Eyes Wide Open

by Andrew Gross

  “If you remember?”

  “We were only together for a couple of months. I hitched around everywhere back then. We hung around for a while in the desert. Did a lot of drugs. Then I moved on.”

  “You moved on?”

  “Picked up.” My brother shrugged. “With someone else. I never knew what happened to her.”

  “So only someone who knew you from back then—from the ranch,” Sherwood said, “could have put the two of you together?”

  Charlie nodded weakly. “Yes.”

  “And how would that same person know where to send these to you now?”

  This time Charlie looked up. His face was a beaten blank. “I don’t know the answer to that question, detective. These past days, I’ve asked myself that a hundred times.”

  “But you now know why . . . ?” he pressed, and glanced at me. “Why they would have sent this to you?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said, moistening his lips. “I know why.”

  “Her name was Sherry,” I said, picking up the photos, “but she went by the name Katya back then. You remember how Susan Pollack said everyone had their own names on the ranch? Susan was Maggie, short for Magdalena. Houvnanian was what?” I looked at my brother.

  “Paul,” he said softly.

  “Paul,” Sherwood said. “You mean like from the Gospels?”

  “No.” Charlie sniffed with a slight smile. “McCartney. He thought he wrote directly to him.”

  Sherwood smiled drily too. “So who is this woman?” The detective looked at Charlie and then at me.

  “Initially, the police were led to Houvnanian by the threats he had made against Riorden,” I answered. “And by Riorden’s sister. Also, the ranch’s white van was spotted in the vicinity of the crime scenes. He and a few of his inner circle were picked up and held in the local jail on trespassing and minor drug possession charges. Walter Zorn and his team went around the ranch and questioned people there. Some of them closed ranks. Others apparently decided to talk. It’s all in Greenway’s book. Katya—Sherry,” I said, correcting myself, “was one of them.”

  Sherwood fixed on Charlie, the truth starting to settle on him. “I guess what I’m about to hear is that you were another, huh, Mr. Erlich?”

  “Yes.” Charlie rubbed his beard. “I was.”

  “And what was your name back then?”

  “Chase.”

  “Chase . . .” Sherwood let out a breath. “So what was it you told them, Charlie?”

  “It’s all detailed in the book,” I said. “Walter Zorn and Joe Cooley conducted the initial interviews. Katya first revealed the identities of those who went along with Houvnanian to Santa Barbara. Charlie led them to a pond on the property where some of the evidence had been buried. A bandana. A poncho. Articles of clothing worn during the murders. Ultimately they found the murder weapons there too.”

  “So you testified against them, Mr. Erlich. You were part of the trial?”

  “No. Once the evidence against Houvnanian and the others became overwhelming—they had prints, the murder weapons, their own incriminating confessions—the names of those followers who talked were concealed. Their testimonies weren’t needed at trial.”

  Charlie looked up. “We were only there for the damn music. And the drugs. Russell had this ring around him. People gave him whatever he wanted. He made it feel like you were blessed to be in his graces. We weren’t into what took place down there. When it happened, we just wanted to get out.”

  “You and Katya,” Sherwood said to him. “Sherry.”

  Charlie nodded.

  “You see it now, don’t you?” I asked Sherwood. “How it all fits. Susan Pollack was with Evan when he went up to that rock. And I have the proof.”

  “The proof?” Sherwood said, furrowing his brow.

  I showed him the sneaker. Evan’s sneaker. Sherwood’s gray eyes widened. He knew exactly what it was, because he had seen the other one, on Evan’s body.

  “When did you get this?” He stared at Charlie.

  “Last week. It was left in the trash.” He sat there with his elbows on his knees, ashen.

  “This is all about Charlie,” I said. “They’re torturing him. Just like they did to that woman. They tried to kill Gabby today. And me. They’re trying to make him bleed for what he did. Zorn knew they had found him and tried to warn them. That’s why he reached out to Evan.”

