The Flaming Motel

III


We got lunch from a taco cart at MacArthur Park and sat on a bench by the tiny lake that sits just south of Wilshire Boulevard. Although it was seventy degrees outside, the park was virtually deserted except for the homeless people who called the place home. Even in the winter, LA is the place to be if you’re living on the street.

Jendrek cocked his head to the side, bit the end off his burrito, and talked while he chewed. “We’ve got to have a talk with the wife. If we’re really working for her we’ve got to get her alone without Ed in the room to make sure she understands how hard this is going to be. Dealing with Ed is going to be tough if he keeps wanting to get in the middle of everything. A case like this is going to be hard enough without family members fighting each other.”

Jendrek seemed to be too focused on the negatives. I said, “Even as hard as these cases are to win, don’t you think we’ve got a good one here?”

“I think anyone who walked around that house and saw what we saw would conclude that the cop who shot Vargas was an idiot. The problem is, cops are allowed to be idiots.”

I protested, “But no jury is going to side with the police on this one.”

“Hell, we’ll be lucky to ever see a jury,” Jendrek interjected. “Look,” he said, taking another bite. “The standard for negligence is different for cops than for the rest of us. The law cuts them a lot of slack. You know the drill. Police work is hard. They have to make split second decisions. It’s the same song and dance every time something like this happens. And the law protects cops, even the stupid ones, by requiring a showing that no reasonable police officer in the same situation would have thought the officer’s actions were lawful.”

Jendrek took another bite and shrugged, shaking his head. “It’s damned near impossible to win. With a standard like that the defense is as simple as saying, ‘But look, we’ve got all kinds of stupid cops, they all would have made the same mistake.’”

I wasn’t buying it. “That’s bullshit,” I said. “How could any cop think it’s reasonable to assume that a guy at a costume party holding a gun is actually holding a real gun? And let’s not forget that it’s not illegal to have a gun in your own house. I mean, even if Vargas was holding a real gun—and he wasn’t—but even if he was, that’s not a crime. There’s just nothing illegal about it.”

“You’re getting it backward though,” Jendrek countered. “We don’t win by proving that most cops would have acted differently or even that most cops would agree that shooting Vargas was a mistake. We have to show that no reasonable cop would have thought it was lawful. That’s why we’ve got to talk to this Pete Stick guy. He’s the only one who’s gonna be able to tell us what they were doing in that room and what it might have looked like from outside that window.” Jendrek stuffed the final bite of his lunch into his mouth and wadded up the paper wrapper. He got up and walked to a garbage can a few feet away.

I stuffed the rest of my taco in my mouth and went after him. “You can’t seriously think this case has no chance at all.”

Jendrek turned toward me and cut me off. “Sure, I think it’s got a chance. But I don’t want any unreasonable expectations building up in people. The LAPD is going to do everything it can to spin this as a justifiable homicide. They’re going to say the officer was in fear for his life. They’re going to say Vargas appeared to be threatening Pete Stick with a gun. They’re going to have some soft-spoken little prick go on television and say that it’s terrible what happened, and how sorry they are for the Vargas family, and then they’ll say that under the facts and circumstances of this case, the officer was justified in acting to protect himself and the safety of others.” Jendrek stopped himself before he started to yell. The outrage poured out of him, his hands trembled with anger. The red in his cheeks leapt off the background of is silver hair.

Finally, he said, “Look, I don’t think cops should be given any breaks at all. I think that if you give a guy a gun and the power to arrest people, it’s not too much to ask that he does his job right. But the rest of the world doesn’t feel that way. When I was with the ACLU, I used to pound the table and give great speeches about how things like this were outrageous, but at the end of the day, I didn’t win a lot of cases. It’s not good to get your hopes up on a case like this.”

Jendrek turned and walked toward the car. I stood there for a second, remembering how giddy he had been earlier that morning. I wondered who he was lecturing, me or himself.

Hollywood is filled with ancient warehouses that were once used by studios. Pete Stick’s costume and prop shop, atrociously named The Do Prop Inn, sat in a low, mustard colored stucco building off Gower, below Sunset. It was a part of the city that had seen better days, but had not yet gone completely seedy.

Jendrek parallel parked the Jag on a side street and we walked around the corner and halfway up the block to the entrance. He had calmed down on the drive and we walked quietly. I’d remembered to grab a notepad from my bag this time and I clicked my pen to the rhythm of our footsteps.

