We had all followed the news stories about Evan Greene, followed them, I ought to say, with the scurvy interest that ‘people like us’ take in stories that could, either in part or entirely, involve people we know, or even people we are, or once were.

At least one of our crowd had actually met Evan Greene at an earlier moment in his, Evan Greene’s, life, his political life if I may call it that, before Evan Greene succumbed to the dark beckoning of lethal excess.

nadia steiger, 44, tenant of hesperus cottage, van meergen estate

When was I first aware of him? He probably introduced himself at some point. I didn’t realize he was living at Number Six at first. Clam Shell Cottage it’s called. I knew the woman who lived there before. I’d been away for a few months, and when I came back, there he was.

I wasn’t aware of him the way you mean until that first incident three years ago.

Who was living there before him?

Jackie Something. Jackie Banning. She was a club promoter, a PR person. She lived by herself.

Did she know Evan Greene?

I have no idea. Why would she?

She might have recommended him to the landlord.

I wouldn’t know. We weren’t friends. I knew her the way you know people you see all the time without thinking about them. I like having neighbors, but they’re usually horrible when you get to know them. Jackie was all right. She gave parties. I went to a couple. But I can’t remember anybody I met there. I don’t know what happened to her.

What were your impressions of Evan Greene before the incident three years ago?

If you look at Number Six from here, you only see that side of it through the trees really. I didn’t run into him every day. I mostly saw him getting in or out of his car.

Just a general impression.

I honestly never gave him a thought. Before, I mean. They say he did modeling when he was young. I could believe that. He has very waspy features. But when I try to picture his face he really looks like nothing. He got very thin. I did notice that. Almost skeletal. His skin started to resemble parchment. We didn’t speak often. Hello goodbye in the parking lot, and a few times at the pool. Or I’d run into him at the supermarket. This isn’t a close-knit community. We’re not up each other’s noses. I see most people here at the supermarket, if ever.

Can you recall any of those conversations?

He was always on about local politics. I have no interest in local politics. In one ear out the other. Dogs, also. He talked about dogs quite a lot.

He had a group that rescued golden retrievers.

Why would you only rescue the most expensive type of dog? He didn’t even have a dog himself.

What else did he talk about?

Nothing memorable. Talked your ear off but nothing you’d remember afterwards. Other people had more contact with him. I didn’t like him, frankly. Something about him wasn’t right. He had scary eyes. Empty, icy blue eyes. They say he used to scream at city council meetings. Even when you had an ordinary conversation with him, he had the look of someone screaming, even though he wasn’t.

Pepper Gillespie was friendly with him. In Coulibri Cottage, over the way. And Dr Balvet, Dr Balvet’s place is the one behind his. He knew him socially, I think. I’m sure Solberg in the front cottage saw things, he spies on everybody. Stargazing, he calls it.

pepper gillespie, 31, tenant of coulibri cottage

The way it was reported made more sense than what actually happened. I never heard of this slamming thing until the article came out in The Times, but I imagine Evan Greene was as fucked up as they were. It excited him to keep it going. He wouldn’t have been rational. Addicts never know what they’re doing, in my experience.

Did you notice these young men coming and going all the time?

It wasn’t all the time. That’s been exaggerated in the press. They weren’t all young, either. The first one that died was almost sixty. None of them were children. It’s a tough thing to decipher. It’s hard to imagine getting off on that. Each to his own and everything but . . .

Anyway, sure, I noticed them. I saw things. I have a pretty clear view of Number Six between the trees. I don’t sleep much. It would’ve been hard not to notice the traffic in and out of Evan Greene’s place. But for a long time it just seemed like, an old, gay white guy with lots of young Black friends. After the first one died, Roderick Williams, I think we started to look at Evan Greene differently.

You were friends with him?

Not at all. If somebody told you that, I bet I can guess who it was.

What were your encounters with him like?

He came on to me once, a few years ago. You know he posed as a photographer for a while. I think he had some delusions of being a Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Goldin type or what have you. He dropped the pretense after a while, apparently. The news stories never mentioned it. Anyway, once, this was by the pool, he said he wanted to photograph me for an art show. He found my tattoos fascinating, he said.

Did he photograph you?

