The room went silent save for the sound of the glass rolling across the room and coming to rest against the wall. Liz and I stared at each other. I wanted to gather up the pictures on the table and just leave. This wasn’t getting us anywhere. I wanted to get the photos in Wilson’s hands and walk away from the whole mess.
After a minute of quiet, Jendrek said, “We could try to get a TRO, but that’s tough to do.”
“TRO?” Ed said in a soft, calm voice, as if his outburst had never happened.
“A temporary restraining order. An injunction.”
“Like abused women get against their husbands? That kind of thing?”
“Just like that. It tells someone they can’t do anything until we sort out the legal mess.”
Ed clapped his hands together, “Well, hell, let’s go get us one of those.” He laughed and said, “Motherfuckin’ TRO. Yeah! I like it. That’s what I’m fucking talking about.” The Wild Turkey delirium was setting in.
“They don’t just hand them out,” Jendrek said, almost sneering. Trying to explain it to a drunk was a ludicrous task. But he went on anyway. “In fact, they’re very difficult to get in a case like this.”
“Why’s that?” Ed asked, appearing lucid again.
“Because you basically have to prove you’re going to win the whole lawsuit before the lawsuit even starts. That’s a bit tough here. The only witness who isn’t dead is Tiffany, and it’s not like she’s going to help us get a TRO against her.”
“Man, we gotta fucking do something. We’ve gotta stop her right now.” Ed looked from Jendrek to me. “Can’t you call Stanton and tell him not to do anything?”
I shrugged and looked at Jendrek. “We can call,” I said, “but that’s not going to do anything. Tiffany is his client.”
“I don’t know,” Jendrek rubbed his face with his hands and brushed his fingers through his gray hair. “It’s Thursday. Maybe we can get him to hold off until after the weekend. Buy a few days anyway.”
“Call him,” Ed urged, pointing over toward the kitchen area in a vague reference to the phone. “Tell him what’s going on. Tell him to stop until we can figure this shit out.”
I knew Stanton wouldn’t just roll over. Jendrek knew it too. It was a waste of time to call. But Jendrek turned slowly and walked over to the counter. He asked me if I knew the number. I still did, after five years. I still knew the main number like it was tattooed on my brain. Just as I said it, my cell phone rang.
“Find anything?” Wilson barked.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, “you have no idea.”
“What is it?”
“It’s some pictures. Old pictures. We found them in her room in a little box.”
“What? Like porno or something?”
The idea made me laugh for some reason. “No,” I shook my head as I spoke, like he was standing there in front of me. “Pictures of two people who died in a motel fire years ago. A motel Don Vargas owned. They could have been Tiffany’s parents.”
There was a pause on the other end and I wondered for a second if the connection had been lost. When Wilson spoke again, I could hear him reeling at the idea. “Are you fucking serious? Are you kidding me?”
“No,” I said. “Vargas’s first wife told me she always suspected the motel they owned was burned down for the insurance money. Two people died in the fire. Those two people had two kids.”
“And Pete Stick went into insurance fraud.” I could hear a kind of sick realization in his voice. “Chasing a payday of his own.”
“Right,” I said. “But she could have gotten the pictures from someone else.”
“Yeah,” Wilson said, “but either way, it looks like she was into something.” He paused for a few more seconds and asked, “You got those pictures with you now?”
I glanced at the snapshots scattered across the glass table. “Yeah, they’re right here.”
“Where are you?”
“At Ed Vargas’s house in Laurel Canyon.”
“How’s he taking it?”
I looked at his slumped profile, weaving slightly on the couch. “About as well as can be expected,” I said.
Wilson cleared his throat and said, “It would be nice to find some evidence she’s the daughter and didn’t just get the pictures somewhere. Have you talked to anyone who knew her when she was a kid? Anyone that might have heard her mention her parents dying in the fire?”
I thought about everyone I’d talked to. “Yeah,” I said, “there was one person.” I felt myself smiling as I said it.
