Alternate Gerrolds (20 page)

“So what’s his claim to fame? No talent and he got himself murdered. And you people are gathering around, sniffing like jackals at a rotting corpse, pissing and moaning about how awful it was that these lives were snuffed out! What the hell—if it weren’t for the fact that there’s someone out there who is provably crazier than Charlie and his stupid Family, I’d probably want to shake his hand and thank him for improving the average IQ of the human race and removing some seriously sociopathic phenotypes from the gene pool.

“Y’know,” Bird said, trotting up into the audience and sitting on the lap of a fat woman. She giggled in delight. “Y’know, if this universe worked the way it was supposed to—like if God had stuck around instead of taking off early for the weekend—Manson’s name would be unknown to each and every one of us in this theater. He would have never made a ripple. He would have died forgotten. Instead, what do we get?” He leapt back to his feet. “The bloody awfulness of his death has turned him into a ninety-day wonder, a cultural icon. It’s the goddamn Lindbergh baby all over again—only this time we’ve got CNN giving us hourly updates on how incompetent the Los Angeles Police Department really is. Like that’s news to the rest of us? Get real! It’s a bloody Frankenstein movie that they keep running because you keep tuning in. It sells toothpaste and tampons, that’s all it means.

“And what do you get out of it? You get to play Halloween. How many of you are going to feel safe in your beds tonight? Yeah, none of you, that’s right! That’s why you do it. You love being scared. You love wallowing in other people’s dreadful deaths, without ever stopping to think of the horror of it! Do you assholes know how much horror there is in the world? There’s already more than enough for all of us! Why do you want to create more? What do you get from it?

“I’ll tell you what you get—you get the feeling of power, the vicarious thrill of going along for the ride during a criminal act of mindless, stupid, thoughtless violence. You’re not identifying with the ones who died screaming in the night—you’re each of you recreating the act of murder, with yourself playing the lead role as a modern day Jack-thefucking-Ripper. And by that singular deed, you align yourself with the disease, not the cure!

“Don’t you give me that look, lady, that self-righteous, ‘It’s not my fault’ look. I’ve seen you standing in the supermarket line, all of you, checking out the headlines in the
National Enquirer
. Oh, you don’t read the
Enquirer
, right? So this speech is for everybody else. What do you read?
People
magazine? I thought so. Really socially uplifting material, lady. I’m not impressed. And who’s that turnip sitting next to you, your husband? You, sir? When was the last time you read something that didn’t have the dialog in balloons?

“The horror isn’t the murders, you idiots. The horror is that we’ve made such horrors commonplace in our society. These murders will be forgotten in two years, because somebody else will be murdered in some other place, some other way, and next time we’ll have color video of it, and CNN will make some poor sucker rich because he was standing in the right place at the right time with his fucking camcorder turned on. Who really gives a shit about Charles Manson? None of you do. You just wish there was a video of him begging and screaming with his killers for his life so you could ride the adrenalin roller-coaster one more time.

“He was a weasel and he’s dead, but the real assassins are the ones who keep him writhing on the knife!”

 

Around town, those who could reliably claim to have known him—
them
—now had stories they could dine out on:

“Oh, yeah, I knew him ....” “What was he like?” Shrug. “Actually, I never saw him get mad. Sometimes, he could be a real charmer. He asked me to engineer an album for him; but nothing ever came of it—”

“The girls? They had a sleazy reputation. Yeah, it was true. If Charlie liked you, yeah, you could end up the meat in a pussy sandwich. But… it wasn’t something you wanted to do twice. The girls were—it’s hard to describe—I think the best word to use is
traif.
It’s a yiddish word, yeah. It means unclean. I got a weird feeling off them, I can’t explain it, but
they looked at you like you were dead, or like they were waiting for you to be dead, like they were necrophiliacs ....”

