“You just remembered that now?” Hollywood asked.
“Yeah,” Affronti said.
“Wait until I come back. I’m going to take a shower.”
With that, Hollywood and Rugge left to go to Rugge’s house. While they were gone, Affronti or Skidmore could have just let Nick go, but they didn’t. They left him tied up and just waited for Hollywood’s next order. Occasionally, one of them would wander into the bedroom and tell Nick not to worry, that things would be OK. Considering his circumstances, Nick was apparently extremely calm. It seemed that he had accepted that this was the way things were going to be for a while; he would just sit there until Ben came around and straightened this mess out.
When Hollywood got back, he relinquished the van keys and let Affronti and Skidmore leave. A short while later, they realized Affronti had left his cell phone behind, so they came back to the apartment. When they got back, they saw that not only was Nick untied, but he was now smoking pot and sitting on the couch playing video games with his captors.
“Be cool,” Hollywood told Nick.
Affronti and Skidmore got the cell phone and went back to their houses. They didn’t alert anyone to the fact that Nick had been kidnapped. They thought it would “blow over.”
Hollywood then said that he had to get home to take care of some repairs so that his real estate agent could get his house on the market, so he left an unhappy Jesse Rugge in charge of Nick that night. The word babysitter was bandied about. With few options open to him at that point, Rugge decided to take Nick to his father’s house after all. They walked there—it was a few miles away—and Rugge asked his father if they could spend the night. His father, Barron Rugge, didn’t seem to notice that anything was amiss; he just figured that his son had a new—albeit younger—friend coming to visit. Even though his son was twenty and Nick was fifteen, Barron didn’t ask questions. He just said a quick hello and told Nick, “You can stay here if you want.” So he did.
Rugge assured Nick that this would be over soon, and he’d make sure Nick got home safely. Hollywood was just freaking out, is all. They’d get it straightened out.
I wonder how Nick slept that night. I wonder if he lay his head on that strange pillow and thought that tomorrow this would all be over. His brother would show up, they’d clear things up—maybe his parents would have to pay Ben’s debt and get Hollywood’s windows fixed. Nick was so good at acting cool, no matter what was happening. I wonder if he had any clue that things really weren’t going to be OK, as Rugge was telling him. I wonder if he was scared.
CHAPTER 8
THE SEARCH BEGINS
Did I sleep that night? I’m not sure. After cleaning Nick’s room and taking my nap under the window, I had fought off conflicting feelings that ranged from fear to anger to doom.
Anger was the easy one, the one that I would have preferred to settle on. I was getting very angry with Ben, who I was sure was harboring Nick . . . at least, almost sure. If only Ben would call us back, then I could just be sure and be angry and get some sleep.
We had briefly wondered if Nick was at a new friend’s house. The day before he disappeared, he had brought a few friends over to play pool at our house, and Jeff had made his famous toasted peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for them while I was at work. One of the kids was new—Jeff had never seen him before.
It was when he left the house with those friends, only to return that night high and with the bulge in his pocket, that the trouble began. We thought it might have come from the new friend Jeff had seen with Nick earlier.
He shouldn’t have even been at our house, I thought of the unknown boy. If I were that mother, I would have made sure I knew where my son was. I would have had the phone number and called to make sure the kid’s parents were home. Who is this kid, anyway?
So I started calling around. I spoke to Nick’s best friend, Ryan, and several other of his close friends, but all of them told me they hadn’t heard from Nick and that he wasn’t with this new friend. We always left off saying that they needed to call me the minute they heard anything, no matter what, even if they thought it was going to get Nick grounded.
So it had to be Ben. It had to be—right?
But what if he was hurt? What if Nick had fallen into a ditch somewhere, and his leg was trapped, or he was unconscious, or . . .
No, he’s fine, I thought.
But what if he wasn’t fine?
Somehow, Sunday turned into Monday when I wasn’t paying attention. The sun was up, and Nick still wasn’t home. Thoughts of him being hurt and unable to call us kept crawling under my skin, but I pushed them back. Had to. I couldn’t allow myself to get stuck on thoughts like that or I’d be paralyzed with worry. I had to find Nick.
