I shrugged and said, “People like Sinatra.”
Ed shook his head and said, “No man, not like this. I’m talking old Sinatra records. Not just ‘My Way’ and greatest hits stuff. This was obscure shit that most people don’t know. But she knew it all. The whole damned thing just seemed like a big performance to me. But Dad bought it. He had this romantic side. You wouldn’t think so, but he did. And he fell hard.”
“Maybe she was just the right girl at the right time.”
Ed threw his head back and laughed. “Now you’re just fucking with me.” He paused for a second and then added, “I suppose anything’s possible. But it was like she came out of nowhere. I mean, I’ve never met any friends of hers from before. That’s weird, isn’t it? She’s got no old friends who ever come around.” He flipped through the pages in the file folder, “And this, you know. There’s nothing here. Like she’s got no past.”
I laughed and said, “Yeah, like an old Clint Eastwood movie. The man with no name.”
“Exactly.”
XII
I took the file and showed myself out. As I was walking down the steps to the driveway, Brianna pulled into the driveway in a bright red Porsche Boxster. She waved at me with the fingers of one hand and smiled. She was wearing a loose, silky suit that draped over her body like a cloth covering a sculpture. “Fancy seeing you here so soon,” she said.
“Sorry to run out on you like that. I just felt sick all of a sudden.” I took the stairs two at a time and met her at the bottom.
“I hope it wasn’t too bad.” She took off her sunglasses and grinned at me. “You look alright now.”
“I’m better. Did you find a place?” I asked, thinking about her website, my conversation with Ed, and the feeling of her pressed against me on the balcony.
She shrugged and said, “I saw a few things. Nothing’s perfect. But I just need to buy something and get out of here. I think I’ve spent enough of my life in this place.” She stared past me at the house. Her words had a conscious, symbolic tone.
“Ed seems to have the same feeling,” I said.
She smiled and shook her head. “Yeah, but he doesn’t live here. He hasn’t since college. It’s Tiffany’s house now and, without Don around, it’s suddenly not big enough for the two of us.”
I don’t know why I’d assumed that Ed lived there. I glanced down at the folder in my hand, wondering if I was holding stolen property. I said, “I gather that there’s no love lost between Tiffany and Ed.”
“That’s an understatement. Especially now.”
“What’s that mean?”
“She inherited the businesses. Ed’s going to be working for her, if he doesn’t kill her first. You should have heard them fighting this morning.”
I suddenly realized it was nearly noon and we were standing in the middle of the driveway. I imagined Tiffany Vargas pulling up the driveway any second and finding me there. I wanted to talk to Brianna more, about a lot of things, but this wasn’t the place to do it. Without thinking, I asked, “What are you doing later?”
She smiled and said, “Nothing. What do you mean? How much later?”
“Tonight.”
With a coy growl in her voice, she said, “Are you asking me out?” .
“I’m asking you to dinner,” I said, trying to make it sound like business and telling myself that’s all it was. “I’d like to talk to you about all of this, but now’s not the time.”
“So it’s dinner, but it’s not a date?” Her voice was flat, but her eyes told me she thought I was just being cautious. “It’s okay,” she smirked. “I’d go out on a date with you, even if that’s what you called it.” She got out of the car.
I backed away a couple of steps and slapped the file against my leg. “Seven?”
She did her best fake gushing smile and said, “I’ll be waiting anxiously at the top of the stairs.”
I heard the heels of her shoes click their way up the steps behind me as I walked away. At the edge of Mulholland Drive, I turned to look back just as she disappeared into the house. The curves of her back seemed to evaporate in the bright sunlight and I stood alone in the midday quiet.
Walking back down the road, I could see north, out over the San Fernando Valley—the Valley—and the capital of the porn industry. The grid of streets and freeways on the Valley floor below me shimmered in the November air, stretching all the way to the dusty brown San Gabriel and Santa Susana Mountains.
My car was on the side of the road, next to the driveway, right where I left it. I could see the guard in the gatehouse, reading the paper and working his way through a sandwich. He grinned when he saw me coming and leaned out the window.
“You look a lot better than you did last night.”
“I’m sure I do,” I smiled back. I walked all the way up to the little window and he handed me my keys. “Thanks a lot for getting me home last night.”
“Hey,” he said, “I gotta sleep at night too. Don’t want to be reading about someone else I knew getting killed.” He waved the paper as he said it. Then he pointed up the road with his chin. “You coming from the Vargas house?”
“Yeah.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Not really. I do some work for them.” He gave me a look like he thought I was a porn star, although, given my clothes, it should have been obvious I wasn’t. “Not that kind of work.” I grinned.
“That’s too bad.” He smiled wide, showing a gold tooth far back in his mouth. “It’s nice work, if you can get it.”
I motioned toward the paper. “You know them?”
