The Flaming Motel

by Fingers Murphy

  “I thought the whole place was strange,” I said, thinking of Brianna’s tan skin and the smell of lotion in the warm sun. “That girl on the deck, Brianna? I guess she lives there, but she’s not a relative. She said something weird. She said that Don Vargas wouldn’t let her move in until she turned eighteen.”

  Jendrek laughed as the doors opened. He spoke in a loud whisper as he stepped out into the lobby. “Well, you gotta be of age to be in porn.”

  The words stunned me for a moment as I thought of her sitting on the deck in the lounge chair. It hadn’t occurred to me that she was part of Don Vargas’s business. I felt both repulsion and fascination come over me and the elevator nearly closed with me still inside. I jumped out and caught up with Jendrek at the desk.

  The receptionist told us Stanton would be with us in a minute and Jendrek and I strolled over to the floor to ceiling windows. The view west was unobstructed. The Hollywood Hills, with the famous sign and the white dome of the observatory in the foreground, stretched off to the ocean, disappearing into a distant blue haze. The grid of Los Angeles crisscrossed through mid-Wilshire, Beverly Hills, Westwood, and on into Santa Monica, which sat in the distance like a handful of white pebbles next to the glimmering Pacific.

  Then a man spoke from behind us. “Mark?”

  We turned to see Max Stanton smiling at us. He was tan and fit. Six feet tall and perfectly groomed. Handsome, but not too handsome. And dressed in a casual shirt and slacks that must have cost a grand if they cost a dime.

  Jendrek shook his hand. “Thanks for seeing us, Max.”

  “No trouble at all.” Then he turned to me. “You must be Mr. Olson.”

  “Good to meet you.” I smiled and shook his hand. He wore an Omega watch that could easily be mistaken for a Seiko by someone who didn’t know what they were looking at. I noticed because it was the same watch I wore. The same watch I’d bought for myself the summer I worked there. I now wore it as a talisman to remind me why I’d left the rarefied air of K&C so far behind. “Nice watch,” I said.

  He smiled and said, “Yours too.” Max Stanton wasn’t the kind of guy who needed to impress people, because he was impressive. It was just a simple fact. The fact that he came across as a decent guy only made him more impressive.

  We followed him back to his corner office and sat in the leather chairs in front of his desk. Stanton eased into his own chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “So, Mr. Olson,” he began, making small talk. “I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to work together when you were here.”

  I was caught off guard by the comment. I smiled and shrugged and said, “Yeah, well, I was pretty busy that summer.”

  Stanton laughed at the understatement and said, “So I’ve heard. Well, Jim Carver still speaks highly of you, if it’s any consolation. And at any rate, I’m glad the Vargases will have someone like you working on this for them. Ed Vargas called me in the middle of the night last night and asked me to take the case, but, as I’m sure you can understand, a firm like ours doesn’t make a habit of suing the city. Too many conflicts of interest.” He grinned.

  Jendrek said, “I understand. We’re happy to take work away from you guys any way we can.”

  Everybody chuckled at that, and then Stanton leaned forward against his desk, resting his weight on his elbows, hunching toward us, signaling that chitchat time was over. “I gotta tell you, I was absolutely shocked last night when I got that call. I’m still reeling from it. It’s unbelievable.”

  “Everyone out at the house is still in shock as well,” Jendrek replied. “It’s understandable, of course. Ed Vargas seems convinced that the police don’t have a leg to stand on. I tried to talk to him about the difficulty of these kinds of suits, but I’m not sure he understood what I was saying.”

  Stanton said, “Well, Ed’s a smart guy. He’ll understand once his mind gets focused, but frankly, I’m not sure Ed’s the one you need to be dealing with.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Ed wrote me a retainer check from some company called Good Times, Limited. Since a wrongful death suit belongs to the next of kin, I assume it’s the wife I should be dealing with. But she was completely out of it. Is she just going to let Ed run the show?”

