I look at Star. Normally, I’d chalk this talk up to one of Charlie’s well-established dodges, leading you one way, only to let you know he really means the opposite. But her mouth is open and she’s letting loose all these little butterfly groans of concern.
He again brings up the conversation he had with Tex, where Tex wanted to know what to do. He’s still on his feet, shoulders pulling back, blood and rage rising to his face. He’s right there. “Don’t ask me what to do!” he roars, punching the air. “One thing you don’t want to do is step on me. You don’t want to do that. Man, you know what to do. Do it!”
The guards look over, wait until he calms, then go back to the TV.
“See,” he says, “there’s no conspiracy in that.” Maybe. But I can see now how he may have gotten his point across to Tex and told Tex what to do without having to come right out and tell him. It’s in his sudden fury, in the buffeting, concussive roar of his voice, in the silent goading chatter of his expressive body, that dance of his, which can say more for him than words.
He sits back down. I ask him where that talk with Tex took place. He goes silent. In the past, he’s said he wasn’t at Spahn when Tex and the girls drove off, that he was in San Diego and spoke to Tex on the phone, not returning to the ranch until much later.
By way of reminder, Star scoots forward and says, “You were on the phone.”
Charlie looks at her, then at me, then at the wall and says, “I don’t know, which is what I say when I’m trying to get out of stuff.”
He lets a moment go by. Smiles that half-man, half-devil smile of his.
“I’m lazy,” he goes on. “Out there, you can get somebody else to do whatever you want done. I’ll do whatever I can to not do anything. When I do nothing, I survive. I just don’t want to take responsibility. The mistake I made is I didn’t go with them. Tex was scared. A mama’s boy. The second night went better, because I had a hand in it. In the situation, not the murders. No, man, I wasn’t there for that. But, oh, they made a mess of it the first night. If I’d been there, it would have been a much better scene. I feel I should have did it. I’d have did it right. There’s no doubt in my mind.”
He nods his head. “Tex always did what I said. He didn’t have to. He could skip on the highway and leave, but when he came to the ranch, he did what I said. He’d just seen the man – me – for the first time in his life, and he wanted to walk like it, talk like it. He wanted to be it. And there I was, in the gutter, man. And he was coming along, and he had a nice truck, and my mistake was, I let him into my world for that truck. I was real smart. It cost me 45 years for a damn Dodge pickup truck.”
Just another miscalculation in a long line of miscalculations that, in the present case, started with the shooting of Lotsapoppa and the slashing of Gary Hinman and ends with him in prison for life, not only for the Tate-LaBianca killings, but also, along with Spahn regulars Bruce Davis and Steve “Clem” Grogan, for the murder of ranch hand Shorty Shea, about which he says, “Yup, we killed Shorty. Chopped him up into pieces. But I didn’t do anything. It was Bruce and Clem, and Tex was there. Bruce didn’t know how to fight, so I showed him how to fight and then seen what they did out the back window of a car when I went away. I wasn’t there.” It’s funny how he’s never around for anything. “Yeah,” he says. “Isn’t that odd?” Sometimes he can be so transparent, which makes him look like nothing more than a goofy, klutzy small-timer who made some bad decisions that led to more bad decisions that led to murder and who then got caught up in an ambitious DA’s dream about a mastermind Svengali with demonic visions of world domination. Some crook, some outlaw, some gangster, some desperado, probably the worst ever.