Eyes Wide Open

My brain throbbed with the memory of how I’d once been in the same room with this gruesome murderer. Houvnanian.

I went over to the bed and closed my eyes-a fourteen-year-old’s distant recollection rushing back at me through the haze of time.

The blond dude in the Hawaiian shirt going on about how great Charlie was. He and Charlie, rushing out to Phil’s Jag. The anger and humiliation on their faces when they returned. My father and Phil laughing at them. The curses, the pointed fingers, accusations. Russell Houvnanian’s dark, laser-like eyes and, with what I now knew, that restrained yet foreboding grin. Thank you for your time…

I was being drawn in.

And I wasn’t even trying to stop it.

So many mysteries wound into my past: Charlie. My father. Evan. It was almost as if Charlie knew it and was trying to keep me away.

But I wasn’t going away.

I wrapped my arms around my chest against the chill. In a minute I was asleep.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“I think I found something,” I said.

Sherwood’s look suggested I was becoming a nuisance fast. “You think you found something; what…?” he replied with an edge of irritation.

I took out the papers I had folded in my jacket. “I think I found the connection between Evan and Walter Zorn.”

I’d called him as soon as I had awakened the next morning. Grudgingly, he agreed to give me a couple of minutes. It came with the promise that if what I had didn’t go anywhere this would be the last time I’d bother him. Along with the looser commitment that if that happened, I’d be on a plane back to New York that afternoon.

He slumped back into his squeaky chair with a glance at his watch, then back at me, impatiently. “Your meeting, doc…”

I pushed the papers across his desk. “Yesterday I heard on the news that Zorn had worked a couple of high-profile cases back when he was on the force in Santa Barbara. One was the Veronica Verklin murder-”

“Don’t tell me your nephew Evan was a fan of sixties porn?” Sherwood clucked, rocking.

I let that pass. “The other was Russell Houvnanian.”

I let that name settle until he gave me an almost indecipherable nod, his noncommittal gray eyes seeming to say, Go on.

“My brother Charlie lived on the Riorden Ranch for a while.”

He furrowed his brow. “Your brother was a follower of Russell Houvnanian?”

“Not a follower. He only lived there for a while. It was the sixties… The early seventies, to be exact. He was rootless. A lot of people found their way there. He claims he was only there for the music and the drugs. Why, you think he prepped for his current status in life with a career at IBM?”

This time, Sherwood shot me a grin, the tiniest encouragement to go forward.

“He said he just hung out there for a couple of months. Long before anything bad happened. Charlie was a musician back then and Houvnanian was trying to raise money for a record.”

“And the kicker to this is what, doc?” The detective leaned back in his chair. “Knock me out.”

“The kicker is you were trying to find a connection between Evan and Zorn. I found one. I thought you might…”

“I might what, doc?” He rose back up, locking his meaty fingers together and dropping them on the desk. “Russell Houvnanian was attempting to arrange financing for your brother’s career and you thought I’d go, Oh, we should check this out! You following me at all on just how this is sounding? Anyway, we’re talking what here, thirty some-odd years ago?”

“Thirty-seven,” I said. I heard exactly how it sounded.

“And so you’re saying exactly what?” Sherwood said. “Zorn and your brother shared this six-degrees-of-separation thing, and now, half a lifetime later, the guy tries to contact his son?”

“I’m not sure what I’m saying,” I said, my tone rising. “Other than it’s a connection. Something. ”

“And this connection…” He picked up the articles I had slid over to him. “It’s to prove exactly what-that your nephew didn’t kill himself after all? That he-let me get this straight-had some other motivation to climb on up there? To go off his medications. After he’d threatened to kill himself. And excuse me if I appear completely pigheaded here, but… isn’t everyone who had an association with Houvnanian, uh… in jail? Like for the rest of their natural fucking lives?”

“No,” I said. “They’re not.”

“They’re not?”

I pointed to the Examiner ’s article on Susan Pollack I had printed and pushed it across to him. He took out his reading glasses and scanned it, looking back up at me when he was done.

“You’re saying what now? That this follower of his, this Susan Pollack, has something to do with your nephew’s death? You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to deal in facts. Not fantasies. It was a suicide! The kid jumped off a cliff.”

I knew there was no one else here I could count on. What I’d said in that TV interview had surely taken care of that. Just people with zero interest in reversing their findings. On a case that had already been put to bed.

And now I was implying the so-called suicide was tied into a horrific, decades-old crime.