The Flaming Motel

Wednesday

November 6





XIX


“What about Dixon, the Police Chief?” I said.

Jendrek shook his head slowly as he thought. “It’s just too hard to believe.”

“He’s a nut case though. He hated Vargas. He cleared the cop who did the shooting. What’s his name?”

“Who the f*ck cares?” Jendrek said, leaning back in his chair with an Egg MacMuffin in one hand and an expression of pure skepticism on his face. He sipped his coffee and added, “Guy’s just another Nazi cop. But why would he threaten you?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want us to find anything.” I was going round and round in circles. “You said it yourself, you can’t keep a large conspiracy secret for long. Maybe we’re close to finding something.”

This was a conversation I’d had a lot in the prior twelve hours. Liz and I had it half the night. Jendrek and I for the last hour. I was groggy and tired, yet amped on my own wired suspicions. The adrenaline twitches from the night before hadn’t worn off. I was a junky, strung out on rumination and speculation.

Jendrek had come in at his regular time and I came in just after him, at a highly irregular time for me. I’d come from the MacDonald’s, which was the only place I could think of to go at seven in the morning, and brought back a sack of their delicious but deadly sandwiches.

Jendrek finished off what he was eating and then shrugged and shook his head. “But how would they know about you? We’ve had no contact with the police.”

That sent a jolt through me. I said, “What about Detective Wilson?” Like I’d caught Jendrek in a logical misstep.

He shrugged again, “I don’t know. You’re the one who knows him. He sounds like a hard ass to me. A by the book, no nonsense guy. You really think he would be involved?”

I didn’t, and I said so, but then I added, “But he fills out reports just like any cop. And there was another guy there with him that night. Wilson introduced me to him. That guy would know my name and who I was.”

“But isn’t that all he’d know?”

“These guys know more than you think,” I said, almost standing, but forcing myself to stay seated. “They’re everywhere you go. They’ve got files. They’ve got surveillance equipment. If they decide they want to do something, there’s nothing to stop them. What about last night? If he’d have hauled us in, there wouldn’t be a damned thing we could do. The cop would testify. Liz and I would say he was lying, and the jury would believe the cop. Because cops don’t lie. They never do anything wrong. That’s what people think, especially juries, they have to, no one wants to believe the bad guy may be the guy you put in charge of enforcing the law. They … They—” My rant ran out of words.

Jendrek cut in and said, “Maybe he wasn’t a cop.”

The possibility struck me like a two-by-four. I was starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but Jendrek was even further out there than I was. The possibility had never occurred to me. Jendrek could see I was stunned, and added:

“Did you get a name? A badge number? A number on the car?”

I hadn’t. Liz hadn’t either. “It was dark,” I said. “It all happened too fast.”

“Then how do you know?” he pressed, sipping his coffee and waiting. “If you’re going to suspect everyone, then you damned well better suspect everything.”

“But where would he—?” I didn’t even finish the sentence because a sick feeling came over me, suggesting an answer. Jendrek watched it cross my face and smiled.

He said, “We’re in the middle of Hollywood, for Christ’s sake, anything can be faked. And faked well.”

I said, “Especially if you happen to own a costume shop.”

Jendrek shrugged again and said, “If you’re going to consider the possibilities, you might as well consider them all.”

That meant no one was off the list. But the problem with suspecting everyone and everything was that you needed a shitload of information. Information I didn’t have. After days of stumbling around in the dark, I knew I needed some light. Something objective. Google was nice, but real research still required a library.

As I sat at my desk making notes, Detective Wilson finally called. When I answered the phone with hello, he said, “You just won’t go away, will you?”

I said, “How could I, when you’re so pleasant to deal with?”

That got a bit of a laugh out of him, and he said, “What do you think you know that’s so important?”

“Not over the phone.”

I could almost hear him rolling his eyes as he said, “Jesus, Olson, life isn’t a spy movie. Spill it.”

But I wouldn’t. Jendrek was always saying the old line: just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. After the cop the night before, that would be my mantra for the rest of the case. Hell, the rest of my life. Maybe I could trust Wilson, but I damned sure couldn’t trust the phone lines.

I said, “You remember four years ago? My suspicion of phones is justified.” He grunted. He knew what I was talking about. He agreed to meet me for lunch at a deli near the UCLA campus.

Online services are great for research about things that have happened since the Internet took over our society. I was able to sit at a terminal in the main UCLA library and gather articles about Police Chief Dixon in much the same way I could have back in my own office.

I scanned through thirty or forty LA Times pieces. I learned that Arthur Dixon had been hired away from the St. Louis police force three years before. In St. Louis, he had been effective in reducing crime dramatically and had been brought in to work his magic here. The stories were accompanied by pictures of people grinning and making speeches about what a great guy he was.

There were also pictures of him going to church, standing in front of churches, shaking hands with priests and clergy of all types. But mostly just Christian types. He made a speech on the steps of the massive new Catholic cathedral downtown where he said, “Faith in the Lord’s guiding hand could help restore peace to our community.”