  “So you knew about this?” Sherwood fixed on Charlie.

  “Evan said the police had been talking to him. He said they wanted him to help us. To make us safe.” Charlie cradled his forehead in his hands. “My son was off his rocker—just like me, right? It sounded like more of his ramblings . . .”

  “It probably was ramblings by that point,” I said. “He probably didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.”

  “Instead I let them kill him,” Charlie said. “I let them take him away . . .”

  I placed a hand on my brother’s back as he sobbed, forcefully, into his beard.

  Sherwood picked up the top photo. “Can you give me any information about her? Where she might have been living lately? Her family? Even a last name?”

  “Myers. Sherry Ann Myers.” Charlie looked up glassily. “At least that was her maiden name. She was from Lansing, I think. In Michigan.”

  Sherwood fit the photos back in the envelope. He wrapped the sneaker up in the towel and stood up, meeting my gaze in a corroborating stare.

  He went over to the door. “I don’t think you could have helped your son, Mr. Erlich, if that’s what’s on your mind. We still don’t know what happened to him up there. But you damned well could’ve helped the investigation. By sharing this earlier.”

  He gave a final look to me and left.

  Charlie waited awhile until we heard his car start up outside. “You can go now, Jay,” he said, still hunched over.

  Gabby was still in the hospital. I didn’t want to leave him. “Maybe I should stay.”

  He lifted his head and looked at me with swollen, bloodshot eyes. “No, I mean tomorrow. It’s all out now. You can go back home.”

  I squeezed his shoulder and said, “We’ll see.”

  At that moment, I thought he was simply caring for me. For the time I had spent there, away from my family. Now that the truth had come out.

  A day later, I wished I’d heard him more clearly.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Russell Houvnanian’s five-by-ten cell was dark and dim at night, but he was still able to conjure Charlie Erlich’s face.

  Chase.

  Though he hadn’t seen him in thirty-five years, he’d memorized every line: the slant of his chin, his ground-down teeth, the bad-boy glimmer in his eye. He also saw the image of his younger brother—at their father’s fancy home in the Hollywood Hills. It was no surprise to see him again the other day after all these years. In fact, it was damn well the highlight of his month! He’d seen him dozens of times over the years in his dreams.

  With a smile, he also brought to mind the face of their father.

  “Mags,” Houvnanian whispered in the night, “my beautiful Maggie Mae. I could touch you as if I was with you now. You can feel me, can’t you? I told you, didn’t I, that what was done from love could never ever be bad or evil? Only twisted that way. I told you to trust me over time and I would give myself to you in a way I have not to any others.

  “And now it’s time.

  “You will do this, and I will come to you, my Mags, like I’ve always come to you. Like I have always traveled from these walls and been with you in the night.

  “You were always my little sweetness, you know. My muse.”

  On his cot, Houvnanian raised up his knee, a smile etched onto his face.

  Even behind these walls I can fly. I can walk your streets. I can be among your children. I can fuck your daughters.

  He’d waited thirty-seven years; what was another day or two?

  Enjoy what’s left, Charlie boy.

  I always told you the
master would one day be home.

  And now I’ve come a-knockin’!

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  The next afternoon, Sherwood sat in his office, staring at a file.

  A gradual transformation had taken place. He no longer believed that Evan Erlich had climbed up that ledge and jumped off on his own.

  The shoe proved that.

  He still didn’t know what happened up there. In truth, he still had nothing—nothing even a twelve-year-old might consider evidence: no proof, no witnesses, nothing directly linking Susan Pollack or anyone else with any criminal actions. Other than these horrible pictures Charlie had given to him.

  And the file on his desk that had come back a short while ago. Inching him closer to the realization that from his cell, possibly starting years ago, Russell Houvnanian was engaged in a process of deadly revenge.

  That Greenway’s and Zorn’s deaths had been part of it. That Susan Pollack might have been aiding him.

  That Evan was the way they got to Charlie.

