Jendrek turned and studied the pictures again. Liz did the same. I was hoping the use of the word “wake” instead of “party” would be enough of an explanation. But obviously, if they were showing porno films at it, then it wasn’t an ordinary wake.
“Anyway, a couple years go by—”
“Hey,” Jendrek said, pointing at one of the pictures and looking at me. “This is the same motel that was in the picture at Pete Stick’s office.”
“Exactly. Pete helped them run it. Colette Vargas says that it was Pete who got Don into making the films. And, when Don needed money to make full-length features, the motel burned down and he collected the insurance money.”
“And Pete Stick goes into the insurance fraud business.” It was clicking for Jendrek now.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Vargas’s whole fortune started with that seed money. And the two people who died in that fire, these two people.” I went over to the counter and gathered up the pictures, stuffing them back in the envelope and back in the box. “They had two kids. And now I’m pretty sure that Tiffany Vargas was one of them.”
The stagnant air of the dressing room went cold as the four of us exchanged glances, searching one another’s faces for some sign of recognition, some symbolic gesture that might tell us everything was fine. But there was nothing but a series of bleak stares, followed by an urgent panic, a sudden need for egress, for distance, to be away from that place. I smiled feebly and turned and left the room.
Everyone followed me as if they knew where I was going. As if I knew where I was going and what might come next. But I was merely fleeing, and they were coming right along with me. Down the hall, around the corner, returning to the loft, descending the stairs. There was nothing but silence clouded by footsteps and adrenaline.
We clustered together in the large room downstairs. Jendrek and I studied each other’s faces, waiting for a good idea to wash across them. Brianna studied the door. The movers came and went with lamps and boxes and an impressionist seascape in a wide gilt frame. I held the wood box in my hand so tightly the tips of my fingers went white.
Finally, Liz said, “How do we know it’s her? Maybe she got the pictures somewhere.”
“Maybe,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know. Anything’s possible. I think she’s the daughter. I can just feel it. It makes sense. She shows up out of nowhere. She convinces this guy to marry her. Eventually, she gets tired of waiting for him to die so she can inherit his money. Then she learns Vargas is going to transfer the most valuable parts of the business to his son and she has him killed before he can do it.”
“By a cop though?” Jendrek said. “That part still doesn’t make any sense. Daniels was her brother. They were obviously both in on it. But Daniels is dead and the cops are involved. There’s something wrong with it.”
“She’s got these fucking pictures.” I was stifling a yell as I held the box out in front of me, gripping it like it contained something evil. “How the hell would she have these? These are her parents. Don Vargas was killed for revenge. This whole fucking thing. This whole marriage. This house. Everything. You should have heard the way Colette Vargas described it. The way she talked about how Tiffany seemed to just show up out of nowhere and fit in like she’d been studying for the part.”
“Look,” Brianna cut in, “you guys have got to get the fuck out of here with that. She’s going to be back soon. I just know it. You can’t be here. You’ve got to leave.” The urgency in her voice almost frantic, uncontrolled. She looked around the room and then checked her watch, as though something might be written there besides the very reason for her sense of doom. “I’ve got to get my shit in that truck and get the hell out of here.”
Brianna took a few determined steps back toward the hallway and then stopped and turned back toward us. “What do I do if she comes back?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Don’t do a goddamned thing. Just get your shit in the truck and get out of here. Just drive away. She’s not going to notice these pictures are missing for awhile.” I stared down at the box and added, “Hopefully we’ll have something figured out by then.”
That wasn’t a plan, but it seemed to make everyone happy. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Everyone else seemed to do the same. We needed to go, but we all continued to stand there. A lulling quiet hung in the room around us. Everything seemed to become calm, almost serene for just those few moments.
I took another deep breath and nearly jumped with fright when my cell phone rang. I handed the box to Liz and answered it.
Ed Vargas was screaming on the other end, “She’s trying to fucking sell everything, that goddamned whore. We’ve got to stop her. You’ve got to do something.”
“Ed? Is that you? What are you talking about?” I said, covering my ear and turning away from the others, although the room was completely silent.
“I just talked to Stanton,” he huffed, sounding out of breath. “He said she’s going to liquidate everything like it’s a fucking fire sale. Jesus Christ, where are you?”
“We’re at the house on Mulholland.”
He rattled off his address in Laurel Canyon. “Get over here. We’ve got to figure something out. This just isn’t right,” he went on, in a mixture of anger and desperation. “This is fucked.”
My eyes caught on the box in Liz’s hand. “A lot of things are fucked,” I said, and told him we’d be right over.
We left Brianna standing in the foyer and went out and got in the car. I gunned it out of the driveway, east down Mulholland, racing through the thickening afternoon traffic toward Laurel Canyon.
XXVII
Ed said, “I’m gonna kill that fucking cunt,” and threw back a shot of Wild Turkey. I watched him pour another into a heavy double rocks glass as I left a second message for Detective Wilson. I’d called him from the car five minutes before, but every minute felt like half an hour. I would call again in another five if I didn’t hear from him.
