The Flaming Motel

XXVIII


Canoga Park at night isn’t any better than Canoga Park during the day. And the darkness made it hard to find the street even though I’d been there before. The traffic coming out of Laurel Canyon had been miserable, and the freeway was no better. By the time we were neck deep in the Valley the sun was long gone and we found ourselves wandering along the wide thoroughfares wondering where the hell we were.

About the third time we passed the same shopping mall, I finally stopped at a mini-market on the corner of Topanga and Vanowen and went in to get directions. We were all getting punchy. After a night of little sleep, we’d spent the whole day racing from place to place. Brief windows of activity strung between endless stretches of being cramped in a car.

The Chinese guy behind the counter left me with only a vaguely better idea of where I was heading than I’d had before I talked to him. I bought a bottle of Evian and bag of pretzels as a way of paying him for his help and went back outside. Jendrek and Liz were stretching in the parking lot and the smell of fresh donuts wafted over us.

I watched the cars idling at the intersection. Liz said, “I think there’s a Krispy Kreme just up the block.”

The cars at the light turned, throwing a series of headlights across us, each of us in turn, glowing briefly as if caught in a wayward spotlight. I squinted at them as they passed and saw a small group of teenage kids making their way across the mall parking lot beyond the far corner of the intersection.

I tried to imagine Tiffany Long, laughing with a group of friends, leaning against parked cars and listening to the radio from someone’s car. In that same parking lot, not so many years before, she had probably done those very things. Was she planning revenge even then? Perfecting her skill at manipulating men. Her dating and f*cking a mere series of dress rehearsals for the ultimate subterfuge she was dreaming up.

Or had she come into those pictures some other way? Had someone shown them to her? Sold them to her? Given them to her? Had Pete Stick come across them and figured out a way to get Don Vargas to repay him for the dirty work he’d done long ago. The crime that permitted Vargas to build his fortune. It would only be right, giving Pete his fair share.

I wasn’t sure the old man we’d come to see would know the answers. In fact, I was sure he wouldn’t. But he might know something more than he’d told me the first time, if only because now I knew what to ask him. Everyone knew something. Everyone, except me, it seemed.

Liz said she was hungry. Jendrek said he needed a drink and a good night’s sleep. They both asked me if the guy in the store had told me where to go as we piled back into the car. I tossed the bag of pretzels into the back seat and Liz tore them open.

Ten minutes and two wrong turns later, we were pulling up in front of the house. The Long house was dark, as I expected, but the old man’s light was on next door. The chair on the porch sat empty, a jug of wine lay on its side, rolled up against it. It was empty too, I was sure. Which made me afraid that the old guy was in there passed out or dead and we wouldn’t be able to talk to him.

Jendrek surveyed the block as we got out of the car. “Dark,” was all he said.

On the porch, Liz poked at the wine jug with her toe while I knocked on the door. The street was almost completely silent. There were no traffic noises from the boulevards and no residual light from them either. The high, dying palm trees hung over the houses like a shroud.

I heard movement inside the house. Then a porch light flipped on, almost blinding us as the door opened. The old man stood there in what I imagined were the same smudged shorts he was wearing two days before. His hair was wild with curls and mats from his head laying sideways on a pillow. He stared out at us with genuine surprise. All I could think of was how short he was. He couldn’t have been more than five-five or so. It hadn’t made an impression on me the first time.

After a few seconds he seemed to recognize me and said, “Still trying to give away that million dollar inheritance, eh? You can leave it with me. I’m happy to take it off your hands.”

Jendrek gave me a curious look and I stuck out my hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name before.”

The old guy hesitated for a moment and then shook my hand. He looked like he didn’t shake hands too often. Then he flashed a sheepish, embarrassed smile and said, “Roger. I’m Roger Barton.”

“Roger, I’m Oliver Olson. We met the other day? This is Mark Jendrek and this is Liz Winslow.”

He shook Jendrek’s hand, a little wide-eyed, and looked visibly embarrassed when he took Liz’s hand. His free arm pulled down on the end of his T-shirt, as if to straighten it out or somehow hide his large, round belly. The shirt was white with the words “Jesus Loves America” stenciled on it.

“Roger, we’re here to see if we can ask you a few more questions about your old neighbors, the Longs. Is that okay?”

He took a step back into the room behind him and said, “Sure. Don’t know what I can tell you.” He turned his head and looked at the room and seemed to think through what to do next. Then he asked, “You guys want to come in?”

I doubted Roger Barton had many houseguests. Our presence seemed to make him nervous. He seemed like a lonely and shy old man, far different from when I’d seen him on his porch. He took a few more steps out of the doorway and motioned us inside.

The room smelled dusty and was cluttered with piles of papers and magazines on nearly every surface. The carpet was old, nearly threadbare, and stained around the bottoms of the chairs and couch. The furniture had a similar feel. The lamps too, and the coffee table, piled with old newspapers, appeared to have been there for decades. But the room was not dirty, just worn. Worn so well, in fact, that it was nearly worn out.

Roger rushed to the couch to clear away a stack of papers. He did the same with the La-Z-Boy chair. It was a futile effort at straightening up for company, but oddly endearing. I studied the old family pictures on the wall, arranged in an arch with a much younger Roger Barton and his wife at the highest point. There were two other pictures on either side, trailing downward, and I asked him who they were.

