by Andrew Gross
“You found something, didn’t you?”
“Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves… But instead of just ‘washing my hands of it,’ ” he said with a smirk, “I went back out to the rock-not that I was buying much of what you were selling, understand-and started asking around.” He picked up the muffin and started tearing it apart on the paper plate. “Someone saw Evan there-the day it happened. Around five thirty… Heading to the rock.”
My blood was revving, and I had the feeling he was holding something back. I waited while he made a shambles of the muffin. “And…?”
“And…” He looked back up at me. “It seems he wasn’t alone.”
Those words hit me like a bus slamming into a wall at a hundred miles an hour.
First it was the possibility that maybe I wasn’t so off the deep end after all-Zorn, Evan, Susan Pollack, the two sets of “eyes” leading back to Houvnanian.
Then I realized that that, in itself, couldn’t be why Sherwood, the last person who had a reason to buy into this, was there.
“It was a woman, right?” I stared at him, my blood surging. And then I knew! “ It was her . Susan Pollack. She was with him!”
“Look, we can’t be sure,” Sherwood said, finally jamming a crumbled piece of muffin in his mouth. “I don’t want us to be like ‘buds’ or anything, but a street vendor spotted them together, as Evan was heading toward the rock. I showed the guy a photo of her and he couldn’t be entirely sure. She was a ways away and was wearing sunglasses and a cap. Smoking.”
My mind immediately darted back to the person in the car outside Charlie’s apartment. She was in a drawn-down cap. Behind a car window.
Then she tossed out her butt at me.
“But you think it’s true.” My blood was hard to hold back. “You must, or else you wouldn’t be here.”
“What I think, doc-and trust me, it’s all I’m thinking-is that it’s worth checking out. Just too bad you had to be heading home today, after investing all this time. Would’ve been nice to have the company.”
My face edged into a grin, a surge of anticipation filling me up expansively. Sherwood never once changed his expression. He only twisted his face up at the half-stale muffin. “This is what you eat every day?”
“How did you find out where she is?” I asked.
“California Department of Corrections. I have made a few buddies washing my hands of things over the past twenty-five years. While technically she’s not on parole, the state requires a convicted felon to file a place of residency. Jenner’s just a dot on the map. A tiny fishing village. Maybe four, four and a half hours from here.”
“What are you telling your boss?” I asked him. I thought of the stack of unresolved cases on his desk.
“Less the better.” He smiled at me. “What are you telling yours?”
“That maybe she was right.” I smiled at him as well. “Maybe the sun out here has made me a little dizzy.”
“What sun?” Sherwood got up, dropped the rest of the muffin back on my tray with a twist of his mouth. “How about seven A.M. then? In front of the hotel. And in case there’s any doubt, I’ll bring breakfast.”
Chapter Thirty-One
I took the easy way out and left a message for Kathy, saying I needed one more day.
I told Charlie and Gabby optimistically that some things were up with Evan’s case. I canceled my appointments. My partners were probably starting to think I was crazy too.
I spent a lot of the rest of the day in my room, online.
I wanted to find out everything I possibly could about Russell Houvnanian. How he had gotten those people to commit the horrible acts they had. How Susan Pollack had fit in.
There was a ton of material online. Several books had been written on the case-one by an FBI investigator, Thomas Greenway, who had gone on to achieve some notoriety. Others by various journalists and criminologists, and even by a few of Houvnanian’s followers. I found articles going back to the 1970s. I devoured them like the medical background to a baffling case, fascinated by how Houvnanian had been able to lure a mix of educated and sometimes affluent young women and homeless drifters onto a collision course with crime and stir them to commit such a bloody act.
He had preyed on rootless young people in the hippie culture of the sixties and early seventies-women mostly, ones estranged from their families who had found their way to his ranch near Big Sur. Most came, like Charlie, for the lure of music, fun, and free drugs. It became a refuge from the materialistic world, a haven for local musical artists. They even put together a makeshift studio there. Houvnanian deftly crafted this twisted concoction-a Garden of Eden protecting cast-off children against the encroaching evil of the outside world. Drugs were a constant, as was sex, with interchangeable partners. Houvnanian himself was said to be the father of several children by women on the ranch.