Just before we reached the door, Jendrek said, “The biggest problem we’ve got here is that this guy is our only witness besides the cops.” He stopped just outside the door and spoke in a fatigued voice. “What I’m afraid of is that no matter how good of a witness this guy is, all we’ll have is his word against theirs. It’s a he said, she said case. And when you’re suing a police department, a tie goes to the cops.”

He said it as if talking to Pete Stick was going to be a complete waste of time. I said, “Will you stop predicting disaster. We haven’t even met the guy yet.” Then I pushed the door open and went inside.

There was a small, dingy room with a counter along the back wall. The paint was worn off most of the surfaces and what little furniture there was had been beat to hell about twenty years before. It was a rugged place that smelled of cleaning solutions and grease. There was a clanging noise coming from the other side of the wall behind the counter and then a door opened and a scruffy young man came into the room.

“Oh, hey, sorry guys, didn’t know anyone was in here.” He was wiry and short and he scratched at the patchy, red beard growth on his chin as he talked. “We’re getting an order together so things are pretty busy around here. What can I do for you?”

Jendrek did the talking. “Hi, we’re here to see Mr. Stick. Is he available?”

The young man eyed our sport coats and ties and gave us a suspicious look. Then he nodded and said Stick was in the back and went to get him. We leaned against the counter and surveyed the room. It had all the comfort of a bomb shelter.

After a couple of minutes, the door opened again and we turned to see a weathered man in coveralls with the sleeves rolled up over a pair of meaty forearms. He looked to be in his late fifties, with deep lines in his face and a stout, thick body that said he’d done a lot of hard work for a lot of hard years. My father was a construction worker and most of the older guys he worked with had that same look. Weathered and hard. If I saw him on the street I wouldn’t have guessed he ran a Hollywood prop company.

“I’m Pete. Can I help you?” He wiped his hands on a rag and tossed the rag on the counter. Jendrek introduced us and Pete smiled slightly. He said, “Ed called and told me you guys would probably be by. Come on back to the office.”

We followed him down a dim corridor that felt like it led to some claustrophobic underground hideout. But instead, it ended at a large and very normal office with windows that looked out over a parking lot at the back of the building. Outside I could see a large truck with the name of a production company painted on the side. People were milling around sorting through bundles of dried, brightly colored flowers.

Pete motioned out the window and said, “Some guy’s making a movie about a florist who’s also a serial killer. Doesn’t sound like much of a movie to me.” Then he laughed and sat behind the 1950s style metal desk. “F*ck it though. What do I care as long as they pay in advance, right?”

Jendrek said, “That’s what we always say.” He glanced at me when he said it and I thought about the retainer check in his pocket. Getting paid first was nice, especially if you suspected the case might be a loser.

Pete leaned back in his chair and scratched the back of his head. I caught the bottom of a faded green tattoo poking out from the rolled up sleeve of his coveralls. It had the look of prison, and I began to wonder exactly where Pete Stick had spent all those hard years.

Pete said, “I been trying to work all day, just trying to keep my mind off of it. Fortunately we had a lot to do today. I’m exhausted.” His yawn gave Jendrek and me a nice big view of his dental work. “Damned cops had me there till three this morning asking me every damned question you could think of. Shit, you’d have thought I was the one who shot him.”

I asked, “What were they talking to you about all that time?”

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Well, first it was about what we were doing in that room. You know, where we were standing. How we looked. But shit, there wasn’t much to talk about. We were only in there about two minutes.” Pete drummed his fingers on the desk a few times and then added, “And after about an hour of that, they got a hold of my prison record and questioned me about that for another two hours.”

I almost smiled at having been right, but I didn’t want Pete to think I was mocking him. Pete Stick didn’t look like a guy you could mock and get away with it. There was something about the guy that said, go ahead, f*ck around, see what happens.

After a moment of silence, Jendrek asked, “Did the cops suggest that you had something to do with it?”

“I don’t know that they were suggesting anything. I think they just have a hard-on for f*cking with guys who’ve done time. They get off on intimidating people. A bunch of f*ckin’ a*sholes, if you ask me.” He rubbed under his nose with an index finger and added, “Incompetent a*sholes.”

Jendrek asked, “What were you talking to Vargas about?”

