The Flaming Motel

XVIII


I skipped the office. It was too late to bother going back. Between the gnomes, the crazy old man, and Colette Vargas’s restrained anger, I was ready to relax. And then I remembered Liz would be back from San Diego. I’d managed to forget about her and Ben for a couple of days, and forgetting felt good.

When I walked into the apartment she was standing in the kitchen wearing shorts and a tank top and the funky, hipster glasses that she loved, but never wore to work. She smiled and came over and put her arms around me. “Hey babe.” She kissed me as I noticed the large bouquet of flowers on the table. “I missed you,” she said.

The smell of the flowers filled the room. Or was it her perfume? She’d put the laptop away and cleared the table, straightened the place up, giving it a touch of warmth that it lacked when I was by myself. She ran her hands along my back and I felt a tension come loose that had been there for days. Cords of stiff muscle suddenly flexed beneath her touch.

“You’re tense,” she said. “What’s been going on?”

I rotated my shoulders and took a few deep breaths. “Traffic on the 405,” I said, and dropped my briefcase next to the table. “A truckload of ceramic lawn gnomes overturned.”

“Are you serious?” She laughed and I watched her eyes for signs of guilt, but found none. Then I wondered about my own eyes. But what had I done? What did I have to be really guilty about? I’d gone out to dinner. I’d gone to a party. It was all in the name of work. My eyes found the laptop on the shelf behind the table and I felt a pang in my stomach.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Then I stretched my arms up over my head and added, “This new case is driving me crazy.” I shook my head and walked back to the bedroom to change clothes.

She spoke from behind me. “The one about the shooting at the costume party?”

I wondered if that was what it was still about. Detective Wilson hadn’t called back. Both Pete Stick and Dave Daniels were dead. Everything about it was suspicious. Tiffany Vargas’s family was gone. Surely she knew where they were, but it wasn’t like I could just go and ask her.

I stood in the center of the bedroom, unbuttoning my shirt and thinking it through when I realized Liz was leaning against the door jam, watching me. When my eyes caught hers, she grinned and shook her head. “You’re thinking pretty hard about something over there.”

“You have no idea,” I said.

I smiled back at her and realized I was glad she was home. Just like that. Despite my concerns, my suspicions, I was lonely without her and I felt better when she was there. Was that love? Was that just what happened to people after a while? I couldn’t say, but for the moment, it was good enough. I watched her push a dark curl of hair back off her forehead. The curvature of her tan flesh, arching down from her shoulder, through her smooth armpit, and around beneath her loose breast hidden beneath her shirt, held my attention for the brief moment of its appearance.

She grinned at me and asked, “You hungry?”

I said I was.

“Good,” she laughed. “You can buy me dinner.”

We went to The Shack. We always went to The Shack. It was our place. I didn’t even have to ask her where she wanted to go. When we walked into the large room filled with long tables and benches, hung with old nets, rusted seafaring implements, and other random junk, I wondered how many times we’d been there. A hundred? Two hundred? It was always fewer than you thought, I told myself. But still, even if we’d only averaged twice a month, for the last six years, that was still over a hundred.

We ordered our usual. She had two fish tacos and a Corona. I had a fish taco, a shrimp taco, and a Dos Equis. The best meal in the city, as far as we were concerned, and for only sixteen bucks, with the beers. We sat in a booth where people had stapled business cards to the wall with a stapler kept at the table for that very purpose.

Two years ago I’d taken Liz to Spago for her birthday. Halfway through our $300 dinner, Liz smiled over her plate of black truffle risotto and said Spago was nice, but it wasn’t The Shack. We both laughed, but we both knew it was true. The dives are always better, if you knew how to find them and who to take with you.

Liz worked her way through a pile of lime wedges, squeezing them one after another over her tacos. She asked, “So what’s going on with the case?”

I wasn’t sure where to begin. I gave her a summary of what Jendrek and I had seen on Friday. She’d already heard it, but it was more to remind myself than anything. Then I told her about the kid wanting the bribe, but never showing up for it.