“Met the dad a couple of times. He was a real nice guy. Whenever they had a party, he’d come by and tell me that there might be some folks parking along here. Most folks around here don’t do that. But he wasn’t like most folks.” He rustled the paper as he spoke. “That’s why I hate to be reading this. It’s just terrible. And I’d hate the family to think I had anything to do with it.”
“Why would they think that?”
“That night, a cop came by asking questions. He said the records showed the call about the noise came from this phone.” He pointed to the phone inside his booth and laughed. “I said no way, their records were messed up. No way I’d call about that. I liked Vargas. Besides, a little noise is better than just sitting out here in the dark all night.”
“You work all the time?”
“Naw,” he grinned. “There’s another guy. Pedro, little Mexican dude, we split the nights.”
My brain was still sifting through the information. I turned and looked back up the road, trying to remember last night. When I turned back to him, I said, “When I parked last night, you couldn’t even hear the party.”
The old guy laughed and shook his head. “I know. That’s what I told the cops. Why would I call a noise disturbance if you can’t even hear it down here?” He shrugged and leaned his dark arms against the narrow white counter in the window. “They didn’t question me much. I think they just wanted to make sure they came down and talked to me. It didn’t really matter. What was done was done. Vargas was already laying in a morgue somewhere by then.”
I thought it through. I supposed mistakes got made now and then. And the old guy was right. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was what the cops did after they got there, and the police chief had already put his seal of approval on that.
The guard pointed over at my car. “I got out a hose and washed your door off a little. Hate to see a nice car like that with dried puke all over it.”
“Thanks.”
“Like I said last night, it’s a helluva lot nicer than the last car that parked there.”
“Yeah, you told me. The junker car, on Halloween.” I took a few steps toward mine and admired his work. Now I had a dusty car with a very clean door.
“It was funny too,” he went on. “The dude driving it didn’t look much better than his ride. I guess it’s like when they say people look like their pets. Some people
look like their cars.”
“Maybe he was dressed up for Halloween.” I grinned, and tossed the cluster of keys from hand to hand.
“Naw, I think he was just ugly. Just wanted to borrow my phone to call someone to pick him up. Then he got his car started again and drove off. Goofy looking kid with this ratty-assed red beard.”
I heard the keys hit the pavement before I realized I’d dropped them. Suddenly, they seemed terribly cold to the touch. But the chill was inside me.
XIII
I told myself two things as I drove out of the Hollywood Hills. First, I didn’t know for sure that it was the same kid that made a phone call from the gatehouse. There were twenty million people in the Los Angeles area and lots of them had red hair. Second, I didn’t really know who he called.
I tried to imagine a conversation with Detective Wilson, and I could hear his gruff voice asking those same questions. How do you know this? How do you know that? And the fact was, I didn’t know. I only suspected.
But I was driving fast in no particular direction and I was sure there had to be something to it. There simply weren’t any coincidences in life. Or maybe the whole damned thing was one big coincidence, human existence wriggling its way up from the muck of history for a few million years in the sun before we managed to kill each other off. Maybe that was an accident, but the Vargas murder sure the hell wasn’t.
My brain stuck on the word. Murder. It hadn’t really been used until that moment. Pete Stick was a suicide. Wilson was adamant about that. And the Police Chief was calling Don Vargas’s death a justifiable homicide. I wasn’t so sure. Nothing about it seemed right. But nothing about it seemed overtly wrong either. It seemed like, a coincidence. And there I was again, going round and round and round. What I needed was to talk to the kid. And if he wouldn’t come to me, I’d go to him.
The warehouse on Gower looked a lot different in the daytime. The mustard colored stucco seemed to absorb the sunlight and glow a little. This time there were no cars on the street, so I parked right out front.
The door was open and I went into the dreary front office. There was no one there, which I was beginning to suspect was the norm. I stood in the silence for a few seconds before it struck me just how silent it was. On Friday, there had been warehouse noises coming from behind the wall, but today there was nothing.
I looked for a bell to ring, but there wasn’t one. I waited for a moment more and then went around the counter and poked my head through a door that opened into the warehouse. It was a large space with rows of shelves and a high roof of exposed beams. I wondered which one Pete Stick had hung himself from and the thought turned my blood cold.
I called out to see if anyone was there, just to fill the silence with something. Then a commotion came from behind some shelves and a forty-something blonde guy who looked like a surfer gone to seed appeared from behind a shelf full of pink flamingoes and lawn gnomes.
“Hey,” he said, with no hint of customer service to his voice.
“You guys open?”
“Yeah, well, kind of. The owner died suddenly, last Friday. So things are a little up in the air. Fortunately, we didn’t have anything big scheduled for today.” He looked around the warehouse like the mere sight of it was overwhelming.
“I’m looking for a guy who works here. Young guy, red hair, red beard.”
“Dave?” The guy looked around again and patted at the pockets of his pants, as if Dave might be in there. Then he said, “He didn’t come in this morning. There’s usually only three of us in the warehouse anyway. Bobby’s on vacation, and Dave didn’t show. The owner’s dead, so that leaves me.” The facts seemed to frighten him. “Man, I sure hope nothing happens.”