  And now, thanks to the doc, he also knew why.

  Sherwood thought back to the remote house up in Jenner. The navy Kia the doc said matched one he had seen outside his brother’s house. The testimony of the street vendor at the rock. They all began to fit in, into some shifting puzzle that was starting to take shape. He knew how skeptical he had been, how simple it had all seemed only a week ago.

  A flashing eye—no more than a Cracker Jack prize, found in a boy’s pocket at the bottom of the rock.

  Sherwood now accepted that Susan Pollack might be involved, but she surely wasn’t alone.

  Thomas Greenway was killed in Las Vegas back in 1988. Susan Pollack was still at the Frontera Women’s Correctional Institution then. Walter Zorn might have been getting on in years, but he still weighed more than two hundred pounds and had fought for his life while being strangled. The doc was sure that it had been a man on the phone threatening him.

  Sherwood looked at the open file. This cinched it.

  Now it was only a question of what he would do.

  It had come in an hour ago, from the FBI’s ViCAP system, a data bank of details on most violent crimes.

  He had run the details from the photos Charlie Erlich had given him.

  Her name was Sherry Ann Frazier. She lived in Redmond, Michigan. A small resort town on the UP. She was fifty-two years old and had been found beaten and murdered in her home by her daughter eight days before.

  There was a local police contact on the file. Some young detective named Arlen Douglas. Sherwood had rung him up. The kid seemed a bit green. What kind of things even happened up there on the Upper Peninsula anyway? A moose wandering into town? Geese sightings? Sherry Ann Frazier lived alone. She was recently separated. She ran a bakery in town. No one had any clue who’d killed her. There were no prints or fibers left behind. Nothing was taken from the house. They clearly didn’t have many homicides in Redmond. The case had gotten nowhere.

  “I want you to take a look at the files,” Sherwood told the young detective, “and tell me if you can find something for me.”

  “Sure,” the kid had replied, empty in the biggest case of his career. “What?”

  “An eye,” Sherwood had told him.

  “An eye?”

  “That’s right, or anything else that resembles one. On the body. Or maybe left around the scene.”

  Ten minutes later he called back. A little confused. They had found something actually. Not quite an eye, Douglas had said. But something . . . Something they hadn’t been able to figure out.

  Something weird.

  He said, “The coroner found a contact lens. In her right eye . . .”

  “Only the right eye?” Sherwood asked, his heart rate picking up.

  “Just the one,” Arlen Douglas confirmed. “But that’s not even the point. According to the ex-husband and daughter, Sherry Ann Frazier didn’t even wear contacts. Or glasses. She didn’t need them. Her vision was fine. Pretty weird, huh?”

  “Crazy fucking weird,” Sherwood said.

  Through the door, Sherwood saw his boss, Phil Perokis, come back into the office. He said good-bye, got up, grabbed his files, along with the incident report on the car fire yesterday and all that Charlie had told him.

  He was about to head after Perokis when his desk phone rang. He grabbed it, answering sharply, “Detective Sherwood here.”

  “Detective, it’s Roland Martinez,” the caller said. “From up in Jenner.”

  Earlier in the day, Sherwood had called up there as well. Martinez was the detective who had happened to pick up his call. He had asked Martinez to ride up to Susan Pollack’s spread on Lost Hill and check on her whereabouts.

  “Thanks for getting back to me, detective.” Sherwood sat back down. “So what’d you find?”

  “What’d I find? You ready?” He sounded almost annoyed. “There was a gate up across the driveway. Newspapers scattered on the road. Two days’ mail. I went in anyway. No car in the garage. No sign of anyone around. Even the front door was bolted shut.”

  Sherwood didn’t like the sound of it. “Thanks.”

  “Something else though . . .” the detective went on. “I smelled something coming from the back. And I’m talking wretched. Thought it might have been a body. So I went around the side.”

  Sherwood waited. “What did you find?”

