by Holmes, John
Diles kept the gun trained on me while he lifted his shirt with his free hand. I saw no sign of a wound, only traces of powder burns along one side just above his waist.
“I thought he was dead!” Nash screeched. “They tried to murder him. They humiliated me. They ripped me off!”
“I brought some of the stuff back,” I said. “My split to prove to you that…”
“What? Where?” he said quickly, cutting me off.
“Outside…in my car.”
Diles tore the tape from my wrists and shoved me out onto the driveway. As I climbed into the car to retrieve Nash’s goods, I noticed his small hand reach for something in the front seat. It was my address book, containing the names of every person I knew in the whole world: friends, relatives, business acquaintances. “That’s mine,” I said.
“Nothing is yours anymore,” Nash answered.
Diles led me back into the house, and for the next eighteen hours I sat with a gun pointed to my face. From one of the other rooms, I could hear Nash on the phone. He was making call after call in French, Arabic, English—he spoke six or seven languages—to girlfriends, customers, and business associates, telling that he was holding John Holmes captive (and why), and inviting them to “come on up” to see his latest prize. What was it with these people, I wondered, that they had to spout off like giddy teenagers after a hot date? Why couldn’t they keep their mouths shut?
Shifts of bodyguards took turns watching over me, threatening to pull the trigger no matter how still I remained. My life was over, that they made very clear. I would not live to see the sun rise. My body would disappear in the muck of the Torrance oil fields, never to be found.
I had every reason to believe them, but as the hours passed I began to doubt that Nash would have me killed in his own house. Too many people were wandering in and out to ogle “the double-crossing porn prick” and hear the lowdown on my despicable deed. Every one of them was a witness to my being at Nash’s.
Around 2:00 a.m. I was left alone with my bodyguard. For the next few hours, I didn’t see another soul; the house seemed deserted except for the two of us. Then, as the sky was beginning to brighten, Nash and his cronies calmly emerged from his bedroom. Nash had a gun in his hand. “Take this,” he said, handing it to me,” and go over to Wonderland. Get the rest of my stuff back and I’ll forget what happened.”
The proposal was insane. Wonderland was an armed camp. There was no way could one person do what he was asking. Perhaps that was Nash’s reasoning, too. It sounded like he was setting me up. By letting the Wonderland people kill me, his hands would be clean.
I had to go along with him if only to get out from under his thumb. Once away from Nash and back at Wonderland, I’d warn everyone then scramble over the hill. I even considered going to the police.
The gun scared the hell out of me; I didn’t want any part of it. “This gun’s no good,” I told Nash, fumbling for an alibi. “What do you mean no good? Hold it up to your temple, wise ass, and pull the trigger. You’ll see how good it is.”
“It doesn’t have a silencer.”
“Yeah? So what?”
“What about the neighbors? They’re all around that house. They’ll hear the shots.”
He looked about to explode. Then he did. “We don’t have a gun with a silencer,” he shrieked. “Just kill them the best you can!” As he handed the gun back to me, he added, “And to make sure you’ve done the job, I want to see everyone’s eyeballs. Take a baggie with you.”
Two cars filled with Nash’s hit men followed me to the Wonderland turnoff, and then parked near a school while I continued on.
The house at 8763 Wonderland Ave. was dark and strangely quiet; no sounds of voices or hard rock coming from within. It didn’t seem likely that everyone would be asleep. They’d just scored a tremendous amount of money and drugs. There should have been one hell of a party going on.
The front gate was wide open. Odd! I walked through then clicked the latch, but not before one of the pit bulls darted by, brushing my leg and yipping pathetically. I called out, but it kept running. The other dog was nowhere to be found.
I made my way along the walkway to the front door and knocked. When no one answered, I knocked again, repeatedly. The door remained shut. If I’d had a key I would have used it, but no one had a key to the house. There was no need for keys, I’d been told. Someone was always home.
From the first day I set foot in the house and became part of the family, Joy and Billy had stressed the importance of keeping all the doors and windows locked and bolted. There were no exceptions, no excuses. The thought of unsuspecting strangers, or worse, wandering inside had them paranoid with fear. It was that unrelenting fear that led them to buy the two pit bulls.
Another entrance to the house was located on the back side. I walked around and started pounding. As my knuckles landed, the door cracked open. It was bad enough that it wasn’t locked; someone had neglected to shut it tightly. Joy would hear about this!
A rush of foul-smelling, warm air greeted me as I started inside. I’d become accustomed to Wonderland’s stagnant air, even the occasional stench of garbage and un-bathed bodies. But this was different, worse than I’d remembered. It was as if all the toilets in the house had backed up. Defying Joy’s warnings, I purposely left the door open.
“Where was she?” I wondered. Where were Billy and Ronny, and the others? Someone had to be in the house. Unless they’d changed plans since I’d last seen them, they weren’t planning on skipping town until later in the morning. It figured that they’d slammed heroin all night and were lying in a stupor somewhere.
Near the downstairs bedroom, which I’d often used, I stepped on something soft. As I kicked it aside I noticed that it was one of Joy’s old housecoats. It hit the wall, leaving a long red smear, before falling again to the floor. The bedroom door was spattered with red. I reached out to touch it, and then stopped short. I didn’t have to get any closer to know that it was blood.