“Go find ‘em. Ask ‘em. See if they ever heard about the fire. Ever heard her talk about revenge, any of that kind of shit. I think I can get a warrant with what you’ve told me. I’m heading to do that now.” Wilson seemed to be hanging up, and then he added, “And for God’s sake, take those fucking pictures with you. Don’t let them out of your sight. We’re fucked if we lose those.”
“Will do.”
“Oh yeah,” he added, “the girlfriend? Out in Baldwin Hills? Long gone. No trace of her. I got the apartment manager to let me in the cottage. Place was cleaned out.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I wish people would quit fucking disappearing,” he said. “It’s a pain in the ass.”
“I hear you.”
“Let me know if you learn anything. I’ll get the warrant and meet you at the Vargas house later. You can give me the pictures then and fill me in on this motel fire. What year was it, by the way?”
“1978, I think. Out in Malibu. The Starlight Motel.”
“Good,” he said. “A little detail might make this warrant sound like I’m not just pulling it out of my ass.”
He hung up without saying anything else. I went over and started gathering up the pictures, putting them back in the envelope. I could hear Jendrek leaving a voicemail for Stanton. As I listened to him, I wondered if he had called Stanton at all. The idea of him talking to a dial tone, just to make it look good for Ed, made me laugh.
When he was through, Jendrek hung up and stated the obvious. “He wasn’t there. I left him a message.” Then he looked at me. “That Wilson?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he’s going to get a warrant. We can meet him back at the house later to give him these.” I held up the envelope and the empty box, and then stuffed the envelope inside the box and closed it. “In the meantime, Wilson gave us a little assignment.”
Then I smiled and added, “Seems like there’s always one more thing. I’m not sure how helpful this thing’s going to be though.”
XXVIII
Canoga Park at night isn’t any better than Canoga Park during the day. And the darkness made it hard to find the street even though I’d been there before. The traffic coming out of Laurel Canyon had been miserable, and the freeway was no better. By the time we were neck deep in the Valley the sun was long gone and we found ourselves wandering along the wide thoroughfares wondering where the hell we were.
About the third time we passed the same shopping mall, I finally stopped at a mini-market on the corner of Topanga and Vanowen and went in to get directions. We were all getting punchy. After a night of little sleep, we’d spent the whole day racing from place to place. Brief windows of activity strung between endless stretches of being cramped in a car.
The Chinese guy behind the counter left me with only a vaguely better idea of where I was heading than I’d had before I talked to him. I bought a bottle of Evian and bag of pretzels as a way of paying him for his help and went back outside. Jendrek and Liz were stretching in the parking lot and the smell of fresh donuts wafted over us.
I watched the cars idling at the intersection. Liz said, “I think there’s a Krispy Kreme just up the block.”
The cars at the light turned, throwing a series of headlights across us, each of us in turn, glowing briefly as if caught in a wayward spotlight. I squinted at them as they passed and saw a small group of teenage kids
making their way across the mall parking lot beyond the far corner of the intersection.
I tried to imagine Tiffany Long, laughing with a group of friends, leaning against parked cars and listening to the radio from someone’s car. In that same parking lot, not so many years before, she had probably done those very things. Was she planning revenge even then? Perfecting her skill at manipulating men. Her dating and fucking a mere series of dress rehearsals for the ultimate subterfuge she was dreaming up.
Or had she come into those pictures some other way? Had someone shown them to her? Sold them to her? Given them to her? Had Pete Stick come across them and figured out a way to get Don Vargas to repay him for the dirty work he’d done long ago. The crime that permitted Vargas to build his fortune. It would only be right, giving Pete his fair share.
I wasn’t sure the old man we’d come to see would know the answers. In fact, I was sure he wouldn’t. But he might know something more than he’d told me the first time, if only because now I knew what to ask him. Everyone knew something. Everyone, except me, it seemed.
