“Shit, I remember this one time all the kids was home alone. Jimmy, the oldest brother, was in charge. They was rastling or whatever, and Jimmy pushed her out on the front porch naked. They were yelling and carrying on. The older brother was a pretty mean kid. Hell, I was sitting right here, just staring at her. Shit, she’s only thirteen or so, but goddamned, she already had a body most women would kill for.”
Then he shook his head and added, “That old Billy Long, I doubt he was able to keep his hands off her.”
“The brother?”
“No, her old man.” He gave me a wide smile that revealed a missing tooth far back in his top row of yellow molars. He scratched at his wispy hair again and puffed away at the cigarette. “I guess she wasn’t his real daughter, so it ain’t like it was a crime against nature or anything. Wasn’t like he was keeping it in the family or nothing. But still, that Billy Long was a weird dude.”
I watched the memory of her naked body standing on the porch wash across his face. He smiled and then shrugged it off. “Shit, she was just a little whore anyway. I watched her fuck two niggers on the kitchen table one night. Had the light on and everything. I was just sitting on my couch and looked out the window and I could see right in. There she was, on her back on the kitchen table with her pussy hanging off one side and her head hanging off the other. Two big black dicks sliding in and out of each end.”
He laughed and said, “Hell, it was a lot better than watching reruns of Rockford Files. When they were finished with her, I saw one of them toss a couple crumpled twenties on her tits and the two niggs walked out, got in their car, and drove away. She was probably fifteen or sixteen then. Hell, I went through my pants to see if I had a twenty on me.” He laughed again and slapped his hand on his knee. Good times in Canoga Park. The old days. Memories.
I started to wonder if there was anything of value he could say. I asked, “So you haven’t seen any of them, the Longs, since they moved?”
“Nah. Shit, by then old Billy was dead and most of the kids were out of the house. They practically lived on the State money they got for the adoptions, so when them kids left home, the money left with ‘em. Old Billy wasn’t interested in working for a living. They was getting three or four hundred a month from the State for each of them kids. Had six of them over there most of the time. By the time they moved, they were down to two. Hard to live on that, even if you do drink cheap wine.” He laughed and hooked his index finger through the handle on the jug. Before he drank again, he said, “Good thing for Billy Long, he died before he had to find a job.”
“What’d he die of?”
“Disappointment.” The old man smiled as he said it and then burst out laughing in a high, raspy shriek. His face turned a deep, ghastly purple and he leaned forward on his knee to steady himself. When the laughter turned to a fit of coughing, he damn near retched right on the wood steps in front of his chair. I could hear loose matter gurgling in his throat and lungs. He sat up and washed it down with a long swig of purple wine and took a hard drag on his still smoldering cigarette to calm himself down.
When his breathing slowed from a sucking hiss to a mild wheeze, he smiled and said, “Cancer got him. Two packs a day for thirty-five years. Died right in that bedroom there.” He pointed to a window at the side of the house. “Didn’t have any insurance, so it wasn’t like it dragged on. One day he started coughing up blood. Two months later he was dead. Wasn’t long after that Helen and the two kids still at home moved away.”
“And you haven’t seen or heard from Tiffany Long since?”
“Nope. She never liked me much. I think she knew I wanted to tickle that pretty little beaver of hers.” He gave me the gap-toothed grin again and added, “But hell, who didn’t? She knew it, too. Like I said, she was making a little side money off that twat of hers. She probably turned that pussy into a fortune.”
He had no idea how right he was. I was out of questions and he had nothing to say, so I tried to wrap it up. “You don’t happen to know where she was adopted from, do you? Or what her last name might have been before?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. Then he said, “Why? Was I right when I was joking about her inheriting a fortune?”
“I just need to find her.”
“Well, I’d help you if I could, buddy, but I don’t know a damned thing.”
