The Flaming Motel

by Fingers Murphy

  Liz saw me with the wine and checked her watch. She smiled and said, “You better drink up. We gotta go.”

  At least one Friday night a month, sometimes more, Liz met some of the people she worked with at Legal Aid at a small restaurant just off the Promenade in Santa Monica. It was an affordable restaurant, with a decent menu and great mohitos, and I didn’t mind the company. It wasn’t like I had anyone from work to hang out with except Jendrek, and he and I did our drinking at a dive near the office.

  When we walked in, most of the regular crew was already there. It was a large table full of young lawyers trying to save the world from the abuses of the greedy, the powerful, or the just plain nasty. Liz had worked there since her second year of law school and was now one of the more senior “junior” people. There was Carmen and her boyfriend, Renaldo, Bobby Parks and his girlfriend, and the new guy, Benjamin Cross.

  There was a swell of greetings as we entered. We said hello all around and sat across from Ben and Renaldo. Liz immediately began talking to Ben and I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She leaned across the table and touched his arm as she laughed. He gave her a big grin. The newest lawyer at Legal Aid, he’d been there less than two months and he was already Liz’s best friend.

  Benjamin Cross was a trust fund baby living off the fat his ancestors had stockpiled. He grew up in Beverly Hills and then it was Yale College and Columbia Law. After law school, he spent two years clerking for a federal judge in New York. Now he was back home in LA as a new lawyer working at Legal Aid with Liz, where he sat around talking about defending the rights of The People. He did triathlons, spoke French, and lived in a two million dollar condo on the beach with an incredible kitchen where he liked to cook gourmet food and watch the sunset. He was twenty-eight years old, a year younger than me, and I hated him. But the thing was, he was actually a nice guy. Which made me hate him even more.

  I took my mind off of him by chatting with Renaldo. We always talked about civil rights cases and I secretly suspected Renaldo was sizing me up, working an angle to ask about getting a job with Jendrek and me after he left Legal Aid. He was one of those true believers. A guy who made me look like a conservative law and order type.

  “Man, you see what they did to that guy at the Halloween party?” He took a long drink from his dark beer and shook his head. “Man, that’s fucked up. And I’ll bet they get away with it too, man. Qualified immunity, right?”

  I laughed and said, “Man, you have no idea. You’ll never guess who called Jendrek first thing this morning.”

  He gave me the eye, not believing it at first and then leaning in, wanting details. “No fucking way, man.”

  “Totally,” I leaned in too, wanting to string him along. “Vargas’s son called, looking for someone to sue the LAPD.” He was hooked. I could see thoughts of leaving Legal Aid to join the fight clicking through his head. I didn’t have the heart to tell him there wasn’t much money in it. There were big paydays on occasion, but they were few and far between, so you had to make them last. Some months, especially lately, Jendrek and I could barely keep the lights on.

  Renaldo had told me on more than one occasion that he’d be happy to spend his whole career suing cops. He’d grown up in Baldwin Hills, a rough Latino neighborhood in East LA, and he’d seen more than his share of police brutality. He wanted to get revenge for every Mexican kid who’d ever been pulled over for no reason; every Latina girl who’d ever been raped and told there was nothing to prosecute, that she’d asked for it because of her behavior; every cleaning woman and janitor who’d ever been arrested based on a false accusation that they’d stolen something. He had the rage, and he wanted to use it. Legal Aid was just a place to get some experience and do a little good for the world in the process.

  “So?” he egged me on.

  “So what?” I responded, acting like it was nothing. “So we went and talked to him. Looked at the scene. Walked around the house.” I shrugged my shoulders and looked for a waiter so I could order a drink.

  “So was it like the paper said?”

  “More or less.”

  “Man, that is fucked.” Renaldo tapped Bobby Parks and said, “Listen to this shit, man. Guess what Ollie was doing today.”

