The Little Brother (26 page)

“Dan Hyde, a prominent supporter and figure in the sheriff's department and many others believe that the someone—the mystery vigilante—actually had a more base reason for turning over the camera: a political vendetta against Hyde and Sheriff Krone.”

“It makes me sick to my stomach that they'd use my son to get to me, and make him suffer,” Dad said. He shook out a match and threw it into his abalone ashtray, then he inhaled on his cigarette.

“He could go to jail for this,” he said, “because of me. Because of who I am. I don't condone what happened at all; I don't. But it's not a crime. It's been made a big-fish-type case right from the start. These types of cases can mean career advancement for a lot of people. I'll tell you: It sickens me.”

“Turn it off,” I said, by this time staring at the bottle of Coors in my grip instead of the TV screen.

Mike shifted forward from the couch and pressed the Off button with the sole of his shoe.

28.

A
FTER THE
48 H
OURS
episode aired, it seemed that everyone knew about the Hyde Three case. R. Sam Michaels began to churn out one article after another in the
OC Weekly.
“Untouchable and unreachable,” I heard Gabe's PR lady say of Michaels. Michaels wouldn't acknowledge her or her press kits, and “no one really knows who he is,” she said. “There are almost no photographs of him. He keeps a very low profile. I'm not entirely certain that he's not using a pseudonym.”

One afternoon just days after the
48 Hours
episode, Mike and I went to the girls' varsity volleyball game against our rivals, Newport Harbor, in their school gym. Mike had become interested in a girl named Karen, a pretty brunette with dark, sad eyes who played setter on the offense.

Since his car was in the shop because of a faulty transmission, Mike had talked me into driving him. It was the least that I could do, he said, trying to be funny but falling a little flat, considering that I lived at his house and borrowed his parents as my own.

We watched as the girls grunted and sweated, their shoes squeaking on the floor, ponytails swinging, and when the game ended (I don't remember who won), Karen and her friend Tina
came over and thanked us for coming. A shy and pretty sophomore, Tina had a smile full of braces of alternating purple and blue bands. She reminded me of a nervous colt, not fully grown into her lanky body. I'd met her before at the volleyball party and liked her.

We flirted awkwardly that afternoon (“You don't remember me, do you?” I said, knowing that she did. “I do!” “No, you don't”), and all the while she pressed the brush-like end of her long, dark braid between her fingers.

Meanwhile, Karen and Mike held hands for a few minutes—looking goofily into each other's eyes—until the girls' coach blew his whistle, calling them for a team huddle, before they had to board the bus back to our high school.

They trotted away from us, Tina throwing me one last shy, sweet look over her shoulder, and we watched in appreciation their firm legs and backsides in their shorts, their shirts knotted at their sides.

“She likes me,” Mike said, happy, as we exited the dank gym into the bright sunlight. I felt happy for him, and for my good luck with Tina, and this was the overall feeling between us as we approached my BMW in the parking lot.

“Oh, shit,” said Mike, the first to see spray-painted on the passenger side of my car in scraggly, large red letters:
RAPEIST SCUM.

It felt like getting slapped in the face, but almost immediately I had another sensation of stoic calmness, as if somehow I deserved this public shaming. I made an attempt at disassociation with the comment: “At least learn how to spell ‘rapist.'”

“What's that?” Mike asked.

Something had been placed beneath my windshield wiper, and I unhooked it: a clipping of an article by R. Sam Michaels, one that I'd already read, outlining the most ridiculous defense strategies for the Hyde Three, including a detailed account of a former porn star as a potential expert witness testifying that Jane Doe wanted to make a necrophilia-themed porn. (The defense team never did call on Sheila Morgenstern, a.k.a. Nikki Foxx, star of over one thousand porn films, including
Jail Bait, Gang Bang Girl, Fur Burger,
and
Both Ends Burning,
but she remained on Dad's payroll just in case.)

I handed the article to Mike.

“What's this?” he asked, scanning it with disgust.

As I faced my car, my back prickled, as if everyone was staring. The person who had tagged my car, I somehow knew for certain, was watching me.

“Let's go,” Mike said, looking around the parking lot.

We got into the car, and Mike wadded the article and threw it on the floor mat. “It's not like it's your fault,” he said.

“Guilty by association,” I said.

He shook his head. “Whatever,” he said, “but you're not a rapist. Uncool.”

I started the car and drove, bouncing over a speed bump in the parking lot, and trying to ignore the stares and pointed fingers from the people leaving the volleyball game and also a crowd from a huge track-and-field event that had just ended.

I couldn't get out of the parking lot quickly enough, since I was bottlenecked behind a line of SUVs trying to exit through the one way possible.

Then I heard a loud groan from Mike. His head went down to his hands, clearing my view so that I could see what he had just seen from the passenger side: the bus with our girls' volleyball team on it, their faces at the widows—pointing, talking animatedly—and there, toward the back of the bus, the grim and sad faces of Karen and Tina.

Looking back, I can pinpoint this as the moment I decided to get out of SoCal as soon as possible. The very next morning I scheduled an appointment with my guidance counselor, a large, kind woman with nerdy black glasses, so that we could more seriously discuss my college opportunities back east, or anywhere, really, but in state. (“Are you sure, Even?” she asked, tapping her pen on her desk. “You know, there are some fantastic universities right here in California.” I stared long and hard at her in answer, and she didn't press me again.)

When we finally made it out of the parking lot, I rolled down my windows, letting the breeze thrash us, a rushing noise like going down a river. At Mike's suggestion, we drove to the elementary school where his mom worked.

