The Flaming Motel

XXVII


Ed said, “I’m gonna kill that f*cking cunt,” and threw back a shot of Wild Turkey. I watched him pour another into a heavy double rocks glass as I left a second message for Detective Wilson. I’d called him from the car five minutes before, but every minute felt like half an hour. I would call again in another five if I didn’t hear from him.

Ed had been drinking for a while before we got there. The sweat on his forehead and the half empty bottle provided all the details we needed. He sat in the corner of a black leather couch, too modern and hard edged to be comfortable. The living room was huge, white, with dark wood floors, and decorated in a minimalist fashion with pieces chosen for their looks rather than their livability.

The walls were made almost entirely of glass, providing views in all directions of heavy foliage and drooping branches, creating the impression that Laurel Canyon really wasn’t filled with tens of thousands of people. It was like sitting in a tree house filled with designer furniture. Ed hunched over the Noguchi coffee table shaking his head at the pictures spread across the glass.

“This is f*cking unbelievable. I knew that cunt was a f*cking fraud. I just f*cking knew it.” He took up his glass and studied the inch of brown liquid he’d just poured into it, contemplating it as he tipped it and watched it pool in the corner of the glass. Then he smiled at something we couldn’t see and drank it in a swift, effortless motion.

“Did your dad ever talk about the motel?” I asked, trying to focus him in on something besides his own anger. “Did he ever say anything about it? Anything about the people who died?”

Ed shook his head. “He never talked about it. I was only vaguely aware that they ever owned a motel. Mom mentioned it. She had some old pictures of the place. I asked her about those once. She might have mentioned that it burned down. But she never said anyone got killed. I never heard anything about that.”

“What about Daniels?” Jendrek asked. “Was she involved in getting him hired? She must have been.”

“Daniels’s girlfriend said she was,” I added.

“I don’t know,” Ed shook his head. “That was Pete’s deal. It was Pete’s business. I didn’t give a shit what was going on with that. I never understood it anyway, the way my dad just took the guy in and all. I mean, I knew they went way back, but Dad was pumping money into that prop company left and right.” Ed stood and crossed the room to the kitchen area on the opposite side.

There were reams of paper piled up along the edge of the wide granite island and Ed thumbed through a couple of the stacks. “I’ve been going through the records, trying to straighten shit out,” he said. “Dad didn’t exactly run the tightest ship, you know. He had all kinds of things going on.”

He found what he was looking for and returned to the couch with a few loose sheets of paper. “Look,” he said, “the money was just flowing like water into that prop company. And there was no f*cking way Pete needed it all to run that business.”

He spread what looked like bank statements across the table, covering the photographs. “These are pages from the accounts for Good Times, Limited, that’s the company Dad used to run most of his smaller stuff. It used to be the main company, but now that the web stuff is so much bigger, this was almost like his own little toy.”

Liz sat on the couch beside him and studied the statements. She moved the bottle of whiskey to the far edge of the table to make room. But I noted that she set it on the edge furthest away from Ed. I wondered if Ed had noticed too.

Jendrek and I leaned in to look. There were a dozen lines of highlighted text spread over five pages. My eye ran over the bottoms of the statements where the current balance was. Each page showed somewhere between eight and twelve million dollars in the account. And that was the small business, I thought, Don Vargas’s toy. It made me feel better about wasting some of Ed’s fifty grand.

“These are just random pages,” Ed said. “I just pulled the ones that showed the payments to Pete.” He traced the highlighted lines with his finger. “You see here, in June, there’s a single payment to Pete for $25,000. Then in July, there’s one payment for $25,000 early in the month and then a second payment later in the month. In August, it jumps to three payments. In September he starts paying Pete $25,000 a week. And by October, that number is up to $40,000 a week. Altogether, I figure that’s more than $500,000 in five months. Most of it in the last two months.”

Ed looked up at us with a baffled expression. He brought the glass up to his lips, in an automated, absentminded way, and realized it was empty only after tipping it up to drink. He looked at it and then his eyes roamed the table for the bottle. He poured another shot and said, “And that’s all on top of what we paid him for the props we actually rented. All that shit’s paid for out of a different account. I can’t see any reason for these payments.” Then he laughed a little and added, “Well, a business reason for them.”

