“But you never told anyone?” Wilson asked. “You lied for your brother, knowing he’d done it on purpose. Knowing he was a murderer?”
“What was I supposed to do?” She sobbed again. “He’s my brother.” She shrugged and stopped trying to hide her tears. They cut tracks through the makeup on her face, leaving dark droplets on her suit coat as they hung along her chin and then fell free.
Everyone was watching her crumble inward on herself so that no one noticed Ed Vargas come through the open front door until the silence was cut by his short, sharp claps. We all looked up to see him there, strolling and applauding sarcastically.
“Give the woman an Academy Award,” he said. “The performance of a lifetime. Boys!” he shouted, to an imaginary crowd. “You thought she was just a young porno whore, but no, she’s got talent. A real fucking star, this one.”
He wavered on the stairs, taking them slow, stepping carefully down into the room. Wilson moved toward him, but Ed waved him off and staggered over to the bar where he rested his weight against the polished mahogany. Tiffany backed away.
“Son?” Wilson said. “You okay?”
“Are you my dad?” Ed smiled at him, and shook his sweaty head. “I didn’t think so. No, because my dad’s dead. I was sitting home alone, having a few drinks, and thinking about that. Thinking about how I’m all by my lonesome. So,” he straightened up, the slur evaporating from his voice “I decided to come on over and visit with my dear mammy!”
Then he burst out laughing, leaning forward, away from the bar, and then catching himself quickly before he fell. “My dearest mummy. Dear old mom. A year and a half younger than me.” He grinned at Wilson. “It’s a goddamned fucking miracle of modern science.”
Ed kept laughing, silently, his mouth wide with nothing but raspy air escaping from his lungs. His face went dark purple and he slapped the bar beside the box of pictures, resting his fingers lightly on top of it. “My mother’s younger than me,” he managed to say. “Ain’t that the damnedest thing?”
Tiffany stepped toward him and spoke softly. “Eddie,” was all she said.
Ed’s eyes locked on her and he stood quickly, almost spry in his movements. “Don’t you Eddie me, you fucking cunt!” And he hurled the wooden box at her, striking her in the face with a hideous crack! The photographs exploded in a cloud and Tiffany’s head shot back, a spray of blood erupting from her nose.
And then Ed was on her like a cat. Springing from the bar, he knocked her over to the floor, screaming at her, wailing as they slid to a stop near my feet. I backed away as Eddie pulled a revolver from the back of his pants and jammed it in her face. The pictures rained down around them and he grabbed one, mashing it into her bloody face as she shrieked and tried to wriggle free.
“Look at it, you fucking cunt. Look at this goddamned thing you worthless fucking whore.” The picture was smeared with blood. She turned her head from side to side, trying to get away but having nowhere to go. “You think Daddy’s proud of you now? His little whore daughter?”
Wilson drew a pistol and shouted. Chuck rushed across the room. But Ed was on top of her; there was no way to shoot just him. No way to risk pulling him off of her with a gun to her head. Chuck hesitated, uncertain; should he grab Ed or not?
Ed pinned her head sideways against the floor by jamming the gun straight down on her temple. “You ruined my fucking life.” His voice was shrill. Thick with liquor and rage.
He stuffed the picture in her mouth.
I heard her muffled, desperate scream. Saw her eyes dart up to mine for an instant, begging me to help her.
Ed jammed the gun in her mouth, ramming the photograph deep in her throat.
She gagged.
He pulled the trigger and her head erupted in a cloud of blood and bone, spattering across me. But I didn’t move. I didn’t do a damned thing but watch.
Detective Wilson put two clean rounds through Ed Vargas’s back and Ed’s screaming stopped, replaced for a moment by the deafening sound of the gun, and then by a stone-dead silence.
The five of us stood in the stillness, eyes darting from walls to windows, couch and carpet. As though some meaning might be hidden in the very objects in the room, we all looked around, at everything but each other.