I checked my messages on the way back to Westwood. Detective Wilson hadn’t returned my call. I tried not to think much about it while my foot alternated between the gas and brake all the way down the freeway. Stop and go traffic eight lanes wide is a treat I try to get as much of as possible.
It was evening by the time I made it over the hill and drove past the train that leads to the Getty Center. A half mile before the Sunset Boulevard exit, traffic came to a complete stop. After twenty minutes of searching, the radio informed me that a truckload of ceramic lawn gnomes had turned over in one of the middle lanes, blocking most of the 405. I thought about Pete Stick’s warehouse as I heard the news.
An hour later, the sun was starting to sink as I crept by them. Thousands of crumbled heads and bodies glowed in the waning sunlight. Grinning and enjoying the mischief they’d caused.
XVIII
I skipped the office. It was too late to bother going back. Between the gnomes, the crazy old man, and Colette Vargas’s restrained anger, I was ready to relax. And then I remembered Liz would be back from San Diego. I’d managed to forget about her and Ben for a couple of days, and forgetting felt good.
When I walked into the apartment she was standing in the kitchen wearing shorts and a tank top and the funky, hipster glasses that she loved, but never wore to work. She smiled and came over and put her arms around me. “Hey babe.” She kissed me as I noticed the large bouquet of flowers on the table. “I missed you,” she said.
The smell of the flowers filled the room. Or was it her perfume? She’d put the laptop away and cleared the table, straightened the place up, giving it a touch of warmth that it lacked when I was by myself. She ran her hands along my back and I felt a tension come loose that had been there for days. Cords of stiff muscle suddenly flexed beneath her touch.
“You’re tense,” she said. “What’s been going on?”
I rotated my shoulders and took a few deep breaths. “Traffic on the 405,” I said, and dropped my briefcase next to the table. “A truckload of ceramic lawn gnomes overturned.”
“Are you serious?” She laughed and I watched her eyes for signs of guilt, but found none. Then I wondered about my own eyes. But what had I done? What did I have to be really guilty about? I’d gone out to dinner. I’d gone to a party. It was all in the name of work. My eyes found the laptop on the shelf behind the table and I felt a pang in my stomach.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.” Then I stretched my arms up over my head and added, “This new case is driving me crazy.” I shook my head and walked back to the bedroom to change clothes.
She spoke from behind me. “The one about the shooting at the costume party?”
I wondered if that was what it was still about. Detective Wilson hadn’t called back. Both Pete Stick and Dave Daniels were dead. Everything about it was suspicious. Tiffany Vargas’s family was gone. Surely she knew where they were, but it wasn’t like I could just go and ask her.
I stood in the center of the bedroom, unbuttoning my shirt and thinking it through when I realized Liz was leaning against the door jam, watching me. When my eyes caught hers, she grinned and shook her head. “You’re thinking pretty hard about something over there.”
“You have no idea,” I said.
I smiled back at her and realized I was glad she was home. Just like that. Despite my concerns, my suspicions, I was lonely without her and I felt better when she was there. Was that love? Was that just what happened to people after a while? I couldn’t say, but for the moment, it was good enough. I watched her push a dark curl of hair back off her forehead. The curvature of her tan flesh, arching down from her sho
ulder, through her smooth armpit, and around beneath her loose breast hidden beneath her shirt, held my attention for the brief moment of its appearance.
She grinned at me and asked, “You hungry?”
I said I was.
“Good,” she laughed. “You can buy me dinner.”
We went to The Shack. We always went to The Shack. It was our place. I didn’t even have to ask her where she wanted to go. When we walked into the large room filled with long tables and benches, hung with old nets, rusted seafaring implements, and other random junk, I wondered how many times we’d been there. A hundred? Two hundred? It was always fewer than you thought, I told myself. But still, even if we’d only averaged twice a month, for the last six years, that was still over a hundred.
We ordered our usual. She had two fish tacos and a Corona. I had a fish taco, a shrimp taco, and a Dos Equis. The best meal in the city, as far as we were concerned, and for only sixteen bucks, with the beers. We sat in a booth where people had stapled business cards to the wall with a stapler kept at the table for that very purpose.