“So if there’s no reason for the payments,” I said, “at least, no legitimate reason, then what is Don Vargas getting for his money?”

“She’s running some kind of scam with Pete and her brother, Daniels,” Ed said, as if the case was closed.

“But what’s the scam?” Liz said, leaning back on the couch. “He’s paying Pete for what? To stay quiet? Is that it? Blackmail?”

“To stay quiet about what?” Ed said.

I said, “About the fire. About the two people who were killed.”

“That was thirty years ago.” Ed smiled and shrugged, and added, feebly, “What difference would that make now?” He swallowed the whiskey in the glass and poured more.

“If the fire was an accident,” Jendrek said, “then it doesn’t matter. But if it the fire was intentionally set,”—Jendrek’s eyes met mine for a moment—“then it matters a lot.”

“Felony murder,” Liz said.

Jendrek and I both looked at her. Ed could sense that we all knew something he didn’t and he asked what it was in a way that indicated he really didn’t want to know the answer. Jendrek and I just kept looking at Liz. She was the one who raised the ugly specter. She was the one who could explain it.

Liz shifted sideways on the couch, facing Ed, and said, “Felony murder is a special kind of murder. It’s an accident that gets treated like first degree murder.”

Ed nodded along, reaching across the table for the bottle. He poured more whiskey in his glass, adding it to the shot already there.

“There’s a short list of crimes that are deemed so dangerous,” Liz explained, “that if you kill someone in the process of committing those crimes, even if it’s an accident, it’s treated like first degree murder. Burglary is one. Robbery is another.” Liz cleared her throat and added, “And arson is another.”

“So what’s that mean?” Ed shook his head, “Accidentally? An accident is an accident. How do you call it something else?” He put the glass to his lips and drank. There was so much Wild Turkey in the glass that he had to take two swallows to drain it all. The sight of it turned my stomach, sent shivers through me. I saw Jendrek grimace as he watched it.

Liz waited for Ed to focus again, and said, “It goes like this. If I break into your house at night to burglarize it and you find me there, and I push you down the stairs while I’m trying to get away and you break your neck and die, that’s felony murder. I didn’t intend to kill you, I was just trying to get away. But I was committing a burglary at the time, and so any accidental death I cause is treated as a murder, just like I intended to kill you.”

“The same goes for arson,” Jendrek said. “If I burn down my motel to collect the insurance money and I accidentally kill two people in the fire, that’s felony murder. In fact, that’s two murders. That’s life in prison,” Jendrek said. “Or worse.”

“Worse?” Ed’s voice was taking on a naïve, vaguely childlike quality, as if pretending not to understand might stop it from being real. No one mentioned the electric chair or the gas chamber, but I could tell everyone was thinking about it. Even Ed. His father may have been a killer. His family fortune built on the backs of those deaths.

“So the payments are what?” I said, rhetorically. “Blackmail? Pete is threatening to turn Don in on the motel fire if he doesn’t pay them?”

Jendrek said, “But does that make sense? Pete’s been coming and going for years. Every time he shows up, Don helps him out. And eventually Pete gets in trouble again and disappears. And in any event, Pete’s on the hook for the murders too. So he’s not going to go to the cops. So why now? Why, all the sudden, would Pete start to threaten Don? It’s got to be because someone is making him.”

“Tiffany. It’s that f*cking whore,” Ed said, reaching for the pages he’d spread across the table, gathering them up with exaggerated, drunken movements. “She’s got these f*cking pictures. It was her parents that were killed. F*cking Christ, man. This whole thing. She’s been planning this the whole time. Since the day she met him, it’s all been a f*cking scam to rip us off.” Ed held several of the pictures up for us to see, as though we weren’t familiar with them, as though the truth were written on them, plain as day.

“We don’t know that for sure,” Jendrek said, shaking his head. “She could have gotten those pictures somewhere else and was just using them. If it was her parents if she really was planning this scam the whole time, then why wait ten years? That seems like an awful lot of patience. And why now?”

