The Flaming Motel

by Fingers Murphy

  The young man eyed our sport coats and ties and gave us a suspicious look. Then he nodded and said Stick was in the back and went to get him. We leaned against the counter and surveyed the room. It had all the comfort of a bomb shelter.

  After a couple of minutes, the door opened again and we turned to see a weathered man in coveralls with the sleeves rolled up over a pair of meaty forearms. He looked to be in his late fifties, with deep lines in his face and a stout, thick body that said he’d done a lot of hard work for a lot of hard years. My father was a construction worker and most of the older guys he worked with had that same look. Weathered and hard. If I saw him on the street I wouldn’t have guessed he ran a Hollywood prop company.

  “I’m Pete. Can I help you?” He wiped his hands on a rag and tossed the rag on the counter. Jendrek introduced us and Pete smiled slightly. He said, “Ed called and told me you guys would probably be by. Come on back to the office.”

  We followed him down a dim corridor that felt like it led to some claustrophobic underground hideout. But instead, it ended at a large and very normal office with windows that looked out over a parking lot at the back of the building. Outside I could see a large truck with the name of a production company painted on the side. People were milling around sorting through bundles of dried, brightly colored flowers.

  Pete motioned out the window and said, “Some guy’s making a movie about a florist who’s also a serial killer. Doesn’t sound like much of a movie to me.” Then he laughed and sat behind the 1950s style metal desk. “Fuck it though. What do I care as long as they pay in advance, right?”

  Jendrek said, “That’s what we always say.” He glanced at me when he said it and I thought about the retainer check in his pocket. Getting paid first was nice, especially if you suspected the case might be a loser.

  Pete leaned back in his chair and scratched the back of his head. I caught the bottom of a faded green tattoo poking out from the rolled up sleeve of his coveralls. It had the look of prison, and I began to wonder exactly where Pete Stick had spent all those hard years.

  Pete said, “I been trying to work all day, just trying to keep my mind off of it. Fortunately we had a lot to do today. I’m exhausted.” His yawn gave Jendrek and me a nice big view of his dental work. “Damned cops had me there till three this morning asking me every damned question you could think of. Shit, you’d have thought I was the one who shot him.”

  I asked, “What were they talking to you about all that time?”

  He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Well, first it was about what we were doing in that room. You know, where we were standing. How we looked. But shit, there wasn’t much to talk about. We were only in there about two minutes.” Pete drummed his fingers on the desk a few times and then added, “And after about an hour of that, they got a hold of my prison record and questioned me about that for another two hours.”

  I almost smiled at having been right, but I didn’t want Pete to think I was mocking him. Pete Stick didn’t look like a guy you could mock and get away with it. There was something about the guy that said, go ahead, fuck around, see what happens.

  After a moment of silence, Jendrek asked, “Did the cops suggest that you had something to do with it?”

  “I don’t know that they were suggesting anything. I think they just have a hard-on for fucking with guys who’ve done time. They get off on intimidating people. A bunch of fuckin’ assholes, if you ask me.” He rubbed under his nose with an index finger and added, “Incompetent assholes.”

  Jendrek asked, “What were you talking to Vargas about?”

  “Well,” Pete hesitated for a second, looking almost embarrassed. “I needed to borrow some money from him. He helped me out when I got out of Quentin. Helped me set up shop. I give him discounts on everything he rents for his movies. But business hasn’t been so great. So I needed to hit him up for a loan. That’s what we were talking about.” Pete shrugged like it was no big deal.

  “What was Vargas’s reaction?”

  “Nothing. Hell, I’d barely had a chance to ask him about it when the whole thing happened. It wasn’t like it was a ton of money. Hell, it was only twenty grand, just to help me pay the rent and make payroll for the next couple of months.”

  “And you told the cops that?”

  “Yeah. Then, like I said, when they found out I’d done time, they got all suspicious.” Pete shook his head and squinted like the suggestion was unbelievable. “But that’s horseshit. It ain’t like that. Donnie and me go way back. I’m talking more than thirty years we’ve known each other. Besides, it was their own guy that shot him. No question about that. Bunch a stupid fuckers. All of them.”

