The Flaming Motel

XVII


She told me it was further west and north, deeper into the Valley. I could take the surface streets or the freeway. When I asked her how far it was, she smiled and said, “Less than ten miles, but it could easily take an hour to get there.” You just have to love LA traffic.

Ventura Boulevard was crammed and I plodded along from light to light for what felt like the rest of the afternoon. Eventually, I found myself at the Topanga Canyon cross street. A turn south would take me over the mountain, through the narrow canyon and eventually to the ocean.

But I was going north. I turned up Topanga and the traffic eased. I went under the 101 Freeway, into Canoga Park, passed strip malls, run down apartments, a high school surrounded by high chain link, and felt the relative beauty and luxury of Ventura Boulevard quickly degrade into a city that had seen its better days.

I stopped at a graffiti covered Kentucky Fried Chicken and asked a scared looking kid where the address I was looking for was. He gave me some half-assed directions, watching me nervously from the corner of his eye. Like a guy in a tie and sport coat was going to rob him. Maybe it was the novelty of my outfit that threw him off. I choked down a chicken sandwich in the car while I wandered off into a neighborhood of fifty-year-old houses that hadn’t been painted since the day they were built.

I found the address on a street of one-story ramblers with trampled dirt for yards and sidewalks out front that were cracked and heaved as though the world had tried to shake the street off its back to get rid of it. The gutters were littered with fallen palm fronds, curled and crisp brown, decaying where they’d landed. It was a street where no maintenance was ever done.

I found the address on the background check. The house looked empty, but I’d gotten lucky finding people this way before. The house next door was identical, except for the old man in the lawn chair eyeing me from the slanted, sagging perch of the front porch. A cluster of small children went by on the sidewalk but not because this was a safe neighborhood where kids played freely. These kids had the look of abandonment in their eyes. They roamed because there was no one home to corral them.

I got out and walked up to the door. Through the window, I could see some furniture and boxes, but no people. I knocked and waited. I knocked again. Nothing. No one home, if there was ever anyone home. I stepped back off the porch and stood in the dirt yard, looking at the house. I could feel the old guy next door watching me. I doubted many guys in BMWs, dressed like me, ever came looking for anyone on this street.

After a long thirty seconds, the old guy called out, “Can I help you with something?”

I looked over at him like I hadn’t noticed him before. He wore khaki shorts with smudges of grease on them and a T-shirt that barely covered his huge belly. An American flag stretched across the front of the shirt, emblazoned across the top in gold with the word “Freedom.”

He lit a cigarette and watched me cross the dirt yard toward him. He exhaled and spoke through the cloud of smoke between us. “You looking for someone?”

“Looking for the Longs. Missus Long, if she’s still here.” I used Missus, not knowing if she was married, figuring it only made me look like an inept businessman if I was wrong.

The old guy shook his head, the thin white hair shaking loose as he moved. “Helen Long’s been gone seven or eight years now. Too damned bad too. She was about the last good people left on this street.”

“Do you know where she went?”

He brushed the hair back off his forehead and said he didn’t. Then he ran his eyes over me again and laughed. “Why you trying to find her? You coming to tell her she inherited a million bucks from some old relative?”

His laughter was hoarse from decades of cigarettes, and it broke off with a series of deep, phlegmy coughs. He caught himself, leaned forward, and spat a dark yellow goo into the dirt. He looked at the cigarette with disdain, like a lover that had done him wrong, and said, “They say these goddamned things’ll kill me. I keep waiting, but I’m still here. Just another f*cking rip-off.” He turned back to the porch and settled in a very old lawn chair.

I almost laughed, but held it in. I said, “I’m actually trying to find some information about her daughter.”

He laughed again—this time without coughing—and said, “Which one? Hell, they had about a hundred kids go through that house at one time or another. Most of ‘em white too. Which is more’n I can say for the rest of the mongrels around here.” He reached around behind his chair and picked up a gallon jug of red wine and took a hard swig from it. He set it back down without offering me any. Not that I was interested.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked down the street, shaking his head with grim awareness. “Shit, we moved out here in ‘65, right after the Watts riots. This was about as far away from the f*cking niggers as you could get back then. Let them burn their own f*cking neighborhood. That’s what I said. So we moved out here. It used to be a nice place. All these houses were practically new back then. But then the spics started sneaking into the country and every damned one of them seemed to move in right next door.” He spat on the ground again and blew out another cloud of smoke.

“Do you recall a daughter of hers named Tiffany? Blonde, very attractive.”

The old guy grinned and said, “Sure, I remember her. Not many women look like that. Especially around here.” He looked over at the house the Longs had lived in and said, “She was fine looking, that’s for damned sure. Probably still is, I’d bet.”