No, I told him I don’t like being photographed. I guess he thought, because of the tattoos . . . I was standing there in my swim shorts and his eyes kept zooming in on my crotch, not furtively at all, he made his interest obvious. It was a bit creepy. He didn’t like being turned down. He took a negative attitude toward me for a while after that. Later, when he really started to change, visibly change, he suddenly became insanely friendly and talkative.

You thought he was insane?

I thought he was taking a lot of speed, or coke, to be that intense.

Anyway, now we know, the guy’s a monster. Became one. I don’t think he was that way before the drugs. It was a real Jekyll and Hyde thing. I feel slightly sorry for him, because it sounds like he’s going to get what amounts to a life sentence at his age. They’ve piled on all these charges like ‘operating a drug house’, which is going overboard in my opinion. It doesn’t seem fair.

What do you think would be fair?

I’d rather see him sent to rehab than prison. It’s just an opinion. None of this would’ve happened if he hadn’t gotten into meth. Meth turns people into robots. The way he’s been painted, he’s likely to get murdered in jail.

He shouldn’t have preyed on those people, if you want to frame it like that, no doubt. They weren’t the brightest bulbs in the box. On the other hand, they kept going back after they knew what they were getting into, so . . . It’s hard to know what to think about it.

aksel solberg, 59, and rosa solberg, 56, tenants of marlin cottage

If the press uncovers anything to grab on to, any stray detail, to make an ugly story sell, they will. It was lucky nothing about the estate figured in the reporting, aside from him living in a ‘fantasyland’ or ‘storybook’ cottage. Otherwise, we’d get tour buses coming through here. It was bad enough that that boy’s family and their political friends turned up every weekend before the arrest. They seemed to think everyone on the estate was somehow implicated in the whole thing. But once Greene was in custody it all went quiet as far as where he lived and all that. Otherwise, some of the old stories about this place would come to light again, no doubt. Not just the suicides, either. The press stuck to its political morality tale and left the neighbors out of it.

This is a totally different –

I know that. I know that. But the reporting has been horrendous. You can see it’s been blown up to fit a particular narrative. Two different ones, in fact. What happened was disgusting. But things like this happen somewhere in this city every night. The race factor got played up, along with the myth about Evan Greene being a billionaire with powerful political connections. What billionaire drives a shitty car like that beat-up Prius he drove?

These cottages are rent-stabilized. You wouldn’t think so, for such prime property. Nobody on the estate has anything like a billion dollars. Evan Greene sold a small data-processing service in Scottsdale ten years ago for two point three million dollars and he’s lived off that nest egg ever since. I looked into it. Tesseray bought the whole property for less than that. It’s no billion dollars.

It’s nice here of course. Exceptional for what we’re paying. The cottages are sweet. Very comfortable, even if they do look a bit Disney. ‘Disney Whimsy’, someone said, with grace notes of perversity. On clear nights I watch the stars above the clouds, through that telescope. The night sky puts things in perspective. We’re nothing but lint on a tiny ball of dirt and water. I mean from a cosmic angle. We all get tossed around on the currents of the universe. That’s the Evan Greene story, more or less.

Were you living here the first time the police showed up?

The police have been here more often than you think. But I know which time you mean, obviously. We were. We’ve lived here almost as long as Dr Balvet or Theresa Lennox, who has the place near the side gate. She’s not one of the original tenants, but she’s been here the longest. She’s a hoarder, apparently. A real fruitcake.

There were several minor incidents leading up to the first really serious one, in the weeks before.

One night a young man wearing a pair of white underpants came running out of Evan Greene’s house up to the side gate and away into the night. He was clutching his clothes. I suppose he pulled them on when he got to the stairs. Definitely in a panic. I happened to be out here stargazing. Another time one of Greene’s charming guests sat masturbating on that bench over there at two in the morning. Rosa was awake for some reason and happened to look out. She came into my room and told me about it. I threw on a robe and chased him off. I had words with Evan Greene about that. He fed me some convoluted tale about volunteering at a mental clinic years earlier, and this guy being a former client who somehow found out his address. I didn’t believe a word of it but I just let it go.

Men sometimes showed up at the main gate or came in through the street entrance. And they often came out stumbling and looking seriously wrecked. I just assumed they were rent boys. They were rent boys, as it turned out.

