The Flaming Motel

by Fingers Murphy

  The cattle call was winding down. Most of the lawyers and families had gone. Liz said they’d brought in a fresh round of detainees and they were now down to only the last few of them. Out in the hallway, we sat on a bench and studied the worn tile on the floors, the worn paint on the walls, smudged with handprints and God knows what else. Municipal courts were dreary places, stained with the residue of misery, rejection, and punishment.

  I was beginning to worry that we’d missed Wilson, or that maybe he’d decided at the last minute that he didn’t want to help us. It didn’t seem like him, but I was starting to question what I knew about everyone.

  Liz spoke suddenly, derailing my thoughts. “I guess I should go to the office,” she said. And then turned to me. “What do you think I should do?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me. “You could make something up, or tell them you’re working on a case and need to be out of the office.”

  “Nothing I’m working on requires that. It would seem odd. Maybe I should just tell them what’s going on.” She seemed to be wanting me to tell her what to do, but I couldn’t. The whole problem seemed absurdly practical and normal compared to the situation we were in.

  “Maybe you should,” I said. “It might be a good idea for someone else to know what’s going on.”

  She stared at me with a glassy fear in her eyes. The implication behind what I’d said surprised even me. Tell someone, in case we’re never heard from again. Was I serious? Was the situation coming to that? I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t be certain of anything.

  “I’m scared,” she said, stating the obvious. “I don’t want to be by myself.”

  “You wouldn’t be. You’d be at the office.”

  “But what about after? Or what about driving in the car alone? I’d rather we just stayed together.”

  I thought about David Daniels’s girlfriend packing her stuff and leaving town. Not a bad idea. It had its appeal. It seemed an easy solution until you had to figure out what to do with yourself. Where you were going, how you were going to survive. I imagined her clutching the piles of cash Daniels had been bringing home. That would help for a while. I supposed forty or fifty grand seemed like a lot of money to her. But it could and would be spent. It might last two years if she was lucky. And then what? Off by herself, hiding from something she wasn’t sure was coming, trying to forget about the afternoon she’d spent tied to a bed in a room off Huntington Drive.

  “Then stay with me,” I said. “We might all go down together, but it’s better than being alone in the world.”

  Liz gave me a funny look. I didn’t explain myself because Detective Wilson came around the corner and down the hallway toward us before I could speak. He held a thin file folder in his hand and looked harried, annoyed, and surly, just like always.

  “So what the hell are you doing down here?” he asked, when he was still twenty feet away.

  I said, “Let’s talk about it outside.” I introduced Liz and Wilson on the way back down the hall. Each of them was indifferent to the other. We rode the elevator in silence. Wilson drummed his fingers on the file folder and we went out the main entrance onto the wide stone entryway where the air was cool and filled with traffic noise. It was only then that I became aware of the oppression inside the courthouse.

  “Is that the file?”

  Wilson handed the tan folder to me and said, “I owe a guy in records a big favor for getting that.” He said it in a way that made it clear that I now owed him a favor as well. I opened it and held it so Liz could see. There were two printouts, one on each flap of the folder. Each had a picture at the top and some basic information about each officer’s career with the LAPD.

  Wilson pointed at the picture on the left. “Officer Davis, the shooting officer,” then he pointed to the other, “Officer Mills, the other officer responding to the call.”

  “That’s him,” Liz said, pointing at the headshot on the left. She poked it so hard I nearly dropped the file. Her voice was cold and flat. “I’m sure of it. That’s him, the one who put the gun in your face.”

  I was sure too, but less sure than she was. It was dark. Everything happened fast. He looked the same, but it wasn’t an overwhelming sense of recognition. “I think you’re right,” I said.

  “Are you kidding me? Of course I’m right. I was looking right at him the whole time. He was standing behind you. If anyone had a good look at him, it’s me. And I’m telling you, that’s the guy.” She turned away from us for a second and took a deep breath. When she turned back she said, “I can’t fucking believe it was really a cop.”