  Stanton cleared his throat and scowled, thinking it over, probably contemplating what he could and couldn’t say. Then he leaned back and shook his head. “Not likely. Ed and Tiffany Vargas don’t have—” Stanton floated us the grin again, “—how should I put this? Let’s just say they don’t have a normal mother-son relationship.”

  Jendrek laughed and said, “I picked up on that. Hell, they look about the same age.”

  “I actually think the son is older than the mother.” Stanton rubbed his chin and said, “Let me give you a little background. Don Vargas first came to me about twelve or thirteen years ago. I was a brand new partner and I’d gotten a reputation doing First Amendment work for a group of adult bookstore owners down in Long Beach. They were challenging some rezoning. The city was trying to put them out of business. Normally we don’t do cases fighting with cities, but it was Long Beach and it was a sexy free speech thing, so I took it and we won.”

  Stanton crossed his legs and took his time telling the story. “This was sometime in the mid-90s, 1995, ‘96, something like that. Anyway, Vargas came in not long after that case and told me he was trying to put together this project selling pornography over the Internet. I know it’s hard to imagine these days, but remember back then most people had never heard of the Internet. I didn’t know anything about Vargas, and the porn industry isn’t something a firm like this likes to do business with, but I was fascinated by the idea. I mean, from a free speech standpoint, there are all kinds of issues with selling pornography over the Internet. It was cutting edge stuff at the time.

  “All I knew about Vargas back then was that he’d made his start back in the 70s. You know, making actual porno movies on film. But the guy was a real visionary. He saw the potential for home video technology to completely change the industry and he was one of the first guys to really start doing video. He made a ton of dough in the early 80s and then kind of limped along from there once business leveled off. Then, when the Internet thing came, he was right at the forefront of that as well.

  “But what’s important for you two to understand, is that a lot of the Internet stuff was driven by Ed Vargas. He was all into video games and shit like that. Computer stuff, right? He was a sophomore or something at UCLA and he’s the one who turned his dad onto the Internet thing. Don Vargas took one look at that, saw what its potential was, and he started pouring money into it. Vargas was one of the first guys, hell, maybe the first guy, to do things like put cameras in a sorority and broadcast it over the Internet.

  “When I first met him, he had a warehouse out in the Valley that he was building these little sets in. You know, a shower room, a gym room, a bedroom, a hot tub room, and he was going to put women in them and have Internet peep shows. That’s what he first came to talk to me about. It was really brilliant. He was way ahead of his time. It was years before the technology really caught up with his ideas and made it possible for him to do everything he really wanted to do.”

  Stanton laughed and rolled his chair over to a file drawer along the wall. He opened it up and flipped through some files as he spoke. “The funny thing is, you’d never have guessed the guy was an innovator by looking at him.” He pulled a booklet from a file, got up, and handed it to me. It was a press release from a pornography conference in Las Vegas.

  “There’s a picture of him on page three,” Stanton said as he sat down again. “I mean, he was a sleazy looking guy. Gold chains, big rings, the whole deal.”

  I opened the booklet and saw a Rodney Dangerfield looking guy grinning out from the page. The caption below the picture read: Don Vargas, a thirty-year veteran of the Adult Entertainment Industry, says, “Everyone loves to fuck, but only a lucky few make money at it.” I smiled and handed it to Jendrek.
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  Stanton said, “Ridiculous right? But that was how he was. And let me tell you, he made a lot of money. He has about twenty companies doing everything from making movies, to making sex toys, to running an Internet empire. It’s brilliant. He cross-sells everything. It’s unbelievable really.”

  Jendrek said, “So all these businesses, who’s going to run them now? If he was the brilliant guy behind everything, is there a successor? A board of directors?”

  Stanton shook his head. “No. See, that’s the problem. Vargas was a wheeler-dealer kind of guy. He had his hand in everything and ran it all fast and loose. No boards of directors, no shareholder meetings, none of that shit. He owned and controlled everything. It was all Vargas all the time. It was a very mom and pop, homegrown kind of thing. No formalities. No strategic plans. Nothing like that. Hell, Vargas didn’t even have a will.”

