The Flaming Motel

XXVI


We all went into the foyer together and stood to the side as two guys carried a dresser wrapped in a blanket out of the house. As we walked into the large main room, Liz looked around, somewhat awestruck by the size, the light, and the crystal clear views through the windows at the back of the house. I was trying to remember how many times I’d been there in the last week. Whatever the number, it felt like too many.

I could hear her voice before I could see her. She was calling out instructions to someone, telling them to be careful with the walls. And then she appeared on the balcony in loose jeans and a black T-shirt tucked tightly around her narrow waist, emphasizing her oversized chest. She was incapable of hiding her body, especially from someone who knew what every inch of it looked like.

She glanced down at us and looked genuinely surprised. She smiled, but she didn’t look happy. “Hey,” she called down to us, looking directly at me as she spoke, “What are you guys doing here? There was just a cop here who wanted to come in and search the house.”

She disappeared behind a wall, with a man carrying a large mirror behind her. A few seconds later she came out through the opening to the hallway and stood with her hands on her hips, exhaling upward and blowing a fray of blonde bangs up off her forehead. Her eyes went from me to Jendrek and finally came to rest on Liz.

I said, “You know Mark Jendrek. And this is Liz Winslow.” I figured it was unprofessional to point out that she was my girlfriend. What did that matter? We were there for work. Brianna smiled at me and shook her head.

She said, “I told that cop there was no way I was letting him in here. I’m moving out anyway. I bought a condo in Brentwood and now I’m trying to get the hell out of here as fast as I can. I’m f*cking exhausted. I worked last night, then I had to get up at the crack of dawn this morning to pack.”

“Where’s Tiffany?” I asked, wondering how she’d managed to buy a condo so quickly. She must have paid cash. Her work was profitable, if nothing else.

“Who knows? I think I heard her on the phone with her lawyer this morning. I also think I heard her talking about selling this place and talking to someone at the bank. I’m glad I’m getting out of here.” She looked around at the room like we were inside a prison.

“I know you can’t let the cop in here, but it’s important that we take a look around. Just in Tiffany’s room and the office, and anywhere else she keeps her stuff. It’s important.”

Brianna thought about it for a few seconds and said, “She might be back anytime. I don’t need that kind of hassle. I just want to get my shit out of here and never see this place or that woman again.”

“You won’t have to do anything. Keep the movers doing their thing. We’ll be in and out in no time.” She didn’t seem convinced. So I added, “Look, it’s not like you’re protecting anything. That cop will be back in a few hours with a warrant. This place is going to get searched anyway. We just want to see if we can find anything before Tiffany gets back. We don’t want to risk her destroying anything.”

That seemed to ease her concern, but only slightly. She looked at Jendrek again and glanced over at Liz, her eyes darting around the room in between. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

“You remember that red-haired kid who worked for Pete Stick? We’ve been told that he was Tiffany’s younger brother.”

That seemed to surprise her. She raised her eyebrows and said, “That guy? What was his name?”

“David Daniels.”

“David Daniels,” she repeated, slowly, as if feeling the words in her mouth. I watched her lips repeat them, recalling when I’d last seen that mouth the night before, recalling what was in it at the time. Then she said, “I can’t believe that. The few times he was around she acted like she didn’t know him. They didn’t even talk to each other I don’t think.”

“So you see, we need to see if there’s any records or anything she has that might confirm that.”

Brianna shrugged and said, “Aren’t there like, public records that show that kind of thing?”

“No. Not here. Tiffany was adopted, along with a bunch of other kids. She lived with a family that made a living off the welfare system, taking in abandoned kids. She probably wasn’t actually related to Daniels.”

She thought about that for a minute and then said, “Well we’ve got to make this quick. I’m planning on having the rest of my stuff packed in an hour. Then I’m planning on being gone. If I can avoid ever seeing that bitch again, I’d like to.”

She turned and went back into the hallway. I started following her and then turned back to Jendrek and Liz and motioned for them to come too. Jendrek shook his head and whispered, “What a weird place. Who are these people?” Liz didn’t say anything at all.

We followed Brianna up the stairs she and I had climbed once before. I looked for a stain in the carpet from the beer I’d spilled, but found nothing. In the loft area at the top two men were carrying large boxes labeled “books” back down the stairs and we made room for them to get by. One of the men glanced over at Brianna and smiled. “A lot of books,” he said. He grinned at me as he went by. I could see he was looking for any excuse to talk to her.

When the men disappeared down the stairs, Brianna looked back at us and sneered, “I think he’s surprised I can read.”

She was being sarcastic, but I wasn’t sure we were supposed to laugh. To do so would mean we understood where the guy was coming from—yeah, that is surprising. Jendrek and I just smiled at each other. Liz looked over the railing, down at the room below, as if contemplating an escape route.