They tried to get their recordings produced-always driving down to L.A., badgering known producers. I thought of Charlie at my father’s house. That was the way Houvnanian hoped to spread his message-his bizarre concept of the End of Days-to the popular culture. Houvnanian had a way of interpreting the songs of the Byrds and the Doors to back up his own apocalyptic gospel. He came to believe that the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” was written specifically for him. He looked at Jim Morrison’s tragic death as a sign pointing to him, like John the Baptist paving the way for Jesus, foretelling his impending martyrdom.
In the summer of 1973, the paranoia seemed to intensify, fueled by a mixture of drugs and religion and repeated attempts by Paul Riorden and the police to get Houvnanian and his followers off the property. Several of the followers either left or were expelled. The locals around the ranch grew alarmed. People were saying there were LSD-addled orgies and blood rituals and threats against society taking place. Riorden pushed to close down the commune.
According to Greenway, Susan Pollack had spent a year at Swarthmore. Her dad was a managing director of Bache and Co., then a major Wall Street brokerage house. Another follower, Sarah Strasser, had a father who was a successful car dealership mogul from Seattle. Others, like Tel Richards of Beaumont, Texas, were simply drifters who’d had criminal records since their early teens.
In July of 1973, Houvnanian and two cronies drove down to Santa Barbara to appeal to Riorden and get him to back off his threats to pressure his ex-wife to shut down the ranch. They also went to see George Forniciari, whom one of his followers knew, to seek his help in purchasing the property. Both of them refused. Paul Riorden even called his ex-wife Sandy, Houvnanian’s sometime benefactor, a “misguided slut.”
Houvnanian drove back home that night in a rage, and a new sense of finality took over the ranch: The “final stage” had begun. There were three days of nonstop revelry on LSD, fueling everyone’s fears that their world of “peace and harmony” was at an end. The words of the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” were twisted into some kind of end-of-the-world prophecy: “A time to kill, a time to cast away stones.” Houvnanian painted Riorden and his wealthy class as devils. He got his most ardent followers to believe that only an act of “pious bloodletting” would protect them against what was to come. They began to look at their commune as a place of impending betrayal-aptly named Gethsemane, where Judas had betrayed Jesus-and Paul Riorden and his family as the “devils,” like the Romans, who would one day come for them. If Judas had not handed over Jesus, Houvnanian preached, “Jesus would have ruled the earth for two thousand years.”
There were various accounts of exactly how many people set out in the commune’s 1967 VW van to head back down to Santa Barbara on September 7, 1973, but in the end, the horrific acts were not in dispute: nine people brutally murdered. Five were convicted on nine counts of first-degree murder. Three more, including Susan Pollack, were convicted of being accomplices and abetting these acts.
Houvnanian was still serving out multiple life sentences at the California state super-max penitentiary at Pelican Bay.
Head spinning,
I shut the computer. I called the restaurant and ordered a meal. I set a wake-up call for six A.M. I didn’t know where anyone-Zorn, Evan, Charlie, Susan Pollack-was fitting in.
My dinner came and I turned on the TV. I found a ball game on ESPN. I realized I’d now been out there for six days. I felt like my whole life had shifted on its axis and altered in just a few days.
I was a little tired, and part of me knew I should make it an early night. But my blood was pumping and I sat back down at the desk, where my computer was. This had become the only place I could feel at home.
I logged back on and did a search on “Houvnanian,” feeling like I was close to something, scrolling to the third and fourth pages for additional links. I came upon a summary of the trial proceedings posted by a reporter with the Santa Barbara Clarion .
