the hippies that they shouldn’t mess with America. I could tell Don hated my dad, but he was being nice for my sake. My dad kept telling Don he should move back to Boston. He could get him into one of the law schools and he’d hire him into the firm. Don wasn’t interested. He wanted to work in movies. Boston wasn’t going to cut it.”

“So how’d your parents react to your marrying him and staying out here?”

“They didn’t,” she said, reaching for her glass. “They were killed in a plane crash in Mexico that following spring.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. What else do you say to something like that?

“Yes,” she said. “It is. But it was a long time ago. And, it left me alone in the world, in California, where my only uncle lived. So I stayed, eventually married Don, and the rest is history.”

“When did Don get involved in,” I wasn’t sure how to say it, and then I realized I was being silly, “pornography.”

“When he couldn’t make it in real movies.”

“He tried to get work at the studios?”

“Oh, he worked there. My uncle got him some jobs with NBC, where my uncle worked, and then Don did different things with the major studios.”

“What kind of things?”

“It was all very menial, low-end stuff. He was in his early twenties and had no experience. They were all entry-level positions as grips, or some kind of assistant to an assistant. He was very frustrated. He expected to get promoted fast and actually be a producer or director or something. So he would get fed up and quit and move on to a different job.”

“What were you doing?”

“For awhile I just stayed home.” She laughed as she thought about it. “I had very traditional notions of what women were supposed to do, I guess. It was my upbringing. That lasted until about 1975 or ‘76. By that time I could see the pattern. Don would get a new job, be excited about the opportunity, and after three or four months he’d quit, claiming they didn’t know what they were doing or they were idiots and he couldn’t work for people like that.”

“That made you concerned?”

“Yeah, it was very unstable. At first, it was okay. I still had a little of the money I’d inherited from my parents, so when things got tight I dipped into it. Don liked to live well. After a few years, it was nearly gone. That worried me.”

I finished my second glass of tea and started to worry about having to go to the bathroom. She leaned over and refilled my glass. As she did, she said, “Don was very smart, very ambitious, but also very impatient. He felt that he should be successful right away. He never seemed to accept the fact that you had to work a long time to get there.” Then she shrugged and added, “But he didn’t have any role models growing up, so I guess he didn’t really know.”

“Where did he grow up?”

“He was an orphan. His father was killed in Korea and his mother just dropped him off with the nuns one day when he was about eight and drove away. So he was raised and educated by the nuns. It got him the scholarship to Pomona. He always used to laugh about what the nuns would think if they knew what became of him.” She laughed about it too.

“So how did it come about?”

“I was getting to that. Don was drifting from job to job and I was getting nervous. So one day I see this ad for this motel out in Malibu that’s for sale. I took the rest of my inheritance and put a down payment on it. I figured I could run it and, even if Don never had a steady job, we’d always have a place to sleep.”

“The Starlight Motel?”

“How did you know?” Her eyes went wide with genuine surprise.

I said, “I’ve seen some old pictures of it.” But I was thinking about the film.

“Where?” she asked, nostalgically.

“In Pete Stick’s office.”

Her expression soured. She shook her head and pursed her lips. “I never liked him. But that was no secret.” She kept shaking her head and added, “I was always amazed that he never seemed to go away. He’d disappear, but he’d always come back. He was a chronic disease.”

“You won’t have that problem anymore.” I didn’t smile as I said it, but she took it as a joke and grinned.

“So I’ve heard.” There was no sadness anywhere on her face. “It was Pete who got Don into pornography.”

“How so?”

“Around the time we bought the motel, Don met Pete working at one of the studios. I forget which one now. They were fast friends, and Pete was always hanging around. The two of them had a lot of big ideas about how they were going to make a fortune. Pete was the one who brought the idea of pornography up. The films were cheap and quick to make, and there was a real public market for them back then. You could get them shown in real theaters.”

I listened to her talk. I wanted to ask about Pete Stick, but I knew I needed to get the conversation around to Tiffany Vargas, sooner or later. I said, “What happened to Pete? One of the detectives I talked to said he was in and out of prison from the mid-70s on.”

