by Andrew Gross
Maybe I should’ve said that I wished that too. That we could have been friends. But instead I drew my chair in and leaned close to him.
“Why don’t you tell me about Russell Houvnanian, Charlie?”
Chapter Fifty-One
“Russell?” Charlie acted surprised. “What do you want to know?”
“About what happened back there on the ranch. About what connection it all has to you. I know you were part of it, Charlie.”
He scratched his gray-flecked beard and shrugged. “I’ve told you everything, Jay. I lived there for a while, that’s all. It kept me from having to sleep under a bridge somewhere… Russell tried to interest some record people in me.”
“Why did he want to push your music, Charlie? That day when you came up with him to Dad’s.”
“Who knows? That’s how he did stuff. Maybe he thought I had talent. He said he had connections. People trying to cut records were always coming in and out of the ranch.”
I looked at him. “I think that was how he was trying to push his message, Charlie.”
“His message?”
“The End of Days. This crazy philosophy of his. Up is down, heaven is hell. Through the music, right?”
My brother smiled, pushing back his hair. “I think you’re reading too much into this, Jay. All that was, was his way of bringing in the chicks.”
“No. I saw how you reacted. That day up at the house… You wanted to kill somebody, Charlie. Dad even.”
“I always wanted to kill someone back then. And I was mad at my shit-ass father for turning against me again. He knew why I was up there. Just once, I wanted something from him. Damn right I wanted to kill him, Jay.”
“No.” I looked at him closely. “There’s more. Why would Houvnanian want to get back at you, Charlie? Through Evan?”
Saying the name of his son was like thrusting a knife into his gut. He recoiled. The color changed in his face. I knew then there was a lot he wasn’t telling me. And that it wasn’t the haze of drugs or schizophrenia clouding it.
I said, “I saw him today.”
“Who?”
“Houvnanian. I went up there. With Detective Sherwood. We talked with him in prison.”
Charlie’s eyes grew agitated. “ You saw Russell? ” Alarm spread across his face. “What are you getting yourself involved in, Jay?”
“No, what are you hiding, Charlie? I’m trying to help you, but you’ve got to tell me everything. Evan’s dead. And I think you might be right, maybe he didn’t jump off that rock on his own after all. Maybe someone else had a hand in it. Wouldn’t you want to know that, Charlie? A few days back you wanted to. When you were using me.
“Why don’t you start with Susan Pollack, Charlie? You knew her. I know you did now. Zorn. Greenway. I know you’re tied to all of them somehow.” I reached out and put my hand on his arm. “What happened there, Charlie, please…?”
He pulled away from me and suddenly jumped up, his guitar rattling to the floor. He was never one to show fear when he felt cornered. He just got angry. Like my father. He lost control. Fought his way out.
And I could see he felt cornered now.
“I want you to leave now, Jay. Before I really lose it. You’re getting into things you have no business in.”
“For God’s sake, Charlie, they killed your son.” I stood up too and grabbed him by the arm. “Don’t you see? They killed Evan.”
It was like a switch suddenly triggered in him. He wrenched his arm away, and blood rushed into his face. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Jay!” Suddenly he lunged at me with a strength I never expected from his smallish frame.
He pushed me back into my chair, dinner plates and a vase clattering, and suddenly I swung at him-my anger coming from I don’t know where-and we crashed into a side table, toppling a lamp to the floor.
We both fell against the wall-his arms wrapped around my throat, me just trying to fend him off. “I told you to stop all this, Jay. I told you to go home!”
A canvas painted by his mother came crashing down.
“I didn’t kill my son.” He glared savagely into my eyes. His hands squeezed around my throat. “ I didn’t! ”
He reared his fist back at me, an animal intensity blazing in his eyes. I knew what was fueling it-that mixture of anger, grief, and guilt.
“I know you didn’t, Charlie.” I looked back at him. “ I know! ”
“Evan didn’t have anything to do with that. You hear? I want you to get out of here, Jay. I want you to go back home.”
“I saw him, Charlie!” A warm ooze trickled down my chin, blood from somewhere. “I know he’s behind what happened to Evan. He and Susan Pollack. I saw a letter she wrote to him in jail. It was her way of telling him it had begun. What’s begun, Charlie? Five people have died.” My eyes locked onto his. “ Evan died…”
My brother’s eyes filled up with tears and he cocked his fist again. I was certain he was about to let it go and hit me.
And I would have let him-if that’s what it took to bring to the surface what it was he needed to say.
Gabriella ran over-“ Charlie, Charlie …”-and grabbed his drawn-back arm. He fought against her for a second. “ It’s Jay, Charlie,” she screamed, “it’s your brother! He’s only trying to help us, Charlie. What are you doing?”
I recalled the image of Evan squeezing the life out of my son. I also saw our father’s own unforgivable temper massed too.
Charlie glared, his eyes filled with ire. Whoever it was aimed at, I knew it wasn’t me.
Gabby’s frantic protestations finally seemed to get to him, and he blinked himself back to consciousness and put down his arm. He took a series of shuddering breaths and bowed his head, and rolled off me onto his back.