Had Tiffany told us the truth? Did it matter? What was truth? The only truth I knew was sprayed across the front of me and would stay there for the rest of my life.
Wednesday
November 13
EPILOGUE
The morning air was cold, but we had the window open anyway. It was a crisp, bright day outside, and neither of us was rushing to work. I poured coffee while Liz got the paper from the bottom of the steps out front.
When she came back in, she said, “They got him.”
I knew who she meant before I even looked up. “Where?”
“Florida. Ft. Lauderdale.”
She spread the front page across our small kitchen table and we both sipped our coffee and leaned over the photograph of Officer James Davis. It had been nearly a week and we had hardly talked about it. We had hardly talked about anything.
I scanned the first few paragraphs. It seemed fitting that they’d caught him at a beachside motel not too unlike the one where his parents died. It was called The Breaks and it sat in a run down part of Ft. Lauderdale where Davis was staying while he planned his next move.
I chuckled at the name of the motel and Liz asked me what was funny. I told her. She smiled, but she didn’t laugh. We turned back to the paper. I could feel Liz’s hip and shoulder rubbing lightly against me.
Tiffany Vargas had given him a suitcase full of cash only hours before she was killed. It seemed his main problem was figuring out how to get himself and his money out of the country without getting caught. So there he was, alone in a ratty motel room trying to figure it out.
He’d been careful the whole way across the country. He drove his own car because he didn’t want to rent one. He didn’t want to use a credit card or have to give his driver’s license. He knew that once he drove out of Southern California, almost no one would be looking for him. When he left, his sister was still alive and no one had figured him out. He was probably in Arizona before the APB. went out.
But he was careful anyway. He paid cash for everything, which required him to go inside of truck stops and convenience stores along Interstate 10 all the way across America. After the fact, this permitted Detective Wilson to string together a series of pictures from the surveillance cameras, providing an almost hour-by-hour timeline of where Davis was for those five days.
But they might never have gotten him had it not been for an unfortunate turn down a toll road in Florida. When Davis stopped to pay his dollar, the camera showed his license plate to the man in the booth, who punched it into a new computer system that was being tested. An hour later a database informed the Florida State Patrol and the FBI that Davis was wanted for three counts of murder in California and it gave them a nice picture of his beard growth and new moustache, courtesy of the camera aimed at the front of the car.
From there, it took less than twenty-four hours to catch him. Ultimately, it was the California plates that did it. The plates made his otherwise nondescript Honda Accord easier to spot in the seedy motels where a guy who didn’t want to show ID could still get a room.
Liz and I sat at the table, drinking our coffee and talking about the odds of finding the guy at all. Other than a few strained comments, we’d barely touched on the subject in the previous days. We’d had endless interviews with the police. Round after round, going over the details with painful scrutiny, but we’d never really talked about it with each other.
Maybe we were talked out. Maybe it was just too terrible to discuss. I can’t really say. All I know is that the few times it came up, each of us shut the other down. I would say something like: “What’s the use talking about it? Terrible things happen. It’s just the way it is. Why go over it a million times?”
Or she’
d say, out of the blue, “I can’t get over the sound of them screaming. The sound of the gunshots.” Then she’d shake her head and turn and walk away.
But then there we were, sitting at the kitchen table, the paper unfolded between us, discussing the details of how they managed to catch the brother, almost by accident. The topic finally unavoidable.
I said, “What was he going to do? It wasn’t like the money would make things better. It wasn’t like it would bring his parents back to life.”
Liz thought for a minute and said, “I don’t think that was the point. Maybe there wasn’t really a point, when it comes down to it. It was just about revenge. It was about getting even for an injustice. You know, getting back at life for being unfair. Threatening Pete Stick to get money from Vargas. Forcing Stick to help him shoot Vargas.”
“And then killing Stick to cover his tracks.” I looked out the window for a long moment. Jasmine blossoms staring back at me. “You really think it’s possible that Tiffany didn’t know about it ahead of time?”