“Well,” Pete hesitated for a second, looking almost embarrassed. “I needed to borrow some money from him. He helped me out when I got out of Quentin. Helped me set up shop. I give him discounts on everything he rents for his movies. But business hasn’t been so great. So I needed to hit him up for a loan. That’s what we were talking about.” Pete shrugged like it was no big deal.

“What was Vargas’s reaction?”

“Nothing. Hell, I’d barely had a chance to ask him about it when the whole thing happened. It wasn’t like it was a ton of money. Hell, it was only twenty grand, just to help me pay the rent and make payroll for the next couple of months.”

“And you told the cops that?”

“Yeah. Then, like I said, when they found out I’d done time, they got all suspicious.” Pete shook his head and squinted like the suggestion was unbelievable. “But that’s horseshit. It ain’t like that. Donnie and me go way back. I’m talking more than thirty years we’ve known each other. Besides, it was their own guy that shot him. No question about that. Bunch a stupid f*ckers. All of them.”

I made a couple of notes on my pad, then asked, “What were you in prison for?”

Pete rolled his eyes again, like he couldn’t believe people wouldn’t let it drop. “I did five years for embezzlement. It was an insurance thing. I opened a shop as a broker and collected premiums.” He smiled, “Except I never remitted them to the insurance company. Worked fine until some guy got in a really bad car wreck and had a huge claim.”

“So you got caught because the guy’s claim was rejected?”

Pete laughed a little, thinking about it, and then shook his head. “Yeah, it was stupid.”

He said it in a way that wasn’t clear what exactly he thought was stupid, the scam itself or his getting caught. Then Jendrek asked, “So how do you go from that to running this place? Seems like a big change.”

“Ah, not really.” Pete shook his head and I realized for the first time that he had no neck. “I worked for Donnie for years when he was starting out, so I’d been around the business.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his barrel chest. He talked about the business like porno flicks were just like any other movies.

“You mean helping him with his movies?”

“Yeah, since way back. I worked with him on his very first one. And for years after that too. I also did odd jobs for him too, whatever he needed. I was his right hand guy for years. So Donnie knew I was a good guy. He knew he could trust me. I just needed a hand getting on my feet after I got out. So I ended up running this place. I got a loan from Donnie. He kept me afloat. And that was that. It’s been, I dunno, three years ago.”

Pete’s eyes brightened up with recognition and he got up quickly and went to a shelf on the wall behind Jendrek and me. He took a small five by seven photograph off the shelf and handed it to Jendrek. “See, that’s Donnie and me.” He chuckled as he pointed at the faces with his thick finger. “Man, I think that was taken before he even got into the business.”

I leaned over to see. It was a photograph of two men in their twenties with arms draped over each other’s shoulders. I recognized Don Vargas. He was a smooth faced, twenty-something version of the picture Stanton had showed us. But Pete Stick looked only vaguely familiar. The intervening years had changed him from the thin-faced, almost scrawny looking kid in the picture to the beaten, bloated man hunching over behind me. In the background was a low, single-story motel painted bright blue and green. I could make out a sign high up in the corner of the picture that read: Starlight Motel.

“When was this taken?” I asked. The odd hue to the colors in the photograph made it look old, even if the clothes the men were wearing didn’t give it away.

“Hell, probably 1976. Man, look at Donnie there.” Pete pointed to the picture again, as though touching the memory in his head.

“Where?”

“That’s the old Starlight Motel out on PCH toward Malibu. Donnie owned it. That’s what he did before he started making movies.” Then, in a sudden shift back to the present, Pete snatched the picture back from Jendrek and set it back on the shelf. He returned to his chair and said, “That’s all ancient history though.”

The change seemed abrupt to me, but Jendrek wasn’t interested in rehashing the good old days with Pete Stick and happily took control of the conversation by asking, “What exactly were you doing in that room right before Don Vargas got shot?”

“Like I said, we were just standing there. We were out in the hall. I said to Don that I needed to talk to him real quick. It was too damned noisy with all those people there, so I asked him to come into the office. He did. I told him I needed to borrow some money for the place here. He asked me a couple of questions about how business was. And bam!” Pete clapped his hands together so hard the noise made us jump. “Just like that. They shot him through the window. It took me a few seconds to even realize what had happened.”

“And what did you do when you realized he’d been shot?”

“Well, first, I tried to grab him as he was falling. It wasn’t until I was kneeling down beside him that it really clicked. I looked back at the window, but couldn’t see anything outside. I didn’t know it was cops until later. So I ran back out into the main room and yelled for help.” Pete walked us through it like he was recounting the details of a traffic accident involving total strangers. He seemed to have lapsed into an automated mode that shielded him from any emotional response to the events of his own life.