We followed Brianna down the hall and made a couple of turns. I remembered the Byzantine nature of the upstairs from the time before. She finally stopped at one corner and pointed into a room. “This is Tiffany’s room,” she said. Then she added, “Actually, it was Don and Tiffany’s, until recently.”

I recognized the chair against the back wall, opposite the door, from the time before. Tiffany had been sitting in it crying, holding a small box. I hadn’t thought about that moment since it happened. I went to step past Brianna and enter the room, but I hesitated at the threshold. This was the point where what we were doing became illegal. But after all that had happened to Jendrek and Liz and me, weren’t we justified? Wasn’t it alright to break the law—commit burglary, larceny—for the sake of something more important?

The answer didn’t matter. I went into the room and the rest of them followed. We stood around, studying the furniture, peering into the huge walk-in closet—more of a dressing room really—with its racks of clothes and rows of shelves and drawers, wondering where to begin. I’d never searched a room before. I looked at Jendrek who simply stared back at me. Liz seemed to be admiring the overall décor. So I turned to Brianna, as though she would have the answer to the simple question, where do we start?

“So,” I said to her, “do you have any idea where she keeps stuff? Papers, things she wants to keep hidden? Stuff like that?”

Brianna shrugged and looked around the room. “I’ve really never spent any time in here. I wouldn’t know. Tiffany is pretty private about stuff and Don never talked about it. Don never seemed to care too much what she did.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Liz studying Brianna. Her eyes running over the curves only slightly hidden beneath the T-shirt. Brianna seemed to be used to women giving her that look and appeared unfazed. But it was evident that Liz found her appearance, her clear skin, sparkling teeth and bright eyes—indeed, her very shape—repugnant.

After another bout of silence, Brianna scratched her arm and said, “Well, we better get this going. I don’t want to be in here when she comes back.”

Jendrek clapped his hands together like a foreman and said, “Okay, let’s get to work.” We divided the room into parts and each of us began going methodically through Tiffany Vargas’s things. Opening drawers and combing through the contents, looking behind the furniture, up against the wall, looking under things and inside them.

“Try not to disturb anything too much,” Brianna said. “I don’t want her to know we’ve been here.”

After five or ten minutes, Liz called me from back in the walk-in closet. She’d come across a stack of papers she wanted me to look through. I went in to check them out. All the way at the rear of the room was a wide marble makeup counter surrounded by mirrors and lights.

The papers were on the counter. Liz whispered to me as I stood next to her, leafing through the documents. “Can you believe all these clothes?” She pulled out a black cocktail dress and held it up against her. She smiled and whispered, “This is Versace.” She put the dress back and added, “And she must have like thirty pairs of Ferragamos in here.” She studied the shelves and added, as an after thought, “There’s like a dozen Prada bags. It’s like a f*cking Neiman-Marcus in here.”

The papers were nothing but a few account statements for things like her cell phone and her gym membership. There were some bills for a dog walking service—although I’d never seen a dog in the house—and bills from the gardener and pool guy, but there was nothing of interest. I set that papers down on the makeup counter and studied myself in the mirror. I looked tired. Liz stopped poking through the closet and looked at me in the mirror.

“What?” she asked, as if I’d said something.

“Nothing.” I shook my head slightly as I spoke. I felt a concern come over me. “What the hell are we doing here?” I asked, without knowing where it came from. “We’re rifling through this woman’s bedroom based on something some woman told me in a little shack out in East LA? I don’t even know for sure if that was really David Daniels’s girlfriend.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, coming closer, putting her hand on my back. “Of course she was. She knew what you were talking about, didn’t she?”

I nodded. Liz was right. I was being paranoid.

“Sometimes you just have to trust people, Ollie.” She continued rubbing my back and I leaned forward on the makeup counter, letting my head hang forward on my neck. “Not everyone in the world is a bad person. Not everyone is part of some grand conspiracy.”

“I know,” I said, as my eyes wandered over the piles of hair clips, the tubes of lipstick and a small glass container of rings and odd bits of jewelry. There were tweezers and mascara and nail clippers and files. In the corner was a cluster of bottles of hair gel and mousse and spray and lotion. Beside that was a small wood box with a star inlaid into the top of it in exotic looking wood. Next to that was a large round container of pancake foundation. Liz kept rubbing my back and my eyes continued to roam.

Then they went back to the box.

It was too small to hold paperwork, unless it was something folded in fourths, like a child might do to a homework assignment or a note. “Did you look in that?” I asked, pointing to it.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think it’s supposed to be a fancy recipe box, but she’s just got some old pictures in it.”

I slid the box out into the center of the counter and studied the top of it. The star set into the wood was composed of dozens of tiny pieces cut perfectly to create a grain that ran opposite the rest of the wood. The contrast was striking. I tried to lift the lid off, but it seemed to be stuck.