She was quiet. Staring at the floor like it wasn’t there. “I don’t know. I don’t think a woman would stay with a man that long for the sake of revenge. She must have had a change of heart somewhere along the way. But who knows? All of those people were so damned crazy.”
I thought of Tiffany Vargas, stoic and quiet on the front steps that first morning Jendrek and I went to the house. What was it she said? It was one of the only times she ever spoke directly to us, other than to fire us. My husband wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t deserve this.
A curious statement, but suggesting he deserved something. How long can someone sit on a secret until it destroys them? Don Vargas sat on his for thirty years. Tiffany for ten. He built a fortune on top of his, as did she, in her own way. And yet both of them, and the fortune too, were destroyed almost simultaneously, and with the force of a hurricane.
I glanced at the wall behind Liz and thought about the affair I’d had years before, which Liz knew all about. Then I thought about Liz and Benjamin Cross, which I knew nothing about. An image of Brianna Jones and her Internet performance went through my head, followed by the tactile memory of my arms around her on that balcony. Then I shrugged and asked, “Do you think people can redeem themselves for the terrible things they do?”
She squinted at me and grinned, but said nothing.
“I mean, Vargas and Stick killed two people thirty years ago. Stick was always no good, but Don, in his own way, wasn’t a bad guy, at the end of the day. Should that matter? Or are some things so terrible that a lifetime of good deeds can never outweigh them?”
“People always pay for the terrible things they do, one way or another.” She sipped her coffee and stared at me over her mug. Then she shrugged.
Liz got up and went to the counter and poured herself more coffee. I watched her movements and wondered what secrets she carried with her. I wondered what damage the two of us might have already inflicted on each other without even knowing how or why. Was that just the nature of things? And did knowing change anything? I thought of the myriad ways I’d contorted myself to be who I thought she wanted me to be. How many ways had she done the same? And what did it matter? Some things were better left unknown. If a disaster loomed out there somewhere, why ruin the present worrying about it? I’d rather not see it until the last possible second. Or, like Don Vargas, maybe never see it at all. Just a curious muzzle flash in the darkness and then the world goes black and still. No pain. No final anxious moments. Just life, uninterrupted, and then serenity.
So I sat there and finished my coffee. Liz returned to the table and studied the newspaper some more. I laughed at the sidebar story beneath the headline: Vargas Son’s Death Leaves No Heirs; $100 million Porn Fortune will go to the State.
I closed my eyes and imagined what it must have been like when the police came through the motel door, guns drawn, shouting at James Davis to get down on the floor. I imagined that he must have sensed it coming in the moments before it happened. Heard it in the way the parking lot outside went oddly still and quiet. Seen it in a quick flicker of shadow across the window shade. What did he think in that last moment before the door burst in on him?
I closed my eyes and saw him sitting there on the bed, almost like he was waiting for them, held motionless with anticipation. He wouldn’t have tried to run or fight or do anything. What would have been the point? I imagined him easing back against the wall, giving the cops the same knowing look his old man had used on a similar bed, in a similar motel, many years before.
It was a look of resigned awareness. A man watching his life play out in front of him, accepting it with all its faults and contradictions, without question. Seeing things the way they were and knowing it was the way they had to be.
Liz looked up from the paper and saw my expression. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
I smiled back and got up to get more coffee. “Like what?” I asked, giving nothing away.
Secrets accumulate in relationships like cholesterol in the blood, silently choking off the connection between two people, until one day someone’s heart explodes.
I was learning to be a patient man.
Now, turn the page for a taste of the debut Oliver Olson novel:
FOLLOW THE MONEY
1
“There was blood everywhere.” Jim Carver leaned back in his chair, chewing a mussel cooked in saffron. “At least that’s how the papers described it. Apparently he was covered with it when they found him, out in his front yard, stammering like an idiot about someone killing his wife.”
