Brianna smirked, the giggle returning to her voice and the humor glinting in her eyes. “Maybe someone had a heart attack over a plate of baked beans.”
Maybe so. As we left the restaurant and drove back to the city, a cluster of police cars and an ambulance were gathered out front of the houses along the narrow edge of the PCH. “I guess you were right,” I said. “Someone choked on a chicken wing.”
Brianna shrugged. “There are worse ways to go,” she said. “Like getting shot by the cops in your own house.”
Tuesday
November 5
XV
I almost missed it. I flipped through the paper without paying attention. I was distracted by the images of Brianna juxtaposed in my head. Her thoughtful, self-reflective face sitting across the table from me was interspersed in the video of her sweating, panting, and straining to brace herself against a fierce, sexual pounding. I had been awake half the night, watching her do things with other men right there in front of me. Things that she might have let me do, if only I had permitted them to happen.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not just because of Liz, but because of the desperation in her voice as she told me about her childhood. A childhood not that many years removed from the present.
Instead, I smelled her perfume all the way home. I marveled at the brightness of her eyes, felt the light brush of her shoulder against mine as we walked from the car to the bottom of the steps of the Vargas mansion. And then I stopped, holding myself back from following her inside. She looked up at me with a sweetness in her face that told me I was the first man in a long time who hadn’t come inside, and it only made her more willing to have me there. It made me one of the nice guys. But not one who was afraid to touch her. It wasn’t fear that restrained me, it was merely an unwillingness to do it. I simply couldn’t.
Instead, I drove home thinking of the hue of her skin in the lamplight. Instead, I sat in the darkness of the apartment, purchasing images of her, paying her to perform for me. Starting slow, watching still pictures of her nude on a bed, by the beach, in the shower, covered with bubbles. And then escalating to images of her masturbating, as I was, and then to watching her with another man, and another. Quickly moving on to videos of her being defiled by three and four men at a time, an erection in every orifice, one in each hand, everything undulating over and over and over in an endless loop of maddening, torrid, unhinged fucking.
And then I slept, still haunted by her. She was with me again when I woke. And in the shower, and on the way to the office. The thoughts of her nearly kept me from reading the paper at all. They distracted me as I made idle talk with Ellen and poured myself coffee. I tried to shake them. Tried to focus on my job. Tried to tell myself that I’d done nothing wrong by having dinner with her. But there she was, creeping into the silences whenever the conversation with Ellen lagged.
When I returned to my desk and the newspaper, determined to focus, it leapt off the front page of the local section. The headline: Young Man’s Body Washes up on Beach. The picture beside it showed a smiling, slightly younger version of David Daniels, but even without the name, his wispy red beard was unmistakable. And more chilling still, as I read the article, I realized what the police cars on the side of the road in Malibu had been about.
“Three people are dead,” I told Jendrek. It was a simple fact that no one—not even Jendrek—could argue with. I didn’t say murder. I didn’t even say the deaths were connected.
But of course I had. That much was obvious from the fact that I was bringing it up. The newspaper article did not connect them. In fact, it had very little detail about David Daniels, other than the fact that his body had washed up on the shore at a dinner party in Malibu with two bullet holes in its chest.
“That’ll ruin your appetite,” Jendrek joked.
“So what do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. Obviously there’s something going on, but I don’t have any idea what it is.”
“I think we should go to the police.”
Jendrek shrugged and asked, “With what? We don’t know anything.”
“We know Daniels made the call reporting the noise disturbance.”
Jendrek thought about it for a second and said, “Don’t you think the cops know that already?”
“I doubt it. Why would they? An anonymous call. But whether they know or not, what difference does it make? We know, shouldn’t we say something?”
“I guess so.” Jendrek rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I just hate getting involved in something like this. I don’t even want my name in a file somewhere. I hate cops. You can’t trust them.”
I groaned. It was a very Jendrek thing to say. “Come on. Not everyone in the entire world is corrupt.” Jendrek just raised his eyebrows and looked at me, as if to say, Oh yeah?
I got up and went back to my office. It took me a minute to find Detective Wilson’s number. When I called I got his voicemail and left him a message with no details. I told him only that I learned something about David Daniels yesterday and figured he’d like to know what it was, given that he now had three bodies on his hands.
It wasn’t long after that when Ellen came in with the original file I’d given her and the background checks on Tiffany Vargas. There was an inch thick stack of paper constituting all the digital connections the electronic universe could make between a few disparate pieces of information: a social security number, name, date of birth, current address, and driver’s license number. I was always amazed by what was out there, floating in the electronic ether.
I flipped through the stack. It was typical stuff. It showed her marriage to Don Vargas. It showed their obscenely expensive house on Mulholland Drive. Five foreign cars registered to the address. It reflected no employment for the previous nine years. It reflected no changes of address for the same period. She had never been sued. Never been convicted of a crime. Never divorced. No bankruptcies.
