Andrew Gross - Eyes Wide Open

“Yeah, like all your weird coincidences, doc…” He spun the plastic chair around and sat, facing me. “I was just wondering what you had going on tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I know what I should be doing! Staff meeting at nine. Possible interview with a new surgical candidate at eleven. My high school senior’s pushing for a new computer, so I thought I’d take him to the Apple store…”

“Heading home?” He grinned amusedly. “So soon?”

“Yeah.” I sniffed back a wistful smile. “So soon…”

“Too bad,” Sherwood said. “I was hoping we might take a ride.”

“Since I met you, you’ve been telling me to get the hell away, Sherwood. Now you want to take me sightseeing. Where? ”

“Sonoma coast. Beautiful up there. Town of Jenner.”

“The Sonoma coast? It’s a nice offer. You want to have a picnic too?” I cut the sarcasm and pushed a corn muffin his way. “I’ve got a living to get back to. And a wife who thinks I’ve lost my mind…”

“I’m sorry about that, doc.”

“ ’Cause I’m out here, trying to connect these dots on my nephew’s death where there might not even be any frigging dots. So if you have something, Sherwood, tell me, and please, make it a good one, ’cause I’m really hanging by a thread right now, trying to do the right thing. Jenner, what’s there?”

“Susan Pollack.” The detective looked at me.

His answer hit me like a bludgeon. I waited for him to grin, like he was only screwing around. But he didn’t grin. He just kept staring at me with those heavy gray eyes.

Except now there was kind of a spark lit up in them. And it looked a lot like vindication.

“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.”

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.