Liz said she was hungry. Jendrek said he needed a drink and a good night’s sleep. They both asked me if the guy in the store had told me where to go as we piled back into the car. I tossed the bag of pretzels into the back seat and Liz tore them open.
Ten minutes and two wrong turns later, we were pulling up in front of the house. The Long house was dark, as I expected, but the old man’s light was on next door. The chair on the porch sat empty, a jug of wine lay on its side, rolled up against it. It was empty too, I was sure. Which made me afraid that the old guy was in there passed out or dead and we wouldn’t be able to talk to him.
Jendrek surveyed the block as we got out of the car. “Dark,” was all he said.
On the porch, Liz poked at the wine jug with her toe while I knocked on the door. The street was almost completely silent. There were no traffic noises from the boulevards and no residual light from them either. The high, dying palm trees hung over the houses like a shroud.
I heard movement inside the house. Then a porch light flipped on, almost blinding us as the door opened. The old man stood there in what I imagined were the same smudged shorts he was wearing two days before. His hair was wild with curls and mats from his head laying sideways on a pillow. He stared out at us with genuine surprise. All I could think of was how short he was. He couldn’t have been more than five-five or so. It hadn’t made an impression on me the first time.
After a few seconds he seemed to recognize me and said, “Still trying to give away that million dollar inheritance, eh? You can leave it with me. I’m happy to take it off your hands.”
Jendrek gave me a curious look and I stuck out my hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name before.”
The old guy hesitated for a moment and then shook my hand. He looked like he didn’t shake hands too often. Then he flashed a sheepish, embarrassed smile and said, “Roger. I’m Roger Barton.”
“Roger, I’m Oliver Olson. We met the other day? This is Mark Jendrek and this is Liz Winslow.”
He shook Jendrek’s hand, a little wide-eyed, and looked visibly embarrassed when he took Liz’s hand. His free arm pulled down on the end of his T-shirt, as if to straighten it out or somehow hide his large, round belly. The shirt was white with the words “Jesus Loves America” stenciled on it.
“Roger, we’re here to see if we can ask you a few more questions about your old neighbors, the Longs. Is that okay?”
He took a step back into the room behind him and said, “Sure. Don’t know what I can tell you.” He turned his head and looked at the room and seemed to think through what to do next. Then he asked, “You guys want to come in?”
I doubted Roger Barton had many houseguests. Our presence seemed to make him nervous. He seemed like a lonely and shy old man, far different from when I’d seen him on his porch. He took a few more steps out of the doorway and motioned us inside.
The room smelled dusty and was cluttered with piles of papers and magazines on nearly every surface. The carpet was old, nearly threadbare, and stained around the bottoms of the chairs and couch. The furniture had a similar feel. The lamps too, and the coffee table, piled with old newspapers, appeared to have been there for decades. But the room was not dirty, just worn. Worn so well, in fact, that it was nearly worn out.
Roger rushed to the couch to clear away a stack of papers. He did the same with the La-Z-Boy chair. It was a futile effort at straightening up for company, but oddly endearing. I studied the old family pictures on the wall, arranged in an arch with a much younger Roger Barton and his wife at the highest point. There were two other pictures on either side, trailing downward, and I asked him who they were.
“Oh,” he said, hands on hips, as if struggling to remember them at all. “That’s my family. Linda, my wife, she died in ’83. Dick, my oldest boy, he lives in Houston. Bill, next youngest, he died in ‘Nam, the Tet Offensive. Last I heard, Janice was somewhere in Florida. And this one,” he pointed to the last picture, which hung cocked slightly to one side, revealing the much darker original color paint behind it.
“This is Emily. She’s my baby. She lives down in Orange County.” He raised his eyebrows at me and said, “Married herself a dentist. Got three kids.”
Then he started to cough and turned away from me, covering his mouth with one hand and resting his weight on the La-Z-Boy with the other. I could see Liz debating whether to try to help the guy. Jendrek just stood and watched, passive, as if nothing was happening at all. When he recovered, Roger went to one of the old walnut end tables and got himself a cigarette and lit it. Two puffs later he looked good as new.