Ed stared up at him, peering out through his hazy eyeballs, glazed over with liquor and rage. He was no longer following anything Jendrek was saying. All he could say was, “But this f*cking bitch is trying to steal everything from us. She’s down there right now, down at Stanton’s office trying to figure out how to sell everything as fast as possible.”

“But it isn’t like she can just sell the business in a day,” Jendrek said. “There’s no way she can do it that fast. It takes time to find buyers, to do all the paperwork.”

“But she can rape the shit out of it in the meantime,” Ed said. “You have no idea how much cash there is in some of these accounts. She could sell the house and drain all the cash from the companies and probably make off with thirty million or more. The businesses wouldn’t survive if that happened. We couldn’t make payroll, couldn’t produce new content for the websites, couldn’t keep the equipment running, pay the rent, pay our vendors. It’s an expensive operation. There’s a lot of cash, but there’s a lot of cash flow too. If the money disappears, it won’t take long for everything to collapse.”

Ed looked around at the room, as though he was talking about the structure we were standing in instead of the family business. Jendrek and I exchanged glances. There was too much anger and speculation in the room to come to a sensible conclusion.

“We at least have to consider,” Jendrek said, “that just because Tiffany may have been involved in a blackmail scam, it doesn’t mean she had Don Vargas killed. It doesn’t mean she had anything to do with that. In which case, the estate was still hers to inherit, and the business is still hers to sell.”

Ed leaned back on the couch and folded his arms across his chest. “Well, it’s awfully goddamned convenient,” he said. “My dad gets shot right before he transfers most of the business to me. That’s awfully f*cking convenient for her, isn’t it?” Ed poured more Wild Turkey, spilling a narrow trail of drops across the stack of bank statements.

“All I’m saying,” he went on, “is it just don’t seem right she can go and f*ck everything up while we sit around with a thumb in our ass trying to figure things out. Shit, she’ll be long gone before we know anything. If we ever know anything at all.” He drank the shot he’d just poured.

“But you’ve got to understand,” I said, “all we know is that Daniels might have been her brother and she might have been the daughter of these people who died in the motel fire. We don’t even know for sure that those things are true. And even if they are, we still don’t know what’s going on.”

“God-damnit!” Ed pounded the table so hard with his palm that his glass tipped sideways and rolled onto the wood floor. “I don’t give a shit about that. All you f*cking lawyers talk about is theories. These are f*cking facts, man. We know something’s going on, and whatever it is, it needs to stop. There’s got to be something we can do. We can sort out the mess later.”

The room went silent save for the sound of the glass rolling across the room and coming to rest against the wall. Liz and I stared at each other. I wanted to gather up the pictures on the table and just leave. This wasn’t getting us anywhere. I wanted to get the photos in Wilson’s hands and walk away from the whole mess.

After a minute of quiet, Jendrek said, “We could try to get a TRO, but that’s tough to do.”

“TRO?” Ed said in a soft, calm voice, as if his outburst had never happened.

“A temporary restraining order. An injunction.”

“Like abused women get against their husbands? That kind of thing?”

“Just like that. It tells someone they can’t do anything until we sort out the legal mess.”

Ed clapped his hands together, “Well, hell, let’s go get us one of those.” He laughed and said, “Motherf*ckin’ TRO. Yeah! I like it. That’s what I’m f*cking talking about.” The Wild Turkey delirium was setting in.

“They don’t just hand them out,” Jendrek said, almost sneering. Trying to explain it to a drunk was a ludicrous task. But he went on anyway. “In fact, they’re very difficult to get in a case like this.”

“Why’s that?” Ed asked, appearing lucid again.

“Because you basically have to prove you’re going to win the whole lawsuit before the lawsuit even starts. That’s a bit tough here. The only witness who isn’t dead is Tiffany, and it’s not like she’s going to help us get a TRO against her.”

“Man, we gotta f*cking do something. We’ve gotta stop her right now.” Ed looked from Jendrek to me. “Can’t you call Stanton and tell him not to do anything?”

I shrugged and looked at Jendrek. “We can call,” I said, “but that’s not going to do anything. Tiffany is his client.”

