Eyes Wide Open

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, sex, 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 shirt, 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.”