Eyes Wide Open Part 11

The first doc.u.ment he found was the 10-05, the report filed by the responding officers at the scene.

There were signs of a struggle. The lamp cord wrapped around his neck. Body found at the couch in front of the TV. Apparently the old guy stuck mostly to himself. Before moving up, he'd spent twenty years on the Santa Barbara force. Worked a couple of high-profile cases back in the day. Retired with the rank of inspector, senior grade.

It was a small community and Sherwood had never seen him around at any of the bars or cafes where cops generally hung out.

What the h.e.l.l would Zorn possibly have wanted with Evan?

Sherwood leafed through the crime scene photos. The victim's eyes were bulging. He looked like he'd put up quite a fight. Just run out of strength. Zorn was a big guy and not one who would go down easy.

Robbery did seem likely.

Satisfied, Sherwood tapped the photos back into a pile. He'd done what he'd promised. He told the doc he'd take a look, and he had. He saw nothing that connected the old cop to Evan. This kid Miguel was probably just trying to make some hay. To be safe, he'd mention to Velez he ought to run Estrada's prints anyway.

And that if Evan's name ever happened to come up to let him know.

As he was putting the crime scene photos back in the file, another dropped out. It had been taken during Zorn's autopsy.

Sherwood picked it up and looked at it, almost randomly. It was a close-up of what appeared to be cut marks on the victim.

Cut marks, Sherwood saw, staring closer, on what appeared to be the underside of the dead detective's tongue.

An asterisk, Velez had mentioned.

It appeared to be kind of a circle with a red dot in the center of it, enclosed in two irregular curved lines.

Even a traffic cop knew no burglar left a mark like that.

Suddenly his heart came to a stop. He adjusted his gla.s.ses and looked closer.

No f.u.c.king way, Sherwood said to himself. Can't be . . .

He blinked, bringing the photograph close to his eyes. Looking at it one way, it appeared to be nothing-simply random, unconnected cut marks.

But if you turned it another way, and he did-and stared at it from another angle-there it was, plain as f.u.c.king day. Staring right back at him.

An eye.

"Sonovaf.u.c.kingb.i.t.c.h," Sherwood muttered, taking off his gla.s.ses.

An open eye.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

The six o'clock news carried an update on the Zorn murder.

A pretty Asian reporter stood in front of an undistinguished, white ranch house, explaining that the retired Santa Barbara detective had been strangled in his home, in what the police were describing as an apparent robbery. She said how Zorn's drawers and closets had been rifled through and a locked metal box in his desk was pried open and emptied.

I was on the bed in my hotel room, hoping that Sherwood might call me back, when the news report came on.

The reporter said Zorn had lived quietly in the area for almost ten years after he retired from the Santa Barbara force. For a while he had volunteered in local youth programs. Then he pretty much just kept to himself, battling some health issues.

In his hometown of Santa Barbara, the woman reported, Zorn had been a decorated policeman and a respected detective. He had even worked some high-profile homicide cases going all the way back to the 1960s. There was the Veronica Verklin murder, which had made national headlines, in which a celebrated p.o.r.n star was believed to have been beaten to death by her convict ex-husband, but eventually it turned out to be her boyfriend/director.

And Zorn had also been involved in the investigation of the Houvnanian murders, in which a charismatic cult figure and four followers committed a series of drug-induced ritual killings of affluent residents in the Santa Barbara hills. This was back in 1973, and it had created national headlines.

The group lived in a commune on a ranch up near Big Sur once owned by Paul Riorden, one of the victims. The perpetrators were all convicted of several counts of murder and were serving life sentences.

The mention struck a chord with me. The Riorden Ranch. I was pretty sure Charlie had lived there for a while. Back in the early seventies. Well before the killings.

The reporter closed by saying the police were appealing to the local residents for any leads.

I sat there for a while, the idea of this vague connection knotting my stomach. Charlie had always distanced himself from the terrible things that had happened on the ranch, always shrugging it off by saying he left long before then and only hung around there "for the drugs and the girls." It was all part of the lore that made his past so captivating.

I watched the news through the sports, then I decided to call him. He answered with a kind of a downtrodden tone. "Hi, Jay . . ." I'd spoken to him twice already that day, and both times, he sounded sullen and kind of medicated. "Did they find any connection between Evan and that cop?"

"No, not yet," I said. "But tell me about Russell Houvnanian."

He paused, the delay clearly letting me know I had taken him by surprise. "Why do you want to know about that?" he asked me.

I didn't want to fully divulge why. Right now I didn't have anything-only this vague, decades-old connection that probably wasn't a connection at all. Plus, I knew how Charlie's mind operated and didn't want him to get all worked up over things that might lead nowhere.

"You lived there for a while," I said. "Didn't I always hear you knew him?"

Charlie's past was always so vague, so clouded by his many retellings, not to mention the drugs, that it was hard to know what was actually the truth and what wasn't.