But what she had done was lived in Canoga Park, and presumably worked there too. And when she had been there, her name was Tiffany Long. I tried to picture where Canoga Park was, but I couldn’t. I knew it was somewhere in the Valley. But so were lots of things.
I noted that she was actually thirty-two years old, although she didn’t look it at all. Nine years ago she would have been twenty-three. It was likely the address was even older, given that the background just jumped from address to address, assuming—often incorrectly—that a person lived at the previous address up until the time a new one was reported. The records were notoriously fragmented. It was probably her parents’ address.
I tried to imagine where she had come from. I thought of Brianna’s story. I thought of Ed’s philosophy of pornography and the women it consumed. I had no idea where the address was, but I pictured a run down apartment building with discolored walls in the common areas and shoeless children in diapers running loose in the dirt outside. My own inner image of where porn stars came from.
On the outside of the file was the address Ed had written down for his mother. The address was in Encino. Also in the Valley. I would have to talk to her as well. In fact, it was the only thing I had to go on besides the address in Canoga Park.
I lingered in the office for a while longer, hoping Detective Wilson would return my call. I thought about the scream we’d heard on the beach the night before. I would never have thought a body had washed up on the shore. It didn’t sound like that kind of scream. Perhaps people in Malibu were more tolerant of horrors than I would be. Not that it mattered. I’d never be living in Malibu.
I checked my watch and realized the day was wasting. I couldn’t just sit around the office all day. I had to get to the Valley.
XVI
I didn’t know the Valley for shit. Once I passed the Getty Center at the top of the hill, heading north, I might as well have been in another country. The San Fernando Valley held a couple million people in a two hundred square mile sprawl of wall to wall humanity, but it never meant anything t
o me. I grew up in Riverside. I went to UCLA. Now I lived in Santa Monica. My reasons to cross the Hollywood Hills were few, and were often avoided when they arose.
Not that the Valley was a bad place. It was just unnecessary. It didn’t have anything the rest of the city didn’t have, and it was twenty degrees hotter. So why go? To interview the mother of your porn mogul client would be one reason. So there I was, battling traffic on the 405 at eleven in the morning, wondering if Detective Wilson would ever call me back.
I got off the freeway at Ventura Boulevard and turned west into Encino. Along the north side of the Hollywood Hills, the houses are just as fancy and only slightly less expensive as they are on the more famous south side. The cities of Encino, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Tarzana, and Woodland Hills are all pretty upper crust places to live, if you are south of Ventura Boulevard, up in the hills.
Which was where Colette Vargas, mother of Ed Vargas, first wife of Don, apparently spent her days by her swimming pool. I’d called her to arrange a meeting. She was more than happy to talk. But I had to get there first. After my left turn on Ventura, I was pretty much out of directions.
One of the problems with the Valley is that you never quite know where you are. Although it was just a giant grid, all the cities run together, making it impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins. So I drifted down Ventura, looking for signs, like a lost ordinate floating through a system with only superficial order.
It took me an hour to find it. The small stucco house with the red tile roof was tucked back on one of the hundreds of side streets that wound their way up through the gullies and washes running down from the tops of the hills. The trees were old growth and overhung the road in lush arches. The masonry wall along the street was covered with ivy, making it more difficult to spot the numbers on the house. The whole place looked like it had settled in long ago to let the world grow up around it and cover it.
The woman who met me at the door was the exact opposite of Don Vargas. Colette Vargas was a thin, attractive, fifty-something blonde, dressed in the casually conservative way that I imagined people looked when they stepped off a boat at Martha’s Vineyard. Placed next to the few images I had of Don Vargas, it was almost impossible to imagine them together.
“You must be Ollie,” she said. I detected a faint New England accent, maybe Boston.
She took me through the house and out onto a back patio with a small swimming pool. The hillside behind the house rose up steep and thick with trees and brush. No other houses were visible. “It’s quiet back here.”
She smiled and said, “It’s small, but it’s certainly quiet. That’s what I enjoy most about it.” She left me alone for a minute and returned with a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses. As she set them on the teak outdoor furniture, she said, “Eddie told me you would be coming by.”
“Did he tell you why?”
She spoke as she poured the tea, but glanced at me as she did. “He said it had to do with Tiffany and his inheritance. Or lack thereof, I should say.”
“He intends to challenge his father’s marriage to her as a fraud. It’s a tough claim to make. He said you were the best one to talk to because you were around when it all happened.”
She reclined in the chair opposite me and smiled as the past flickered across her face. She shook her head and said, “I was there alright.” There was no bitterness to her voice. She spoke with amusement more than anything else. “It’s strange watching your life unravel right in front of you. But it’s even stranger to realize, after the fact, that you’re not that upset about it.”
“Were you glad you got divorced?”
“I wouldn’t say I was glad.” She sipped her tea thoughtfully and added, “Ambivalent is probably a better word.”
“Ed seems to have a different opinion. He still seems angry about it after all these years.”
“Ed has had an easy life,” she grinned, the ice clinking in her glass. “For him, the divorce was the worst thing that ever happened to him, until now anyway.”