At one point, I’d had all of Nick’s friends’ parents’ phone numbers in my Palm program, but he’d erased them—by accident, he said. Now I had to search through his room to get the numbers back. I went through every notebook, every drawer and pocket, every little slip of paper. One by one, I made the calls, and I programmed the numbers back into my Palm as I went along.
Hello. This is Susan Markowitz. By any chance, have you seen my son Nick?
No.
I documented all of the calls, keeping notes on what everyone had said and who they suggested I try next. And in the midst of that, Ben showed up.
He hadn’t seen Nick.
And that’s when the room started spinning.
There Ben was, sitting in our family room, telling us he had been away in Arizona working a construction job with his uncle. He swore that he honestly hadn’t heard from Nick. He would tell us if he had. Did he have any idea where . . . ? No.
I didn’t hear much of the conversation after that. My mind was far, far away. I briefly tuned in to hear Ben mentioning how he’d hated me all the years he was growing up until he had a girlfriend who had a child. He said it was only then that he understood what it took to be a stepparent.
My mind drifted again. I don’t care. Where is Nick? Something is wrong. Nick is hurt. He needs me. Visions of him lying bloody on the side of a road came back, and I tried to push them away.
Jeff asked Ben if anyone was angry with him. Well, of course, I thought. Pick a name. Then I heard Ben mention something about money.
“Ben, you owe someone money?”
“No, Susan, it’s not like that.”
“I’ll write you a check right now.”
“I don’t owe him anything.”
Ben joined us in making phone calls, too, and one of the first people he called was Jesse James Hollywood. He left Hollywood a message. “Listen, I know we’re not on good terms, but I really need your help. My brother has been missing since yesterday morning, and if you hear anything, please let me know.”
It turned out that Ben did suspect Hollywood was involved, but not the way it was actually happening. One of the people Ben called that night mentioned that Nick might have been hanging out with Hollywood at a party or rave in Santa Barbara—the person made it sound like they were out having fun together.
So what Ben thought was that maybe Hollywood was purposely hanging out with Nick just to piss him off. Acting like a cool guy, befriending Nick so that he’d come home and tell stories that would drive Ben up a wall. What a jerk.
After a while, Ben got up to leave to see one of his friends, and I repeated my offer to write him a check. I didn’t connect the two events in my mind. I wasn’t thinking that the fact that Ben owed money to someone could have anything to do with Nick’s disappearance. I just couldn’t stand any more tension that day. Nick was missing, and I wanted everything else to be smooth so we could concentrate on what mattered.
When Ben left, I focused on making “Missing Person” posters and flyers. A few phone calls later, I had a roomful of volunteers ready to go pass them out around town. People headed to the mall, to the local schools, to the park—my goal was to get Nick’s face in front of everyone. Someone had to have seen him.
Jef
f went out to comb the area on his bike. He knew some of the trails Nick might have taken. Every time someone left the house, they took a piece of my hope with them. And every time they returned without Nick, that hope swirled down the drain.
It was August, and one of the hottest summers in decades, yet I found myself singing Christmas songs. There was comfort in Christmas songs. Silent night, holy night, all is calm . . .
Again and again, I told myself to stay calm and stay positive. We just hadn’t looked in the right place yet. We hadn’t turned over the right rock, or looked behind the right hill. He had probably fallen somewhere and was waiting for us to find him. I knew he was coming back, but it was horrible to wait and worry.
That night was worse than the one before. At least the night earlier, I had been able to reassure myself that Nick was probably with Ben. Now I had absolutely nothing. No hints, no clues.
Ben was confident that Nick had just run away to a friend’s house, probably due to the fight we’d had the night before—Nick had likely felt that he needed some space and had run off somewhere to stay with a friend for a few days. He’d turn up.
I didn’t believe it. The only time Nick had ever taken off before, he had gone straight to Ben, and he’d sworn to me he wouldn’t do it again. Nick didn’t break his promises.