A trail of blood led from the door into the room. One wall was splashed with the sticky substance as it formed an icicle pattern on the plaster. Not far away, a long shape sprawled across crumpled, blood-soaked sheets. It was difficult to see in the dim morning light, but it appeared to be a body—a body without a face. Its head had been split open, pulverized into mush and drenched with blood. But the hair, the clothes…
God, it was Ronny!
My heart pounded as I ran back out into the hall, stumbling over the blood-stained clutter that lay scattered across the floor.
Joy…Billy. Where were they?
I made for the stairs, taking them two at a time. My legs felt wobbly. I was certain my knees would buckle at any time.
Lightheaded, I stood hanging onto the rail at the top of the stairs, straining for air. The heat was unbearable. And the stench! If anything, it had grown stronger.
The silence was deafening. I strained to hear sounds of life, but I heard nothing, only the rushing of blood—my blood—pulsating through my head.
I turned slowly to face Joy’s room. The door was open, but it was dark inside. Even so, I could see the ugly stains on the carpet, and the huddled shape of another body. It was lying in a heap, twisted and grotesque like a battered rag doll, not ten feet away. I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t stop myself.
The rumpled housecoat and matted, reddish hair were the only remaining identifying features. Joy’s head, what was left of it, looked like someone had run it through a shredder. Across the room, Billy’s lifeless form lay motionless on the floor. A gooey mess was oozing from the remnants of his open skull. His brains had literally exploded.
How many devastating blows with a heavy object, such as a club or lead pipe, does it take to rip open a human skull? One-Two-Three, at the most. The person—or persons—responsible for these heinous murders hadn’t stopped there. Joy, Billy, and Ronny had been struck forty or fifty times each. Maybe more? Their heads were mutilated, pulverized. Nothing remained but slime.
The smell of blood and human waste was overpowering. Nothing in the world smells like violent death. I’d scraped bodies off the freeways when I had worked for the ambulance company. I’d picked up dismembered hands and arms and legs, but this was a hundred times worse. I can still smell it.
I can still feel the anger.
Was my mind playing tricks on me? Was this a cruel hoax or just another setting for a grisly film fantasy? It’s Johnny Wadd—back in action! But where were the other actors, the cameras, the lights? Where was the director? Why wasn’t he hollering, “Great shot! That’s a wrap?”
I felt like puking, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do much of anything except wander about in a daze. My brain wasn’t functioning normally. I couldn’t see straight; my ears thumped with the sound of my own heartbeat. Run away? I hadn’t the strength. Go to the police? Not with three people dead.
In my stupor I thought only of clearing myself with Nash, making him believe that I had carried out his orders by bringing something back to him.
I began searching frantically through the bloody mess. The suitcases that had been so hurriedly packed after the burglary were now on the floor, open and empty, along with the discarded contents of closets and drawers. Lamps, clocks, magazines, and clutter had been swept from table tops and flung about like leaves in a violent windstorm.
Less than twenty-four hours before, the bed had been piled high with Nash’s riches. Now it was stripped bare. Even the mattress had been searched and left hanging limply over the blood-stained box spring.
Joy had always kept her good jewelry secretly hidden in the shoe box. Someone had known where to find it. The box was on the floor, its contents scattered and smeared with red. I pawed through the sticky strands but could find nothing of value. I scooped it all up, dumped it back in the box, and took it anyway.
On the carpet, half submerged in a small circle of coagulation blood, a solitary eyeball stared up at me. It was there for the picking. I felt a tightening in my stomach, and I turned away.
The other rooms in the house, upstairs and down had been ransacked as well. Every drawer was empty, every shelf swept clean. Nash’s coveted possessions had vanished. The guns that earlier rested within arm’s reach on every flat surface were gone. So was Ronny’s knife collection. I hurriedly retraced my steps, stumbling over tossed debris in the eerie light and grabbed what I could, all of it worthless.
What possessed me to wander through that horrifying house of death, knowing that the killer—or killers—might still be there, lurking around the corner or in the next room? I can’t honestly say. I only know that something was pulling at me, compelling me to go on. Perhaps I felt threatened by Nash’s men; I knew they were outside in their cars, waiting for me. As it turned out, they weren’t.
My hands pressed uneasily on the car horn, sending out a sharp sound that shattered the early morning stillness. Slowly, Nash’s garage door opened and I backed the car inside. Nash was waiting there for me. “You came back,” he said suspiciously.
“Of course I came back,” I replied. “Why wouldn’t I?” I tried to sound as positive as possible, under the circumstances, as though everything had gone as planned.
If Nash noticed the uncertainty in my voice, he didn’t let on. “Where’s my money?” He asked, changing the subject. “Where’s my coke?”
I opened the car trunk and pulled everything out: crumpled clothes, paste jewelry, boxes of used drug paraphernalia. “This is all that was there,” I said, pointing to the pile of junk.
Nash pawed through the stained odds and ends. “So much blood, he smiled, wiping his fingers. “You could have been neater.”
“I wasn’t trying to be neat.”
“And this is it? You got everything?”