  I couldn’t either. Somehow, the mere possibility that it was someone faking it had kept reality at bay. Despite David Daniels’s girlfriend. Despite Jendrek’s arrest. Somehow we both still imagined and took comfort in the possibility that we were wrong. But we weren’t. Here was the guy’s picture right in front of us, direct from the files of the LAPD.

  “Now hold on,” Wilson said, holding his hands out in front of him as though our words could be physically held back. “Wait a minute. You’re saying this guy is the guy who put a gun in your face and told you to stay away from Vargas?”

  “That’s him,” Liz said, poking at the picture again.

  “What about the other guy?” Wilson asked. “That was the other guy at the Vargas house.”

  I didn’t recognize the other guy at all. Liz took the file from me and studied it for a minute. “Haven’t seen that guy before,” she said, shaking her head. “But this guy,” she pointed at the picture again. “This motherfucker I’m certain about.”

  Wilson scratched his head and looked around behind him, over his shoulder and back at us again. He seemed to be looking for something, perhaps the answer to the question what next? He combed his fingers through his cropped gray hair and said, “You’re absolutely sure? You’d testify to that?”

  “Absolutely,” Liz said.

  Wilson looked at me. “What about you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, this is just great.” Wilson stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the traffic going by in the street in front of the county courthouse.

  Liz said, “So what do we do? Who do we talk to about this?”

  Wilson glanced sideways at her and held his gaze on her for a second, sizing her up. Then he glanced at me. “Look,” he said, “we don’t do shit with this right now. I can’t just go back to the station and arrest the guy. And I can’t just go back there and start raising hell about it either. If we do, two things will happen. First, no one’s going to believe you. Or at any rate, it’ll take a helluva lot of convincing. Second, Davis will hear about it—you can’t keep a goddamned thing secret around there—and whatever he’s up to, he’ll bury it. He’ll back off. We’ve got to get more evidence first. When you go after a cop, you’ve got to be ready to go all the way, and we’re not ready yet. We’ve got no idea what he’s up to.”

  “Well, we’ve got something else,” I said. “Two things, actually.” Wilson just stared at me, waiting for the big news.

  “First,” I went on, “the reason we’re down here is because two cops arrested Mark Jendrek, my law partner, last night. They found a pound of heroin that had been planted in his car.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t his?” Wilson asked.

  I shot him a stern look. “Please,” I said, “give me a break.”

  “Hey man,” he said, “I’m just asking. You can’t trust anyone.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “But Jendrek ain’t that kind of guy. Besides, a pound? Where the hell would you even get that kind of quantity, even if you were into the stuff?”

  “It’s easier than you think.”

  “I’m sure it is, especially for a cop. Look, this was a setup. The cops that arrested him said they got an anonymous tip.” Wilson flashed me a grin and gave me a light roll of the eyes. He was familiar with the anonymous tip, and the abuse that went with it.

 
; “You think it was Davis?”

  “I got no idea. He described them to us. They didn’t sound like the same guys. But these pictures will clear that up. But even if it wasn’t the same guys, it would probably be Davis here who called in the tip.”

  Wilson didn’t have anything to say to that. He stood quiet for a minute and then asked, “So what was the other thing?”

  “What?”

  “You said there were two things that helped prove Davis is up to something.”

  “Oh yeah, I went to see David Daniels’s girlfriend yesterday, after I left you. She said a cop came by her place and roughed her up, asking her about Daniels.”

  “The guys we sent never roughed her up.”

  “This cop came after your guys. He came the next day. Said he needed to follow up on some things.” I paused for a moment and wondered how much to tell him. I had kept the details from Liz so far, but I thought Wilson would want to know. I thought it might help motivate him a little.