Did you or, if you know, any of the other tenants call the police when –

These people coming to see Evan Greene at all hours were often familiar to me. If I saw someone going there once, chances were I’d see the same person again over the course of a week or a month. After that it would be someone else. They were generally pretty well-dressed. I wouldn’t call the police just because someone I recognized looked wasted or turned up at weird hours, unless they seemed threatening. Theresa Lennox would, I imagine. Nadia Steiger might. They’re both a little nuts, in my opinion.

They didn’t, though.

That was more out of laziness than consideration, I’m sure. The thing is, people would shout his name from the front gate, where he couldn’t possibly hear them. Someone who did hear them would have to go down and explain that after sunset, when the gate gets locked, you’re supposed to have the code, or phone whoever you’re visiting to let you in. I had to do that a few times. I let them in, just to avoid trouble.

You might have kept them out for the same reason.

Looking at it now, that’s probably true. Of course they didn’t need a code for the side gate. There’s just a flight of narrow steps that runs up from the boulevard and then an ordinary wrought-iron mesh door, if they knew where it was. It’s a bit hard to find. There’s a lot of overhanging vegetation. There’s no light there. That gate’s almost never locked. It’s overgrown with ivy.

Actually, the police came more than once about Evan Greene before all this. Something to do with drugs. But that was all handled quietly. They never arrested him.

Did the owner ever try to evict him, do you know?

What, Mr Tesseray? Not at all. Him and Evan Greene have certain interests in common, I would think. It’s probably why he rented to Greene in the first place. They were friends.

What interests?

Well, not rescuing dogs, let’s say.

theresa lennox, 76, tenant of starfish cottage

I’m not set up for company at the moment. We can sit out here.

I just have to send a text message.

Okay.

I look after the plantings and landscaping. Not all of it, but some. The walkways and the shrubs, the hedges, the trees, the fieldstone benches, and so forth, were laid out in the late 1940s, but a lot of it’s changed over the years. I came here in ’86, after Tesseray bought the estate from the original owner’s trustees.

Who was the original owner?

I can’t think of his name offhand. He built these cottages . . . houses really . . . shifted a lot of the hillside, flattening parts of it out. None of it’s exactly flat, but flat enough where the houses are to put up structures, with all this foliage and garden areas between them. You make the foundations level when the land’s crooked.

He thought of himself as a sea captain. I read that somewhere. There’re nautical motifs, little seafaring touches in all the cottages. McAvery. The name just came to me. People called him Captain McAvery. In reality he’d never been on a ship, I’m told. He made all his money in noodles. Spaghetti imports, farina wheat from Spain or Italy, something like that. Captain McAvery the spaghetti king.

So, Elio Tesseray hired you –

No, not until long after I moved in. It happened more recently, that Tesseray needed help with the grounds. He knew I worked with plants and gardens. It’s only an occasional job. He hires a crew for heavier work. For instance, replacing the soil. The soil here is too alkaline for sycamores, and he wanted sycamores. They’re valuable trees. The ones over there were brought in from Idaho.

The drought has affected things. We can’t use the water we normally would. The fires don’t help either. Soot from the big fires gets carried here. Soot is oily, it reduces photosynthesis. By the time it gets here it’s particulate matter you don’t really see. It does a lot of damage. Leaves develop chlorosis and turn yellow. It isn’t that severe now, because of these torrential rainstorms. Which are pretty weird in themselves. But the fires are just going to continue to come in the dry season, and get bigger. The landscape is taking its revenge. Anyway . . .

Anyway –

Yes, anyway. What can I tell you? The tenants had a meeting after Roderick Williams died. Then another meeting after Jason Crosby died. Fat lot of good it did.

You went to these meetings?

At Solberg’s place. I didn’t stay long at either one. All they wanted to do was drink Solberg’s wine from Solberg’s vineyard and talk about Evan Greene for ten minutes and then chit-chat about Solberg’s butterfly collection and Solberg’s vitrines full of exotic spiders and beetles. Solberg also has a big collection of guns over there, I happen to know, though he wasn’t showing them around. I kept saying we should do something, but nobody wanted to stay on the subject. It was as if they just wanted to express their horror at the whole thing, to show how normal they are, and have done with it. The truth is, I didn’t want to do anything about it either. But I felt that someone should.

Yes, but who –?

Someone Evan Greene would be afraid of.

I don’t know who that would be.