“Everything”
“Well, that’s O.K.,” he said, with a toss of his head. “The important thing is you did it. You really did it!” He began jumping up and down, clapping his hands together, and shouting, “Good! Good!”
That’s O.K.? Good? Good? As welcome as those words were, I couldn’t believe that Nash was accepting my return—and the worthless delivery—as a fait accompli. Why wasn’t he more concerned about his stolen property? The man had lost enough cash and merchandise to buy 100 new Cadillacs. Why wasn’t he rummaging through my car to make sure I wasn’t holding out on him? Why wasn’t he demanding to see the baggie?
“Take this crap and dump it where no one will find it,” he told one of his men. “You know where.” Nash had a favorite dumping ground in the ghetto of Los Angeles. “Those cops never poke through the trash cans in that area,” he once confided to me, “and black people never turn shit in.”
For the next hour, Nash kept me by his side, congratulating me on a job well done. He put on quite a show. He almost had me believing that he’d bought my story. Almost! I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was crazy. Nash was much too intelligent to be conned so easily. He had to know more than he was letting on. Could it be that he—or his goons— had beaten me to Wonderland?
I began to blame Nash for everything. He detested the Wonderland people and had, in fact, threatened to kill them during one of his uncontrollable rants. The humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Billy, Ronny and David Lind incensed him far more than the loss of his merchandise. He could always get that back, he said. But he could never regain his lost pride after they’d forced him to his knees to beg for his life.
It made absolute sense that Nash was responsible for the massacre. He and his bodyguards certainly had the time to hit Wonderland sometime after midnight when his house had seemed so strangely deserted for hours. He’d wanted me to believe that everyone was scoring in the back room. Yet no noise came from that end of the house. People on freebase make noise. They turn up the stereo full blast. They stumble into things.
All signs pointed to Nash—until I began to think about “Killer David Lind”. He was supposed to have gone to Pasadena with his girl friend— Susan Launius. Susan was the only survivor. I never saw Susan while rummaging through the house. Lind knew the house was loaded with cash and cocaine. He’d kill anyone for a gram of coke, and there were bags of it at Wonderland. He could have taken all the loot for himself and split. Whoever did this made damn sure those people were dead.
And what about Sam? What if he had made good in his threat to knock over Wonderland? Time had run out.
Shortly before noon, Nash told me I was free to go. As I hurried for the door he held out a hundred dollar bill. “Call me,” he said. “Keep in touch.” Somehow, I made it back to the motel and Dawn.
The horrific events of the past twenty-four hours had taken their toll on me and I headed straight to bed without filling Dawn in on where I’d been or what had happened. I hadn’t intended to nod off, but I did. Sleep: the great escape.
When I opened my eyes again, Dawn was propped in front of the television set, straining to hear; she purposely turned the sound low as not to disturb me. I felt awful, punchy and still a little queasy. As I turned over, trying to get more comfortable, the bed squeaked. Dawn was on her feet and at my side in a flash. She didn’t look so hot either. From her expression I could tell that the shit had hit the fan. Or in this case, The News. “Something awful has happened at Wonderland,” as her voice trembled. “You’ve got to see. They’re showing pictures and everything.” I asked Dawn to turn up the sound then run across the street for a newspaper. The images on the television screen sent chills through me. Cameras were positioned outside the Wonderland house, trained on the front door as grim-faced
police and plain-clothes detectives moved quickly in and out. The coroner was seen briefly as he accompanied several shrouded stretchers, with their lifeless loads, beyond the yellow tape that cordoned off the house and out to the street, where they disappeared in the crowd of stunned onlookers. Not since the Manson murders, gasped an on-thespot newscaster, had there been such a brutal massacre.
Watching the television screen was like reliving the nightmare. I could handle that, but I wasn’t prepared for some of the details being broadcast. In the downstairs bedroom, one reporter noted, two battered bodies had been discovered. In the living room, yet another. He talked of five victims. I had combed the house from top to bottom and had found only three.
When Dawn returned, she was carrying a box of Van de Kamp’s donuts and two special edition newspapers, both headlining the killings. One of the papers had already put a tag on the bloodbath, calling it the Laurel Canyon Murders.
Every hour, it seemed, brought new information. The corpse in the living room had been identified as Barbara Richardson. The other victim was Susan Launius. She, too, had been bludgeoned, but she somehow managed to escape death after drifting in and out of consciousness for hours. If Barbara was at Wonderland then chances are “Killer David Lind” was, too! If Lind was there, why wasn’t he killed? Why was Susan the only survivor? The three bodies I had seen were brutally mangled— someone made damn sure they were dead—why didn’t they make sure that Susan was dead too?
It was the discovery of Susan’s lifeless body that had me completely mystified. In my fright, I could easily have overlooked Barbara on the dim and shadowy living room floor. But Susan and Ronny were reportedly found together.
NOTHING MADE SENSE!
For two days I sat riveted before the television set, listening to the latest developments. On the third day, I phoned one of my drug connections. The first words out of his mouth were: “The police have been by here looking for you—something about the Laurel Canyon murders.”
“Why me?” I said, indignantly. “Why would they be looking for me?”