“Did he call in sick?”
“No, he just didn’t show.”
“Did you call him?”
He looked stunned, like the thought had never occurred to him, as though he’d just awoken in a world where he was all alone and there was nothing he could do about it, like a bad science fiction movie. I would have guessed he was stoned, but his movements were too jittery for that.
I said, “You got a phone number for him? Maybe you could call him. I’d really like to get a hold of him.”
The man’s eyes seemed to focus on me again, for the first time. “What are you? A cop or something?”
“Why do you think a cop would be looking for Dave?”
The question shocked him and I could see his brain racing to figure out if he’d just fucked up, and if so, how bad. Then a kind of defeat showed in his eyes. It looked natural there. Then he said, in a glum voice, with shoulders sagging, “His phone number and address are in the office.”
He wrote the information down and handed it to me. I looked it over to make sure I could read it before I left. Then I thanked him and turned to go. He seemed surprised and took a step toward me, asking, “So now what?”
I smiled and shrugged and said, “Nothing.”
I left him standing in the wreck of an office, alone and studying the walls like they where covered with absurd, post-modern art.
I stopped at the In N’ Out at Sunset and Orange for lunch. I called the number he gave me on my cell and got an answering machine with a woman’s voice. I left a message and mowed my way through a burger and fries while I studied the piece of paper.
The kid’s name was David Daniels. His address was on Huntington Drive, which I vaguely recognized as an address in East LA. It was a part of town I never had any need or desire to visit, but I suspected I might have to if the kid didn’t return my call.
Ellen was playing solitaire on the computer when I got back to the office. She didn’t try to hide it or anything. There would have been no point. Jendrek and I were both well aware that we didn’t have enough work. She looked me over without interest when I came in.
I asked, “Where’s Mark?”
She shrugged. “Said he had a meeting out of the office. He left a couple hours ago.”
“Any calls?”
She laughed at me. “Are you kidding?”
Ellen was a funny one, sarcastic and clever. She had to be to survive so long with Jendrek. In her mid-forties, she was still single, had no children, and seemed to prefer it that way.
I handed her the file I’d gotten from Ed Vargas and she flipped through it quickly. “Yeah?”
“Can you order background checks on her? The social security number and everything else is in there.”
“Is this the woman who was in here this morning?”
I smiled at her. “Piece of work, huh?”
“The Vargas kid doesn’t want her to inherit the family fortune?”
“He’s got a little problem with the fact that he’s older than his mother.” We both laughed.
Then the door opened and Jendrek came in and looked us over. He eyed me in particular and said, “You’re looking a lot better than you did this morning. What did Ed have to say?”
I followed him into his office and gave him the highlights. The background checks would give us some addresses and maybe some prior employment information. In the meantime, I’d drop in on Vargas’s mother tomorrow and see what she had to say about her replacement.
I intentionally saved the best for last. “And there’s one more thing I learned up there,” I said. Jendrek raised his eyebrows, waiting. “It looks like that red haired kid that worked for Pete Stick, you remember him?” He nodded at me.
“Well,” I said, “it looks like he might have been the guy who called in the noise disturbance.”
I watched his face stumble through a half-dozen perplexed expressions as he put together exactly what that might mean. “How do you know that?” he asked in a voice loaded with caution.
“I don’t, for sure. But here’s what I do know.” I ran him through it. How I’d gone to the party, parked the car there, taken a taxi, and talked to the guard again this afternoon.
“And he described the kid?”
“The description matched.”
“I don’t know what I think. It sure seems that way. But a setup for what?”
“To kill Vargas.”
“But why? The kid didn’t have anything to gain.”
“That we know of.”
“Well, let’s assume he didn’t. Let’s assume he and Pete planned something. Pete didn’t gain anything either.”
Jendrek thought about that. Then he said, “Maybe the shooting really was an accident. Maybe there was something else going on and the cops just got in the middle of it and fucked it all up.”
I said, “But if the kid called the cops …”
“Maybe they wanted some cops there for some reason. Something else they had in mind, and then the cop did what he did and screwed it all up.” Jendrek shook his head and shrugged. “Besides, the alternative is too hard to put together. The alternative requires the cop to be in on it. If the cops were in on it, they’d have to be in on the whole thing. It would be hard to get a cop to commit a murder for you.”
I said, “And Pete wasn’t exactly friendly with the cops. So it would be even more unlikely.”
Then Jendrek smiled and said, “Yeah, but the police chief hates pornography so who knows? Maybe it’s all a giant conspiracy.” He leaned forward with a shiver in his voice, drumming his fingers in the air in mock terror. “Maybe they’re listening to us right now. Maybe the invisible helicopters are hovering above the office right now.”
“Okay, fine.” I nodded. “Laugh if you want. The kid obviously thought he had something important to tell us on Saturday, and I’m guessing it was that he was the guy who made the call.”
The Flaming Motel Page 11