Josh Mankiewicz

Cliff was a lonely person who made some foolish romantic choices.

You know, Cliff lost a lot of his friends to AIDS in the eighties and nineties.

So he was not just lonely.

He also had lost a lot of people and, you know, there's no way that that doesn't weigh on you.

So, you know, I think Danny figured out

Uh, that cliff didn't have a family and he didn't have a lot of close friends.

And I think they thought if, if we make this guy disappear, basically no one's going to notice in the amount of time that we need to clean out his house, sell the artwork and get all his money.

And were it not for Eddie, uh, they were just about right.

Yeah.

The real estate agent got a listing for the house and couldn't figure out why the person selling it wanted such a small amount of money for what was a house that was going to bring a lot more money, but they wanted to sell it like in the next couple of days.

Um,

the neighbors across the street who I think were sitting out on their porch having an afternoon cocktail realized they hadn't seen Cliff in a while saw a U-Haul across the street with somebody putting stuff into it and they thought like that's kind of weird I had no idea Cliff was moving they called the cops

So, and Eddie, you know, Eddie, who was waiting for Cliff at the Festival of Lights, which is an annual thing in Palm Springs.

It's the event that Eddie and I were walking around during that you saw on the show.

But, you know, it was Eddie who first thought something's wrong.

Cliff and Eddie clearly were very good friends.

And Eddie, he was like, no, no, something's wrong.

If Cliff had left town, I'd know about it.

And he went into the cops.

But the fact that Bustamante was taking stuff out of the house, some of which he was putting in the U-Haul and some of which was in his hotel room, which police found, everything about that said that Cliff was being victimized in some way.