When I got that far, I realized I had to tell her about the guard at the house down the street, which meant I had to tell her about the party. Then I started wondering if I really had to tell her. But she was asking questions and I was answering them, which wasn’t giving me time to sort out the story and properly edit it.

She was asking, “So what did you do after he didn’t show up?”

I thought about my walk to the beach and my stakeout of Ben Cross’s condo. “Nothing,” I said. And then added, “Jendrek and I talked about it, and figured the kid either didn’t have anything to say, or didn’t really think we’d show up with the money.”

That was true. It just wasn’t a complete answer to the question.

“So then what?” she asked.

“Then we got fired.”

She scrunched up her face, almost in the shape of a question mark. I laughed. It was the impact I’d been going for, mostly to give me time to think of what I was going to say. “And then we got hired again,” I added, “but this time by the son.”

“The wife fired you?”

“She just walked into the office Monday morning, told us she didn’t want to go through a drawn out lawsuit against the cops, that she’d suffered enough, and then headed on down to her lawyer’s office to collect her inheritance.”

Liz grinned and said, “They say time heals all wounds, but money apparently does the job too.”

“Apparently,” I said. “But one thing she also made clear was that we had been hired by the son, without her authorization. She said she was never interested in a suit and that Ed, the son, was the driving force behind it.”

I drank some beer and went on. “So anyway, we call Ed, tell him she fired us, and he immediately hires us to sue her.”

“The wife?”

“Right,” I nodded my head as I spoke, “he says she’s a fraud, that she conned his old man into marrying her, that he wants to challenge her inheritance.”

“Can he do that?”

I shrugged, “Anyone can file a lawsuit. Whether he can win, we’re not entirely sure. But we’ve already got his retainer. It’s not like we’re drowning in work at the moment. So we said sure.”

“You guys are such whores.” She laughed. The fact that it was the same word Jendrek used was not lost on me.

“Hey, we’ve got to make a living. How else am I going to be able to take you to fancy restaurants like this?”

She smiled as she cocked her head to the side to chomp off a bite of taco. While she was still chewing, she said, “So now you’re after the wife? Can you even do that? I mean, you were originally representing her.”

“Ed hired us the first time. The only conversation we ever had with her was when she fired us. She didn’t even fire us really, she just said she wasn’t hiring us. We never worked for her.”

“So now you’re investigating your former client who was never really your client?”

“Right, but here’s where it gets interesting.” My brain was now scrambling, trying to assess various options and settling on this: “After the son hires us, I go up to the house on Mulholland to pick up some papers from him. There are some workers working on the driveway when I get there, so I park at the edge of this other house’s driveway.”

“Next door?”

“Across the street. There’s this guard in a little gatehouse there, and I ask him if it’s okay. He says it is, so I park.” I paused for a second. Liz took another bite of her taco and looked at me like she was wondering why I’d stopped. There was no doubt anywhere on her face. As far as she would know, I’d never gone to the party, never even had the opportunity to be alone in a room with Brianna Jones and feel her rub up against me.

“So anyway,” I went on, “I go in. I talk to Ed Vargas for a while. And when I come out to get my car, I start making small talk with this gate guard at this other house. He starts talking about the night Don Vargas was shot and tells me that the cops questioned him because they said the call that reported the noise disturbance came from the phone in his gatehouse.”

“And he says he never called?”

“Right.” I nodded. Liz was as quick as they come. It was intelligence I fell for more than anything. “But he says even more than that. He looks at my car and says it sure is nicer than the last guy that parked there. He starts telling me about this kid who had car trouble and stopped to call a friend of his.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “Thursday night?” She was more cynical than I was.

“Exactly. But worse than that. Guess who the guy describes when he tells me the details?” She thought for a moment, and shrugged. I said, “The kid who wanted the payoff, but never showed up,” and watched her eyes grow wide.

And then I added, after a pause and a swig of Dos Equis, “And now for the topper. Guess whose body washed up on the shore in Malibu this morning?”