"I was only there for a couple of months." His tone was halting, as if he were still trying to figure out where I was headed. "I was long gone before anything took place. You know how stuff like that always gets built up. Dad always liked to tell it that way. Like when he was trying to bang some chick and needed to wow her with one of his stories."

I kept on him. "But you were there." Years before, he had told me about the Rasputin-like effect Houvnanian had on his followers. The cultlike mix of religion, music, s.e.x, and drugs. "You met the guy, right?"

"Yeah, I met him," Charlie said. He didn't follow up for a moment, but when he did, it almost knocked the phone out of my hand.

"You met him too, Jay."

Chapter Twenty-Four.

I drove right over and we sat on the lawn chairs in back. My brother recounted an episode that for years was buried in the most remote corner of my mind because I had never given it the slightest significance.

I was around fourteen, visiting my father in L.A. He had moved out there after selling his first business and had bought a sprawling ranch home high in the Hollywood Hills.

He wasn't working at that time and his girlfriend then was a waitress at the Playboy Club. She and a couple of her equally mind-boggling friends were hanging out in the pool, which I remember had most of my attention. A buddy of my dad's was there as well, a goateed so-called real estate entrepreneur named Phil Stella, who I later found out was an ex-con and whose main role then was pretty much as a supplier of hot chicks whom he referred to as his "wards," but who I eventually realized were actually working for him.

That afternoon, Charlie and a couple of his friends dropped in. One was a blond surfer type in a Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt, whom Charlie introduced as a record producer or something, and the other a thin, dark-featured guy in an embroidered blue caftan with long black hair and these intense, deep-set eyes.

All I remembered was the three of them animatedly trying to pitch my dad-who clearly wanted nothing to do with it-on the idea of anteing up several thousand dollars to help Charlie produce a record.

After the thousands he had spent on hospitals and lawyers bailing Charlie out of jails, Lenny wasn't biting.

"You remember what he did?" Charlie asked me, as if the scene had happened yesterday and was still vivid in his mind.

"You mean the guy you were with?" I asked, to get him to clarify.

"No. Dad," Charlie said with an edge. "You remember the rest of the story?"

What I did remember was my dad and Phil looking at each other amusedly and Phil shrugging. "I don't know, I'm a little intrigued. Why don't you go out to my Jag in the driveway?" Phil said. "There's an envelope in the glove compartment with a bunch of cash in it. Bring it in."

Charlie and his Hawaiian-s.h.i.+rt pal got all excited, their legs spinning like in the cartoons as they dashed out to the driveway. A minute later they returned, empty-handed and humiliated, faces flush with anger. Phil was cackling like a bully who'd just tripped a naive freshman in front of a group of girls. My father told Charlie and his loser friends to get the h.e.l.l out. "What are you, f.u.c.king crazy?" he exclaimed. The surfer dude was seething. Charlie, veins popping, jabbed his finger at my dad-"You've f.u.c.king shat on me for the last time!"

The longhair in the blue caftan just stood up with this cryptic half smile. He told Charlie to let it go, that they'd find the money somewhere else. That it wasn't right to treat your father with disrespect. He thanked Lenny for his time, casting a thin smile toward Phil, who sat there shaking his head as if they were the biggest rubes on the planet. The guy in the caftan said he was very sorry to bother them all. Then they all left. Afterward, my father and Phil just sat there laughing.

"That was Russell Houvnanian?" I said to Charlie in shock. I looked at him and conjured the scene I'd buried in my mind for more than thirty years. I don't think I even saw Charlie again for years after that. It was one of a thousand such moments. I'd never had another reason to bring it to mind.

"Yes." Charlie nodded dully. "That was him."

"And when did all the bad stuff happen?"

"The bad stuff . . . ?" Charlie said with a smile. "The bad stuff always happened, Jay. But if it's the Riorden murders you mean-six months, maybe a year later.

"Anyway," Charlie said, "it's all a little foggy to me too. It's been thirty-five years, not to mention a couple of hundred hits of LSD . . ." He looked at me. "Why is all this so important now?"

I told him the murdered detective, Zorn, was one of the original detectives on the Houvnanian case.

"Oh." I heard Charlie draw a breath and was expecting him to come back with, So what does this have to do with Evan and me?

Instead he said, "Listen, Jay, you've done what you can, maybe you oughta just head back home tomorrow . . ."

I already planned to pick up with Sherwood again in the morning. Maybe Zorn knew about Charlie's past and wanted to contact him through Evan. Not that I had any idea why.

"Charlie, there's a possibility this is somehow tied into Evan."

His eyes lit softly and he grinned, his ground-down teeth showing through his beard. "Now you're sounding a little crazy, Jay. Really, you've done all that you can, guy. Just go on home . . ."

"I will. Maybe in another day. But there could be something here, Charlie."