Two years ago I’d taken Liz to Spago for her birthday. Halfway through our $300 dinner, Liz smiled over her plate of black truffle risotto and said Spago was nice, but it wasn’t The Shack. We both laughed, but we both knew it was true. The dives are always better, if you knew how to find them and who to take with you.
Liz worked her way through a pile of lime wedges, squeezing them one after another over her tacos. She asked, “So what’s going on with the case?”
I wasn’t sure where to begin. I gave her a summary of what Jendrek and I had seen on Friday. She’d already heard it, but it was more to remind myself than anything. Then I told her about the kid wanting the bribe, but never showing up for it.
When I got that far, I realized I had to tell her about the guard at the house down the street, which meant I had to tell her about the party. Then I started wondering if I really had to tell her. But she was asking questions and I was answering them, which wasn’t giving me time to sort out the story and properly edit it.
She was asking, “So what did you do after he didn’t show up?”
I thought about my walk to the beach and my stakeout of Ben Cross’s condo. “Nothing,” I said. And then added, “Jendrek and I talked about it, and figured the kid either didn’t have anything to say, or didn’t really think we’d show up with the money.”
That was true. It just wasn’t a complete answer to the question.
“So then what?” she asked.
“Then we got fired.”
She scrunched up her face, almost in the shape of a question mark. I laughed. It was the impact I’d been going for, mostly to give me time to think of what I was going to say. “And then we got hired again,” I added, “but this time by the son.”
“The wife fired you?”
“She just walked into the office Monday morning, told us she didn’t want to go through a drawn out lawsuit against the cops, that she’d suffered enough, and then headed on down to her lawyer’s office to collect her inheritance.”
Liz grinned and said, “They say time heals all wounds, but money apparently does the job too.”
“Apparently,” I said. “But one thing she also made clear was that we had been hired by the son, without her authorization. She said she was never interested in a suit and that Ed, the son, was the driving force behind it.”
I drank some beer and went on. “So anyway, we call Ed, tell him she fired us, and he immediately hires us to sue her.”
“The wife?”
“Right,” I nodded my head as I spoke, “he says she’s a fraud, that she conned his old man into marrying her, that he wants to challenge her inheritance.”
“Can he do that?”
I shrugged, “Anyone can file a lawsuit. Whether he can win, we’re not entirely sure. But we’ve already got his retainer. It’s not like we’re drowning in work at the moment. So we said sure.”
“You guys are such whores.” She laughed. The fact that it was the same word Jendrek used was not lost on me.
“Hey, we’ve got to make a living. How else am I going to be able to take you to fancy restaurants like this?”
She smiled as she cocked her head to the side to chomp off a bite of taco. While she was still chewing, she said, “So now you’re after the wife? Can you even do that? I mean, you were originally representing her.”
“Ed hired us the first time. The only conversation we ever had with her was when she fired us. She didn’t even fire us really, she just said she wasn’t hiring us. We never worked for her.”
“So now you’re investigating your former client who was never really your client?”
“Right, but here’s where it gets interesting.” My brain was now scrambling, trying to assess various options and settling on this: “After the son hires us, I go up to the house on Mulholland to pick up some papers from him. There are some workers working on the driveway when I get there, so I park at the edge of this other house’s driveway.”
“Next door?”
“Across the street. There’s this guard in a little gatehouse there, and I ask him if it’s okay. He says it is, so I park.” I paused for a second. Liz took another bite of her taco and looked at me like she was wondering why I’d stopped. There was no doubt anywhere on her face. As far as she would know, I’d never gone to the party, never even had the opportunity to be alone in a room with Brianna Jones and feel her rub up against me.