I asked, “Was he holding this gun, this prop, when he was shot?”

“Yeah, he had it in his hand. He was dressed as a 1920s gangster, you know, with the old style suit and hat. He was holding the pistol in his right hand. He’d been walking around with it all night.”

“But was he pointing it at you or anything like that?”

“Donnie used his hands a lot when he talked, you know, big gestures. So I’m sure he was kind of waving it around. But pointing it at me? No.”

“How realistic was this gun he had?”

Pete’s eyes lit up, and he said, “Completely real. You wanna see one?” He got up and went back down the hallway, leaving Jendrek and I alone in the office. We looked at each other. I shrugged and asked:

“So what do you think?”

“It’s about what I expected, I guess. I’m a little concerned about how realistic he thinks this gun is. What about you?”

I said, “Yeah, that concerns me. And, I dunno, there’s just something a little off about the guy. I’ll have to think about it.”

We heard a door close somewhere down the hallway and Pete’s footsteps coming back toward us. He came in with a semi-automatic pistol in each hand and gave one to each of us. “Here, check them out. We got a whole rack of them in the back.”

The weight of it was what I noticed first. It was heavy. I turned it over in my hands. I’d probably only held a couple of pistols in my hands before, so I was a long way from being an expert. But I was thinking that if someone walked up to me and pointed this prop at me, there’d be no way I could tell it was fake. I glanced at Jendrek and could see the same thought in his eyes.

Jendrek asked, “This is the exact same thing Vargas was holding when he was shot?”

“Yeah, he got it here. Same model and everything.” Pete scratched the back of his neck and said, “Kind of makes me feel bad that I suggested it to him. I mean, he got his outfit here and I suggested he carry the gun around to make it look real. But how the f*ck was I to know this was going to happen?”

I handed the gun back to Pete and he took it and looked me right in the eye, almost pleading with me. “There was no way I could have known this was going to happen,” he said. Then he dropped the gun on his desk and returned to his seat. His words hadn’t seemed to convince him. His eyes said that deep inside he was blaming himself.

I was wondering what happened to the automaton from a few minutes earlier when Jendrek asked him, “When you think about it all, when you remember what was going on right before the shot, do you think the cops could have reasonably mistaken Don Vargas for a guy who was threatening you with a gun?”

Pete looked down at his desk, shaking his head. His eyes never looked at us as he spoke. “I guess. I dunno. I suppose I can understand them thinking it was a real gun. I mean, our props look awfully damned real. They’re supposed to, right?”

There it is, I thought. There goes the case. Our only witness admitting it looked real, admitting that he could see how someone standing outside could be confused. If Pete Stick sounded this bad sitting in his own office, he would sound a hell of a lot worse on a witness stand, under cross-examination by a government lawyer.

Pete went on, “So yeah. Donnie’s standing there with the gun, maybe waving it around as he talked. I can see someone thinking this guy’s in there waving a gun around. I can understand that. But just hauling off and shooting a guy like that? I can’t understand that at all. I mean, we weren’t arguing. He didn’t look mad. I didn’t look scared. We were just talking. F*cking cops, man. They overreact to everything.”

Back on the sidewalk, making our way to the car, Jendrek let out a long breath and said, “Well, there’s always got to be something like that.”

I didn’t have much to say. Pete Stick was not a good witness. There was no way around it. If we worked with him, he’d get better, but a good lawyer on the other side would eventually get that testimony out of him and our case would be shot. Maybe the police would settle before they ever heard that testimony, but it wasn’t likely.

I tried to put a good spin on it. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “He’s not that bad. The whole thing is still outrageous. We can probably settle the thing without going to trial.”

“But Ed Vargas won’t want to settle.”

“But Ed Vargas isn’t in charge. We’re really working for the wife, remember?”

“I’m sure she’s just as outraged as Ed. Maybe worse. These people want revenge, not a settlement. What’s a settlement do for them? They’re already rich. A few hundred grand, if we’re lucky to get even that, isn’t going to make them happy. These people will want a trial. They’ll want headlines in the newspaper.” Jendrek unlocked the car and gave me a defeated smile across the roof. “Revenge, baby. It’s a killer.”

I laughed and slid into the car. “Man,” I said, shaking my head. “That gun sure looked real.”