“I got a friend whose cousin works in the coroner’s office, and she said that the bodies were dismembered. The heart was removed from Manson’s body and they still haven’t found it. The baby was cut out of the mother—I mean, the things she said—it was sick. But they won’t put it in the paper, because they’re hoping to keep it secret to help catch the killers.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you what I heard. I got this from the head of legal. He knows one of the detectives on the case. Anyway, the theory is that Charlie and his girls were having a wild party with some drug dealers, gang-members, crack-heads, slam-bangers, whatever they’re called, and it got out of control. Charlie tried to stiff them, offered them sex with the girls instead of cash, or maybe he tried to rob them, and the bangers took them down instead. It wasn’t supposed to get that violent, but they were all strung out on drugs and you know—”

“No, I swear, this is God’s honest truth. The caretaker was having a homosexual affair with Charleton Heston. Heston was there! While it was happening. But when they heard the screams, they climbed out a window and hid naked in the bushes. Then they snuck away. My stepbrother is a public defender. He heard it from a secretary in the DA’s office. The caretaker’s lie detector test was really dirty. They think the caretaker knows more than he’s saying.”

“Did you see this in the
San Francisco Chronicle
? Manson was a big L. Ron Hubbard fan. Now they think the Scientologists might be involved somehow—”

“You won’t believe this, but I was invited up there a few times. Yeah, I could have been up there that night. Yeah, the rumor was that Charlie always had plenty of dope, that he grew it in the basement, that they were always stoned. But that’s not true. They were beer-drunks. They sat around drunk all day watching TV. They watched reruns. They watched
Happy Days
and
The Brady Bunch
and
The Partridge Family
, all of those. Charlie loved them. They were supposed to be the nasty boys of rock, and the truth is, they were just a bunch of couch potatoes vegging out on phosphors. It was boring, man. Stupid. Killing them was redundant. They were already dead from the neck up.”

The investigative task force spread out across the city. Charlie’s connections to the music community, the drug community, the gay community, the prison community, the science fiction community, the Scientologists and the underground club scene were all investigated. Nothing substantial developed, but everything was pursued. Something had to fit somewhere; the crime couldn’t have been simply a random happenstance. If a band of drug-crazed hippies could burst into anyone’s home on a murderous killing spree, then what purpose was there to civilization?

Days stretched into months. No new leads developed. Old trails dried up. Publicly, the police said they were still investigating every possibility. Privately, they acknowledged that they were getting nowhere fast.

A panel of criminal psychologists and detectives appeared on the Cordwainer Bird talk show to discuss the apparent failure of the LAPD to produce substantial results. Bird had intended to focus on the issue of public safety, but instead allowed himself to be distracted into more speculation on the unsolved murders.

“What puzzles me the most,” said one of headshrinkers, “is the silence. There had to be at least three killers—probably more. The violence in the Manson house was ... well, it wasn’t describable. I was in Vietnam, and I never saw anything like this. But even assuming there were only three killers, that’s three people who would know. More, if you include other gang members, family members—or anyone else who knew them who would have a reason to be suspicious. Whoever did it would have come home drenched with the blood of their victims. That couldn’t have gone unnoticed. So, why haven’t we gotten a call from someone’s girl friend or neighbor or cleaning lady? A secret this big—it’s got to break sooner or later.”

Bird seized on this thought as the channel for the discussion that followed. “All right,” he demanded. “What are the possibilities then?”

A forensic pathologist suggested, “The violence of the crime scene seems to rule out that it was an execution; but maybe it was an execution gone bad. In any case, if it was an execution, the killers were professional. They’re probably out of the country by now. I’d look in the Bahamas, somewhere around there.”

The first detective shook his head. “No, I think the killers are dead, at least one or two of them anyway. Maybe the victims fought back and the murderers died of their wounds later. Maybe they were killed in an innocent-looking
car crash while they were trying to escape. Maybe they fled to Arizona or Nevada and were killed there. The best way to cover up an assassination is to kill the assassin too.”

Bird spent the better part of the hour pursuing conspiracy theories, trying to puzzle out why anyone would want to murder a useless old has-been like Charles Manson.