The trials were pretty much a slam dunk for the state. All the defendants were tried separately. The killers were amateurs and careless and had barely even made an attempt to hide their tracks. Fingerprints were left at the scenes. In blood. Articles of clothing. Most even helped convict themselves with their own rambling testimonies.
Susan Pollack pled guilty to helping to hide the murder weapons back on the ranch and washing down the inside of the van.
I’d had enough. I sat back and put my hands on the sides of my head and rubbed my temples. The lids of my eyes were so heavy. I didn’t know what was in store for us tomorrow.
But someone had been with Evan just before his death.
And I was sure Susan Pollack was involved.
I was about to turn the computer off when I happened to scroll down farther ahead and noticed something. I pulled it closer to me, forcing my eyes open.
It was the transcript of a speech given by Houvnanian at the time of his sentencing. In a rambling jeremiad, he blamed the rich for their victims’ deaths, their pawns the police, the lawyers who argued against him, the nonbelievers out there who doubted who he was. He ranted that it served no purpose to put him away, “no matter for how long, even for life.” The social turmoil and upheaval he foretold in End of Days would come to pass.
“You can put me in the strongest prison,” he declared, “in the smallest cell, let me rot for a hundred years,” but one day he’d be back, he said, just like Jesus had come back, “to finish what was begun.”
A moment ago I had been exhausted, but now I felt wired and breathless again.
“On that day of judgment, or even the hour,” Houvnanian said to the judge, “no one will know. Not those who think they hold the power; not their pawns who enforce their will. Not even the sleeping child will know…
“It’s like a man who goes away for a long time and puts his servants in charge of the house. He gives them tasks, duties, but they don’t know when he will return. Only the master will know. Watch,” the self-proclaimed messiah warned, “for no one knows when the master will choose to come back, or in what manner. It might be in the morning, or at midnight, when everyone is asleep. Watch, ” he repeated-the lawyer’s account said he was grinning-“lest he come back suddenly and find you sleeping.”
Suddenly the eyes on Evan and Walter Zorn flashed into my mind.
I almost heard Houvnanian saying it himself-as I’d heard him nearly forty years ago at my father’s house.
“Watch!”
Chapter Thirty-Two
T he night was so still, he recalled, even all these years later, the only sound he heard was the lapping of tiny waves against the sides of the pool.
They made their way through the ornate iron gate out front, snaking across the grounds in the dark to the sprawling house.
In back, there was the pool, kidney shaped, blue lit, a breeze blowing in from the sea. They heard laughter, the sounds of wineglasses clinking. Music playing. “ Bad, bad, Leroy Brown…”
Through the glass doors that opened to the back, the sight of a man and a woman dancing a bit drunkenly, two others at the long wooden table who seemed to be into themselves. Decades from now, he realized, when everything else about them was forgotten-who they were, what they did in their lives, the piles of money they had amassed-what would happen here tonight would be the one thing that would make everyone remember.
Pigs.
Grunting sounds came from nearby, from the fancy pool house off to the side. The group of them snaked around in the shadows and saw a man with long dark hair in a white cotton shirt, his jeans down at his ankles, fucking his blond cutie from behind, her palms supporting her against the pool table and her bare ass thrusting. With relish, the thought crossed his mind that he’d like to join in. Just drop the old trou and go, Surprise, kids-company! But instead he motioned to Carla and Squirrel to do what they had to do to them first and then to wait for their word.
That wasn’t who they’d come for.
He and Sarah Jane and Tel went around to the front, cutting through a row of yuccas and pines. The house was low, Spanish style, a sloping tiled roof and white stucco walls. He’d been there once before, trying to reason with the man, trying to make a proposition. Show them the way. But he wouldn’t listen. Now they were only doing what they had to do. The only course that was left to them, right?
The front door was of heavy wood with black iron hardware. Like a mission door, rounded on top. Sarah Jane wore a gauzy tie-dye top with a red bandana around her hair. Tel, his hair tied into a long ponytail, wore a dark poncho. They held at the door a few moments, the sounds of merriment dancing around them. He took out a blade. Tel tucked the gun into his pants. There was no sign of wavering in anyone’s eyes. He knew they loved him. They had ridden with him when it had just been fun and games, frolic and music.