  I said, “She showed me some bruises. Said he knocked her around pretty good. Looked pretty bad to me.” I left it at that. Then I said, “It scared her enough, she was packing her stuff, getting ready to leave town. But the most important thing of all was something she said she didn’t tell him, or your guys, for that matter.”

  “What’s that?”

  “David Daniels was Tiffany Vargas’s adopted brother.”

  Wilson looked like he was choking on something. Surprise most likely. “Our guys didn’t find that out?”

  “She said Daniels made her swear to never tell anyone. And she didn’t, until I came along.”

  “And what, you’re such a charming guy she just spilled it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Wilson spat on the concrete. “You’re just one lucky guy, ain’t you?”

  XXV

  “This isn’t them,” Jendrek said for the tenth time, shaking his head. “Neither of them.”

  We were in my car, heading east on Sunset, through Hollywood, getting ready to turn up into the hills and wind our way up to the Vargas house. Jendrek held the file on his lap and stared at the two faces, as though the features might rearrange, transforming the identities into ones he would recognize.

  Liz leaned forward from the backseat and said, “It was probably Davis who phoned in the tip. That’s got to be who it was.”

  We’d been having the same conversation for forty-five minutes. Round and round, going nowhere. First with Wilson, then with Jendrek after we left Wilson to go pick him up. Wilson had gone ahead to the Vargas house to see if he could learn anything new from Tiffany. By the time we’d finished on the stairs in front of the courthouse he was fuming mad. I suggested he take his rubber hose with him when he talked to her. He said a rubber hose would only be the beginning.

  If there was an upside to anything, it was that we finally had Wilson’s full attention. He wasn’t going to rush into accusing a cop of being involved in a murder, but he wasn’t going to let it slide any longer either. “We’ve got to make sure everything is solid,” he’d said before we parted. That was the only way to ensure the LAPD would take it seriously. That meant chasing everything down. Talking to Tiffany Vargas. Talking to Ed. Talking to the girlfriend again, the guy at the gatehouse again, everyone who worked for Pete Stick, and anyone else who might know something.

  And it would have to happen fast. Any one of them might be in on it or might be the source of a leak, even if only by accident. The longer it took, the more likely word would get back to Officer Davis and what little evidence there was might disappear. Or perhaps he might disappear.

  Which created problems for Jendrek, given the charges against him. I’d asked Wilson about it. What would happen with the heroin possession case? He just grinned at me and told me not to worry. If it turned out that Officer Davis was behind it all, it wouldn’t be a problem. “These things have a way of working out,” he’d said. “Evidence gets lost all the time.”

  “Just like it has a way of getting found,” I said back. He winked at me and turned around and walked away.

  Jendrek seemed happy enough that he’d gotten bail and was back on the street. But the happiness was temporary. Sunshine and smiling faces only got a guy so far. By the time we turned up La Cienega and headed into Laurel Canyon, we were all back to speculating about David Daniels and Tiffany Vargas, what the money was for and who was behind it all. Who had the power to get someone like Officer Davis to run around threatening people? And if they had that kind of power, why threaten these people? What made them so interesting?

  Police Chief Dixon came up again. Jendrek was liking that idea more and more, now that he was on the business end of a bullshit frame job. I was liking it less, now that Daniels was involved. Keeping his relationship to Tiffany a secret had to be important, and it seemed less relevant if the Police Chief was just trying to rub out a pornmonger. Liz was convinced that Daniels was the key. Maybe he was blackmailing his sister. But how would that get him killed? He was the guy who made the noise disturbance call, there had to be a connection between him and Officer Davis. But maybe the killing was just a mistake. And there we were, right back at the beginning.

  But it wasn’t a mistake. It couldn’t be. If it were a mistake, Officer Davis wouldn’t be out shoving guns in people’s faces or planting heroin in their cars. He was scared of something, and whatever that something was, it undoubtedly showed that Don Vargas’s death was anything but an accident.