We both lay next to each other for a few seconds, breathing heavily.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes were glistening and his cheeks moist. “I’m so sorry, Jay…”
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” I lay next to him and reached over and put my hand on his chest.
“Look! ” Gabriella shouted, staring around the room. “Look at what you’ve done!”
She pointed to his guitar. It was completely broken. The neck separated from the body, the wood splintered.
He’d had it as long as I could remember. He rolled over and picked it up, the broken neck coming apart in his hands.
All that he had ever done in his life seemed to fade there.
Gabby cried too. “Look at what you’ve done!”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter, Gabby.” Charlie turned to me, like an empty weight. “You have to go back home, Jay.” He dropped the broken shaft and it lay on the floor. “There’s nothing to do here anymore. Please. Just let us be.”
I sat up and we stared at each other on the floor. I shook my head. “I can’t, Charlie. It’s too late. Not now.”
Gabby and I cleaned up the mess. Afterward she brought me a damp rag, and I dabbed my mouth. There was blood all over it. Charlie was back at the kitchen table, his hair wild and covering his face. He had picked up one of his other instruments, an old blue Fender Stratocaster that hadn’t worked in years, strumming at the silent strings.
Just when you say your last good-bye
Just when you calm my fears…
“He loves you, Jay,” Gabby said to me. She took the rag and wiped my face, blotting the blood. “But for your brother the past is a locked place. Even I cannot be let in. What’s happened has happened, Jay. Nothing is going to bring Evan back. I have to salvage something here. Maybe he’s right. You tried to help. You always help us, Jay. Now go back to your wife and kids. They need you there. That’s where you belong.”
“What’s happened has happened,” I said in agreement, “but even if I go, Gabby, it’s not going away.”
Charlie continued on the guitar:
Just when the dawn is breaking,
There’s always one last thing…
“Then let
happen whatever will.” Gabby’s blue eyes fixed on me. “That’s what he wants. You can see that now. Now that Evan is gone, what is there for us, anyway?”
I took her hand and squeezed it warmly. But I shook my head. “It’s not just about him anymore, Gabby.”
I listened to my brother’s distant voice. The lyrics to his one recorded song.
Oooh, girl, it’s always one last thing…
“I’ve got to go.” I picked up my jacket and gave Gabby a hug, heading toward the door.
I turned a final time to look at Charlie, playing. He didn’t even look up at me.
The wind and the rain knocking at my door,
Don’t you know, girl, the dawn will be here soon…
I stopped, the words to my brother’s song knocking me back.
The wind and the rain… That refrain. I suddenly realized I’d never heard the whole thing through before, only pieces:
The storm’s outside, but in here how do we tell,
The morning sun from the dying moon?
The hairs stood up on my arms.
Those were Houvnanian’s words: The wind and the rain… The moon is the sun and the sun the moon.
I’d assumed it was just all gibberish.
But it wasn’t gibberish.
Houvnanian knew.
I brought back his face, that last mocking grin as they led him away. And suddenly it dawned on me that he hadn’t even been talking to me at all in there.
But to Charlie through me.
He’d been pulling the strings all along.
The room suddenly turned cold, and I looked back at my brother as he silently strummed the guitar.
Houvnanian’s ramblings about where God was, it was all from the lyrics to Charlie’s song.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Now I knew. I knew for sure.
And it left me feeling like I had to vomit. Dread creeping up inside me.
Charlie was a target.
Houvnanian had simply been toying with Sherwood and me all along. Greenway. Zorn. Evan. Whatever my brother had done, whatever role he played in what took place more than thirty years ago, they were massing around him. Torturing him slowly.
Piece by piece, slowly cutting him up.
The wind and the rain were at his door.
Charlie was next.
As soon as I got back to my hotel room, I called Sherwood. “My brother’s in trouble,” I said, my heart pounding off my sides from what I’d just learned.
“Take it easy, doc,” the detective said, trying to calm me. The agitation in my voice was clear. “ How? ”
“Houvnanian. All that gibberish about ‘the wind and the rain’? That he didn’t even remember Charlie? Oh, he remembered him, Sherwood! Those were all lyrics. They were straight out of my brother’s song.”
“What lyrics?”
“From a song he recorded back then. I heard him playing it tonight. What we heard in that prison, it was all basically just a threat! He was warning him. Through me!”
“A threat of what?” The detective snorted skeptically.
“Please, Sherwood,” I begged him, “don’t play the skeptical cop shit with me. Not now. You know! I know you know. Maybe I can’t prove it. Maybe it all sounds crazy when you try and put it together. But Houvnanian made a vow at his sentencing to get back at the people who had harmed him. Who put him and his followers away. And now he’s doing it. One by one. He’s been doing it! Greenway. Cooley. Zorn. Evan . And now they’ve got my brother in their sights.”
“You’ve still never told me how your brother is involved. Why him? ”
“I don’t know why him! ” My brain throbbed. “He won’t come clean with me. I think he’s too scared to admit he had a hand in his son’s death. But that’s what Evan’s death was about. And their cat. And that cigarette butt left on my doorstep. They’re warnings. Warnings that were meant for him! Don’t you see, Sherwood? Charlie’s next!”