“Please, have a seat,” he said, motioning to the couch and chairs. Then he bent over and picked up a jug of wine from the floor beside the couch. “Can I offer anyone a drink?”
And then it struck. Roger Barton was sober, and a totally different man from the one I’d met before. Did that make him less ugly? Did it make his racism less offensive? Could bad behavior be excused so easily? What about one terrible act followed by a lifetime of being a better person? I was thinking of Don Vargas but looking at Roger Barton, whose sobriety would soon be wiped out. I watched him unscrew the top of the jug and take several long gulps.
Something about the whole damned place was making me sad and I wanted to get through the interview and out of there as soon as I could. I set my briefcase on the coffee table and took out a notepad. I was hoping he’d say something worth writing down.
“Roger, I think you told me last time that you remembered Tiffany Long.”
“Oh yeah, cute little thing.” Roger smiled at me and I remembered his missing tooth from before. Then his eyes flickered at the window in the opposite wall. I could see he was wondering if he’d told me the story about seeing her on the kitchen table.
Liz took a seat on the end of the couch and Roger came around and sat on the other end. I sat in the La-Z-Boy and Jendrek sat in the chair at the other end of the couch. It was nice and cozy, everyone settling in for a chat.
“And I believe you remembered her brother as well.”
“Well,” he laughed, “there were a lot of kids over there.” Roger leaned toward Liz and said, as if speaking only to her, “The Longs knew how to work the welfare system. They adopted a lot of foster kids.” Then he brought the jug up for another pull.
“Right. But wasn’t one of her brothers her actual brother? They had both been adopted by the Longs?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, “I think that’s right. I remember him. A mean son of a bitch.”
“How do you mean that?”
Roger smiled and shook his head, recalling something. Then he said, “I remember this one time, a Mexican kid down the street stole his bike. The little spic was a couple years older, kind of a tough kid. But that didn’t stop Jimmy. He hid behind this parked car out there with a baseball bat and waited a whole Saturday afternoon. Kid was out there for hours, just waiting. Eventually, that little taco ea
ter came out on that bike and started riding up and down the street. Jimmy waited for the kid to go by and he darted out from behind the car and knocked that little fucker in the head with that bat like he was Mickey fucking Mantle. Laid that Mex out cold.”
Roger laughed until something came loose in his lungs, and then he let out a cough with a deep, wet echo beneath it.
Jendrek asked, “What happened?”
Roger said, “Jimmy got his bike back. Don’t know about the Mexican kid. His folks were illegals. They disappeared after that. Maybe the little shit died.” Roger shrugged, took another drink, and said, “That’d be one less we’d have to worry about.”
I was getting confused. I asked, “But what about a brother named David? Do you remember a brother named David?”
Roger nodded as he filled his lungs with smoke. “Davey? With the red hair? Sure, I remember him. He was just a little shit when they moved.”
“He was Tiffany’s little brother?”
“Sure. Like I said, she had a bunch of brothers.”
“No, not an adopted brother. Her real brother.”
The old man shook his head and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “No, Davey was adopted later. Davey wasn’t her real brother. Her real brother was Jimmy, the older one.”
It puzzled me for a second and I reached into my bag and pulled out some files. I set them on the edge of the coffee table and flipped through them. Everything was a mess. For the last twenty-four hours I’d been stuffing things into my briefcase without any organization. When I finally found the folder I was looking for, I flipped it open. There was the old newspaper article about the motel fire. I scanned it, looking for the vague description of the two children. But there wasn’t one. The article just mentioned that there were two, a son and daughter, and that was it.
As I stood there reading, the files I’d piled up tipped sideways and several of them fell to the floor, their contents sliding out, leaving a fan of papers on the stained carpet. The old man glanced down at them and I saw his eyes light up.
The Flaming Motel Page 25