  I made a couple of notes on my pad, then asked, “What were you in prison for?”

  Pete rolled his eyes again, like he couldn’t believe people wouldn’t let it drop. “I did five years for embezzlement. It was an insurance thing. I opened a shop as a broker and collected premiums.” He smiled, “Except I never remitted them to the insurance company. Worked fine until some guy got in a really bad car wreck and had a huge claim.”

  “So you got caught because the guy’s claim was rejected?”

  Pete laughed a little, thinking about it, and then shook his head. “Yeah, it was stupid.”

  He said it in a way that wasn’t clear what exactly he thought was stupid, the scam itself or his getting caught. Then Jendrek asked, “So how do you go from that to running this place? Seems like a big change.”

  “Ah, not really.” Pete shook his head and I realized for the first time that he had no neck. “I worked for Donnie for years when he was starting out, so I’d been around the business.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his barrel chest. He talked about the business like porno flicks were just like any other movies.

  “You mean helping him with his movies?”

  “Yeah, since way back. I worked with him on his very first one. And for years after that too. I also did odd jobs for him too, whatever he needed. I was his right hand guy for years. So Donnie knew I was a good guy. He knew he could trust me. I just needed a hand getting on my feet after I got out. So I ended up running this place. I got a loan from Donnie. He kept me afloat. And that was that. It’s been, I dunno, three years ago.”

  Pete’s eyes brightened up with recognition and he got up quickly and went to a shelf on the wall behind Jendrek and me. He took a small five by seven photograph off the shelf and handed it to Jendrek. “See, that’s Donnie and me.” He chuckled as he pointed at the faces with his thick finger. “Man, I think that was taken before he even got into the business.”

  I leaned over to see. It was a photograph of two men in their twenties with arms draped over each other’s shoulders. I recognized Don Vargas. He was a smooth faced, twenty-something version of the picture Stanton had showed us. But Pete Stick looked only vaguely familiar. The intervening years had changed him from the thin-faced, almost scrawny looking kid in the picture to the beaten, bloated man hunching over behind me. In the background was a low, single-story motel painted bright blue and green. I could make out a sign high up in the corner of the picture that read: Starlight Motel.

  “When was this taken?” I asked. The odd hue to the colors in the photograph made it look old, even if the clothes the men were wearing didn’t give it away.

  “Hell, probably 1976. Man, look at Donnie there.” Pete pointed to the picture again, as though touching the memory in his head.

  “Where?”

  “That’s the old Starlight Motel out on PCH toward Malibu. Donnie owned it. That’s what he did before he started making movies.” Then, in a sudden shift back to the present, Pete snatched the picture back from Jendrek and set it back on the shelf. He returned to his chair and said, “That’s all ancient history though.”

  The change seemed abrupt to me, but Jendrek wasn’t interested in rehashing the good old days with Pete Stick and happily took control of the conversation by asking, “What exactly were you doing in tha
t room right before Don Vargas got shot?”

  “Like I said, we were just standing there. We were out in the hall. I said to Don that I needed to talk to him real quick. It was too damned noisy with all those people there, so I asked him to come into the office. He did. I told him I needed to borrow some money for the place here. He asked me a couple of questions about how business was. And bam!” Pete clapped his hands together so hard the noise made us jump. “Just like that. They shot him through the window. It took me a few seconds to even realize what had happened.”

  “And what did you do when you realized he’d been shot?”

  “Well, first, I tried to grab him as he was falling. It wasn’t until I was kneeling down beside him that it really clicked. I looked back at the window, but couldn’t see anything outside. I didn’t know it was cops until later. So I ran back out into the main room and yelled for help.” Pete walked us through it like he was recounting the details of a traffic accident involving total strangers. He seemed to have lapsed into an automated mode that shielded him from any emotional response to the events of his own life.