I grinned as her jaw dropped open, food and all.

I told her the rest, about how no one knew much about Tiffany Vargas née Long. Not the ex-wife. Not the old neighbor. Nobody. I told her about Pete Stick’s shady history and how I suspected Don Vargas was propping him up once again. But she couldn’t get past the kid making the phone call.

When we were back in the car, she said, “So you think Pete was extorting money from Don?”

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “But the shooting just seems to have been a random thing. It just doesn’t make sense that the guys who planned the shooting end up dead.”

“Unless they were pawns,” she said.

“Sure, but what are the odds of that?” I turned the car east off of Ocean Avenue and headed up Montana. The blocks near the ocean were lined with nondescript apartment houses and dark sidewalks. Late on a Tuesday evening, the street was completely empty.

“The problem with that,” I said, “is that the cops would have to be in on it. A, that’s hard to do anyway, and B, then you’ve got too damned many people involved. There’s no way they could keep it a secret.” I noticed the police car behind me almost as I said it. I felt the surge of adrenaline I always felt whenever one of them was following me. I don’t know why. I just didn’t like having them back there.

Liz said, “Not if it was just the one cop.” Almost as if on cue, the red and blues came on behind me and she almost jumped as they lit up the inside of the car. “Jesus Christ,” she said, and turned to look back at the car, just a silhouette now in the glow of the flashing lights.

I mumbled a string of curse words as I pulled over in the middle of the block between fifth and sixth streets. I looked at the speedometer, as if it could still tell me if I’d been speeding. “What the hell does this guy want? I was barely moving.”

I watched in the mirror. A lone man stepped out of the driver’s side, flashlight held up at shoulder height. The other hand resting at the edge of his hip, just above his gun. Liz watched in her mirror as well. The cop walked up my side and leaned over, flashlight beam strafing the dash and floor, between the seats, coming to rest directly in my face. I squinted in the brightness. Couldn’t see anything.

“Is there a problem, officer?” It was the same thing everyone said in every bad TV show ever made, but I said it too. It just came out naturally.

“License and registration please.” I leaned over and reached in the glove box. The flashlight followed my hands. I glanced up at Liz as I leaned across her. She raised her eyebrows, wondering what this was all about.

I handed the cop my paperwork. He took a half second glance at it and asked, “You been drinking tonight, son? Smells like you been drinking.”

I didn’t like the sound of that at all. My impulse was to lie and say I hadn’t. It just felt like the natural thing to do, but I knew he could smell it on my breath. So I said, “At dinner, just a few minutes ago.” I knew if I was going to lie, it was better to say you just had a drink, only minutes before they pulled you over. That way, your blood alcohol content was theoretically increasing as you sat there on the side of the road. By the time they measured it, you could argue it was higher than when you were pulled over.

The cop handed my license and registration back. He bent over as he did and held his face parallel to mine, flashlight still blinding me. He sneered and took in a deep breath.

Exhaling, he said, “I think I smell marijuana too. You two out partying tonight? Don’t lie, I’d know that smell fifty feet away.”

Panic and heat swept through my face and hands. Liz let out an exasperated breath beside me and said, “What the hell is this? You don’t smell anything.”

The cop’s eyes lit up. He reached in through the window and tossed a Ziploc baggie of pot into her lap. “What about that?” he said.

Liz and I both recoiled at the bag. I yelled, almost shrieked, “Don’t touch it!” at the same time she said:

“What the f*ck?”

My door handle clicked and the door swung open. “Okay smart ass, out of the car,” the cop was saying as he put his hand on my shoulder and started pulling. But I was belted in and couldn’t get free. I pulled back and he reached in with his other hand and pinched the back of my neck. “We got a fighter here. You some kind of tough guy?”

I wriggled beneath the pressure of his grip and weight and said, “Jesus Christ, man, I’m belted in. Give me a second.”