There were only vague references to Dixon’s midwestern roots. I pieced it together from the string of articles. Dixon grew up in southern Missouri. His father was a minister in the Assembly of God Church. He attended Northwestern University on a football scholarship, but injured his knee as a sophomore. He moved to St. Louis, became a cop, and worked his way up through the ranks, earning a graduate degree in divinity along the way.

In St. Louis, he vigorously enforced zoning and anti-pornography laws. Making speeches against smut was one of his favorite pastimes. He’d done much less of that kind of talk in Los Angeles. Given the size of the industry, his restraint showed he was a savvy guy. But there was no doubt how he felt about the issue.

I studied his picture, wondering if he was the kind of guy who could commit murder to justify what he believed was a higher good. I was always skeptical of the devoutly religious. They were the same people who blew up abortion clinics in the name of saving lives. Marx was probably right about it being the opiate of the people, for most people. But for small few, religion was like PCP. It made them irrational and violent.

Was Dixon one of those? Had he used his power to ensure that Don Vargas was no more? Had he “created” a situation where officers would have no choice but to shoot? It seemed far fetched. Too complicated and risky, for one. I had to agree with Jendrek there. It was also just too difficult. It wasn’t like Dixon pulled the trigger. How could he get a couple of officers to get involved in something like that? There was no way he could guarantee that they wouldn’t be prosecuted. There was no way he could guarantee that people like Jendrek and I wouldn’t come along and sue them.

I decided I was wasting time.

I moved on to Don and Tiffany Vargas, Colette Vargas, Pete Stick, and everyone else I could think of. That was where the library really paid off. There were a few news stories about the Halloween shooting, about the clearance of the officers involved, but the Internet ran out of information pretty fast. It was time to hit the books.

In the computer age, it’s become common for people to forget about things like microfiche and the bound volumes of indexes to periodicals, tracking names and other key terms. I sat at a long table in the library, leafing through them, looking up my list of names, trying to find references to any of them.

There wasn’t much.

I went to the key dates. Three years ago, Pete Stick had come on the scene. There was nothing about him anywhere. No mention of Brianna Jones either. At least, she wasn’t appearing in the publications being tracked. Then I went back a decade, to when Tiffany Long showed up and stole Don Vargas away from Colette. Still nothing.

In each of those years, there were a few references to Don Vargas. I pulled them. Went to the dusty microfiche machines along the back wall of the reading room and stared at their reverse-negative images and confirmed they contained nothing relevant. Then I printed them out for twenty-five cents a page. Better to be thorough, I thought. I didn’t want to have to come back.

In 1974, I found a single article mentioning Pete Stick and the insurance fraud on the jewelry store. It was a short article and contained no picture. It described how an industrious insurance investigator kept canvassing pawnshops along Sunset, looking for items that had been reported stolen by his employer’s clients. Eventually, he spotted some pieces of jewelry that were stolen from a downtown jeweler named Colson DeWitt. Eventually, he figured out who was selling the merchandise to the pawnshops: one Peter Stick. Then he spotted Colson DeWitt and Pete Stick eating steaks at Dan Tana’s. It didn’t take a genius to put that together.

The article was interesting, but irrelevant. The whole morning had been a waste. Sifting through three decades of history looking for … for what? I didn’t even know. Something. Anything. Ed and Colette Vargas both suspected Tiffany of being a fraud. I suspected Don Vargas’s killing was no accident. Three people were dead with only a tenuous connection between them. I didn’t know anything, but someone certainly thought I did, or might, or was on the verge of learning something. Why else would a cop grind my face into the street with the tip of his gun? And what’s more, I couldn’t even be sure it was a cop.

All I could do was keep digging.

In 1978 there had been a single news story mentioning Don and Colette Vargas, owners of the Starlight Motel in Malibu, which burned in a fire that killed two motel guests. There was a quote from Colette, saying pretty much what she’d told me on her patio the day before. She’d checked them in. They were a nice young couple. It was such a tragedy. There was a picture of firefighters rummaging through the smoldering ruins. Only the sign for the motel remained standing.

There were two related articles as well. One was a sidebar in the same paper, describing the young couple, Ray and Sylvia Davis of Indio, California. The other was in the following day’s paper. It was an interview with the owner of a Malibu Fotomat, saying he had developed a roll of film the young couple had dropped off with him and that he intended to return it to the couple’s children.

The story showed a picture of Mitchell Silberg standing in front of his tiny pagoda-roofed Fotomat kiosk in the parking lot of a grocery store. The picture was black and white, but I could practically see the bright yellow and blue of the Fotomat. The kiosks had dotted the southern California landscape when I was a kid. Everywhere you went there was a Fotomat. What had happened to them all? I hadn’t noticed one in years. Maybe they’d all been torn down or converted into drive through espresso stands. Or maybe they’d all ended up in some mysterious field in South Dakota or Wyoming, arranged in vast ranks and files like an odd American counterpoint to China’s vast and permanent terracotta warriors.

I spent a few minutes lamenting the disposable nature of our culture. Then I printed the articles and checked my watch. There went another morning I’d never get back.