  I asked, “Was he holding this gun, this prop, when he was shot?”

  “Yeah, he had it in his hand. He was dressed as a 1920s gangster, you know, with the old style suit and hat. He was holding the pistol in his right hand. He’d been walking around with it all night.”

  “But was he pointing it at you or anything like that?”

  “Donnie used his hands a lot when he talked, you know, big gestures. So I’m sure he was kind of waving it around. But pointing it at me? No.”

  “How realistic was this gun he had?”

  Pete’s eyes lit up, and he said, “Completely real. You wanna see one?” He got up and went back down the hallway, leaving Jendrek and I alone in the office. We looked at each other. I shrugged and asked:

  “So what do you think?”

  “It’s about what I expected, I guess. I’m a little concerned about how realistic he thinks this gun is. What about you?”

  I said, “Yeah, that concerns me. And, I dunno, there’s just something a little off about the guy. I’ll have to think about it.”

  We heard a door close somewhere down the hallway and Pete’s footsteps coming back toward us. He came in with a semi-automatic pistol in each hand and gave one to each of us. “Here, check them out. We got a whole rack of them in the back.”

  The weight of it was what I noticed first. It was heavy. I turned it over in my hands. I’d probably only held a couple of pistols in my hands before, so I was a long way from being an expert. But I was thinking that if someone walked up to me and pointed this prop at me, there’d be no way I could tell it was fake. I glanced at Jendrek and could see the same thought in his eyes.

  Jendrek asked, “This is the exact same thing Vargas was holding when he was shot?”

  “Yeah, he got it here. Same model and everything.” Pete scratched the back of his neck and said, “Kind of makes me feel bad that I suggested it to him. I mean, he got his outfit here and I suggested he carry the gun around to make it look real. But how the fuck was I to know this was going to happen?”

  I handed the gun back to Pete and he took it and looked me right in the eye, almost pleading with me. “There was no way I could have known this was going to happen,” he said. Then he dropped the gun on his desk and returned to his seat. His words hadn’t seemed to convince him. His eyes said that deep inside he was blaming himself.

  I was wondering what happened to the automaton from a few minutes earlier when Jendrek asked him, “When you think about it all, when you remember what was going on right before the shot, do you think the cops could have reasonably mistaken Don Vargas for a guy who was threatening you with a gun?”

  Pete looked down at his desk, shaking his head. His eyes never looked at us as he spoke. “I guess. I dunno. I suppose I can understand them thinking it was a real gun. I mean, our props look awfully damned real. They’re supposed to, right?”

  There it is, I thought. There goes the case. Our only witness admitting it looked real, admitting that he could see how someone standing outside could be confused. If Pete Stick sounded this bad sitting in his own office, he would sound a hell of a lot worse on a witness stand, under cross-examination by a government lawyer.

  Pete went on, “So yeah. Donnie’s standing there with the gun, maybe waving it around as he talked. I can see someone thinking this guy’s in there waving a gun around. I can understand that. But just hauling off and shooting a guy like that? I can’t understand that at all. I mean, we weren’t arguing. He didn’t look mad. I didn’t look scared. We were just talking. Fucking cops, man. They overreact to everything.”

  Back on the sidewalk, making our way to the car, Jendrek let out a long breath and said, “Well, there’s always got to be something like that.”

  I didn’t have much to say. Pete Stick was not a good witness. There was no way around it. If we worked with him, he’d get better, but a good lawyer on the other side would eventually get that testimony out of him and our case would be shot. Maybe the police would settle before they ever heard that testimony, but it wasn’t likely.

  I tried to put a good spin on it. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “He’s not that bad. The whole thing is still outrageous. We can probably settle the thing without going to trial.”

  “But Ed Vargas won’t want to settle.”

  “But Ed Vargas isn’t in charge. We’re really working for the wife, remember?”

