As he approached the house, he noticed a rail broken off the fence. The dead boy in the car—maybe he broke it trying to get away.
He walked through his front yard, past the wishing well, the flowerbeds, a bloodied blue bedsheet left under a pine tree.
He walked to the swimming pool, covered in brown leaves. Sharon’s inflatable swimming tube.
He walked to the front porch. “PIG” in brown blood on the door.
Living room. On the floor, two smears of blood where Sharon and Jay were found. Beside them, a candle stub, a bedroom slipper, a book on natural childbirth.
Their bedroom. Two big pillows across the bed. She always kept them that way, to hold on to when he was gone.
Blood on the door leading to the pool. She was awakened by the screams, he reasoned, got up, and went to the living room, where she was attacked before running to the back door to get away. They must have dragged her back.…
He spoke slowly. “There is something here. I can feel it. Something the police missed. I must find the thread.”
Outside again, he found a broken lantern in a flowerbed. He recognized it. The lantern. It meant something. What did it mean? It should be hanging on a nail on the front door. It must have fallen off.
Or was it taken off?
He looked up to the door, to the nail. He looked hard. Then he picked up the lantern and stared at it for some time, waiting for it to answer. Then he dropped it back into the flowers. It meant nothing.
In the master bedroom, he wept.
The next day, August 18, was his birthday. Newspapers and magazines, even the most reputable, ran lies: Sadomasochistic drug orgies, “a scene,” Time said, “as grisly as anything depicted in Polanski’s film explorations of the dark and melancholy corners of the human character.”
The day after, he appeared before the press at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “Excuse me,” he sobbed. “This is difficult for me. The last two months of my life were the happiest. I turned thirty-six yesterday and my birthday present was this treatment of me by the press. It isn’t true, these things they say. These were selfish newsmen who said horrible things about my wife. You all know she was one of the most beautiful women in the world, but what few of you don’t know is how good she was. She couldn’t refuse any friendship.”
He moved into Dick Sylbert’s rickety beach house overlooking the water on Old Malibu Road, secluded, but not far from the Malibu Colony, its gaggle of concerned and suspicious neighbors. Polanski stayed under Sylbert’s care for six months.
As he had with the Wilkses, he hid.
What little energy he could muster, he devoted to the case. The police, who kept in constant contact with him, maintained that the killer or killers were out for personal revenge, and advised Polanski to keep a sharp eye on anyone he knew, or had ever known. “We sat around,” Sylbert said, “thinking anybody could have done it ’cause we had no idea … So it was, ‘Hey, I wonder which one of our friends did it?’” On the theory that Polanski’s friends would be more vulnerable with Polanski than the police, he was advised to go under cover as himself, to act as “some kind of amateur sleuth.” Polanski, a gifted actor, assumed the part without hesitation.
It couldn’t be Sylbert. Sylbert was innocent. He was with Polanski in London.
One clue—a pair of horn-rimmed glasses found by the police at the scene—persisted, unaccounted for. With caution, lest his intentions be discovered, Polanski charged himself with matching the prescription of the glasses in question to those of his friends. He wouldn’t let on, even to Sylbert, his reasons for examining their dinner guests’ frames or engaging pals in conversation about their eyesight; it was too dangerous.
Sylbert unwittingly provided a lineup. “The house was always full of interesting people,” said Susanna Moore. “Warren, Anthea, Joan Didion, and [Didion’s husband] John Dunne, who had just moved up the road.” The devastation Polanski showed Sylbert he hid, in public, behind bravado. At dinners he entertained arduously. He soliloquied. He sprayed the air with outsize moods and gestures, one minute laughing, too hard, the next bursting with unchecked rage. He pounded the table, drunkenly slapped backs, rudely and brilliantly forced his voice into conversation. “Roman,” Moore said, “was not what you would call, by most standards, mature. He was so egocentric and so needy and so restless. He was manic, jumpy, talkative, dominating. Like an imp. He was often funny, but he would go on too long, and it would get boring. He would interrupt. He needed to be the center of attention. His clowning was a sign of insecurity and vulnerability. He was devastated by Sharon’s murder.”
“I think I was probably a better human being before [the murders],” he said. “It’s difficult to define, but I think I was more gentle with people before.”
He had sex. He partied.
Because he seemed to be singled out by fate, the public suspected and feared him, and because, in the midst of death, he tried to enjoy life, they hated him. There was a way, they said, to suffer, to grieve properly. This wasn’t it. Where was his heart?
The girls were young, too young, but he didn’t see any problem. He didn’t hide it. “I like young women,” he would say to the press.
He didn’t think. He ran.
“Shove off.”
“What happened to me diminished my contact, my rapport with people,” he said. “It reduced me.”
Alone with Sylbert, he cried.
* * *
The randomness of the tragedy reinforced Polanski’s belief in the chaotic absurd, that “our destinies are the result of apparently meaningless coincidences.” “After all,” he said, “even sitting here at some stage may be dangerous.” There was no reason for the murders, for his mother’s murder, for his unborn son’s murder, no reason why he, Roman Polanski, should be the recipient of so much misfortune. It would be frankly immoral to draw lessons from it, for to organize it was, in some way, to justify it. “Unfortunately,” he said, “there is no lesson to be taken. There is just nothing. It’s absolutely senseless, stupid, cruel and insane. I’m not sure it’s even worth talking about. Sharon and the others are dead. I can’t restore what was.” Meaning was for art. That’s what art was for. The rest was … what?
By night he ran amok; by day he fixated on the horn-rimmed glasses. Bruce Lee, formerly Polanski’s martial arts instructor, and now his friend, had casually mentioned he had lost his glasses. Could it be? Laying a trap, Polanski suggested they stop by the optician’s for a new pair. But there he discovered Lee’s prescription didn’t match that of the glasses found at the crime scene. But what now? Who? Plunged back into chaos, Polanski reevaluated his methodology. He realized leading suspects to the optician was a clumsy and impractical tactic, and over time would arouse the suspicions of the shop people. Instead, he bought himself a pocket-size Vigor lens measure gauge and carried it with him everywhere. Now, in case he should encounter anyone else who had lost their glasses, he would examine them himself, stealthily and undercover.
He bought a pin mike, a transmitter, a tape recorder, and bugs. He would hide them around his friends’ homes.
Paranoia was a kind of obsessive perfectionism; the microscope went under the microscope. There was the possibility that the killer or killers, after the murders, would have left bloodstains—surely cleaned, but still detectable—in his or her car. Polanski’s attention to detail: Equipped with testing chemicals and Q-tips, he sneaked into friends’ garages, swabbing inside their Chevrolets and Porsches, but quickly, before he could be found out. He went to work on John Phillips’s Jaguar, finding nothing of relevance—nothing, that is, save for a machete stashed in the trunk, but there was nothing linking such a weapon to the murders. Onward, he applied his Q-tips to Phillips’s Rolls-Royce convertible, swabbing the brakes, seats, steering wheel. He found Phillips’s diary. Inspecting the handwriting, he noted a resemblance to the blood lettering of “PIG” written on the front door. Or was he imagining the resemblance? Would that ease his suffering? He pinched the diary and photocopied a sample, which he sent off to a handwriting expert in New York, but the results came back negative. Was that a relief?