  Bobby looked at me, and then everyone on that end of the table was looking at me. I walked them through the story, giving them all the details. Technically, it was a breach of confidentiality, but most of it was in the newspapers anyway, so I figured what the hell. After awhile we ordered food. We drank several rounds. By the time I was through it all, everyone was outraged and everyone agreed it would be a tough case to win.

  “Take it to a jury though,” Bobby said. “Who the hell is going to believe the cops when they said they were in fear for their lives? I mean, it was dark. The dude in the room wouldn’t even have been able to see them.”

  “And,” Carmen cut in, “the guy who was in the room will testify that he wasn’t in any danger. It’s just some trigger-happy cop making an assumption. And don’t forget it was a noise call. I mean, you don’t go on a noise disturbance thinking you need to be on guard and ready to shoot someone.”

  I listened to what they had to say. They were right on a visceral level. The whole thing stunk. But the counter-arguments kept running through my head.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but what if the noise disturbance is a domestic? Some guy beating the shit out of his wife and waving a gun around?”

  Renaldo said, “But that’s not what this was.”

  “But the cops didn’t know that when they got there. It could have been anything.”

  Carmen said, “Sure, but when they pulled up and saw all the cars, they knew it was a party. Unless they think people invite all their friends over to watch a domestic dispute.”

  She had me there.

  I was scrambling to argue the other side. I said, “Sure, but as they’re walking around the side of the house, they look in the window and they see two guys standing there. One guy’s got a gun in his hand and is waving it in the direction of the other guy.”

  “So what?” Renaldo pointed his finger at the table, pounding it down as he made his points. “Not that I’m in favor of guns, but I have a constitutional right to own one and keep it in my home. Two, there’s no evidence he was doing anything threatening with the gun, he was maybe being careless by waving it around, but that’s not a crime. And three, let’s not forget it was Halloween and everyone is wearing fucking costumes. The goddamned cops don’t even take two seconds to think about that? Now that’s bullshit. It’s absolutely fucking unbelievable.”

  “You tell him, Renaldo,” Carmen laughed.

  Bobby took a swallow of beer and said, “But I’d leave out the word ‘bullshit’ when you argue to the judge. But keep fucking unbelievable.”

  I shook my head, drank my beer, and said, “I know it. It’s insane. It’s hard to come up with a bulletproof story for the cops.”

  “Nice pun,” Carmen smiled.

  “Yeah, but still,” Bobby spoke slowly as he thought it through. “It’s still a tough case. What’s the standard for qualified immunity? No reasonable officer would have thought his actions were constitutional? Something like that?”

  “I think that’s right.” Renaldo nodded his head.

  “Ask Ben.” Bobby leaned across Renaldo and tapped Benjamin Cross on the shoulder, “Hey Ben.”

  Ben and Liz stopped gabbing at each other for the first time since we’d gotten there. I turned to look at the two of them and I could see something in Liz’s eyes like fright or shock. It was as if she’d been caught doing something she knew she shouldn’t have. As though she was feeling guilty just by talking to him.

  No one else seemed to notice or care. “Hey, Ben,” Bobby asked again. “You just took the bar exam, what’s the standard for qualified immunity?”

  Ben thought about it for a second. Then he said, “It’s got two parts. First, was the constitutional right clearly established? And second, could a reasonabl
e officer have believed his conduct was lawful?” Then he smirked and added, “I think in Burns v Reed the Supreme Court stated that qualified immunity, quote, ‘provides ample support to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.’”

  “Whoa!” Carmen gasped, mocking him. “Look at the big brain on Ben.”

  But he seemed to take himself seriously. He smiled and raised his eyebrows. I could tell he was proud of himself for knowing the case. I caught a quick flick of his eyes toward Liz. Checking to see if she was impressed. I had a sudden urge to throw something at him. Maybe a punch. But instead, I returned to the conversation.

  “So with a standard like that, unless the guy knowingly violated the law or is so absolutely incompetent that no officer anywhere would ever do the same thing in the same circumstances, we lose.”