“Listen, doc,” the detective said, clearing his throat, “I’ve done everything short of ruining what’s left of my career trying to tie the strands together for you. But they’re just not tying. Because that’s just what they are, strands . There ain’t no bow. Now you’re talking about lyrics to your brother’s song. From more than three decades ago? It’s been a long day, doc. Just what is it you want me to do?”
“I want you to put someone on Susan Pollack. I want you to station a car outside my brother’s apartment. Unless you’re ready to wake up and find him dead too.”
“I told you, I can’t just take personnel off the street. I’m a coroner’s detective. There hasn’t even been a direct threat made against anybody. There’s not even a case open against anyone.”
“Then make one!” I realized if I’d lost Sherwood for good, I was completely alone out here and I couldn’t just walk away. Not now. Too much had happened. With Zorn. Susan Pollack. Evan. Sherwood was all I had.
In my life, there had been only a handful of moments when I felt like everything was at stake. One of them was rushing my son, gasping, to the ER. Whatever the outcome, good or bad, I always felt I had this cushion to protect me. A beautiful wife who loved me. Kids who were healthy and made me proud. A position in life that gave me stature and money. Even when things got bad and we had to negotiate a new deal with the hospital or when my father died, I knew I’d make it through.
This was one of those moments.
“Don, please … it’s time to risk it,” I said to him. “To pay it back.”
“Risk what, doc?” he replied a little testily.
“Whatever it was they gave you that new liver for.”
He remained silent for a while. I knew this was my last chance, and without him, I might as well just go back home and leave my brother to his fate. He and Gabby meant nothing to anyone there. Other than to Sherwood and me. And it all meant nothing if he sent me packing.
“All right,” he finally said, exhaling, “I’ll find you a car.”
“How?” I asked. I wanted to hear. Charlie’s life was in the balance.
“It doesn’t matter how.” His voice had a resigned quality to it. “So tell me,” he said with a laugh, “you ever gonna go back to practicing medicine again, doc, or are you just gonna move out here so you can become a permanent pain in my ass?”
“I sure hope so,” I said, and exhaled. “About going back.”
“Well, let me know, ’cause I want to be first in line to drive you to that plane.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
An hour later, darkness setting in, Sherwood drove his car down Grand Avenue, past the empty fast food storefronts and closed-up auto supply stores, toward Grover Beach.
The clock read eight forty-five. Only a few cars were on the road. The small beach town shut up like a cell block after dark. One or two of the Latino bars still had some life, field hands and out-of-work construction workers drunkenly staggering out.
In another lifetime, he might’ve stopped and checked them out as they headed for their cars.
He made a left on Fourth, and then Division, heading farther down the hill along the tracks. They used to find bodies dumped in the woods around there. He could still have told you every clearing in the brush where you could score weed or crack. The only time he’d ever fired his gun was on a bust down there back when his hair was still dark and he was still in a uniform.
You’ve got to risk it all, the doc had said.
Funny, he thought as he drove. He thought he had risked all he had twenty years before.
He thought of Kyle.
He drove his Torino up to the run-down apartment complex. He had been there twice before in the days after Evan had been killed. He stopped the car and put it in park in a dark spot out of the glare of the streetlamp, maybe thirty yards from the entrance. From there, he had a good view of the courtyard and the first-floor apartment. He saw a light glowing behind the drapes. He sank deeper into the car seat and made himself comfortable. He hadn’t done this sort of thing in m
ore than a decade. In a way it felt good.
Dorrie would laugh, he thought. He turned off the ignition. No, she wouldn’t.
She would smile.
Erlich was wrong. He knew everything about risking it. About losing it all too.
It had been a family camping trip. On the Clackamas River, up in Oregon. He, Dorrie, and Merry, their twelve-year-old daughter.
And Kyle.
They went rafting. It was the week of the initial spring release. The rapids were mostly level threes and fours. They’d taken pictures. The whole family smiling. Having the time of their lives.
Later, they coasted downstream. The river grew wide and the current smooth. The group pulled over to the shore for a basket lunch, part of the outing. The guide broke out the single-person kayaks that the rafting company had towed there. Everyone took a shot at it. It was fun. The current was easy. Kyle was a little scared to get in, but some other kid not much older tried it and had a blast.
Maybe if he hadn’t pushed him, Sherwood always thought when the dark moments came.
Maybe if he hadn’t pushed Dorrie: “C’mon, he’s a big kid. He can handle it.”
He was nine.
Kyle was paddling a few yards behind the main raft when the current, more like a series of small eddies, intensified.
Still not enough to make anyone alarmed, only enough to keep an eye out. Kyle suddenly seemed to be having a little trouble steering. No one paid much attention. There was no danger. Sherwood had been telling his war stories to one of the other couples, a stockbroker and his wife from Seattle. The guide even broke out the cold drinks.
Then Kyle called out.
“Donny, ” Dorrie shouted, noticing the gulf between them had widened.
For the first time Sherwood saw that his son was afraid.
“Mom,” he called out, struggling. “Dad!”
“Right side, right side, ” one of the guides yelled out to him, doing his best to slow the main raft.
“Keep it steady, son!” Sherwood called.