“You have to kind of squeeze the side of it,” Liz said.

I picked up the box and squeezed. The lid came right off. When I looked inside I felt like something was squeezing me. A hot, sick feeling of instant recognition started at the back of my head and flowed down through my whole body.

The brittle paper envelope was folded back so I could see the top of the first of the dozen photographs in the box. I pulled the envelope out of the box. Just above the Fotomat logo, in carefully written block letters were the words: I am terribly sorry for your loss. Your parents left these with me, now I leave them with you. Condolences, Mitch Silberg.

I took the pictures and spread them out across the marble counter. The color was faded, but oddly saturated, as if taken at a time when the whole world was softer, hazier. There were a dozen snapshots of a young couple—some of the woman, some of the man, and some of the two of them together—laughing and smiling for the camera as they lounged on a beach. In the background of several of the pictures was the Starlight Motel. The image leapt out of the photos. Familiar from having seen it now so many times.

The rest of the photos were taken inside one of the rooms. There was no mistaking the gold bedspread and pastel green walls I’d seen only four days before. Was that all it was? Four days? That, and about thirty years. But the father, with his cheeky grin and hair still tousled from the wind and spray off the ocean, sat on the bed looking as though his lover was coming to him that very moment, walking toward him snapping the picture. The man stared out at me with a knowing look. As if somehow he recognized that I might see him, leaning back against the wall of that motel room all these years later, not knowing him, but knowing the seahorse lamp mounted on the wall beside his head. Knowing what that meant, and not wanting to know any more.

“What is it?” Liz asked, leaning in and looking up at me. “Is something wrong?”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, almost winded, nodding. “Something is very wrong.”

“Who are these people?” She picked up one of the pictures and studied it. “Do you know them?”

“I know who they are,” I said. I held myself up against the counter with one hand and stirred the pictures around with the other, randomly mixing them together, as if some alchemy might occur that would transform them into pictures of other people.

“Nothing,” I heard Jendrek call from the main room. “There wasn’t anything interesting out here,” he said as he came into the dressing area. Brianna followed close behind him. Both of them stopped halfway across the room. “What is it?”

“We have a problem,” I said, pointing down at the pictures. “It looks like Tiffany and Don Vargas go way back. Probably a lot further back than Vargas ever realized.”

“What do you mean?” Jendrek asked. He came over to the counter and stared down at the pictures. “What are these?”

Brianna followed him and did the same. She took a few seconds to process the photographs and then nearly gasped. “Oh my God.” She picked up the picture of the man on the bed and put her other hand over her mouth, a mortified confusion and fear on her face. “These people are in that same motel we saw in the movie.” Then she turned to me an added, “The other night, at the party.”

I could feel the laser focus of Liz’s eyes boring into my back as Brianna spoke. Now I would regret not telling her about the party. Now my fear of looking suspicious had made me look so much worse. I could imagine some mixture of anger and disappointment on Liz’s face, but I didn’t turn to see it. Instead, I stood there for a second trying to think of something to say that would make sense to everyone in the room. But nothing came to me.

I picked up the old Fotomat envelope and pointed to the note scrawled across it. “This guy,” I said. “This Mitch Silberg. I’m positive this is the guy who owned the Fotomat in Malibu where these people”—I pointed to the pictures—“dropped some film off before the Starlight Motel burned down. I have an old newspaper article about it. This Silberg guy gave the pictures to the couple’s kids.”

Jendrek looked confused. Brianna looked confused. I still didn’t turn to look at Liz, but I could feel her looking at me. I began to wonder if I’d even told Jendrek about it. It seemed so irrelevant that I might not have. So I said, “When the Starlight Motel burned down, two people were killed in that fire, and I think it was these two people.”

Jendrek still wasn’t making the connection, but Brianna was starting to, I could see it in those light blue eyes of hers, flickering like the beginning of a nightmare. I took a couple of steps back away from the counter and faced them all. Liz looked cool and detached, but even she was interested in what I had to say. I was hoping she was interested enough to forget about the party I’d attended with Brianna and my attempt to lie my way out of looking and feeling guilty.

“Look,” I said, “when I talked to Colette Vargas, Don’s first wife, she told me that they used to own the Starlight Motel back in the mid-70s. This was when Don first got into porn.” My eyes caught on Brianna for a brief moment as I said the word.

There was a hesitation in my voice and then I realized I simply had to say it all. There was no way to hide anything from Liz, no way to talk around it. I said, “When Don first got into it, he started making low budget movies at the motel. They played one at the wake on Sunday. The one they played took place in a room that looked just like the one in these pictures. The motel was the same one that’s in the background of some of those pictures on the beach.”