I heard Liz unbuckling, and then the cop yelling “Stay in the car ma’am.” I whispered for her to stay calm and be careful not to touch the baggie, then unclasped my seatbelt and felt myself being pulled sideways from the car. I tried to get one foot under me.

Flailing, scrambling to catch my weight, I heard her say, “You’re f*cking up, a*shole. We’re both lawyers and we know our rights a hell of a lot better than you.”

She couldn’t help herself. She was right. We both knew it. But it was the worst thing to say. It could only make things worse. This guy clearly didn’t give a shit about rules.

I heard him laugh and say, “I got your rights hanging a foot hard, cunt, now stop resisting before someone gets shot.”

He gave me a hard tug and I stumbled headlong, out into the empty street. I paused on my hands and knees, trying to get my head around the situation, but the cop was yelling, “Don’t f*ck around, son. Don’t try anything stupid.” I turned slowly to see he had a baton in his hand.

He brought it down sideways across my shoulders and my arms buckled. Face flat on the pavement, I let out a howl as pain racked up and down my spine. He was on me in seconds, cuffing my hands and then he was gone, around to Liz’s side of the car. I turned my head back in time to see him drag her out through her door. She yelped as he slammed her down on the hood. Tossing her like a ragdoll.

He started frisking her. Groping hard. The anger on her face garish in the pulsing red light from the cop car. She made a guttural noise as he grabbed somewhere she didn’t like, and then she said, “Get yourself a good grope, pervert. I’ll bet this is as close as you ever get to a woman.”

Her face tensed again, and the cop said, “Better shut that mouth bitch, before I stick something in there.”

I struggled against the handcuffs. I wanted to get free and attack the guy. Jam that baton up his ass and slam his face into the pavement until he stopped moving, then empty his gun into him just for good measure. But who was I kidding? The handcuffs were the best thing for me. If I had been able to go for it, I knew it wouldn’t play out the way I was imagining.

Then he brought her arms up behind her back, tugging to the limits of her ligaments. She grimaced as he leaned in close to talk in her ear.

“What’s in your trunk?” he spoke softly, but not a whisper. I could hear him plain as day in the still Santa Monica night. She didn’t answer because it was a threat, not a question. Then he said, “What do you think I’ll find in there? More drugs?” He paused again, letting his words hang in the silence. I studied her face, her cold, emotionless eyes. Her angry, stoic expression. The cop was grinning, almost laughing. I wanted to leap over the car, take him by the throat, and shake him till he broke.

Then he said, “What else do you think I might find? Huh? What else? Maybe a gun with ballistics that match a murder we’ve been trying to solve? You think we might find something like that in there?”

He let her go suddenly and was around the car and back on me. He squatted down and leaned over, putting his face right in mine. It was the first good look I’d gotten of him. Icy blue eyes and dishwater stubble. Sweaty. I only realized he had his gun drawn when he put it to the side of my head and jabbed it into my temple, grinding the side of my face into the street. He leaned in so close I could almost feel his moist lips tickle my ear as he whispered:

“If we have to do this again, we’ll find what we need to find. You’ll go downtown, and you’ll never come back. Understand me?”

I didn’t say anything or move. But he repeated his question. I nodded that I understood. He moved his head back and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Or maybe you’ll try to resist. Maybe you’ll be a threat to an officer’s safety. Maybe I’ll have to use this gun to protect myself. You think something like that might happen?”

I didn’t nod, and I couldn’t shake my head. But he wasn’t looking for an answer that time. He just leaned back in. So close his hot breath went down my neck.

“Keep your nose out of the Vargas business, or you might lose your whole f*cking head. Cops protect their own.”

Then he unlocked the handcuffs, stood, and was back to his car in seconds. The lights went off. The street went dark. His car roared away, turned at the corner, and was gone. I lay in the street feeling my body jitter and shake from fear and rage and adrenaline.

Liz rushed around the car and knelt beside me. Her hands were warm against my face. I took hold of her wrists like the edge of a precipice high above a deep, flaming hell.