The Flaming Motel

IV


Liz and I had been dating since our first year of law school. We’d been living together since graduation. In the three years since then, our relationship had become like I imagined any married couple’s might be—except that we weren’t married. Not that Liz wouldn’t have married me. She would have, if I ever got around to asking. But I never did, and she never pressed it with me, so we drifted through the months and years in a state of silent détente.

It wasn’t that we were unhappy. Bored, perhaps, but not unhappy. At least I wasn’t. If there was anything unsatisfying about my life, it had nothing to do with her. But those things that were unsatisfying—work, the inescapable realization that my life was most likely going to be utterly and completely normal, even mediocre—had metastasized into a general unfulfillment that had invaded the space between Liz and me.

As I drove home to the one bedroom apartment we shared in Santa Monica, I thought about Max Stanton, about standing in the lobby at Kohlberg & Crowley again, and about how I had once been on the fast track and had abruptly gotten off. There were a lot of reasons for my decision at the time, not the least of which was that I’d almost been murdered in the course of investigating a case. I could have stayed. The firm had asked me to stay. But I chose to leave because I was terrified of the seduction that money and power could have on me.

That was five years ago, and I’d thought that the repercussions of my decision had long since faded into oblivion and calm. But being back at K&C had revived them. Maybe I’d been wrong, too rash, or maybe I just didn’t have what it took after all but had tricked myself into believing I’d left out of principle. Maybe the stress of the four months I spent there got to me and broke me. All the reasons that supported the decision five years ago seemed suspect to me in hindsight. But perhaps that’s just the nature of life.

And there were a lot of very good reasons at the time: the insurmountable pressure, the pervasive invasion of my personal life, the fact that my judgment had been blinded by my desire to fit in, to make money, to prove something to people who couldn’t care less if I existed at all. Any one of them would have been a fine reason to move on with my life, but now I found myself wondering if the real reason hadn’t been Liz, wondering if all of those other concerns were merely a ruse I’d used to justify my desperate need to hold onto her. Had it not been for her (or, more correctly, my fear of losing her), I found myself speculating, I might have stayed at K&C.

Our place was in a small, one-story row of six units. We had old ladies on either side of us who tended to the massive clusters of rose bushes that lined the walkway in front of the apartments. It was a quiet street, a quiet neighborhood, and at $1500 a month, a steal for that part of town. Despite the fact that Liz and I were both lawyers, we were stretched pretty thin. She worked at Legal Aid and my income wasn’t the most stable in the world.

I walked in and set my bag by the door. Liz looked up from the counter in the kitchen where she stood with a glass of white wine. “Hey babe,” she smiled. “You look like you had quite a day.”

I smirked. “You can say that again.” She scrunched her forehead and I pointed to the newspaper on the table. “We got a call about the lead story. Spent all day running around talking to people. Not sure how great of a case it is, despite how the newspaper makes it sound.”

She picked up the newspaper while I stole a sip of her wine. She had already changed into a light pair of linen draw string pants and a T-shirt and I went into the bedroom to change too. “This is f*cking outrageous,” she called from the front room.

“I know,” I called back. “Problem is, we’ve only got one witness, and he told us he can understand how the cops could have botched it. Not very helpful.”

“But the house was full of people.”

“I know,” I said, coming back into the living room. “But this happened in a room on the side of the house and it was just Vargas and one other guy. The other guy won’t make the best witness. So it sounds better in the paper.” I poured myself a glass of wine and watched Liz from behind as she finished reading the article. She was a beautiful woman. She was smarter than I was, and she stuck with me. I wondered for a second what was wrong with me, why I just didn’t marry her and get it over with.

Liz saw me with the wine and checked her watch. She smiled and said, “You better drink up. We gotta go.”

At least one Friday night a month, sometimes more, Liz met some of the people she worked with at Legal Aid at a small restaurant just off the Promenade in Santa Monica. It was an affordable restaurant, with a decent menu and great mohitos, and I didn’t mind the company. It wasn’t like I had anyone from work to hang out with except Jendrek, and he and I did our drinking at a dive near the office.

When we walked in, most of the regular crew was already there. It was a large table full of young lawyers trying to save the world from the abuses of the greedy, the powerful, or the just plain nasty. Liz had worked there since her second year of law school and was now one of the more senior “junior” people. There was Carmen and her boyfriend, Renaldo, Bobby Parks and his girlfriend, and the new guy, Benjamin Cross.