He reached back for the jug again. I could hear the sloshing of the liquid inside as he brought it to his lips. I figured it for half empty and wondered how long ago it had been full. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand again and glanced back at the porch of the Long house with a prurient grin.

“Shit, I remember this one time all the kids was home alone. Jimmy, the oldest brother, was in charge. They was rastling or whatever, and Jimmy pushed her out on the front porch naked. They were yelling and carrying on. The older brother was a pretty mean kid. Hell, I was sitting right here, just staring at her. Shit, she’s only thirteen or so, but goddamned, she already had a body most women would kill for.”

Then he shook his head and added, “That old Billy Long, I doubt he was able to keep his hands off her.”

“The brother?”

“No, her old man.” He gave me a wide smile that revealed a missing tooth far back in his top row of yellow molars. He scratched at his wispy hair again and puffed away at the cigarette. “I guess she wasn’t his real daughter, so it ain’t like it was a crime against nature or anything. Wasn’t like he was keeping it in the family or nothing. But still, that Billy Long was a weird dude.”

I watched the memory of her naked body standing on the porch wash across his face. He smiled and then shrugged it off. “Shit, she was just a little whore anyway. I watched her f*ck two niggers on the kitchen table one night. Had the light on and everything. I was just sitting on my couch and looked out the window and I could see right in. There she was, on her back on the kitchen table with her p-ssy hanging off one side and her head hanging off the other. Two big black dicks sliding in and out of each end.”

He laughed and said, “Hell, it was a lot better than watching reruns of Rockford Files. When they were finished with her, I saw one of them toss a couple crumpled twenties on her tits and the two niggs walked out, got in their car, and drove away. She was probably fifteen or sixteen then. Hell, I went through my pants to see if I had a twenty on me.” He laughed again and slapped his hand on his knee. Good times in Canoga Park. The old days. Memories.

I started to wonder if there was anything of value he could say. I asked, “So you haven’t seen any of them, the Longs, since they moved?”

“Nah. Shit, by then old Billy was dead and most of the kids were out of the house. They practically lived on the State money they got for the adoptions, so when them kids left home, the money left with ‘em. Old Billy wasn’t interested in working for a living. They was getting three or four hundred a month from the State for each of them kids. Had six of them over there most of the time. By the time they moved, they were down to two. Hard to live on that, even if you do drink cheap wine.” He laughed and hooked his index finger through the handle on the jug. Before he drank again, he said, “Good thing for Billy Long, he died before he had to find a job.”

“What’d he die of?”

“Disappointment.” The old man smiled as he said it and then burst out laughing in a high, raspy shriek. His face turned a deep, ghastly purple and he leaned forward on his knee to steady himself. When the laughter turned to a fit of coughing, he damn near retched right on the wood steps in front of his chair. I could hear loose matter gurgling in his throat and lungs. He sat up and washed it down with a long swig of purple wine and took a hard drag on his still smoldering cigarette to calm himself down.

When his breathing slowed from a sucking hiss to a mild wheeze, he smiled and said, “Cancer got him. Two packs a day for thirty-five years. Died right in that bedroom there.” He pointed to a window at the side of the house. “Didn’t have any insurance, so it wasn’t like it dragged on. One day he started coughing up blood. Two months later he was dead. Wasn’t long after that Helen and the two kids still at home moved away.”

“And you haven’t seen or heard from Tiffany Long since?”

“Nope. She never liked me much. I think she knew I wanted to tickle that pretty little beaver of hers.” He gave me the gap-toothed grin again and added, “But hell, who didn’t? She knew it, too. Like I said, she was making a little side money off that twat of hers. She probably turned that p-ssy into a fortune.”

He had no idea how right he was. I was out of questions and he had nothing to say, so I tried to wrap it up. “You don’t happen to know where she was adopted from, do you? Or what her last name might have been before?”

He looked at me like I was crazy. Then he said, “Why? Was I right when I was joking about her inheriting a fortune?”

“I just need to find her.”

“Well, I’d help you if I could, buddy, but I don’t know a damned thing.”

I checked my messages on the way back to Westwood. Detective Wilson hadn’t returned my call. I tried not to think much about it while my foot alternated between the gas and brake all the way down the freeway. Stop and go traffic eight lanes wide is a treat I try to get as much of as possible.

It was evening by the time I made it over the hill and drove past the train that leads to the Getty Center. A half mile before the Sunset Boulevard exit, traffic came to a complete stop. After twenty minutes of searching, the radio informed me that a truckload of ceramic lawn gnomes had turned over in one of the middle lanes, blocking most of the 405. I thought about Pete Stick’s warehouse as I heard the news.

An hour later, the sun was starting to sink as I crept by them. Thousands of crumbled heads and bodies glowed in the waning sunlight. Grinning and enjoying the mischief they’d caused.