“So anyway,” I went on, “I go in. I talk to Ed Vargas for a while. And when I come out to get my car, I start making small talk with this gate guard at this other house. He starts talking about the night Don Vargas was shot and tells me that the cops questioned him because they said the call that reported the noise disturbance came from the phone in his gatehouse.”
“And he says he never called?”
“Right.” I nodded. Liz was as quick as they come. It was intelligence I fell for more than anything. “But he says even more than that. He looks at my car and says it sure is nicer than the last guy that parked there. He starts telling me about this kid who had car trouble and stopped to call a friend of his.”
“Let me guess,” she said. “Thursday night?” She was more cynical than I was.
“Exactly. But worse than that. Guess who the guy describes when he tells me the details?” She thought for a moment, and shrugged. I said, “The kid who wanted the payoff, but never showed up,” and watched her eyes grow wide.
And then I added, after a pause and a swig of Dos Equis, “And now for the topper. Guess whose body washed up on the shore in Malibu this morning?”
I grinned as her jaw dropped open, food and all.
I told her the rest, about how no one knew much about Tiffany Vargas née Long. Not the ex-wife. Not the old neighbor. Nobody. I told her about Pete Stick’s shady history and how I suspected Don Vargas was propping him up once again. But she couldn’t get past the kid making the phone call.
When we were back in the car, she said, “So you think Pete was extorting money from Don?”
“Maybe,” I shrugged. “But the shooting just seems to have been a random thing. It just doesn’t make sense that the guys who planned the shooting end up dead.”
“Unless they were pawns,” she said.
“Sure, but what are the odds of that?” I turned the car east off of Ocean Avenue and headed up Montana. The blocks near the ocean were lined with nondescript apartment houses and dark sidewalks. Late on a Tuesday evening, the street was completely empty.
“The problem with that,” I said, “is that the cops would have to be in on it. A, that’s hard to do anyway, and B, then you’ve got too damned many people involved. There’s no way they could keep it a secret.” I noticed the police car behind me almost as I said it. I felt the surge of adrenaline I always felt whenever one of them was following me. I don’t know why. I just didn’t like having them back there.
Liz said, “Not if it was just the one cop.”
Almost as if on cue, the red and blues came on behind me and she almost jumped as they lit up the inside of the car. “Jesus Christ,” she said, and turned to look back at the car, just a silhouette now in the glow of the flashing lights.
I mumbled a string of curse words as I pulled over in the middle of the block between fifth and sixth streets. I looked at the speedometer, as if it could still tell me if I’d been speeding. “What the hell does this guy want? I was barely moving.”
I watched in the mirror. A lone man stepped out of the driver’s side, flashlight held up at shoulder height. The other hand resting at the edge of his hip, just above his gun. Liz watched in her mirror as well. The cop walked up my side and leaned over, flashlight beam strafing the dash and floor, between the seats, coming to rest directly in my face. I squinted in the brightness. Couldn’t see anything.
“Is there a problem, officer?” It was the same thing everyone said in every bad TV show ever made, but I said it too. It just came out naturally.
“License and registration please.” I leaned over and reached in the glove box. The flashlight followed my hands. I glanced up at Liz as I leaned across her. She raised her eyebrows, wondering what this was all about.
I handed the cop my paperwork. He took a half second glance at it and asked, “You been drinking tonight, son? Smells like you been drinking.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. My impulse was to lie and say I hadn’t. It just felt like the natural thing to do, but I knew he could smell it on my breath. So I said, “At dinner, just a few minutes ago.” I knew if I was going to lie, it was better to say you just had a drink, only minutes before they pulled you over. That way, your blood alcohol content was theoretically increasing as you sat there on the side of the road. By the time they measured it, you could argue it was higher than when you were pulled over.
The cop handed my license and registration back. He bent over as he did and held his face parallel to mine, flashlight still blinding me. He sneered and took in a deep breath.
Exhaling, he said, “I think I smell marijuana too. You two out partying tonight? Don’t lie, I’d know that smell fifty feet away.”
The Flaming Motel Page 15