And they were here with him now, when it was about to turn ugly and bad.
He always told them, nothing was evil if it came from love.
“Party time!” he said, and rang the bell.
Pig Number One came to the door-the man himself-in a floral shirt with a glass of wine, his grin evaporating as he saw who it was. “Russell?” He must’ve shit in his pants, knowing what they were there for and that his days were about to end. He looked so confused. “What are you doing here?”
“You told me, ‘ Drop in anytime, Russ.’ So, guess what, Paul, we’re here!”
They pushed past him into the house, Tel dragging Pauly-boy along. The sounds of merriment came to a stop.
Suddenly all eyes fixed on them. Riorden’s pretty wife stopped dancing. “Who are they, Paul?”
Tel took out the gunny-gun-gun.
Suddenly everyone realized, which, he recalled, sent his dick to the moon.
Maybe one of the gals screamed. Who could recall? There was a lot of screaming later on. A shot rang out from outside, from by the pool. A woman’s squeal, pitched in terror. “No, no, please, no, no…”
Then two more shots. Followed only by the most delicious silence.
Carla and Squirrel appeared at the back doors. Riorden’s wife began to whimper.
“C’mon, everyone”-he looked around the room-“why so glum?”
“What do you want from us, Russell?” Paul Riorden asked, reaching for some kind of last authority.
He grinned. “What do I want?”
He never gave him an answer. Even now, all these years later, he really wasn’t sure what he wanted that night. He put his hands behind his head and rested a leg over his knee, light from the guard’s station darting off his yellow jumpsuit.
Maybe just to pay someone back. At last.
Maybe to take a piece of what he always felt was his. The good life. He’d never know it.
Maybe it was just to let the evil out. It had been in him so long.
He nodded to Sarah Jane, who went over to the stereo and turned the volume way up high.
“It’s time, everyone.” Party time.
Time for the devil to sprout his horns.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“I think I found something last night,” I said to Sherwood, who was doing seventy on Highway 101 the next m
orning, heading up the coast.
“What?” He glanced over from behind the wheel.
“What all the eyes are about. The ones on Zorn and Evan.”
Sherwood flashed me that skeptical glower of his, taking a gulp of coffee from a paper cup. “It’s a long drive, doc. I’ve got nowhere to go.”
I told him what I had come upon last night in Houvnanian’s trial transcript. The killer’s psychotic rambling at his sentencing in front of the judge. I had written it down and read it out loud, pausing each time as the killer had uttered, “ Watch! ”
“That’s what the eyes mean . They’re warnings. They’re prophesying his return.”
Sherwood’s face scrunched, but he kept his gaze straight ahead. “You’re saying this is all about some kind of revenge? On Zorn and Evan. All these years later?”
“Zorn handled Houvnanian’s case. He helped put him away.”
“And your nephew ? ”
Evan-I admit I couldn’t quite answer that yet. Other than this growing suspicion that my brother was holding something back from me.
“Look,” I said, “I dug a little deeper after I read this. Zorn was only part of the police team in Santa Barbara that investigated Houvnanian. His boss on the case was someone named Joe Cooley, his lieutenant. I Googled him. Turns out he’s dead too. He was killed in a car accident in Marin County back in 1991.”
“That’s nineteen years ago,” Sherwood said.
I went on. “And one of the FBI investigators, this guy named Greenway. He even wrote a book on Houvnanian. It was sort of a bestseller back in the late seventies. Twenty-two years ago, his wife found him facedown in his pool. It went down as a suicide-by drowning.”
Sherwood eyed me a couple of beats, allowing himself the slightest smile. “And all this proves what, doc? Blow me away…”
“I’m simply saying if we looked into these other cases, what are the chances we might find something in the form of an open eye on those victims too?”