  I said, “You’re kidding me? What’s this guy’s estate worth?”

  “It’s hard to say. Vargas might have been worth a hundred million.”

  “Dollars?” Jendrek almost gasped.

  Stanton nodded very seriously. “Yeah. I don’t know the exact number, but what I do know is that California is a community property state, which means whatever it’s worth, it all goes to his wife.”

  “So Ed Vargas is out in the cold?” Jendrek chuckled at the cruelty of it.

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, someone’s got to run these companies and Ed is the logical choice. But with Tiffany owning everything, Ed’s just another employee. They’ve never gotten along before, I doubt this is going to improve their relationship.”

  Jendrek and I glanced at each other. I was thinking about Ed Vargas’s comment about what had been done to him and it suddenly made a lot more sense. I could see Jendrek was thinking the same thing.

  Stanton cleared his throat again. “This is made even touchier by the fact that Ed has really been the one running the Internet companies. And lately, he’d been pressuring his dad to go ahead and transfer ownership of those companies to him. Don was ready to do it. We were drafting the documents this week. Don’s plan was to transfer ownership to his son before the end of the year.”

  Stanton let his words hang in the air for a few long seconds. Jendrek leaned forward and set the press release on the edge of Stanton’s desk and said, “So Vargas the younger has lost out on a sizeable chunk of dough?”

  Stanton said, “That’s an understatement. With the explosion of the web, the Internet business has grown exponentially over the last ten years. Everything else has been flat, or has actually declined in value. The Internet business is now far and away the largest revenue generator in the Vargas empire. Tiffany Vargas could always go ahead and complete the transfer to Ed, but something tells me she won’t.”

  Jendrek asked, “Was Ed aware that his father was going to transfer ownership?”

  “Oh yeah, definitely. He’d been pressuring his dad to do it for a long time. They were both in here just last week looking over some documents.”

  “So Tiffany Vargas is the beneficiary of the cop’s stupidity.”

  “I’d say that’s about right.” Stanton smiled.

  On the way out we stood around in the lobby waiting for the elevator. I could tell Jendrek was thinking things through when a soft ding signaled that our ride was there. We stepped into the elevator and I could see his eyes focus on the bright colored painting hanging on the opposite side of the elevator bank.

  “Is that a real Picasso?” he asked, as the doors closed.

  I said, “Of course. Only the best around here.”

  III

  We got lunch from a taco cart at MacArthur Park and sat on a bench by the tiny lake that sits just south of Wilshire Boulevard. Although it was seventy degrees outside, the park was virtually deserted except for the homeless people who called the place home. Even in the winter, LA is the place to be if you’re living on the street.

  Jendrek cocked his head to the side, bit the end off his burrito, and talked while he chewed. “We’ve got to have a talk with the wife. If we’re really working for her we’ve got to get her alone without Ed in the room to make sure she understands how hard this is going to be. Dealing with Ed is going to be tough if he keeps wanting to get in the middle of everything. A case like this is going to be hard enough without family members fighting each other.”

  Jendrek seemed to be too focused on the negatives. I said, “Even as hard as these cases are to win, don’t you think we’ve got a good one here?”

  “I think anyone who walked around that house and saw what we saw would conclude that the cop who shot Vargas was an idiot. The problem is, cops are allowed to be idiots.”

  I protested, “But no jury is going to side with the police on this one.”

  “Hell, we’ll be lucky to ever see a jury,” Jendrek interjected. “Look,” he said, taking another bite. “The standard for negligence is different for cops than for the rest of us. The law cuts them a lot of slack. You know the drill. Police work is hard. They have to make split second decisions. It’s the same song and dance every time something like this happens. And the law protects cops, even the stupid ones, by requiring a showing that no reasonable police officer in the same situation would have thought the officer’s actions were lawful.”

  Jendrek took another bite and shrugged, shaking his head. “It’s damned near impossible to win. With a standard like that the defense is as simple as saying, ‘But look, we’ve got all kinds of stupid cops, they all would have made the same mistake.’”