“Pete was always looking for a way to make money fast. Pete wasn’t interested in hard work. Don became very successful very quickly, and Pete didn’t. With pornography, Don finally found something he could throw himself into and be his own boss. Don was a brilliant businessman with good instincts. Pete wasn’t. So Pete looked for other ways to make money.”

“He was convicted of insurance fraud.”

“A skill he became adept at, I’m afraid, under Don’s tutelage.”

“How’s that?”

She shrugged and smiled. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know anything for sure. In late 1978, the motel burned in a fire. It was terrible. Two guests were killed. I was very shaken by it.”

“Pete didn’t mention that.”

“No, he wouldn’t.” Her smile was flat and cold. “I always assumed, like everyone else, that it was a tragic accident. And it might have been. The upside was that Malibu had become very expensive during those years. Don had taken out a huge policy on the motel. When it was destroyed, Don was in business. Flush with cash. He jumped right into high-end movies. Pete was still broke and working for Don. A few years later, when Pete was arrested for insurance fraud, I put two and two together.”

“Did you ever ask Don about it?”

“Not directly. But when it finally occurred to me, I was just sick about the two people who were killed. It was a young couple. I remember them. I checked them into the motel. They were just getting away for a few days. They’d left their kids with a friend. It was just terrible. Sometimes I’d mention the fire, or that couple, and Don would get very quiet and dismissive of it. You know, it was just a tragic accident, he’d say.”

She let the memories smolder inside her for a moment, and then added, “I was never convinced.”

“No one ever suspected anything? The insurance company?”

“They investigated. They didn’t turn anything up. Besides, to determine it was arson would also have been to determine two murders had been committed. Most arsonists are more careful than that. But then, Don and Pete weren’t professionals.” She smiled and shrugged it off. “Who knows? They determined it was an accident. Maybe it was.”

“So then Pete took up crime and Don made his fortune?”

“I guess. There were a lot of good years after that. Don poured the insurance money into the business. He worked nonstop. I lived a very comfortable life.” She made a gesture at her back yard. “I still do, thanks to my share from the divorce. Every few years, Pete would drift back into our lives. Don would do something to put some money in his pockets. But Pete would always end up back in jail again.”

“But it didn’t last?”

She shook her head and narrowed her eyes. “Then she showed up.”

It was clear who she was, but I asked anyway. “Tiffany?”

“Tiffany Long. The great seducer. Stealer of husbands and destroyer of lives. They should erect a monument to her. She’s very talented.”

Her sarcasm was devoid of humor. “Ed told me it happened very fast.”

“It was incredible. One day Don comes home and says he’s found the next big star, two months later he’s telling me we’re through and he’s taking up with her.” She was more amazed than angry, as though the very thought of it was still baffling even a decade later.

“Ed said he remembers a strange connection between them. That they seemed to enjoy the same things. He mentioned Sinatra, for example.”

She smirked and shook her head, as though the suggestion was ridiculous. “She was trying to steal my husband. And she succeeded. I watched it happen right in front of me.”

“You think it was all a show.”

“It wasn’t that they hit it off because they happened to be interested in the same things. It was that she was interested in whatever he liked to do. It was like she went home at night and studied. She was a complete fraud.” Her voice was rising, climbing from upset to outraged. She stopped herself and took a few breaths. In the brief silence, I caught the heavy scent of the roses drifting over the pool and past us.

The ice in my tea was gone, but I drank the watery brown liquid anyway. The day felt warm for November. I studied Colette’s face as it swam in a surprising morass of emotions. She must have been almost sixty, but she looked younger, as though the tragedies she’d suffered had never broken through to the surface.

Her face animated quickly, and she said, “What was most surprising wasn’t that he was interested in her. I was always sure he had occasional flings with some of his stars. I didn’t like it, but I tolerated it and never made any demands on him about it. Does that surprise you?”

I wasn’t sure if she was asking about his cheating, or her tolerance of it. All I could say was, “I don’t know.”

“It surprised me. When I finally admitted it to myself. When a woman is finally forced to make a hard choice, she’ll often tolerate things she never thought possible. I certainly did.”

