The Mansions of Limbo Read Online Free PDF Page A

the guesthouse to the main house.
    •        •       •
    From the beginning, the police were disinclined to buy the highly publicized Mafia-hit story, on the grounds that Mafia hits are rarely done in the home, that the victim is usually executed with a single shot to the back of the head, and that the wife is not usually killed also. The hit, if hit it was, looked more like a Colombian drug-lord hit, like the bloody massacre carried out by Al Pacino in the film
Scarface
, which, incidentally, was one of Lyle’s favorite movies.
    Months later, after the arrests, the Beverly Hills police claimed to have been suspicious of the Menendez brothers from the beginning, even from the first night. One detective at the scene asked the boys if they had the ticket stubs from the film they said they had just seen in Century City. “When both parents are hit, our feeling is usually that the kids did it,” said a Beverly Hills police officer. Another officer declared, two days after the event, “These kids fried their parents. They cooked them.” But there was no proof, nothing to go on, merely gut reactions.
    Inadvertently, the boys brought suspicion upon themselves. In the aftermath of the terrible event, close observers noted the extraordinary calm the boys exhibited, almost as if the murders had happened to another family. They were seen renting furniture at Antiquarian Traders to replace the furniture that had been removed from the television room. And, as new heirs, they embarked on a spending spree that even the merriest widow, who had married for money, would have refrained from going on—for propriety’s sake, if nothing else—in the first flush of her mourning period. They bought and bought and bought. Estimates of their spending have gone as high as $700,000. Lyle bought a $60,000 Porsche 911 Carrera to replace the Alfa Romeo hisfather had given him. Erik turned in his Ford Mustang 5.0 hardtop and bought a tan Jeep Wrangler, which his girlfriend, Noelle Terelsky, is now driving. Lyle bought $40,000 worth of clothes and a $15,000 Rolex watch. Erik hired a $50,000-a-year tennis coach. Lyle decided to go into the restaurant business, and paid a reported $550,000 for a cafeteria-style eatery in Princeton, which he renamed Mr. Buffalo’s, flying back and forth coast to coast on MGM Grand Air. “It was one of my mother’s delights that I pursue a small restaurant chain and serve healthy food with friendly service,” he said in an interview with
The Daily Princetonian
, the campus newspaper. Erik, less successful as an entrepreneur than Lyle, put up $40,000 for a rock concert at the Palladium, but got ripped off by a con-man partner and lost the entire amount. Erik decided not to attend U.C.L.A., which had been his father’s plan for him, but to pursue a career in tennis instead. After moving from hotel to hotel to elude the Mafia, who they claimed were watching them, the brothers leased adjoining condos in the tony Marina City Club Towers. “They liked high-tech surrounds, and they wanted to get out of the house,” one of their friends said to me. Then there was the ghoulish sense of humor another of their friends spoke about: Sitting with a gang of pals one night, deciding what videos to rent for the evening, Erik suggested
Dad
and
Parenthood.
Even as close a friend as Glenn Stevens, who was in the car with Lyle when he was arrested, later told the
Los Angeles Times
that two days after the murders, when he asked Lyle how he was holding up emotionally, his friend replied, “I’ve been waiting so long to be in this position that the transition came easy.” The police were also aware that Lyle Menendez had hired a computer expert who eradicated from the hard disk of the family computer a revised will that Jose had been working on. Most remarkable of all was that,unlike the families of most homicide victims, the sons of Jose and Kitty Menendez did not have the obsessive interest in the police search for