Ed had been drinking for a while before we got there. The sweat on his forehead and the half empty bottle provided all the details we needed. He sat in the corner of a black leather couch, too modern and hard edged to be comfortable. The living room was huge, white, with dark wood floors, and decorated in a minimalist fashion with pieces chosen for their looks rather than their livability.
The walls were made almost entirely of glass, providing views in all directions of heavy foliage and drooping branches, creating the impression that Laurel Canyon really wasn’t filled with tens of thousands of people. It was like sitting in a tree house filled with designer furniture. Ed hunched over the Noguchi coffee table shaking his head at the pictures spread across the glass.
“This is fucking unbelievable. I knew that cunt was a fucking fraud. I just fucking knew it.” He took up his glass and studied the inch of brown liquid he’d just poured into it, contemplating it as he tipped it and watched it pool in the corner of the glass. Then he smiled at something we couldn’t see and drank it in a swift, effortless motion.
“Did your dad ever talk about the motel?” I asked, trying to focus him in on something besides his own anger. “Did he ever say anything about it? Anything about the people who died?”
Ed shook his head. “He never talked about it. I was only vaguely aware that they ever owned a motel. Mom mentioned it. She had some old pictures of the place. I asked her about those once. She might have mentioned that it burned down. But she never said anyone got killed. I never heard anything about that.”
“What about Daniels?” Jendrek asked. “Was she involved in getting him hired? She must have been.”
“Daniels’s girlfriend said she was,” I added.
“I don’t know,” Ed shook his head. “That was Pete’s deal. It was Pete’s business. I didn’t give a shit what was going on with that. I never understood it anyway, the way my dad just took the guy in and all. I mean, I knew they went way back, but Dad was pumping money into that prop company left and right.” Ed
stood and crossed the room to the kitchen area on the opposite side.
There were reams of paper piled up along the edge of the wide granite island and Ed thumbed through a couple of the stacks. “I’ve been going through the records, trying to straighten shit out,” he said. “Dad didn’t exactly run the tightest ship, you know. He had all kinds of things going on.”
He found what he was looking for and returned to the couch with a few loose sheets of paper. “Look,” he said, “the money was just flowing like water into that prop company. And there was no fucking way Pete needed it all to run that business.”
He spread what looked like bank statements across the table, covering the photographs. “These are pages from the accounts for Good Times, Limited, that’s the company Dad used to run most of his smaller stuff. It used to be the main company, but now that the web stuff is so much bigger, this was almost like his own little toy.”
Liz sat on the couch beside him and studied the statements. She moved the bottle of whiskey to the far edge of the table to make room. But I noted that she set it on the edge furthest away from Ed. I wondered if Ed had noticed too.
Jendrek and I leaned in to look. There were a dozen lines of highlighted text spread over five pages. My eye ran over the bottoms of the statements where the current balance was. Each page showed somewhere between eight and twelve million dollars in the account. And that was the small business, I thought, Don Vargas’s toy. It made me feel better about wasting some of Ed’s fifty grand.
“These are just random pages,” Ed said. “I just pulled the ones that showed the payments to Pete.” He traced the highlighted lines with his finger. “You see here, in June, there’s a single payment to Pete for $25,000. Then in July, there’s one payment for $25,000 early in the month and then a second payment later in the month. In August, it jumps to three payments. In September he starts paying Pete $25,000 a week. And by October, that number is up to $40,000 a week. Altogether, I figure that’s more than $500,000 in five months. Most of it in the last two months.”
Ed looked up at us with a baffled expression. He brought the glass up to his lips, in an automated, absentminded way, and realized it was empty only after tipping it up to drink. He looked at it and then his eyes roamed the table for the bottle. He poured another shot and said, “And that’s all on top of what we paid him for the props we actually rented. All that shit’s paid for out of a different account. I can’t see any reason for these payments.” Then he laughed a little and added, “Well, a business reason for them.”
“So if there’s no reason for the payments,” I said, “at least, no legitimate reason, then what is Don Vargas getting for his money?”
“She’s running some kind of scam with Pete and her brother, Daniels,” Ed said, as if the case was closed.
“But what’s the scam?” Liz said, leaning back on the couch. “He’s paying Pete for what? To stay quiet? Is that it? Blackmail?”
“To stay quiet about what?” Ed said.
I said, “About the fire. About the two people who were killed.”
“That was thirty years ago.” Ed smiled and shrugged, and added, feebly, “What difference would that make now?” He swallowed the whiskey in the glass and poured more.
“If the fire was an accident,” Jendrek said, “then it doesn’t matter. But if it the fire was intentionally set,”—Jendrek’s eyes met mine for a moment—“then it matters a lot.”
“Felony murder,” Liz said.
Jendrek and I both looked at her. Ed could sense that we all knew something he didn’t and he asked what it was in a way that indicated he really didn’t want to know the answer. Jendrek and I just kept looking at Liz. She was the one who raised the ugly specter. She was the one who could explain it.
Liz shifted sideways on the couch, facing Ed, and said, “Felony murder is a special kind of murder. It’s an accident that gets treated like first degree murder.”
Ed nodded along, reaching across the table for the bottle. He poured more whiskey in his glass, adding it to the shot already there.