“Oh,” he said, hands on hips, as if struggling to remember them at all. “That’s my family. Linda, my wife, she died in ’83. Dick, my oldest boy, he lives in Houston. Bill, next youngest, he died in ‘Nam, the Tet Offensive. Last I heard, Janice was somewhere in Florida. And this one,” he pointed to the last picture, which hung cocked slightly to one side, revealing the much darker original color paint behind it.

“This is Emily. She’s my baby. She lives down in Orange County.” He raised his eyebrows at me and said, “Married herself a dentist. Got three kids.”

Then he started to cough and turned away from me, covering his mouth with one hand and resting his weight on the La-Z-Boy with the other. I could see Liz debating whether to try to help the guy. Jendrek just stood and watched, passive, as if nothing was happening at all. When he recovered, Roger went to one of the old walnut end tables and got himself a cigarette and lit it. Two puffs later he looked good as new.

“Please, have a seat,” he said, motioning to the couch and chairs. Then he bent over and picked up a jug of wine from the floor beside the couch. “Can I offer anyone a drink?”

And then it struck. Roger Barton was sober, and a totally different man from the one I’d met before. Did that make him less ugly? Did it make his racism less offensive? Could bad behavior be excused so easily? What about one terrible act followed by a lifetime of being a better person? I was thinking of Don Vargas but looking at Roger Barton, whose sobriety would soon be wiped out. I watched him unscrew the top of the jug and take several long gulps.

Something about the whole damned place was making me sad and I wanted to get through the interview and out of there as soon as I could. I set my briefcase on the coffee table and took out a notepad. I was hoping he’d say something worth writing down.

“Roger, I think you told me last time that you remembered Tiffany Long.”

“Oh yeah, cute little thing.” Roger smiled at me and I remembered his missing tooth from before. Then his eyes flickered at the window in the opposite wall. I could see he was wondering if he’d told me the story about seeing her on the kitchen table.

Liz took a seat on the end of the couch and Roger came around and sat on the other end. I sat in the La-Z-Boy and Jendrek sat in the chair at the other end of the couch. It was nice and cozy, everyone settling in for a chat.

“And I believe you remembered her brother as well.”

“Well,” he laughed, “there were a lot of kids over there.” Roger leaned toward Liz and said, as if speaking only to her, “The Longs knew how to work the welfare system. They adopted a lot of foster kids.” Then he brought the jug up for another pull.

“Right. But wasn’t one of her brothers her actual brother? They had both been adopted by the Longs?”

“Yeah,” he nodded, “I think that’s right. I remember him. A mean son of a bitch.”

“How do you mean that?”

Roger smiled and shook his head, recalling something. Then he said, “I remember this one time, a Mexican kid down the street stole his bike. The little spic was a couple years older, kind of a tough kid. But that didn’t stop Jimmy. He hid behind this parked car out there with a baseball bat and waited a whole Saturday afternoon. Kid was out there for hours, just waiting. Eventually, that little taco eater came out on that bike and started riding up and down the street. Jimmy waited for the kid to go by and he darted out from behind the car and knocked that little f*cker in the head with that bat like he was Mickey f*cking Mantle. Laid that Mex out cold.”

Roger laughed until something came loose in his lungs, and then he let out a cough with a deep, wet echo beneath it.

Jendrek asked, “What happened?”

Roger said, “Jimmy got his bike back. Don’t know about the Mexican kid. His folks were illegals. They disappeared after that. Maybe the little shit died.” Roger shrugged, took another drink, and said, “That’d be one less we’d have to worry about.”

I was getting confused. I asked, “But what about a brother named David? Do you remember a brother named David?”

Roger nodded as he filled his lungs with smoke. “Davey? With the red hair? Sure, I remember him. He was just a little shit when they moved.”

“He was Tiffany’s little brother?”

“Sure. Like I said, she had a bunch of brothers.”

“No, not an adopted brother. Her real brother.”

The old man shook his head and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “No, Davey was adopted later. Davey wasn’t her real brother. Her real brother was Jimmy, the older one.”

It puzzled me for a second and I reached into my bag and pulled out some files. I set them on the edge of the coffee table and flipped through them. Everything was a mess. For the last twenty-four hours I’d been stuffing things into my briefcase without any organization. When I finally found the folder I was looking for, I flipped it open. There was the old newspaper article about the motel fire. I scanned it, looking for the vague description of the two children. But there wasn’t one. The article just mentioned that there were two, a son and daughter, and that was it.

As I stood there reading, the files I’d piled up tipped sideways and several of them fell to the floor, their contents sliding out, leaving a fan of papers on the stained carpet. The old man glanced down at them and I saw his eyes light up.

“Well shit,” he said, pointing with his foot. “You got a picture of him right here.”

I looked down from the newspaper article just as I read the lines about the couple who died in the fire. The words from the newspaper trickled through my brain: Ray and Sylvia Davis, of Indio California, died in a fire late Saturday night.

Roger’s foot was pointing to the file Wilson had given me at the courthouse that morning. Roger’s gnarled toes, with their yellowing nails, aimed straight at the biographical summary and the picture above it. The picture of Officer James Davis.

“There’s Jimmy right there,” he smiled.

Jimmy.

James.

Jesus. The connection to the shooter had been right in front of us all along.

The words of David Daniels’s girlfriend came back to me: Sometimes adopted kids keep their original names. It’s up to them, if they’re old enough.