  “I’m sure she’s just as outraged as Ed. Maybe worse. These people want revenge, not a settlement. What’s a settlement do for them? They’re already rich. A few hundred grand, if we’re lucky to get even that, isn’t going to make them happy. These people will want a trial. They’ll want headlines in the newspaper.” Jendrek unlocked the car and gave me a defeated smile across the roof. “Revenge, baby. It’s a killer.”

  I laughed and slid into the car. “Man,” I said, shaking my head. “That gun sure looked real.”

  IV

  Liz and I had been dating since our first year of law school. We’d been living together since graduation. In the three years since then, our relationship had become like I imagined any married couple’s might be—except that we weren’t married. Not that Liz wouldn’t have married me. She would have, if I ever got around to asking. But I never did, and she never pressed it with me, so we drifted through the months and years in a state of silent détente.

  It wasn’t that we were unhappy. Bored, perhaps, but not unhappy. At least I wasn’t. If there was anything unsatisfying about my life, it had nothing to do with her. But those things that were unsatisfying—work, the inescapable realization that my life was most likely going to be utterly and completely normal, even mediocre—had metastasized into a general unfulfillment that had invaded the space between Liz and me.

  As I drove home to the one bedroom apartment we shared in Santa Monica, I thought about Max Stanton, about standing in the lobby at Kohlberg & Crowley again, and about how I had once been on the fast track and had abruptly gotten off. There were a lot of reasons for my decision at the time, not the least of which was that I’d almost been murdered in the course of investigating a case. I could have stayed. The firm had asked me to stay. But I chose to leave because I was terrified of the seduction that money and power could have on me.

  That was five years ago, and I’d thought that the repercussions of my decision had long since faded into oblivion and calm. But being back at K&C had revived them. Maybe I’d been wrong, too rash, or maybe I just didn’t have what it took after all but had tricked myself into believing I’d left out of principle. Maybe the stress of the four months I spent there got to me and broke me. All the reasons that supported the decision five years ago seemed suspect to me in hindsight. But perhaps that’s just the nature of life.

  And there were a lot of very good reasons at the time: the insurmountable pressure, the pervasive invasion of my personal life, the fact that my judgment had been
blinded by my desire to fit in, to make money, to prove something to people who couldn’t care less if I existed at all. Any one of them would have been a fine reason to move on with my life, but now I found myself wondering if the real reason hadn’t been Liz, wondering if all of those other concerns were merely a ruse I’d used to justify my desperate need to hold onto her. Had it not been for her (or, more correctly, my fear of losing her), I found myself speculating, I might have stayed at K&C.

  Our place was in a small, one-story row of six units. We had old ladies on either side of us who tended to the massive clusters of rose bushes that lined the walkway in front of the apartments. It was a quiet street, a quiet neighborhood, and at $1500 a month, a steal for that part of town. Despite the fact that Liz and I were both lawyers, we were stretched pretty thin. She worked at Legal Aid and my income wasn’t the most stable in the world.

  I walked in and set my bag by the door. Liz looked up from the counter in the kitchen where she stood with a glass of white wine. “Hey babe,” she smiled. “You look like you had quite a day.”

  I smirked. “You can say that again.” She scrunched her forehead and I pointed to the newspaper on the table. “We got a call about the lead story. Spent all day running around talking to people. Not sure how great of a case it is, despite how the newspaper makes it sound.”

  She picked up the newspaper while I stole a sip of her wine. She had already changed into a light pair of linen draw string pants and a T-shirt and I went into the bedroom to change too. “This is fucking outrageous,” she called from the front room.

  “I know,” I called back. “Problem is, we’ve only got one witness, and he told us he can understand how the cops could have botched it. Not very helpful.”

  “But the house was full of people.”

  “I know,” I said, coming back into the living room. “But this happened in a room on the side of the house and it was just Vargas and one other guy. The other guy won’t make the best witness. So it sounds better in the paper.” I poured myself a glass of wine and watched Liz from behind as she finished reading the article. She was a beautiful woman. She was smarter than I was, and she stuck with me. I wondered for a second what was wrong with me, why I just didn’t marry her and get it over with.