  “Sad, but true.” Bobby leaned his chair back against the wall behind him and sipped his beer. “Sad, but true,” he muttered again.

  “Man, it’s fucking outrageous. That’s what it is.” Renaldo leaned his chair back as well and we all seemed to be out of things to say. We ordered more drinks and talked about other things. As the evening wound down, my cell phone rang.

  I dug it from my jacket pocket and looked at it. I had no idea who it might be. My mother called me now and then, and Jendrek, but they never called me this late. The only one who called me regularly was Liz, and she was sitting beside me fawning over Benjamin Cross’s big brain and big smile.

  Finally, I answered it. “Hello?”

  “Um, hi, is this Mr. Olson?” The voice was girlish and familiar, but strained and nervous at the same time. I didn’t place it right away. Instead, I hesitated and said:

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  “This is Brianna. We met this morning?” She sounded unsure of herself. Like I wouldn’t remember the shape of her thighs, the smell of her in the morning air.

  I glanced over at Liz, feeling a tightening in my stomach. I couldn’t imagine why she was calling. I checked my watch. It was nearly eleven. I realized I hadn’t said anything in response, just as she asked, “Do you remember?”

  “Um, yes,” I said. “What can I do for you?” I pictured the flesh overflowing her bikini top and glanced back at Liz again. She was still laughing at everything coming out of Benjamin Cross’s mouth.

  “Well,” she began. “I don’t know if I should be calling you, but it just seemed like you’d want to know this.”

  “Know what?”

  “The police were just here asking questions. They found Pete Stick dead in his warehouse a couple hours ago. They said he hung himself.”

  Saturday

  November 2

  V

  Something nagged at me as I drove across the city in the middle of the night. I’d left Liz at the restaurant, laughing at Ben Cross’s jokes, after I announced that I needed to go, that a key witness on the Vargas case was found dead. I made sure everyone, especially Ben, was aware of where I was going. Maybe that was my reason for going. Maybe I wanted to make sure Ben knew I was an important guy and he was just some spoiled rich kid who didn’t matter to anyone but himself.

  As I drove through the misty Santa Monica air, I tried to quit thinking about Liz and Ben. I tried to stop asking myself what it was about him that made her like him so much. He was the exact opposite of me. And maybe that was the point. Maybe that was her way of rejecting me indirectly. Maybe she was glad I’d left to go play big shot. Maybe they were back in our apartment right now, fucking like crazy right on the living room floor. Or worse, on the deck of his condo, listening to the waves crash beneath them while Liz let him inside of her.

  By the time I made it all the way across the city, I’d driven myself crazy, beating myself up with suspicions and baseless speculations. Benjamin Cross wasn’t the problem. He was a symptom. I was blaming him for something I couldn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand.

  I pushed it all aside when I pulled up at the bottom of the block of Gower by the Do Prop Inn. Pete Stick had been dead for about four hours by the time I got there. It was the middle of the night and I had no real reason for going there, other than curiosity and escape. I parked near the corner of the street and sat in the car, watching the bodies move around in the pulsating glow of the flashing police lights. The ambulance was still there, along with two police cruisers and a couple of other vehicles. It seemed like a lot of activity for a hanging.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d come. Besides wanting to remind Liz of my own existence, something just seemed wrong about the whole thing. I kept picturing the thick-framed, hard-edged Pete Stick and found it impossible to believe he hung himself. I figured if I went, I might learn something. Although it seemed all but certain, now that he was dead, that our big case was definitely over.

  I got out and walked up the block. There was no police tape or anything, just the collection of vehicles and people milling about. I stood on the sidewalk across the street and watched. The entrance to the Do Prop Inn was open, and people kept coming and going from it.

  Next to the ambulance were a couple of uniform cops, standing around smoking cigarettes. An EMT was loading a large plastic equipment box into the back of the ambulance, and two guys in regular clothes were leaning against an unmarked car, talking through some notes one of them was holding.

