When the police found Gary Hinman, he looked as though he had been posed deliberately to frighten them. He was slouched in a chair, his torso and the side of his face smeared with blood, his ankles and wrists still tied up with extension cords. There was blood on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, smudged and imprinted with the marks of tennis-shoe soles. Messages had been written on the walls in blood: incitements to rise up, to destroy.
He was a music teacher — Gary Allen Hinman — a graduate student a few credits short of a master’s degree in sociology. In his living room and his bedroom there was a library of textbooks, Marx’s Das Kapital, several books on Buddhism, transcendental meditation, gardening, jazz. Because his kitchen had been ransacked — all the drawers pulled out, papers scattered on the counters — it looked at first like a drug deal gone bad, just another hippie killing another hippie. There was not much of an investigation until a few days later, when another seven people were murdered in a similar fashion, wealthy people who were not hippies or drug dealers at all. They had been bound by ropes or cords before being stabbed to death, sometimes fitted with a noose or a hood in some elaborate rite of sacrifice. Because the meaning of the killings was impossible to ascertain, it became more ominous. The news brought panic, bewilderment, fascination. When the killers’ faces were at last revealed in newspapers and on TV — offhand or contemptuous or even smiling — they looked beatific, or simply empty, young people severed from all ties to the ordinary world.
It had started when someone that Gary Hinman had not seen in a long time showed up in a sweat, his face pale, almost gray, a boy who had lived in Hinman’s basement last year for a few months, Bobby Beausoleil, with his white dog. When Hinman let him in, he offered Bobby some tea, but Bobby said no, he’d take a glass of wine, if there was any wine. He hadn’t slept last night, he’d had nowhere to go. He told Hinman that he needed a hundred dollars. He didn’t ask for it, he just insisted that he needed it, his voice quiet, almost resigned. He stood in the kitchen in his borrowed clothes and Hinman didn’t understand what had happened to him, how he had become this vagrant in an army coat, a bruise on his face, circles of sleeplessness under his eyes. He thought of Charlie, the day three months ago that Charlie and Bobby had dropped a used piano off on his porch, something in their manner giving Hinman the first indication he’d ever had that they were anything other than his friends.
He told Bobby he didn’t have any money, what was he talking about, but Bobby just looked down at his glass of wine, the stem rising from the web of his fingers on the kitchen counter. He insisted that he was in trouble, he needed the money, he owed it to some bikers, Danny and Ray from the Straight Satans, Charlie’s friends. He said that he had sold them some mescaline and now they were saying it was cyanide, it was a burn, they wanted their money back, and what did Gary think they were going to do? Did he think they were just going to let him go? Did he think Charlie was going to just let him go?
Hinman had a mustache and a beard — marbled and crusted with blood when they found him, blood that looked more like dark syrup — and a bald spot at the back of his head. He looked older than he was. He had had a little bit of a crush on Bobby last year, not sexual but an attraction, a desire to help, and Bobby was always at loose ends, always driving up and down the coast with nothing to eat, no money, this beautiful white dog that he managed to feed and that he loved like a little boy loved his dog, a white Alsatian. He didn’t have a hundred dollars. He told Bobby that he would try to help with at least some of it, but he lived from paycheck to paycheck — Bobby knew that — and he had maybe twenty in his wallet. He grew plants in his garden, corn and beans and lettuces and tomatoes. He had fed Bobby for a couple of weeks last year, different casseroles and soups he would have made in bulk anyway, it wasn’t a problem. A few months ago, he had even bought the used piano from Bobby, the one on the porch. He had always tried to help, and that was why it made no sense now for Bobby to shout at him, angry, but then with tears in his eyes, standing so close, shouting for the money that Hinman didn’t have, knowing he didn’t have it, hating him for the stupidity of not having it.
And so the pistol came out of nowhere. The blunt force of the pistol grip — the wood and steel against the skull — and then the blood coming down through Hinman’s hair. It seemed to happen almost in reverse. Right before, there was something in Bobby’s eyes that told Hinman that this wasn’t just about money, that it could not be explained by anything as rational as a hundred dollars. Bobby hit him on the side of the head with the pistol frame clenched backward in his hand, not once but three times, cutting open his scalp, hitting him with the gun and then kicking him when he was on the floor. It’s a hundred fucking dollars, Gary. I know you have it somewhere. Don’t be a fucking Jew about this, it’s just a hundred dollars. They just sat there on the floor for a while, neither of them moving, Bobby breathing hard, a glaze on his face as if he was going to be sick. For a moment he seemed to become aware of how things had changed in that kitchen, aware of how they had once been friends, but that was when Hinman knew it wasn’t going to stop, that Bobby was just steeling himself for another round, that Hinman’s own weakness, so naked and exposed, was making it necessary for this to continue. When Charlie showed up a few minutes later with two girls, Susan and Mary, everything began to move forward with a kind of dream logic, each step like some confirmation of what Hinman had always known but was realizing only now.
Charlie had a knife, almost as long as a sword, in a scabbard at his side. He was wearing a shirt with big, loose sleeves that Hinman recognized as one of Bobby’s. He just stood there with his hands crossed in front of his waist, looking down at them like a bored father: two boys in a fight, blood on the floor, Bobby breathing, Hinman breathing. He didn’t say anything, he just turned his head slowly to one side, as if searching for a better angle from which to judge their inanity. Then he went into the living room and left them there, Hinman watching as Bobby leaned over his knees on the floor, staring into space, trying to think his way through this. The girls stood silently by the kitchen counters, their fingers hooked in the belt loops of their jeans, not sure what was expected of them yet. It wasn’t just a question of money, Hinman knew for sure now. The money was something like an excuse they had all made to help them arrive at this moment. He could see that Bobby wasn’t thinking clearly, sitting there with the pistol in his hand, not moving. Then Bobby left the kitchen and came back with the extension cords and said to the girls, “I have to talk to Charlie for a minute. You watch him. Don’t let him move.”
He saw his chance then. It was just the girls. They looked as scared as he was. He started twisting himself up onto his feet, his head throbbing and his vision blurred, but he couldn’t do it, he just kicked himself slowly in a meager arc on the floor, his sense of balance gone. A black sheet of pressure forced his eyes shut and pushed out against his eardrums. The girls were screaming, Goddamn it, Gary, why don’t you sit down? Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just do what he said? One of them hit him in the back with a chair. He could hardly feel it through the pain in his head, his eyes closed, his face pressed down against the linoleum floor. She hit him again — groaning, sighing, making a sound of disgust — and now he felt a bar of pain across his shoulder blade. They came back into the kitchen, and Charlie was standing over him, his foot on Hinman’s chest, prodding him a little. He turned to Bobby and told him that this was important, he had to do this right, to call him when it was finished. Then he reached down for the long knife at his side and drew it out of its scabbard, crossing it over his body like a skilled swordsman, the point in the air behind his shoulder, and in the same motion brought it back down on Hinman’s head. It was as if the side of Hinman’s face had been torn out by a rake. He felt nothing but pain. He screamed, but the screaming came from another room. His fingers did not recognize the sticky slime that had been his ear, and it took several minutes before he had returned fully to his body.