Something is wrong. We have to find him.
The day after the kidnapping, the first person Hollywood went to confess his sins to was his lawyer. Not many twenty-yearolds have their own lawyers, and even visit them at home, but again, the Hollywood family wasn’t exactly typical. Stephen Hogg (pronounced “Hoag”), a heavy-set man with glasses and a gray ponytail, was not only the Hollywoods’ longtime lawyer, he was a family friend who had even come to Jesse’s Little League games. He had represented Hollywood on two previous criminal charges, and his wife, also a lawyer, represented him on civil matters.
Pacing and chain-smoking in the Hoggs’ backyard, Hollywood told him that his “friends” had beaten up and kidnapped the younger brother of a tough guy who had busted out his windows. He made it sound like his friends had done this without his consent.
“You know where he is?” Hogg asked.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“What are they doing with him? Have they got him tied up?”
“No, no, they’re all sitting around smoking grass, taking Valium, drinking beer, and playing video games.”
“You mean the brother, too?”
“Yeah, I think they’re all sitting around doing that.”
Hollywood wanted to know what could happen next.
“Look, if it is kidnapping, you can get up to eight years. If they asked for ransom, they could get a life sentence,” the lawyer told him.
Hollywood didn’t react, but he looked irritated. Stephen Hogg thought about it some more and decided that maybe the situation could be considered just “false imprisonment” rather than kidnapping. But in any case, it was still illegal.
“You have to get the boy back home. Call the police. If you’re the first one there, they’ll go easy on you.”
“I can’t. You don’t know these people. They’ll go off on my family.”
“Jesse, you’ve got to.”
Hollywood angrily refused, and when Hogg pressed the issue, he stormed out. At least, that was the lawyer’s version. One of Hollywood’s friends has a different take on it—according to him, Hollywood said that Hogg told him he was in so much trouble that he should “dig a deep hole.”
As Jesse James Hollywood was leaving, Hogg told him not to go home.
“Go somewhere where no one knows where you are, and call me.”
Hogg waited, but got no phone call, so he started paging Hollywood once an hour from 4:00 until 8:00 that night. He never called the police. He said later that he “didn’t have enough information.” A few hours later, by coincidence, Jack Hollywood called Stephen Hogg about a DUI case in Ventura. Jack and his wife, Laurie, were in Big Sur spending a few days at the gorgeous mountainside resort Ventana Inn and Spa. The couple had been separated, but the two were apparently trying to patch things up. Hogg put a damper on their romantic getaway when he told Jack that there was a problem with Jesse.
“What’s wrong? Is he OK?”
“Yeah, he’s OK, but this is serious. He is very much afraid,” Hogg said.
“Well, what’s it about?”
“It’s not something that we should discuss on the phone.”
“OK, well then, I’m going to be down tonight. Get ahold of Jesse and sit on him for me.”
Then Jack made a bunch of phone calls trying to track his son down—calling his pager, his cell phone, his girlfriend—to no avail. Jack called the lawyer back and asked him to get in touch with Jack’s good friend John Roberts, an alcoholic ex-gangster who had loaned Jesse the van to help him move out of his old house. Maybe John would know how to find his son. After all, Jesse thought of him as an uncle. They were close.
So Hogg called Roberts and asked him to come over, and he filled him in on what was going on. The two of them talked about what to do and mused about going to Santa Barbara together and bribing Nick to keep him quiet. They thought it would be a good idea to scare Nick a little and tell him they’d take him home if he promised to keep his mouth shut. But they decided against it.
John had more important things on his mind—now that he had his van back, he wanted to take it straight to the car wash and tell workers to clean it inside and out with solvent to hide any fingerprints. John could have called the police, but he “didn’t want to be involved.”