She turned her head and looked at the hillside behind the house, thick with California foliage. Palm trees and dense, tropical brush. Birds of Paradise leaping out of the darkness, their flowery heads frozen in time at the tip of their rigid necks. She was thinking of something, searching for words. She spoke with her head in profile.

“I really loved Don. Because of him my life was completely different than I ever would have imagined when I first came out here from Boston.” She turned back toward me, forced a smile. “Maybe that’s silly to say after forty years. Everyone’s life turns out far from what they planned when they were young. I never hated Don because of the business he was in. I tried never to be jealous of all of those women he was around. All the sex and the drugs and the parties. I tolerated a lot.”

She stopped for a moment, holding her emotions. “But he broke our agreement.”

After another pause, I asked, “What agreement was that?”

“After all those years he just decided it was over. Just flipped a switch and took up with that trashy little whore. He could have f*cked her all he wanted. I wouldn’t have cared, as long as he was discrete and I never had it thrown in my face. But even that wasn’t enough. He just—” She scrunched her face and wiped at her eyes.

She took another moment and composed herself. Then she shrugged again and smiled, donning the dismissive tone of her longstanding rationalization. “Who knows, maybe it was love. Maybe I really am just the bitter ex-wife. Men bore easily. They find new things attractive. And she was certainly new, and certainly attractive.”

“But something made you and Ed both think it was a fraud. Can you remember anything specific that made you think that?”

She shook her head, “It was just everything about her. The way she acted so interested in everything about him. The way she fawned over him. The way she just seemed to know too much about him. She was too familiar. It was just strange.” She made a reach for her glass and then drew her hand back. “Can I interest you in a gin and tonic?”

It sounded good, but I declined. She disappeared into the house and returned a minute later with a fizzing Collins glass topped with a wedge of lime. She spoke as she sat.

“After her own behavior, I’m sure Tiffany was awfully nervous about Brianna Jones moving into the house.” The thought made her smile. She enjoyed the idea of Tiffany in pain. “After all,” she added, “Ms. Jones is very new, very attractive, and very young.”

I had to agree. Her image raced through my head and I felt a flush of heat that had nothing to do with the sun. Colette sensed it, and asked, “You’ve met her? Ms. Jones?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to act like I barely knew her.

“Ed tells me she stands to make out very well with Don out of the picture. All debts being erased and all.”

“That’s what I understand. Although, I also understand that there weren’t any formal debts in place.”

She smiled at that and said, “That’s the lawyer in you talking. There are always debts, even without a contract. Everyone owes something to someone. Don was the kind of guy who liked people to owe him favors. And Don would always collect on them, believe me. Ms. Jones has done well for herself, but she couldn’t have done it without Don. And trust me, her debt would have been repaid, one way or the other. That’s just the way Don operated.”

“But Brianna thought the suggestion that there was anything between her and Don was ridiculous.” She caught the defensive tone in my voice and smiled.

She said, “I just hear what Ed tells me. I don’t know anything, other than what Don was like. I’ve never even met Ms. Jones.”

“But you think there was something between her and Don?” I couldn’t help asking it. I wanted an answer for reasons that had nothing to do with the case.

She chuckled softly and said, “It’s entirely possible they were just using each other. It’s what people do. But I have a good idea who would have won out. Ed tells me Ms. Jones is very careful with her business affairs. Which leads me to believe she was careful with her other affairs as well. Don was always more lucky than careful. And he was one of those men who never understood women, despite building his career on their exploitation. Some men will always let women manipulate them, no matter what their age.” She was talking about Don, but she was smiling at me as she spoke. Her eyes held a mixture of recognition and pity.

I watched her finish her gin and tonic. The angle of the shadows on the pool told me that late afternoon was coming on without me having to check my watch. The shadows wavered on the glassy surface of the water as I wondered who could tell me about Tiffany Long. Where she had come from and why she had come. As Colette showed me out we made small talk—if there’s anything I can help you with, and all that.

I hesitated in her doorway, thanking her for her time, then, as an afterthought, I said, “Oh, and one more thing. Can you tell me how to get to Canoga Park?”