The Flaming Motel

Wednesday

November 13





EPILOGUE


The morning air was cold, but we had the window open anyway. It was a crisp, bright day outside, and neither of us was rushing to work. I poured coffee while Liz got the paper from the bottom of the steps out front.

When she came back in, she said, “They got him.”

I knew who she meant before I even looked up. “Where?”

“Florida. Ft. Lauderdale.”

She spread the front page across our small kitchen table and we both sipped our coffee and leaned over the photograph of Officer James Davis. It had been nearly a week and we had hardly talked about it. We had hardly talked about anything.

I scanned the first few paragraphs. It seemed fitting that they’d caught him at a beachside motel not too unlike the one where his parents died. It was called The Breaks and it sat in a run down part of Ft. Lauderdale where Davis was staying while he planned his next move.

I chuckled at the name of the motel and Liz asked me what was funny. I told her. She smiled, but she didn’t laugh. We turned back to the paper. I could feel Liz’s hip and shoulder rubbing lightly against me.

Tiffany Vargas had given him a suitcase full of cash only hours before she was killed. It seemed his main problem was figuring out how to get himself and his money out of the country without getting caught. So there he was, alone in a ratty motel room trying to figure it out.

He’d been careful the whole way across the country. He drove his own car because he didn’t want to rent one. He didn’t want to use a credit card or have to give his driver’s license. He knew that once he drove out of Southern California, almost no one would be looking for him. When he left, his sister was still alive and no one had figured him out. He was probably in Arizona before the APB. went out.

But he was careful anyway. He paid cash for everything, which required him to go inside of truck stops and convenience stores along Interstate 10 all the way across America. After the fact, this permitted Detective Wilson to string together a series of pictures from the surveillance cameras, providing an almost hour-by-hour timeline of where Davis was for those five days.

But they might never have gotten him had it not been for an unfortunate turn down a toll road in Florida. When Davis stopped to pay his dollar, the camera showed his license plate to the man in the booth, who punched it into a new computer system that was being tested. An hour later a database informed the Florida State Patrol and the FBI that Davis was wanted for three counts of murder in California and it gave them a nice picture of his beard growth and new moustache, courtesy of the camera aimed at the front of the car.

From there, it took less than twenty-four hours to catch him. Ultimately, it was the California plates that did it. The plates made his otherwise nondescript Honda Accord easier to spot in the seedy motels where a guy who didn’t want to show ID could still get a room.

Liz and I sat at the table, drinking our coffee and talking about the odds of finding the guy at all. Other than a few strained comments, we’d barely touched on the subject in the previous days. We’d had endless interviews with the police. Round after round, going over the details with painful scrutiny, but we’d never really talked about it with each other.

Maybe we were talked out. Maybe it was just too terrible to discuss. I can’t really say. All I know is that the few times it came up, each of us shut the other down. I would say something like: “What’s the use talking about it? Terrible things happen. It’s just the way it is. Why go over it a million times?”

Or she’d say, out of the blue, “I can’t get over the sound of them screaming. The sound of the gunshots.” Then she’d shake her head and turn and walk away.

But then there we were, sitting at the kitchen table, the paper unfolded between us, discussing the details of how they managed to catch the brother, almost by accident. The topic finally unavoidable.

I said, “What was he going to do? It wasn’t like the money would make things better. It wasn’t like it would bring his parents back to life.”

Liz thought for a minute and said, “I don’t think that was the point. Maybe there wasn’t really a point, when it comes down to it. It was just about revenge. It was about getting even for an injustice. You know, getting back at life for being unfair. Threatening Pete Stick to get money from Vargas. Forcing Stick to help him shoot Vargas.”

“And then killing Stick to cover his tracks.” I looked out the window for a long moment. Jasmine blossoms staring back at me. “You really think it’s possible that Tiffany didn’t know about it ahead of time?”

She was quiet. Staring at the floor like it wasn’t there. “I don’t know. I don’t think a woman would stay with a man that long for the sake of revenge. She must have had a change of heart somewhere along the way. But who knows? All of those people were so damned crazy.”

I thought of Tiffany Vargas, stoic and quiet on the front steps that first morning Jendrek and I went to the house. What was it she said? It was one of the only times she ever spoke directly to us, other than to fire us. My husband wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t deserve this.

A curious statement, but suggesting he deserved something. How long can someone sit on a secret until it destroys them? Don Vargas sat on his for thirty years. Tiffany for ten. He built a fortune on top of his, as did she, in her own way. And yet both of them, and the fortune too, were destroyed almost simultaneously, and with the force of a hurricane.

I glanced at the wall behind Liz and thought about the affair I’d had years before, which Liz knew all about. Then I thought about Liz and Benjamin Cross, which I knew nothing about. An image of Brianna Jones and her Internet performance went through my head, followed by the tactile memory of my arms around her on that balcony. Then I shrugged and asked, “Do you think people can redeem themselves for the terrible things they do?”

She squinted at me and grinned, but said nothing.

“I mean, Vargas and Stick killed two people thirty years ago. Stick was always no good, but Don, in his own way, wasn’t a bad guy, at the end of the day. Should that matter? Or are some things so terrible that a lifetime of good deeds can never outweigh them?”

“People always pay for the terrible things they do, one way or another.” She sipped her coffee and stared at me over her mug. Then she shrugged.

Liz got up and went to the counter and poured herself more coffee. I watched her movements and wondered what secrets she carried with her. I wondered what damage the two of us might have already inflicted on each other without even knowing how or why. Was that just the nature of things? And did knowing change anything? I thought of the myriad ways I’d contorted myself to be who I thought she wanted me to be. How many ways had she done the same? And what did it matter? Some things were better left unknown. If a disaster loomed out there somewhere, why ruin the present worrying about it? I’d rather not see it until the last possible second. Or, like Don Vargas, maybe never see it at all. Just a curious muzzle flash in the darkness and then the world goes black and still. No pain. No final anxious moments. Just life, uninterrupted, and then serenity.

So I sat there and finished my coffee. Liz returned to the table and studied the newspaper some more. I laughed at the sidebar story beneath the headline: Vargas Son’s Death Leaves No Heirs; $100 million Porn Fortune will go to the State.

I closed my eyes and imagined what it must have been like when the police came through the motel door, guns drawn, shouting at James Davis to get down on the floor. I imagined that he must have sensed it coming in the moments before it happened. Heard it in the way the parking lot outside went oddly still and quiet. Seen it in a quick flicker of shadow across the window shade. What did he think in that last moment before the door burst in on him?

I closed my eyes and saw him sitting there on the bed, almost like he was waiting for them, held motionless with anticipation. He wouldn’t have tried to run or fight or do anything. What would have been the point? I imagined him easing back against the wall, giving the cops the same knowing look his old man had used on a similar bed, in a similar motel, many years before.

It was a look of resigned awareness. A man watching his life play out in front of him, accepting it with all its faults and contradictions, without question. Seeing things the way they were and knowing it was the way they had to be.

Liz looked up from the paper and saw my expression. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

I smiled back and got up to get more coffee. “Like what?” I asked, giving nothing away.

Secrets accumulate in relationships like cholesterol in the blood, silently choking off the connection between two people, until one day someone’s heart explodes.

I was learning to be a patient man.