  I stared at the profile of the older of the plainclothes guys. He looked familiar in the darkness, but I couldn’t be sure from across the street. I was nervous about getting any closer. I didn’t want to piss anyone off. But then, I figured there wasn’t any barricade or anything, so I stepped off the curb and walked toward them, trying to get a better look.

  The older guy must have heard me coming because he turned to look at me when I was halfway across the street. I recognized him for sure then. And from his grimace, it was clear he remembered me. He said, “There’s no way I’ll believe this is a coincidence, even if you lie to me. What in the hell are you doing here?”

  “Nice to see you too, Detective Wilson.” I smiled at him and walked the rest of the way to the car. Wilson looked exactly as he had four years ago. Still had the crew cut. Still looked like he ran five miles a day and could do a hundred pushups without breaking a sweat. His hair might have been a little more silver, but it was hard to tell in the pulses of red and blue light.

  The other guy was looking at me now, so Wilson said to him, “Chuck, this is Oliver Olson. He was the kid who broke the Steele case a few years back.” Chuck nodded in recognition. Then Wilson turned back to me and said, “I assume you actually became a lawyer after that?”

  “Sadly, yes,” I joked. But Wilson didn’t smile. Despite his gruffness, I always felt like Wilson kind of liked me. He knew putting the Steele thing together had nearly gotten me killed. He seemed like the kind of guy who respected things like that, even if he would never admit it.

  He studied me for a moment and said, “So what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Got a call.” I turned and studied the ambulance and cop car. Their lights blinked in the darkness, splashing red and blue light over the entire street. Then I said, “I heard there was a light show over here on Gower. I’m an insomniac, so I figured I’d come check it out.”

  “You gotta few more years to go before you become a good bullshitter, Olson. Quit fucking around. The kid call you?”

  “Nope.” Now I was wondering who the kid was.

  He rolled his eyes and barked, “Spill it, Olson. I got a woman at home who’s a lot better looking than you. I’d like to mother up to her before sunrise.”

  I smiled at him. “Detective Wilson, you’re such a romantic.” I shrugged, and said, “I was just curious why the key witness in one of my cases ends up dead only a few hours after I talked to him. That’s all. I’m having a hard time believing that’s a coincidence.”

  “He hung himself, Olson.”

  “If you’re so sure of that, why’d you go to Don Vargas’s house to t
alk to people?”

  “You represent Vargas, eh?”

  “I can’t tell you who I represent.” I could see in Wilson’s eyes that he knew I had him cornered. He was trying to change the subject from his presence there to mine. So I added, “But what I do know is that they don’t send homicide cops out in the middle of the night to take a look at a clear cut suicide.”

  Wilson raised his eyebrows at Chuck and then came around the car and walked past me. I followed him to the other side of the street. “Look,” he spoke in a soft, confidential voice. “Stick hung himself. The ME already signed off on it as a suicide. Stick’s blood alcohol level was about point two-five, which would have you or me stumbling around trying to remember our own names. Guy got drunker than shit, got depressed, and did himself. Unless the coroner finds something interesting, that’s the way it’s going in the books.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little strange that he happens to kill himself right after Vargas, his business partner, is murdered?”

  Wilson smiled, and laughed a little. “First of all, Vargas wasn’t murdered, that was an accident.” Then he leaned back a little, cocked his head to one side, and said, “You always did jump to conclusions, Olson. Keep in mind what happened last time.”

  “Hey, last time, everyone got caught. So don’t give me that shit.”

  “What about the journalist?”

  I groaned. It was the second time in twenty-four hours it had come up. “This isn’t about me,” I said.

  “No, it’s not. But you’re assuming things you don’t know anything about. You’re working for Vargas, and your witness is dead, and you’re pissed off about it. Well, frankly, I’m glad your case is fucked up because I don’t like to see cops get sued by ambulance chasers like you. What happened to that fancy-assed law firm you worked for anyway?”