“There’s a short list of crimes that are deemed so dangerous,” Liz explained, “that if you kill someone in the process of committing those crimes, even if it’s an accident, it’s treated like first degree murder. Burglary is one. Robbery is another.” Liz cleared her throat and added, “And arson is another.”
“So what’s that mean?” Ed shook his head, “Accidentally? An accident is an accident. How do you call it something else?” He put the glass to his lips and drank. There was so much Wild Turkey in the glass that he had to take two swallows to drain it all. The sight of it turned my stomach, sent shivers through me. I saw Jendrek grimace as he watched it.
Liz waited for Ed to focus again, and said, “It goes like this. If I break into your house at night to burglarize it and you find me there, and I push you down the stairs while I’m trying to get away and you break your neck and die, that’s felony murder. I didn’t intend to kill you, I was just trying to get away. But I was committing a burglary at the time, and so any accidental death I cause is treated as a murder, just like I intended to kill you.”
“The same goes for arson,” Jendrek said. “If I burn down my motel to collect the insurance money and I accidentally kill two people in the fire, that’s felony murder. In fact, that’s two murders. That’s life in prison,” Jendrek said. “Or worse.”
“Worse?” Ed’s voice was taking on a naïve, vaguely childlike quality, as if pretending not to understand might stop it from being real. No one mentioned the electric chair or the gas chamber, but I could tell everyone was thinking about it. Even Ed. His father may have been a killer. His family fortune built on the backs of those deaths.
“So the payments are what?” I said, rhetorically. “Blackmail? Pete is threatening to turn Don in on the motel fire if he doesn’t pay them?”
Jendrek said, “But does that make sense? Pete’s been coming and going for years. Every time he shows up, Don helps him out. And eventually Pete gets in trouble again and disappears. And in any event, Pete’s on the hook for the murders too. So he’s not going to go to the cops. So why now? Why, all the sudden, would Pete start to threaten Don? It’s got to be because someone is making him.”
“Tiffany. It’s that fucking whore,” Ed said, reaching for the pages he’d spread across the table, gathering them up with exaggerated, drunken movements. “She’s got these fucking pictures. It was her parents that were killed. Fucking Christ, man. This whole thing. She’s been planning this the whole time. Since the day she met him, it’s all been a fucking scam to rip us off.” Ed held several of the pictures up for us to see, as though we weren’t familiar with them, as though the truth were written on them, plain as day.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Jendrek said, shaking his head. “She could have gotten those pictures somewhere else and was just using them. If it was her parents if she really was planning this scam the whole time, then why wait ten years? That seems like an awful lot of patience. And why now?”
Ed stared up at him, peering out through his hazy eyeballs, glazed over with liquor and rage. He was no longer following anything Jendrek was saying. All he could say was, “But this fucking bitch is trying to steal everything from us. She’s down there right now, down at Stanton’s office trying to figure out how to sell everything as fast as possible.”
“But it isn’t like she can just sell the business in a day,” Jendrek said. “There’s no way she can do it that fast. It takes time to find buyers, to do all the paperwork.”
“But she can rape the shit out of it in the meantime,” Ed said. “You have no idea how much cash there is in some of these accounts. She could sell the house and drain all the cash from the companies and probably make off with thirty million or more. The businesses wouldn’t survive if that happened. We couldn’t make payroll, couldn’t produce new content for the websites, couldn’t keep the equipment running, pay the rent, pay our vendors. It’s an expensive operation. There�
��s a lot of cash, but there’s a lot of cash flow too. If the money disappears, it won’t take long for everything to collapse.”
Ed looked around at the room, as though he was talking about the structure we were standing in instead of the family business. Jendrek and I exchanged glances. There was too much anger and speculation in the room to come to a sensible conclusion.
“We at least have to consider,” Jendrek said, “that just because Tiffany may have been involved in a blackmail scam, it doesn’t mean she had Don Vargas killed. It doesn’t mean she had anything to do with that. In which case, the estate was still hers to inherit, and the business is still hers to sell.”
Ed leaned back on the couch and folded his arms across his chest. “Well, it’s awfully goddamned convenient,” he said. “My dad gets shot right before he transfers most of the business to me. That’s awfully fucking convenient for her, isn’t it?” Ed poured more Wild Turkey, spilling a narrow trail of drops across the stack of bank statements.
“All I’m saying,” he went on, “is it just don’t seem right she can go and fuck everything up while we sit around with a thumb in our ass trying to figure things out. Shit, she’ll be long gone before we know anything. If we ever know anything at all.” He drank the shot he’d just poured.
“But you’ve got to understand,” I said, “all we know is that Daniels might have been her brother and she might have been the daughter of these people who died in the motel fire. We don’t even know for sure that those things are true. And even if they are, we still don’t know what’s going on.”
“God-damnit!” Ed pounded the table so hard with his palm that his glass tipped sideways and rolled onto the wood floor. “I don’t give a shit about that. All you fucking lawyers talk about is theories. These are fucking facts, man. We know something’s going on, and whatever it is, it needs to stop. There’s got to be something we can do. We can sort out the mess later.”
The Flaming Motel Page 24