There was a swell of greetings as we entered. We said hello all around and sat across from Ben and Renaldo. Liz immediately began talking to Ben and I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She leaned across the table and touched his arm as she laughed. He gave her a big grin. The newest lawyer at Legal Aid, he’d been there less than two months and he was already Liz’s best friend.

Benjamin Cross was a trust fund baby living off the fat his ancestors had stockpiled. He grew up in Beverly Hills and then it was Yale College and Columbia Law. After law school, he spent two years clerking for a federal judge in New York. Now he was back home in LA as a new lawyer working at Legal Aid with Liz, where he sat around talking about defending the rights of The People. He did triathlons, spoke French, and lived in a two million dollar condo on the beach with an incredible kitchen where he liked to cook gourmet food and watch the sunset. He was twenty-eight years old, a year younger than me, and I hated him. But the thing was, he was actually a nice guy. Which made me hate him even more.

I took my mind off of him by chatting with Renaldo. We always talked about civil rights cases and I secretly suspected Renaldo was sizing me up, working an angle to ask about getting a job with Jendrek and me after he left Legal Aid. He was one of those true believers. A guy who made me look like a conservative law and order type.

“Man, you see what they did to that guy at the Halloween party?” He took a long drink from his dark beer and shook his head. “Man, that’s f*cked up. And I’ll bet they get away with it too, man. Qualified immunity, right?”

I laughed and said, “Man, you have no idea. You’ll never guess who called Jendrek first thing this morning.”

He gave me the eye, not believing it at first and then leaning in, wanting details. “No f*cking way, man.”

“Totally,” I leaned in too, wanting to string him along. “Vargas’s son called, looking for someone to sue the LAPD.” He was hooked. I could see thoughts of leaving Legal Aid to join the fight clicking through his head. I didn’t have the heart to tell him there wasn’t much money in it. There were big paydays on occasion, but they were few and far between, so you had to make them last. Some months, especially lately, Jendrek and I could barely keep the lights on.

Renaldo had told me on more than one occasion that he’d be happy to spend his whole career suing cops. He’d grown up in Baldwin Hills, a rough Latino neighborhood in East LA, and he’d seen more than his share of police brutality. He wanted to get revenge for every Mexican kid who’d ever been pulled over for no reason; every Latina girl who’d ever been raped and told there was nothing to prosecute, that she’d asked for it because of her behavior; every cleaning woman and janitor who’d ever been arrested based on a false accusation that they’d stolen something. He had the rage, and he wanted to use it. Legal Aid was just a place to get some experience and do a little good for the world in the process.

“So?” he egged me on.

“So what?” I responded, acting like it was nothing. “So we went and talked to him. Looked at the scene. Walked around the house.” I shrugged my shoulders and looked for a waiter so I could order a drink.

“So was it like the paper said?”

“More or less.”

“Man, that is f*cked.” Renaldo tapped Bobby Parks and said, “Listen to this shit, man. Guess what Ollie was doing today.”

Bobby looked at me, and then everyone on that end of the table was looking at me. I walked them through the story, giving them all the details. Technically, it was a breach of confidentiality, but most of it was in the newspapers anyway, so I figured what the hell. After awhile we ordered food. We drank several rounds. By the time I was through it all, everyone was outraged and everyone agreed it would be a tough case to win.

“Take it to a jury though,” Bobby said. “Who the hell is going to believe the cops when they said they were in fear for their lives? I mean, it was dark. The dude in the room wouldn’t even have been able to see them.”

“And,” Carmen cut in, “the guy who was in the room will testify that he wasn’t in any danger. It’s just some trigger-happy cop making an assumption. And don’t forget it was a noise call. I mean, you don’t go on a noise disturbance thinking you need to be on guard and ready to shoot someone.”

I listened to what they had to say. They were right on a visceral level. The whole thing stunk. But the counter-arguments kept running through my head.

“Yeah,” I said, “but what if the noise disturbance is a domestic? Some guy beating the shit out of his wife and waving a gun around?”

Renaldo said, “But that’s not what this was.”

“But the cops didn’t know that when they got there. It could have been anything.”

Carmen said, “Sure, but when they pulled up and saw all the cars, they knew it was a party. Unless they think people invite all their friends over to watch a domestic dispute.”

