And then she started talking.
43
O H GOD!” LINDIE Holmes sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling. The tears were coming freely now, her brown eyes muddied with sadness. “I feel like I did back then…when everything came crashing down.”
“I’m hear to listen, so why don’t you start from the beginning?” Decker had several notepads. Pen poised, he said, “Tell me about yourself, Lindie.”
“Nothing to tell. I was a good kid from a nice family. It was the times.”
“Crazy times. Lots of good kids got swept away. Where’d you go to college?”
“Kentmore College in Pasadena. Do you know where that is?”
“Absolutely,” Decker stated as he wrote. “It was started by the Reverend William Coolidge Jones. It was a bastion of conservatism during very turbulent times.”
“Exactly. Most of us came from conservative homes. That’s where I met Christian Woodhouse. We started dating with the intention of getting married. I had the wedding planned out in my mind. Then one day at a party, he met Alyssa Bright, who later added the Mapplethorpe, the pretentious twit. After he met her, things radically changed.”
“How so?”
“Alyssa was a transplant to UCLA and Berkeley. She introduced Christian to a social conscience, but mostly she introduced Christian to sex and drugs.” She shrugged. “I was in love with Christian, so I went along for the ride. He didn’t have to prod me too much. It was a hell of a lot more fun than organic chemistry.”
Decker nodded, his hand cramping as he wrote as fast as he could. He got a slight break as she finished up her third latte and asked for another.
“All the drugs and partying took its toll. Technically, we dropped out of college, but if we hadn’t left, we would have flunked out. Both Christian and Alyssa came from more money than me, but I had some savings in the bank. We pooled our resources and rented some crash pad in the East Valley. Its biggest claim to fame was that it had a lot of bedrooms. To make ends meet, we took in boarders, dropout students like us. We weren’t picky about who they were as long as they could pay the rent. In the end, there were twelve of us in the one little house. Drugs flowed, sex flowed, life was one big party.” She stared at Decker. “You’re around that age. You must know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about.”
“See?” A smile through her tears. “Even cops have a past.”
Not much of one. In the early seventies, Decker was a father, a husband, and, most important, a traumatized vet, working as a beat cop in Gainesville, Florida. Still, he gave her a smile. She perked up when her fourth latte appeared. It gave her fortification.
She sipped and said, “After a while all the mindless stuff got boring, so we slipped into the next obvious stage. This was around ’73 or ’74, I guess. The Beatles and the Stones had discovered the Eastern religions. Now there was a purpose to being stoned. It led to spiritual enlightenment, but when we tried it out, something was lacking. Then Alyssa brought in Beth and Manny. Things changed. We found our real purpose.”
“Let me back it up a moment,” Decker said. “How did Alyssa meet Beth?”
“At the coffee shop where they both worked. Alyssa invited her to one of our meditation parties. Beth and Manny happened to be somewhat religious…Catholic by birth, but they also had included many Native American customs in their worship. It led to the perfect solution. We created a service that was familiar, but now we had the cachet of including Indian lore. We were entranced. Manny and Beth joined our group. We started our own spin on meditation. Hence the birth of the Church of the Sunland.”
Decker wrote and wrote. “Okay, then what?”
“With Manny as our leader, we pulled in some new members. He gave our little group some focus and much-needed gravitas. Otherwise we were just a bunch of white American kids rejecting what we grew up with. People started coming to hear Manny speak. It was Beth’s idea to start charging money for the good of the group. She also found the storefront and that made the church a real entity. Beth and Manny used to spin the Indian tales and folklore. Beth taught us all how to cook traditional New Mexican dishes and we held all these potlucks that drew even more people. Beth also gave demonstrations in ceramics and charged for lessons. We used one of the bowls for sacramental wine, and another for an incense burner. It was all very exotic.”
“I understand.”
“Manny was the natural leader, but Beth was the creative one. She also came up with the idea of buying an organic farm to give the group some real purpose. We all thought it was a fabulous idea. This was before the hard-core organic-food craze, but a lot of hippies were into health food. We were all psyched on the idea. We finally had some goals in our pathetic lives. It was all going so well!” Lindie sighed and drank more latte. “Then Belize showed up.”
Decker nodded. “Trouble?”
“With a capital T.” She wiped away tears. “If Manny and Beth were exotic, Belize was the king of glamour. Belize not only had Indian blood, but he had actually served time in jail. At that time, you’ve got to remember that there were no such things as criminals, just political prisoners. This was the decade when the Indians took over Alcatraz. Native Americans were hot. Belize was hot. He caught everyone’s eye when Manny brought him in one day. Manny worshipped Belize. Their old man was sentenced to something like forty years in prison for murder. Belize took over the role as Manny’s father figure.”
“Belize took an instant liking to me. Believe it or not, I was cute when I was young. I wish I had had warts on my nose. It would have saved me a lifetime of misery.”
Yet she had stuck it out with the guy. Decker said, “He made a play for you?”
“Yes.”
“And it flattered you.”
“You have to understand, I was always second fiddle…more like third fiddle. First in the alpha female position was Beth, then Alyssa, then me, and then some of the others. All of a sudden this exotic, mysterious guy was coming on to me. Instantly, I gained a new stature.”
“What happened to Christian as your boyfriend?”
“That broke up a long time ago. He was part of the group, but we were no longer an item. It was a free-for-all.” She paused. “Do you know what happened to Christian?”
“He’s a headmaster of a very exclusive private school back east.”
She rolled her eyes. “Talk about a sellout.”
“Maybe he felt he could serve best by educating young minds,” Decker said.
“Maybe he fell into the job because that’s what his father did. Christian used to deride his dad because he received all these expensive birthday and holiday gifts. Now he’s doing the same thing. I use the word ‘hypocrite’, but look at me. Soccer mom complete with the brownies and the SUV.”
“You’re raising your children in a wholesome environment. What’s wrong with that?”
She gave him a tearful smile. “Thanks.”
Decker said, “When you say that it was a free-for-all, I assume you mean all the partying?”
“Of course.”
“What about Beth and Manny. Did they get into the partying?”
Her eyes looked past the physical walls that she gazed upon. “For some reason, I remember the two of them as being kind of spiritual. I know they smoked a lot of weed, that I can remember really well. But I don’t recall them fucking around a lot. Beth and Manny took their roles as leaders pretty seriously. I remember Manny being more into drugs and food than sex.”
Consistent with what Alyssa Bright Mapplethorpe had told Marge. “How long was Belize with the church before things went wrong?”