“And for you?”
She shrugged. “I’m getting old. I drink iced tea. I trim my roses,” she motioned to a cluster of bushes on the far side of the pool. “I’m just trying to wring the good things out of my life. Who needs to focus on the bad stuff?”
“How long were you and Don married?”
“He told me he wanted a divorce on our twenty-fifth anniversary.” She took another sip of tea and raised her eyebrows, “Don always had a flair for the dramatic.”
I smiled instead of laughing. She smiled too and added, “I had seen it coming, of course, but it made me pretty angry at the time. I remember I said to him, couldn’t you have waited another day?”
“Twenty-five years is a long time. How did the two of you meet?”
“We met in college. I’d come out from Boston, where I grew up, to go to Pomona. Don was there too, on a full scholarship.” My surprise must have registered on my face, because she said, “That surprises you. It would surprise most people, I guess. Especially those who met him later on. But Don was very intelligent and very different back then. He was two years older than me and unlike anyone I’d ever met before.”
“How so?”
“My father was a lawyer in Boston. We weren’t wealthy, but we were well off. I grew up in a pretty genteel environment. I had an uncle out here working in television. In Burbank. So I came out here to go to school. It seemed very exciting, California and all. This was the late-60s; 1968, right when the country was falling apart. I was just a girl from Boston who hadn’t yet given much thought about what her life might be like.”
She laughed at something inside herself and then shrugged it off. “It’s funny that the only point in your life when you really have time to plan, is when you’re young and have no ability to plan.”
I drank some tea and tried to relax a little in my seat. “Had you planned to stay in California?”
“Oh, heavens no. It was only supposed to be a little fun out west. I think my dad always intended me to move home and marry a junior partner in his firm. But here I am.” She laughed and held her arms up, making a display of herself. “I guess that means the fun lasted forty years.”
“I guess so.”
She leaned forward and poured more tea into both our glasses. “If only life were that simple,” she said, almost as an aside.
But I didn’t let it die. I asked, “So you stayed for Don. Is that it? Got married and all of that?”
“In a nut shell, I suppose. But it was more complicated than that. I fell in love with Don, but I was more practical than that. We talked for a while about moving back east, but Don was a real Californian. He wouldn’t hear of it. I remember we went back one Christmas, early on.” She leaned her head back, as though the past were just behind her somewhere and she could see it clearly if only she looked.
“It must have been ‘71. I remember it was Don’s first time on an airplane. We got to Boston and he thought that was alright. But when we drove out into the country all Don could say was, ‘I can’t believe how many people there are. It’s way too crowded.’ Funny, coming from an LA boy.”
She paused for a second, and then added, “It was probably 1970 because I remember Dad making all these remarks about how Kent State taught all the hippies that they shouldn’t mess with America. I could tell Don hated my dad, but he was being nice for my sake. My dad kept telling Don he should move back to Boston. He could get him into one of the law schools and he’d hire him into the firm. Don wasn’t interested. He wanted to work in movies. Boston wasn’t going to cut it.”
“So how’d your parents react to your marrying him and staying out here?”
“They didn’t,” she said, reaching for her glass. “They were killed in a plane crash in Mexico that following spring.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. What else do you say to something like that?
“Yes,” she said. “It is. But it was a long time ago. And, it left me alone in th
e world, in California, where my only uncle lived. So I stayed, eventually married Don, and the rest is history.”
“When did Don get involved in,” I wasn’t sure how to say it, and then I realized I was being silly, “pornography.”
“When he couldn’t make it in real movies.”
“He tried to get work at the studios?”
“Oh, he worked there. My uncle got him some jobs with NBC, where my uncle worked, and then Don did different things with the major studios.”
“What kind of things?”
“It was all very menial, low-end stuff. He was in his early twenties and had no experience. They were all entry-level positions as grips, or some kind of assistant to an assistant. He was very frustrated. He expected to get promoted fast and actually be a producer or director or something. So he would get fed up and quit and move on to a different job.”
“What were you doing?”
“For awhile I just stayed home.” She laughed as she thought about it. “I had very traditional notions of what women were supposed to do, I guess. It was my upbringing. That lasted until about 1975 or ‘76. By that time I could see the pattern. Don would get a new job, be excited about the opportunity, and after three or four months he’d quit, claiming they didn’t know what they were doing or they were idiots and he couldn’t work for people like that.”
“That made you concerned?”
“Yeah, it was very unstable. At first, it was okay. I still had a little of the money I’d inherited from my parents, so when things got tight I dipped into it. Don liked to live well. After a few years, it was nearly gone. That worried me.”
I finished my second glass of tea and started to worry about having to go to the bathroom. She leaned over and refilled my glass. As she did, she said, “Don was very smart, very ambitious, but also very impatient. He felt that he should be successful right away. He never seemed to accept the fact that you had to work a long time to get there.” Then she shrugged and added, “But he didn’t have any role models growing up, so I guess he didn’t really know.”
The Flaming Motel Page 13