She had me there.

I was scrambling to argue the other side. I said, “Sure, but as they’re walking around the side of the house, they look in the window and they see two guys standing there. One guy’s got a gun in his hand and is waving it in the direction of the other guy.”

“So what?” Renaldo pointed his finger at the table, pounding it down as he made his points. “Not that I’m in favor of guns, but I have a constitutional right to own one and keep it in my home. Two, there’s no evidence he was doing anything threatening with the gun, he was maybe being careless by waving it around, but that’s not a crime. And three, let’s not forget it was Halloween and everyone is wearing f*cking costumes. The goddamned cops don’t even take two seconds to think about that? Now that’s bullshit. It’s absolutely f*cking unbelievable.”

“You tell him, Renaldo,” Carmen laughed.

Bobby took a swallow of beer and said, “But I’d leave out the word ‘bullshit’ when you argue to the judge. But keep f*cking unbelievable.”

I shook my head, drank my beer, and said, “I know it. It’s insane. It’s hard to come up with a bulletproof story for the cops.”

“Nice pun,” Carmen smiled.

“Yeah, but still,” Bobby spoke slowly as he thought it through. “It’s still a tough case. What’s the standard for qualified immunity? No reasonable officer would have thought his actions were constitutional? Something like that?”

“I think that’s right.” Renaldo nodded his head.

“Ask Ben.” Bobby leaned across Renaldo and tapped Benjamin Cross on the shoulder, “Hey Ben.”

Ben and Liz stopped gabbing at each other for the first time since we’d gotten there. I turned to look at the two of them and I could see something in Liz’s eyes like fright or shock. It was as if she’d been caught doing something she knew she shouldn’t have. As though she was feeling guilty just by talking to him.

No one else seemed to notice or care. “Hey, Ben,” Bobby asked again. “You just took the bar exam, what’s the standard for qualified immunity?”

Ben thought about it for a second. Then he said, “It’s got two parts. First, was the constitutional right clearly established? And second, could a reasonable officer have believed his conduct was lawful?” Then he smirked and added, “I think in Burns v Reed the Supreme Court stated that qualified immunity, quote, ‘provides ample support to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.’”

“Whoa!” Carmen gasped, mocking him. “Look at the big brain on Ben.”

But he seemed to take himself seriously. He smiled and raised his eyebrows. I could tell he was proud of himself for knowing the case. I caught a quick flick of his eyes toward Liz. Checking to see if she was impressed. I had a sudden urge to throw something at him. Maybe a punch. But instead, I returned to the conversation.

“So with a standard like that, unless the guy knowingly violated the law or is so absolutely incompetent that no officer anywhere would ever do the same thing in the same circumstances, we lose.”

“Sad, but true.” Bobby leaned his chair back against the wall behind him and sipped his beer. “Sad, but true,” he muttered again.

“Man, it’s f*cking outrageous. That’s what it is.” Renaldo leaned his chair back as well and we all seemed to be out of things to say. We ordered more drinks and talked about other things. As the evening wound down, my cell phone rang.

I dug it from my jacket pocket and looked at it. I had no idea who it might be. My mother called me now and then, and Jendrek, but they never called me this late. The only one who called me regularly was Liz, and she was sitting beside me fawning over Benjamin Cross’s big brain and big smile.

Finally, I answered it. “Hello?”

“Um, hi, is this Mr. Olson?” The voice was girlish and familiar, but strained and nervous at the same time. I didn’t place it right away. Instead, I hesitated and said:

“Yes? Who is this?”

“This is Brianna. We met this morning?” She sounded unsure of herself. Like I wouldn’t remember the shape of her thighs, the smell of her in the morning air.

I glanced over at Liz, feeling a tightening in my stomach. I couldn’t imagine why she was calling. I checked my watch. It was nearly eleven. I realized I hadn’t said anything in response, just as she asked, “Do you remember?”

“Um, yes,” I said. “What can I do for you?” I pictured the flesh overflowing her bikini top and glanced back at Liz again. She was still laughing at everything coming out of Benjamin Cross’s mouth.

“Well,” she began. “I don’t know if I should be calling you, but it just seemed like you’d want to know this.”

“Know what?”

“The police were just here asking questions. They found Pete Stick dead in his warehouse a couple hours ago. They said he hung himself.”