  Then I told the two of them about my realization that Don and Pete were standing in the opposite positions that they naturally should have been standing. That had to mean that Pete was in on it, which only made sense because Daniels worked for Pete. Which brought us back to Pete Stick. Where did he fit into all of this? None of us believed he’d killed himself. Whoever killed Daniels had killed Stick.

  It went on like that for another half hour. We finally stopped talking when we pulled into the driveway of the Vargas house to find Detective Wilson leaning against his car, watching movers carry furniture into the back of a large truck. We pulled up beside him and got out.

  “She’s not here.” He said it like an accusation, like it was somehow our fault. “The concubine inside says she left early this morning and hasn’t been back.”

  Jendrek asked, “What’s going on with the movers?”

  Wilson studied him for a second, and I realized the two of them had never met. I said, “Detective Wilson, this is Mark Jendrek.” I suddenly realized the two of them were probably the same age. They shook hands and nodded at each other.

  Then Wilson said, “Apparently blondie inside has decided to move out. She wasn’t too interested in talking to me.” Wilson stared up at the entrance to the house, as if mystified that his powerful charm had not worked on Brianna Jones. “She said she’d just been living here because Don Vargas had let her. Now that he’s gone, she thinks it’s a pretty good idea for her to be gone too.”

  “I guess she found a place then,” I said, before I realized how it sounded.

  Wilson squinted at me and sneered, “I guess so. Either that or she’s going to live in this truck.” Then he turned back to look at the house and shook his head slightly. “Girl like that wouldn’t have trouble finding someone to take her in though. Hell, I’d offer her my place if she hadn’t already found something else.”

  Jendrek and Wilson chuckled at that. I shook my head. The salty cop and the indicted radical lawyer, a regular match made in heaven. I could see Liz giving me a look out of the corner of my eye. She was wondering how well I knew this woman inside the house. I suddenly regretted her being there. I felt like preparing a snide comment about Benjamin Cross in advance so I’d have it ready if the need arose. But this wasn’t the place for a fight. Tensions were high enough already.

  “Well,” I said. “Shouldn’t we go on in and have a look around? See if there’s something in there that confirms Tiffany Vargas is David Daniels’s sister.”

  “
I asked her already,” Wilson said. “She wouldn’t consent to a search. Says she doesn’t live here anymore anyway. I don’t have a warrant, and I’m not sure I know enough to get one right now. Besides,” he shrugged. “It’d take awhile to get one anyway. Best we could hope for is later today or tonight.”

  “Do either of you know her well enough to get her to let us in?” Liz asked, looking at Jendrek and me.

  It was a trap, but I was ready. “We’ve both spoken to her,” I said, looking at Jendrek and shrugging. “It’s worth a try,” I added, just like that, like it was no big deal. We had no idea what she’d say. It wasn’t like we were friends of hers. All we could do was ask.

  Jendrek and Wilson both gave me strangely amused looks. Jendrek said, “Sure, it’s worth a try.”

  Wilson scratched the back of his head and said, “I’m not sure I’ll hang around for this, folks. She’s already told me to fuck off once. I don’t want to run the risk of having anything you might find in there suppressed.” He looked at Jendrek and said, “The last thing we’d need at a time like this is to do something some damned lawyer will get thrown out later.”

  “I hate lawyers,” Jendrek said with a smile.

  Wilson folded his arms across his chest, leaned back against his unmarked police cruiser, and said, “Now I’m going to have to warn you folks about breaking and entering, burglary, or otherwise committing some kind of crime while you’re looking through that house. That is, if the current occupant will let you in. I certainly can’t have any of you doing something illegal at my request.”

  “We wouldn’t think of it,” I said.

  “No, I’m sure nothing like that would ever occur to fine citizens like yourselves.” Wilson took another look up at the entrance to the house and watched as two men carried Brianna’s Eames chair down the steps and up the ramp leading into the back of the truck. Then he laughed a little and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if she was just here ripping the place off and we all just stood out here and watched?”