He was about to say something else, then simply nodded, his eyes kind of runny and sullen and his energy trailing off.

I said I'd talk to him tomorrow. His urgency to find the truth about his son suddenly seemed to have dimmed. I thought it could be just another swing of his mood-the finality of what had taken place sinking in.

I went back and called room service and ordered an onion soup and a burger. I thought maybe I should call Kathy, but this Houvnanian thing was suddenly gnawing at me.

I was intrigued. I was pretty much just a kid back then, and I didn't know much more about him than I'd read.

I took out my computer and went online.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

Google came back with thousands of hits on the man and the horrifying events that happened on September 7, 1973. It was dizzying. I opened a link from Wikipedia.

Russell Houvnanian was thirty-four when his name became synonymous across the globe with senseless, gruesome murder.

He had been a drifter, the son of a Tennessee minister. He was kicked out of the army for psychological issues, then drifted across the country doing odd jobs, spent time in prison in Oregon for car theft and s.e.xual battery. He moved down the coast to Northern California and took up on this commune at what became known as the Riorden Ranch, a wooded, undeveloped tract of sixty acres not far from Big Sur, which was owned by Sandy Riorden, the ex-wife of Santa Barbara real estate developer Paul Riorden.

The attached photo was the familiar one of Houvnanian being led away from the courthouse by a California marshal, leering and wild-eyed. He didn't look radically different from the image I had carried in my mind. Houvnanian was mysterious and charismatic, and he had a mesmerizing effect on rootless youths, the article read, "who flocked to Big Sur back then, attracted by drugs, music, free love, and a sense of connection, contained in his chimerical vision of evangelical prophecy and influenced by hallucinogenic drugs and rock music." He soon attracted a following. Paralleling himself with Jesus, he called his commune Gethsemane.

In Houvnanian's brain, heaven was a false paradise and had been invaded by the devil, and the earthly battle to retake it was being played out in California. The true gospel was conveyed through rock bands like the Byrds, the Doors, and the Beatles. The name he gave his brand of prophecy and social revolution-End of Days-described the battle between the forces of Truth, represented by the spiritual young, his flock, who sought out love and beauty, and the temporal agents of corruption and the devil: wealthy property owners and their local proxies, the police, who were trying to push his followers out of their "heavenly garden."

Houvnanian ultimately attracted a following of about sixty on the ranch, mostly runaway teens, musical wannabes, religious dreamers, all attracted to the environment he'd created of open s.e.x, rock music, and LSD.

Eventually, this celebration of beauty and music gave way to a cult of fear and paranoia. In August 1973, he convinced his followers that a series of brushfires near the ranch were the work of Satan's agents trying to force them out. Some of his threats of reprisal and a few minor acts of vandalism had attracted the attention of the local police, and the Riorden clan tried to force Sandy Riorden, herself a sometime follower, to shut down the commune.

On the night of September 7, 1973, Houvnanian and four "family" members broke into Paul Riorden's Santa Barbara mountain estate, interrupting a dinner party, and ritualistically murdered him and five of his guests. They tied them up and forced them to watch as each was ultimately stabbed repeatedly or shot, the last victim, according to the police, being Cici Riorden, Paul's new, young wife, and left cryptic symbols carved into their victims' bodies.

Conjuring the image of the gaunt, chillingly reserved cohort Charlie had brought up to my father's house that day sent a tremor down my spine.

That had been him!

The b.l.o.o.d.y murders, I went on to read, convinced Houvnanian's followers that the final chapter of the conflict between good and evil had now begun. After sleeping in their van, they went to the home of George and Sally Forniciari, another wealthy Santa Barbara couple who had rebuffed Houvnanian in an earlier attempt to purchase the ranch, and murdered them in a similar fas.h.i.+on.

That night they had driven back to Big Sur and rounded up his clan to leave for Arizona when police surrounded the ranch, led by tips from Riorden's sister, and arrested Houvnanian and several of his clan.

In all, Houvnanian and four of his followers, Telford Richards, Sarah Stra.s.ser, Nolan Pierce, and Carla Jean Blue, were convicted of nine counts of premeditated murder and sentenced to consecutive life sentences in California prisons.

Three others were convicted of aiding and abetting their actions and were currently serving thirty-five-year terms. One, John Redding, hung himself in his cell in 1978. Another, Alexandra Feuer, was released for medical reasons in 1998 and died shortly after from pancreatic cancer.

The third, Susan Jane Pollack, the daughter of a Wall Street executive, was set to be released in May 2010.

My eyes opened wide. That was four months ago.

Antic.i.p.ation wound through me as I went back to Google and searched the links, finding the headline I was looking for: SUSAN POLLACK, HOUVNANIAN ACCOMPLICE, RELEASED FROM PRISON.

It was from the San Francisco Examiner and was dated February 10 of this year.