  I wasn’t buying it. “That’s bullshit,” I said. “How could any cop think it’s reasonable to assume that a guy at a costume party holding a gun is actually holding a real gun? And let’s not forget that it’s not illegal to have a gun in your own house. I mean, even if Vargas was holding a real gun—and he wasn’t—but even if he was, that’s not a crime. There’s just nothing illegal about it.”

  “You’re getting it backward though,” Jendrek countered. “We don’t win by proving that most cops would have acted differently or even that most cops would agree that shooting Vargas was a mistake. We have to show that no reasonable cop would have thought it was lawful. That’s why we’ve got to talk to this Pete Stick guy. He’s the only one who’s gonna be able to tell us what they were doing in that room and what it might have looked like from outside that window.” Jendrek stuffed the final bite of his lunch into his mouth and wadded up the paper wrapper. He got up and walked to a garbage can a few feet away.

  I stuffed the rest of my taco in my mouth and went after him. “You can’t seriously think this case has no chance at all.”

  Jendrek turned toward me and cut me off. “Sure, I think it’s got a chance. But I don’t want any unreasonable expectations building up in people. The LAPD is going to do everything it can to spin this as a justifiable homicide. They’re going to say the officer was in fear for his life. They’re going to say Vargas appeared to be threatening Pete Stick with a gun. They’re going to have some soft-spoken little prick go on television and say that it’s terrible what happened, and how sorry they are for the Vargas family, and then they’ll say that under the facts and circumstances of this case, the officer was justified in acting to protect himself and the safety of others.” Jendrek stopped himself before he started to yell. The outrage poured out of him, his hands trembled with anger. The red in his cheeks leapt off the background of is silver hair.

  Finally, he said, “Look, I don’t think cops should be given any breaks at all. I think that if you give a guy a gun and the power to arrest people, it’s not too much to ask that he does his job right. But the rest of the world doesn’t feel that way. When I was with the ACLU, I used to pound the table and give great speeches about how things like this were outrageous, but at the end of the day, I didn’t win a lot of cases. It’s not good to get your hopes up on a case like this.”

  Jendrek turned and walked toward the car. I stood there for a second, remembering how giddy he had been e
arlier that morning. I wondered who he was lecturing, me or himself.

  Hollywood is filled with ancient warehouses that were once used by studios. Pete Stick’s costume and prop shop, atrociously named The Do Prop Inn, sat in a low, mustard colored stucco building off Gower, below Sunset. It was a part of the city that had seen better days, but had not yet gone completely seedy.

  Jendrek parallel parked the Jag on a side street and we walked around the corner and halfway up the block to the entrance. He had calmed down on the drive and we walked quietly. I’d remembered to grab a notepad from my bag this time and I clicked my pen to the rhythm of our footsteps.

  Just before we reached the door, Jendrek said, “The biggest problem we’ve got here is that this guy is our only witness besides the cops.” He stopped just outside the door and spoke in a fatigued voice. “What I’m afraid of is that no matter how good of a witness this guy is, all we’ll have is his word against theirs. It’s a he said, she said case. And when you’re suing a police department, a tie goes to the cops.”

  He said it as if talking to Pete Stick was going to be a complete waste of time. I said, “Will you stop predicting disaster. We haven’t even met the guy yet.” Then I pushed the door open and went inside.

  There was a small, dingy room with a counter along the back wall. The paint was worn off most of the surfaces and what little furniture there was had been beat to hell about twenty years before. It was a rugged place that smelled of cleaning solutions and grease. There was a clanging noise coming from the other side of the wall behind the counter and then a door opened and a scruffy young man came into the room.

  “Oh, hey, sorry guys, didn’t know anyone was in here.” He was wiry and short and he scratched at the patchy, red beard growth on his chin as he talked. “We’re getting an order together so things are pretty busy around here. What can I do for you?”

  Jendrek did the talking. “Hi, we’re here to see Mr. Stick. Is he available?”