“I don’t know,” Jendrek rubbed his face with his hands and brushed his fingers through his gray hair. “It’s Thursday. Maybe we can get him to hold off until after the weekend. Buy a few days anyway.”

“Call him,” Ed urged, pointing over toward the kitchen area in a vague reference to the phone. “Tell him what’s going on. Tell him to stop until we can figure this shit out.”

I knew Stanton wouldn’t just roll over. Jendrek knew it too. It was a waste of time to call. But Jendrek turned slowly and walked over to the counter. He asked me if I knew the number. I still did, after five years. I still knew the main number like it was tattooed on my brain. Just as I said it, my cell phone rang.

“Find anything?” Wilson barked.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, “you have no idea.”

“What is it?”

“It’s some pictures. Old pictures. We found them in her room in a little box.”

“What? Like porno or something?”

The idea made me laugh for some reason. “No,” I shook my head as I spoke, like he was standing there in front of me. “Pictures of two people who died in a motel fire years ago. A motel Don Vargas owned. They could have been Tiffany’s parents.”

There was a pause on the other end and I wondered for a second if the connection had been lost. When Wilson spoke again, I could hear him reeling at the idea. “Are you f*cking serious? Are you kidding me?”

“No,” I said. “Vargas’s first wife told me she always suspected the motel they owned was burned down for the insurance money. Two people died in the fire. Those two people had two kids.”

“And Pete Stick went into insurance fraud.” I could hear a kind of sick realization in his voice. “Chasing a payday of his own.”

“Right,” I said. “But she could have gotten the pictures from someone else.”

“Yeah,” Wilson said, “but either way, it looks like she was into something.” He paused for a few more seconds and asked, “You got those pictures with you now?”

I glanced at the snapshots scattered across the glass table. “Yeah, they’re right here.”

“Where are you?”

“At Ed Vargas’s house in Laurel Canyon.”

“How’s he taking it?”

I looked at his slumped profile, weaving slightly on the couch. “About as well as can be expected,” I said.

Wilson cleared his throat and said, “It would be nice to find some evidence she’s the daughter and didn’t just get the pictures somewhere. Have you talked to anyone who knew her when she was a kid? Anyone that might have heard her mention her parents dying in the fire?”

I thought about everyone I’d talked to. “Yeah,” I said, “there was one person.” I felt myself smiling as I said it.

“Go find ‘em. Ask ‘em. See if they ever heard about the fire. Ever heard her talk about revenge, any of that kind of shit. I think I can get a warrant with what you’ve told me. I’m heading to do that now.” Wilson seemed to be hanging up, and then he added, “And for God’s sake, take those f*cking pictures with you. Don’t let them out of your sight. We’re f*cked if we lose those.”

“Will do.”

“Oh yeah,” he added, “the girlfriend? Out in Baldwin Hills? Long gone. No trace of her. I got the apartment manager to let me in the cottage. Place was cleaned out.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I wish people would quit f*cking disappearing,” he said. “It’s a pain in the ass.”

“I hear you.”

“Let me know if you learn anything. I’ll get the warrant and meet you at the Vargas house later. You can give me the pictures then and fill me in on this motel fire. What year was it, by the way?”

“1978, I think. Out in Malibu. The Starlight Motel.”

“Good,” he said. “A little detail might make this warrant sound like I’m not just pulling it out of my ass.”

He hung up without saying anything else. I went over and started gathering up the pictures, putting them back in the envelope. I could hear Jendrek leaving a voicemail for Stanton. As I listened to him, I wondered if he had called Stanton at all. The idea of him talking to a dial tone, just to make it look good for Ed, made me laugh.

When he was through, Jendrek hung up and stated the obvious. “He wasn’t there. I left him a message.” Then he looked at me. “That Wilson?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he’s going to get a warrant. We can meet him back at the house later to give him these.” I held up the envelope and the empty box, and then stuffed the envelope inside the box and closed it. “In the meantime, Wilson gave us a little assignment.”

Then I smiled and added, “Seems like there’s always one more thing. I’m not sure how helpful this thing’s going to be though.”