Tesseray?

Tesseray lives in another world. He spends all his time at body-building competitions as far as I can tell. When he needs something done, he sends this kid Bobo. When he pays me, the kid brings the check over. Or we subtract it from the rent. Nobody ever really sees Tesseray.

The police wrote them off as drug casualties. Still, you’d think having illegal drugs and paraphernalia in the house would have had some repercussions. The papers say he had important friends, that that’s why it all got buried at first. You have to wonder if it was that, or simply that the victims were Black. It wasn’t until their families went to the press that things came to a head.

dr richard balvet, 67, tenant of pequod cottage

People aren’t telling you all they know. That I can assure you. They want to distance themselves as much as possible. It’s understandable. It wasn’t their doing, so they resist any suggestion . . . Of course, that’s how I got pulled into this as the first doctor at hand, and even though it had nothing to do with me either, I’m not going to disown having any relationship to Evan Greene. I wouldn’t say he was a close friend, but we certainly spent time in each other’s company, in my place or his place, or on the grounds, we talked, I thought I knew him pretty well. He lived right there, everyone on the estate knew him to some degree. He was even something of a public figure. I mean in local politics, if you went to any public meeting of any interest, he would be there.

Did he speak a lot at any meetings you went to?

I think there was a zoning meeting and a city council meeting that was open to the public. He always had a lot to say. Much of it didn’t go down well. He harangued people who were speaking. I always had an odd feeling that . . . that he was ‘acting’. That he wanted to be seen as someone ‘passionate’ about his ideas, which were . . . convoluted, would be a way of describing it. I’m sure he believed in whatever he was voicing his opinions about, but there was also this slightly artificial edge to it. Wanting to be seen, wanting to be regarded in a certain way.

Evan Greene brought you both times to his place before calling the police?

He thought the men could be revived. The first time I went in more or less unawares, the second time I phoned the police or anyway tried to, as soon as he described the situation to me. I couldn’t get a signal. In both cases it was way too late for CPR or anything like that.

Can you talk about the first incident and what happened that night?

Well, there too, a lot of the news stories distorted things. Some of the neighbors have probably added to that. Contrary to what’s been written, Roderick Williams was living with Evan Greene. He was known to everybody on this estate. He was living here when he died. Whether he was a house guest or a roommate is irrelevant. Everyone knew him.

Jason Crosby too: he’d been staying with Evan Greene for at least two weeks before he overdosed. He left, I believe, for five or six days, and then came back late one afternoon, and died the same night.

But look, I’m pressed for time today. I have a meeting with my lawyer, unpleasantly enough. If you’re seriously interested in what happened I could possibly see you next week. We can discuss it over coffee. Preferably somewhere off the estate. Now that you’re known here, the village gossips will be taking note of all your comings and goings . . .

wesley carter, 34, research assistant

I went to the estate several times. Some of the tenants wanted to expand on their initial statements. But after a certain point, the subject of Evan Greene melted away somewhat. They talked around the subject. Their own lives and so forth dominated these conversations.

Did that happen naturally, or were they deliberately avoiding talking about Evan Greene in too much detail?

With some it was hard to tell. I think they became worried about saying something ‘on the record’ that might contradict what they had already sworn to in affidavits, or, who knows, might implicate them in some way. The Evan Greene business was very touchy. This in spite of knowing I was only drilling into it as the basis for a possible film script. On the other hand, this was right at the end of the pandemic. People had been stuck in their houses for months and desperate to resume some kind of social life. Even spilling out their personal shit to an investigator made a welcome change. As opposed to going mad from isolation. They didn’t care to talk about Evan Greene, but they loved talking about themselves.

And Balvet? Did you speak with him again?

I did. A few times. Never on the estate. He was intent on keeping his neighbors out of his business. I’m not sure they were that interested in Balvet. But he wanted to keep them uninterested. We met at a coffee shop in Silver Lake, not far from the estate, another time we took a long walk together in Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Another person with obsessive problems, though his seemed a lot more real than others. Theresa Lennox, for example, was a complete paranoiac, steeped in conspiracy theories.

Pepper Gillespie?

