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Dedication

For Diane Houslin and her tireless pursuit of truth

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Monday, July 7, 1969

I looked down from the third-floor office window onto the hastily built greenhouse in our back-fence neighbors’ yard. The hothouse frame was constructed from pine four-by-fours. This structure was tightly wrapped in semiopaque plastic sheeting that fluttered only slightly in the morning breeze. The structure reminded me of an army barracks at maybe one-third size. Standing around six and a half feet high and wide, it was four times that in length, with a partially flattened triangular roof. These current neighbors, seven long-haired hippies, had moved in five months before. They built the nursery and wired it for perpetual electric light on the first day. Nearly every daylight hour since then they went back and forth armed with bags of soil, watering cans, clay pots, insecticide brews, and various pruning devices.

At night they sometimes had parties. These festivities often spilled out onto the front porch and lawn but never the backyard. The hothouse was off limits to anyone except the Seven.

They were an interesting-looking crew. Three young women and four men; all somewhere in their twenties. All white except for one young black man. Wearing embroidered jeans and threadbare T-shirts, they spent an hour or so almost every afternoon sitting around a redwood picnic table eating food prepared, served, and shared by the women. They poured wine from green-glass gallon jugs of Gallo red and passed hand-rolled cigarettes from one to the other in an endless circle.

I liked the city farmers. They reminded me of life in my childhood home—New Iberia, Louisiana.

LA was a transient city back then. People moved in and out with predictable regularity. Five months was a long stay for tenants without blood ties or children.

When the back door to the hippie house came open I looked at the round white face of my Gruen Chronometer mit Kalender. It was 7:04 a.m. on Monday, July 7, 1969. The hippie I’d dubbed Stache came out of the split-level ranch house wearing only jeans. The nickname was because of his generous lip hair. I was standing at that window because Stache came out early every morning toting a long-necked tin watering can, wearing neither shirt nor shoes. This ritual had tweaked my detective instinct.

When Stache bent down to get the garden hose I turned away from the window but remained standing behind the extra-large desk. A case had taken me out to Las Vegas over the past week. This was my first day back at the agency and I was the only one there so far that morning.