Each time he moved, the luxurious blue fabric of his shirt shimmered in the soft light. I’d never seen a shirt so well tailored, so textured. It practically screamed the word money. I wanted to come right out and ask him how much it cost, but I’d known him less than an hour.
We were eating lunch at an overpriced restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. I, of course, had never been there before, but the staff knew Carver by name when we walked in. The cheapest thing on the menu was the soup du jour, at fourteen dollars a cup. Between Carver, Tom Reilly, and me, lunch was well north of a hundred bucks. While he sat there and told me about a gruesome murder and the trial that followed — which I remembered watching on television when I was a kid — all I could think of was the cost of the lunch. Somewhere in the middle of it I realized I had $87.13 in my checking account. Good thing lunch was on Carver. I would have had to borrow money to pay for it, if my credit was even any good anymore. It made me smile. My life was ridiculous.
I had been employed by the international law firm of Kohlberg & Crowley for all of four hours. I was one of twenty second-year law students who started my summer job with the firm that morning. “Summer associates,” we were called, as opposed to real associates, like Tom Reilly, and partners, like Carver. It was the beginning of a three month job interview that all began with projects the firm had picked for us on our first day. Mine involved a murder, a former United States senator, and a jumble of procedural nonsense that I couldn’t even begin to understand. So I sat and listened and nodded my head and tried not to do or say anything stupid. I couldn’t believe I would be working on a case that had once been so famous, or infamous, I should say. Jim Carver went on.
“You remember the story, of course.” Carver was right about that. “James Steele was a United States senator at the time. A U.S. senator claiming someone broke into his house and stabbed his wife in the bathtub. Nothing stolen, no apparent motive. He says he didn’t hear anything until it was too late because he was in another part of the house. When he finally hears a scream, he runs upstairs, down the hall, and, as he’s going into the bathroom where his wife is, someone else is running out. The person running out slashes at him with a knife and pushes him back. Steele falls, hits his head on the baseboard, and by the time he’s out of his daze the intruder is long gone.” Carver pried a mussel open with a tiny fork and glanced at Reilly.
Reilly continued the st
ory. “So Steele sees his wife in the tub. Apparently she’s still struggling, but the tub’s full of water.” Reilly drank some iced tea. His tone was casual, like he was describing a football game he watched on television. Twenty years Carver’s junior, and not yet the multimillionaire many times over that Carver surely was, Reilly’s shirt did not captivate me in the same way. It was obviously down an order of magnitude. Reilly set his tea down and leaned back in his chair.
“Then, at 8:52, Steele calls 911. Turns out, Steele is flustered and transposes the numbers in his address so there’s a mix up and the cops aren’t sure exactly where to go. During the 911 call, Steele sets down the phone for a few minutes. He says he’s checking on his wife. He comes back to the phone and the 911 operator suggests to Steele that he pull the body out of the tub so he can administer CPR. Steele says he will and he’s gone off the phone for a few more minutes.”
I broke in. “So he admits handling the body and moving it?”
“Right. That’s why he’s covered in blood when the cops get there.”
“So he completely messed up the crime scene?”
“Exactly.” Reilly poked the air with his cocktail fork. “Now, it isn’t until Steele comes back on the line the second time that he mentions to the operator that he’s Senator Steele. Once that comes out, the cops know exactly where to go. When they get there, they find Sharon Steele with thirty-nine stab wounds all over her body laying dead in the middle of the bathroom floor.”
The table went quiet. Carver sorted through the empty mussels, looking for another and not finding it. The clinking of shells in a bowl of broth was an odd counterpoint. The guy at the next table coughed and I glanced over at him. He was bald, with a thick moustache and touristy street clothes. He looked as out of place as I felt. Then the waiter arrived with the food and I took a bite of the best damned ham and cheese sandwich I’ve ever had. A twenty-two dollar ham and cheese sandwich. Both immoral and awesome at the same time.
The Flaming Motel Page 28