Well, look, it’s all in the notes and interviews I compiled. I’d rather you read through them and draw your own inferences from what’s in there, rather than listen to my third-hand paraphrasing of all that material. There are transcripts of the recordings I made, notes I took after every visit. I think you’ve got plenty there to work with, if you really think a viable script can come out of it. It would have to be an indie film, so-called, because a studio wouldn’t go near this stuff.

There’s always someone happy to do drugs with anybody who has an apartment. That seemed to be what Evan Greene had done, harvested interested persons out of polyester tents in freeway underpasses, or scooped them off Santa Monica Boulevard, promising to get them high, maybe promising other things, and whisked them back to his curious nautical cottage. Two of these fun-seeking friends, unfortunately, died on his premises. A third one ran half naked to a gas station, where police were called, and this individual said he’d been injected with drugs while unconscious. There is a legal way of describing Evan Greene’s life pod, which no news outlet failed to do, as a ‘drug house’, with penalties on that basis alone involving jail time . . .

When the story broke we all immediately thought of Daniel – whom some considered a friend, while others, like myself, tended to keep him at arm’s length, albeit in a friendly way. Daniel could be an oblivious, scarily effusive meth head when he was using. He once picked me up by the waist and swung me around someone’s living room like a hapless rag doll, in an excess of what he apparently considered affectionate high spirits, and I simply found obnoxious and frightening. Others liked him better, or at any rate put up with him with greater indulgence. I never knew what to do with my face when I caught Daniel’s attention. He brought his own face uncomfortably close to yours when he spoke to you, as if he intended to chew your nose off and suck out your eyeballs. He refused to let any gathering end, and if hard drugs could be brought into it to keep things going far into the next day, or the next week, so much the better from Daniel’s point of view. People who do meth often feel a need to do it with others; it’s a sociable drug, although it often leads to homicide. Daniel has been known, in the absence of anyone closer, to find transient drug pals in the jhuggi colonies that crop up all over any fallow stretch of land in Los Angeles.

Apparently, Evan Greene’s reputation as a methedrine candyman had spread among the city’s street-dwelling riffraff, particularly among men of color down on their luck, mainly young men of color, but some others too, older men of color, younger men of less color, it could go like that. Evan Greene was often too high to be picky about who he dragged home with him. It’s after three in the morning, you want to do speed with somebody else to get that nice orgiastic feeling going. Not that you’d be able to do anything especially orgiastic. As the Porter in Macbeth observes of drink, ‘it provokes the desire, but takes away the performance’. A drug friend could really be anybody. Not someone special (and then, as the song goes, I’m only me, not someone better, not someone good, I’d be a soldier, that’s if I only could . . .). Los Angeles is a physically big city, but a rather small conurbation when it comes to artists and writers, and people driven to extremes, if they didn’t start out in extremis in the first place. (I’m not counting actors, who take up so much space.) Word travels fast.

Evan Greene was sexually attracted to Black men. That much is established. But a few ‘in-depth’ stories in the press suggested that he also had contempt for the very people he was attracted to, that he sometimes, casually, used jarring racial slurs in conversation among Caucasian listeners. So the later explosion of outrage against him doesn’t seem unjustified, even if it looks cooked up from a cynical misreading of what actually occurred between Greene and his house guests. (Was it cynical? A question for later.) Apparently Greene could only gratify himself with men rendered fully passive after he shot them up with a combination of methedrine and other drugs, sedatives for the most part, men who lay on his polished living-room floor naked except for ‘tighty whitey’ underpants and white athletic socks. How he happened to locate men already clad in this under-attire when he brought them home has never been reported, and possibly Evan Greene was never questioned about it. Perhaps Evan Greene provided the socks and underpants. Whether Greene achieved any sort of sexual release in this situation also isn’t known, in fact it isn’t known whether Greene even made physical contact with these prone individuals, except while injecting their arms or other body parts. For all we know, he may have fondled their privates, fellated them, licked their testicles, rubbed his body against theirs, rimmed their anuses, or done other things to them, but nothing of this nature has been reported. We do know that he videotaped many of his sessions, encounters, whatever these episodes might be termed, but of course his videotape collection was confiscated by the police, so we really don’t know what he did or didn’t do with these men.

Photograph by Nan Goldin, Daily dose, Berlin, 2015

This is an excerpt from the last book Gary Indiana was working on before he died on October 23 2024. Here, Jesse Barron contextualises Indiana’s final novel, Remission.