Eyes Wide Open

Charlie and his Hawaiian-shirt 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 hell out. “ What are you, fucking crazy? ” he exclaimed. The surfer dude was seething. Charlie, veins popping, jabbed his finger at my dad-“ You’ve fucking 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

G oogle 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 sexual 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.