Jendrek turned and studied the pictures again. Liz did the same. I was hoping the use of the word “wake” instead of “party” would be enough of an explanation. But obviously, if they were showing porno films at it, then it wasn’t an ordinary wake.

“Anyway, a couple years go by—”

“Hey,” Jendrek said, pointing at one of the pictures and looking at me. “This is the same motel that was in the picture at Pete Stick’s office.”

“Exactly. Pete helped them run it. Colette Vargas says that it was Pete who got Don into making the films. And, when Don needed money to make full-length features, the motel burned down and he collected the insurance money.”

“And Pete Stick goes into the insurance fraud business.” It was clicking for Jendrek now.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Vargas’s whole fortune started with that seed money. And the two people who died in that fire, these two people.” I went over to the counter and gathered up the pictures, stuffing them back in the envelope and back in the box. “They had two kids. And now I’m pretty sure that Tiffany Vargas was one of them.”

The stagnant air of the dressing room went cold as the four of us exchanged glances, searching one another’s faces for some sign of recognition, some symbolic gesture that might tell us everything was fine. But there was nothing but a series of bleak stares, followed by an urgent panic, a sudden need for egress, for distance, to be away from that place. I smiled feebly and turned and left the room.

Everyone followed me as if they knew where I was going. As if I knew where I was going and what might come next. But I was merely fleeing, and they were coming right along with me. Down the hall, around the corner, returning to the loft, descending the stairs. There was nothing but silence clouded by footsteps and adrenaline.

We clustered together in the large room downstairs. Jendrek and I studied each other’s faces, waiting for a good idea to wash across them. Brianna studied the door. The movers came and went with lamps and boxes and an impressionist seascape in a wide gilt frame. I held the wood box in my hand so tightly the tips of my fingers went white.

Finally, Liz said, “How do we know it’s her? Maybe she got the pictures somewhere.”

“Maybe,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know. Anything’s possible. I think she’s the daughter. I can just feel it. It makes sense. She shows up out of nowhere. She convinces this guy to marry her. Eventually, she gets tired of waiting for him to die so she can inherit his money. Then she learns Vargas is going to transfer the most valuable parts of the business to his son and she has him killed before he can do it.”

“By a cop though?” Jendrek said. “That part still doesn’t make any sense. Daniels was her brother. They were obviously both in on it. But Daniels is dead and the cops are involved. There’s something wrong with it.”

“She’s got these f*cking pictures.” I was stifling a yell as I held the box out in front of me, gripping it like it contained something evil. “How the hell would she have these? These are her parents. Don Vargas was killed for revenge. This whole f*cking thing. This whole marriage. This house. Everything. You should have heard the way Colette Vargas described it. The way she talked about how Tiffany seemed to just show up out of nowhere and fit in like she’d been studying for the part.”

“Look,” Brianna cut in, “you guys have got to get the f*ck out of here with that. She’s going to be back soon. I just know it. You can’t be here. You’ve got to leave.” The urgency in her voice almost frantic, uncontrolled. She looked around the room and then checked her watch, as though something might be written there besides the very reason for her sense of doom. “I’ve got to get my shit in that truck and get the hell out of here.”

Brianna took a few determined steps back toward the hallway and then stopped and turned back toward us. “What do I do if she comes back?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Don’t do a goddamned thing. Just get your shit in the truck and get out of here. Just drive away. She’s not going to notice these pictures are missing for awhile.” I stared down at the box and added, “Hopefully we’ll have something figured out by then.”

That wasn’t a plan, but it seemed to make everyone happy. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Everyone else seemed to do the same. We needed to go, but we all continued to stand there. A lulling quiet hung in the room around us. Everything seemed to become calm, almost serene for just those few moments.

I took another deep breath and nearly jumped with fright when my cell phone rang. I handed the box to Liz and answered it.

Ed Vargas was screaming on the other end, “She’s trying to f*cking sell everything, that goddamned whore. We’ve got to stop her. You’ve got to do something.”

“Ed? Is that you? What are you talking about?” I said, covering my ear and turning away from the others, although the room was completely silent.

“I just talked to Stanton,” he huffed, sounding out of breath. “He said she’s going to liquidate everything like it’s a f*cking fire sale. Jesus Christ, where are you?”

“We’re at the house on Mulholland.”

He rattled off his address in Laurel Canyon. “Get over here. We’ve got to figure something out. This just isn’t right,” he went on, in a mixture of anger and desperation. “This is f*cked.”

My eyes caught on the box in Liz’s hand. “A lot of things are f*cked,” I said, and told him we’d be right over.

We left Brianna standing in the foyer and went out and got in the car. I gunned it out of the driveway, east down Mulholland, racing through the thickening afternoon traffic toward Laurel Canyon.