Finally, at the end of the hour, he turned to the last of the detectives, an older man who’d sat quietly puffing his pipe, listening to everything and saying nothing. “What do you think?” he demanded.

The old man shifted his position in his chair, tapped his pipe on the ash tray and spoke with deceptively soft words. “I think everybody’s looking in the wrong place. I think the killers are already in custody,” he said. “I think the LAPD picked them up on some traffic violation, found an old warrant for unpaid parking tickets and put them away for a few months. Something like that. If they’re a bunch of giddy kids—and that’s my guess—then they’ve probably told their cellmates. And I’ll bet that the cellmates are too terrified to say anything. That’s what I think.”

The following evening, Cordwainer Bird hosted a panel of psychics to see if they could solve the murders with their metaphysical prowess.

One psychic said that the murderer had red hair. Another said that the house was the target, that the murderers were trying to avenge a crime that the house had committed. A third claimed that the murderers had a supernatural connection with their victims, a connection that could not be explained or understood within the context of Euclidean geometry—that the lives of killers and victims were tangled in a web that went beyond the context of ordinary space-time. Right.

Bird let them babble for twenty or thirty minutes before he angrily ordered them all out of the studio. Then he turned to his studio audience and delivered another of his scathing diatribes, this one about the human mind’s inability to accept “I don’t know” as an answer—that we will make up the most astonishing explanations and reasons and justifications, just so we don’t have to live with the dreadfulness of having something in our lives feel
incomplete
.

“You supposedly intelligent human beings, educated and literate, will throw all of that rationality out of the window to become supplicants to a bunch of post-menopausal, self-important, unschooled, pretentious, posturing, posing old fools. These idiots don’t know anything; they’ve conned themselves into believing they have some connection
to the cosmic fluxes of the universe—and you idiots are so desperate to believe, you’ll hang on every word, simply because you can’t stand the pain of not knowing the answer.

“You wanna know the truth? When you don’t know, you won’t admit it. You got it hard-wired that not-knowing means you’re stupid. No, you got it worse than that. You believe that not-knowing is connected to your survival. So when you don’t know something, you don’t put yourself into a rational investigation, an inquiry, which is what a truly intelligent being would do. No, the evidence is that when you don’t know something, you make something up. All of you—and then you pass your bullshit around as if it means something. And then you have the colossal gall to wonder why you’re not producing results!

“You know what I think? I think the murderers are just like you. Just smart enough to understand the difference between rational and stupid, but not smart enough to recognize which side of the line you belong on. I think that when they finally catch the bozos who did it, we’ll all be amazed at how small and pitiful they really are.”

He was right.

 

Two days later, an ABC news crew, acting on their own initiative, performed an interesting experiment.

A driver, a cameraman and two reporters started at the Manson house on Cielo Drive. They pulled out of the driveway and headed down the hill to Benedict Canyon, where they turned left to head out toward the San Fernando Valley. In the back seat, the two reporters began changing clothes. The cameraman taped the entire process.

When both reporters had completely redressed, the driver stopped the car. They were on a wide curve, overlooking a fairly steep slope. Reporting on their regularly scheduled broadcast later that night, they said, “We assumed that the murderers changed clothes in the car. We thought to recreate that drive and see what we could discover. What we discovered was the place where they threw their bloody clothes away.”

Three pairs of jeans, a flannel shirt, a USC sweatshirt, a blue t-shirt and a black windbreaker were found on the hillside. Also a pair of tennis shoes and socks. All the clothes were blood-soaked.

The ABC news-team knew better than to touch the evidence, but they brought back great shots of their reporters pointing at the clothes on the hillside and the forensics team bagging the evidence and carting it away.

The USC sweatshirt provided the break in the case. It was an expensive limited-edition shirt available only to members of Tommy Trojan’s Homecoming Committee. Only thirty of them had been made. Armed with a new list of suspects, the detectives fanned out again. Anyone who couldn’t produce their Homecoming sweatshirt was a suspect.