Jack and Laurie Hollywood got back to town about 2 a.m. At some point that day, the Hollywoods met up with Jesse Hollywood at his girlfriend Michelle Lasher’s house. But Jesse was not forthcoming; evasive was the word Jack Hollywood used. His son was angry that Stephen Hogg had told his dad what was going on. Jesse claimed that he had been trying to track Nick down all night, but that they must have moved to another house or something. Or maybe they had just let Nick go and then took off themselves. He wouldn’t tell his dad where Nick was or who was involved.
Next, Jack dropped his wife at home, then went on to John Roberts’s house. Roberts reiterated everything that Stephen Hogg had told him—that his son was involved in a kidnapping, that they were all at some friend’s house drinking and partying, and that Jesse was worried that when he let the kid go, they would all get arrested. Roberts volunteered to find out where Nick was and to go get him.
Back at Jesse Rugge’s house, Nick and Jesse had spent the morning on the couch watching television together. Barron Rugge and his wife, Jesse’s stepmother, were in and out of the house, never paying much attention to what was going on. Barron noticed the boys watching television that day, but he didn’t say anything to them and left again.
Jesse Rugge invited friends over for—what else?—partying. Seventeen-year-old Natasha Adams, sixteen-year-old Kelly Carpenter, and seventeen-year-old Graham Pressley all showed up while Nick was playing a James Bond video game on Rugge’s shabby couch. Rugge told them that Nick was his “friend from Los Angeles” who would be staying with him for a while. Graham Pressley sat and played video games with him while Nick enthusiastically talked about gaming.
They went out to the back patio and sat on some old lawn chairs, where Nick seemed comfortable around the new guests. There was even a moment when he laughed so hard at something Kelly Carpenter said that he almost fell over sideways in the rickety chair and landed in a large barrel cactus.
It took them a little while to question the whole “friend from Los Angeles” thing; what tipped them off was the way Rugge was ordering Nick around. For one thing, he told Nick to vacuum the carpet before they went out, which was an odd thing to ask of a visiting friend. For another thing, Rugge told the three teens not to let Nick use the phone.
Eventually, when Rugge wasn’t listening, Nick himself told Graham Pressley what had happened. He explained that he’d been beat up and thrown into a van and tha
t he had been kidnapped because of his brother Ben’s drug debt to Jesse James Hollywood. Graham told the girls, who were incredulous. Was Nick OK? Why didn’t he try to escape?
“I’m all right,” Nick told them. “I’m going to stick it out for my brother. As long as he’s OK, I’m OK.”
The stoned quintet went to Natasha Adams’s house. She noticed that Nick had some cuts and bruises from the beating he had received the previous day, and she helped him clean his wounds. Even so, she convinced herself that it didn’t seem like a “big deal.” And like all the others, “I was trying not to get involved,” she later said.
The girls nicknamed Nick “Stolen Boy.” They liked him, and so did Graham Pressley. Nick was only a year or so younger than they were, and they had easy conversations. He told them about a girl he liked and how he wanted to call her as soon as he got home. This was all the girls needed to hear—they launched into a barrage of advice about how to attract girls. Nick was amused and overwhelmed and gave Pressley a “What did I get myself into?” kind of look.
At one point, Adams went upstairs to use the bathroom, and when she got back, Rugge was unexpectedly gone. It turned out that he went to lunch with Hollywood and his girlfriend, Michelle Lasher, ostensibly to figure out what to do with Nick. Rugge had been trying to get in touch with Hollywood for a while by paging Ryan Hoyt. Each time he connected with Hollywood, Hollywood would just say things like, “Don’t worry; don’t worry. Make Nick your best friend.” But Rugge tired of this and wanted to see Hollywood in person to find out what his next orders were. What was going to happen to Nick? What was actually discussed at this lunch remained their secret.
It was the first time that Nick would be left without any of his original captors. Now he was just with the other teenagers: Natasha Adams, Kelly Carpenter, and Graham Pressley, who had been told not to mess with Hollywood’s plans. They knew what a loose cannon Hollywood was, and they all feared angering him. After all, look what he did when he was angry—he had already kidnapped and beaten up someone. No one wanted to stick his or her neck out and become Hollywood’s next target.
My Stolen Son Page 10