  “A bunch of fucking chickens, detective. All with their throats cut. Blood everywhere. You know whose place it is, don’t you? I checked. The county has it registered to a Susan Pollack. You know who that is, don’t you? This doesn’t exactly sit well up here. Anything I should know?”

  “If there is,” Sherwood said, “I promise I’ll let you know . . .”

  He hung up. He knew what it all meant. She had said those chickens were her only friends these days . . . He felt the hairs raise on his arms.

  She wasn’t going back there.

  Sherwood saw the lieutenant’s door open. He took his jacket and stood up again; then something stopped him and he put back down his files.

  Whatever it was you got that second chance for, he heard a voice say, this is it.

  He sat back down. He felt a pain throb in his abdomen. He said a thank-you to Edward J. Knightly. For all the good work he had done.

  He lit up a cigarette he’d been saving in his drawer, then wheeled his seat around and sat there staring out at the hills.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Charlie took an extra Xanax along with his usual pills that morning. He felt totally wound up, his heart racing at twice its normal speed.

  First, he went and brought Gabby home from the hospital. She was still a little woozy and in shock; she’d been prescribed four milligrams a day of Klonopin, just like himself. Otherwise, thank God, she was fine. She walked into the house, looking a little perturbed at the mess Charlie had let accumulate—his papers and old music strewn all over the couch, dirty plates thrown in the sink—and she snapped at him for always being in his own world, especially with what had happened.

  He sat her down at the table. “Gabby, we have to talk.”

  He could no longer hide the past from her. Or pretend it had not caught up to them. He had put her in danger now.

  She could see his anxiety, how he couldn’t sit still. “What’s wrong, Charlie?”

  “It’s all coming apart, Gabby.”

  “What is coming apart?”

  As calmly as he could manage, he told her about the photos he had received days before. The ones he had hidden from her. And the horrible things that had been done. How Sherwood had taken them, but he still described them one by one, what his old friend’s killer had done to her.

  “Who is this person?” Gabby looked at him, befuddled, recoiling as he described Sherry’s terrible wounds. “Who would do this to somebody? Like some dog.” The more he told her, the less she could even believe it.

  “Gabby, there are things I haven’t told you. Things about me, before we met.”

&nbs
p; “This is what your brother has been saying, Charlie.” A deepening apprehension robbed the color from her face. “This is what he wanted you to admit. He—”

  “Listen to me, Gabby.” He clasped her hands and slowly, his mind remarkably clear for once, told her of his time on the Riorden Ranch.

  Who Sherry was. And Russell Houvnanian—a name Gabby had never heard him utter in all their years but, it now became clear to her, had influenced every day of their lives together, even how they had raised their own son, and how they had hidden like fugitives, shrunk from any chance to raise themselves up.

  And finally, he told her who Zorn was. How their paths had crossed years and years before.

  Gabby saw it all now. A fog opening up. And the cruelest part was Evan.

  “Why, why wouldn’t you ever let him leave, Charlie? When your brother invited him? You said it was because we needed the state support for us all to continue to live. Otherwise we would die. But I see it now . . . That was a lie. You never wanted him to leave. You never wanted him to have a chance. Why, Charlie . . . ?”

  “I was scared, Gabby. It was the only way I could protect him.”

  She pulled back, a sudden judgment flashing in her eyes. “You did this to Evan? All these years. To your own son. You kept him from being someone. And why? Because you feared they would find you? That they would do these things to you too? You said it was out of love, but it was this? You took this out on our son, Charlie?”

  “No. No.” He shook his head, but the answer was on his face. In his guilt he felt that it was true.

  “You held him here. For what? For the money he received from the state. So we could continue to hide? All these years. Because without him, we had nothing? Your brother begged him to come to New York. When he had a chance, Charlie—to give his life a chance. Things we couldn’t give to him.” Tears shone in her eyes. “When he was not so ill . . .” She grabbed him by the collar. “You stole our son’s chance in life, Charlie . . .”