She'd been rearranging her room, getting ready for summer, taking down her grade schoolers' pictures and their names, which had been stapled across a wall. When we walked inside, she smiled until she saw our bleak faces, and then she said in a panicked voice, rushing to us, “What is it? What happened?”

“Mom,” said Mike, “it's okay, calm down.”

She looked to me, and I confirmed, “It's okay, Mom. Everything's okay.”

She followed us to my car, which was parked at the curb. Hands at her hips, she stared for a silent moment at the spray-painted message, and then she said—and by the way, I loved her even more for this—“Whoever wrote this uncreative and crude and completely erroneous statement was not one of my students, since the idiot can't spell worth shit.” I'd not heard her curse before.

We went back to her classroom, and she unrolled a large piece of green construction paper from its spool—a
zzzzip
noise as she cut it with a blade of an opened pair of scissors—and then we went back to my car, where she instructed us to hold the paper over the offending graffiti while she duct-taped it into place.

Dad paid for a new paint job, saying that I could get whatever color I wanted to replace the original Alpine White shade.

Without hesitation, I chose black.

29.

K
NOWING SOMEONE INVOLVED
in a notorious case such as the Hyde Three, for some people, seemed a little like knowing a celebrity. For the first time in my life, people sought me out. I became popular at my high school, but for all the wrong reasons. I preferred blending into my environment, being the observer and not the observed. I'd worked hard for my invisibility. But now people knew me. I became a salacious anecdote, not a person. I felt the constant stares and heard the whispers of the students and teachers around me those last weeks of the school year before the trial began in that summer of 2004.

As I made my way to my classes, I heard plenty of unsolicited opinions in the hallways and in the quad.

“Even!” someone shouted as I crossed the cafeteria. “How about a game of pool?” Then someone else, “Yeah! How'd you like a pool cue up your ass?”

“Hey, man,” said a junior who happened to be our class president, pulling me aside by my elbow before I opened the door to biology, “that girl, Jane Doe, should be thanking your brother and his friends.” A smile. “Now she won't have hang-ups about sex, huh? Anything goes.”

“That's so fucked up,” said a girl I'd never met, who happened to be listening. She glared at me and said, “You should be so ashamed.”

“I am,” I told her. “I live in shame. Shame and me are best friends. It's my first, middle, and last name. Shame Shame Shame.”

She looked horrified.

Another time, a popular senior named Heather Potter said hello to me, and then she asked me if I wanted to hang out sometime.

I'd been surprised that Heather Potter even knew my name. But then I remembered my notoriety and politely declined her invitation.

A few days later, the pretty volleyball player Tina, with her multicolored bands on her braces, found me in the quad at break.

She looked at me with commiseration, thumbing the end of her long braid. “I know about your brother, Even,” she said. “About what's going on. It must be awful for you. Let me know if I can help.”

“You can,” I said.

That was how Mike, Tina, Karen, and I found ourselves at Karen's bay-front three-story home on Linda Isle on a Friday night; her parents were out of town for a quick escape to Santa Barbara, and her younger brother was spending the night at his friend's.

We'd planned the get-together for three days, each of us coming up with excuses and explanations for our parents (in my case, Mike's parents), so that we could spend the night with each other.

Mike pushed the doorbell next to the large mahogany door which was decorated with a heron standing on one leg, beak up, with a leafy plant behind it. A slow, solemn, church-like gonging sounded, and Mike said, “Shit. Fancy.”

Tina opened the door, wearing a tight T-shirt and faded jeans, looking sweet and kind, and she beckoned us inside.

Karen's affectionate golden retriever followed me around the enormous marble entryway, nosing my crotch as if I'd stuffed the area with kibble.

“Honeybun, stop!” said Karen, pulling her dog by the collar. “Leave Even alone!” She looked at Tina and then at me with a sly smile, while she crouched to keep her dog in place. “Honeybun likes you,” she said.

“I like Honeybun, too,” I said, my heart thumping in both embarrassment and excitement.

Mike laughed, but when Karen and Tina weren't looking, he sent me a look, letting me know that Karen and her multimillion-dollar home intimidated him.

Mike had an attraction to athletic, rich girls such as Karen, girls with a particular confidence born of competition and wealth and a comfort with the physicality of their bodies. But for these same reasons, these girls puzzled and frightened him.

That night, we sat in Karen's living room near a cavernous fireplace fit for a castle, talking and laughing and passing around a bottle of Irish whiskey that Karen had pulled out from the bar.

Mike and I drank the most to ease our discomfort. Honeybun lay near my feet, now and then glancing up at me with a half-lidded stare. She really did like me.

At Mike's request, Karen played a DVD from one of their volleyball games, pausing the screen to show us what a “perfect spike” looked like and replaying it in slow motion.

As the bottle of whiskey diminished, our voices got louder, until Tina seemed to notice all at once, and she put a finger to her lips and said, “Shhhh,” and then we all burst out laughing.

Karen pulled out a plastic baggie of cocaine from her pocket, telling us that she'd found a stash in her mother's bathroom, hidden in a box of tampons, and had been saving it for tonight.

“It wasn't easy,” she said of the sacrifice, as she cut the cocaine with her dad's American Express card, which he'd left for her on the kitchen counter. She made fat lines for each of us on her mom's face mirror, saying, “But that's how much I care about you guys.”

Finished preparing the drug, she looked up and gave each of us a flash of her traveling-love-beam stare.

Then she bent over the mirror, a cut straw in one nostril and her index and middle fingers pressing the other nostril shut, and sucked up half her line.

She flipped her head and hair back with a wide, dazzled smile. A repeat with the other nostril, clearing her line.

Neither Mike nor I had tried cocaine before—and neither had Tina—but we followed Karen's example.