âWeâre trying to spend our way into some happy feelings.â Thatâs the spin Lyle Menéndez gives a functionary at his fatherâs company about the preposterous sums of money theyâre blowing on clothes, hotel rooms, meals, you name it. Theyâre not doing this because theyâre sitting pretty, safe in the assumption that their hated father José left them all his money. On the contrary, they believe â because he told them so, after they got caught burglarizing houses â that theyâre out of the will, and stand to inherit nothing.
But Lyle, whose self-confidence increasingly feels about as consciously self-applied as his hair, has a plan. While continuing to spend money he doesnât have like thereâs no tomorrow, he will also somehow find and dispose of the will before anyone else can read it. Then their dadâs wealth and empire â which Lyle plans to use as the basis for his buffalo wings chain â will be all theirs.
Now, you can see why such a rationale might be a motive for murder. But if it were, boy, the Menéndez brothers sure made a hash of it. If they believed they were being written out of the will, theyâre being reckless as hell for spending so much money. If they believed they werenât being written out of the will, theyâre being reckless as hell by going to such great lengths â including contacting a friend whose dad is a probate lawyer and who subsequently wonât let the safe ostensibly containing the will leave his house â to hide it. This gets farther and farther from the perfect crime every time you think about it.
But spending money seems to be the only way they know how to cope. Tanned, shredded, and speedo-clad, the Menéndez brothers blow a small fortune, including a house party that leaves its guests mildly repulsed when Lyle and Erik start getting uncomfortably intimate on the dance floor. Considering what itâs safe to assume about their father, the conclusions one can draw here are unpleasant.
Theyâre not alone in this strange quantum state between the commission of the crime and someone, anyone being charged by it. The cops are increasingly desperate to find a culprit for the killings, which have upset the wealthy denizens of Bel Air â already on the verge of an uprising against Chief Daryl Gatesâs infamous LAPD because a cop got in some kind of slapfight with actress Zsa Zsa Gabor. The City of Angels, folks! Unfortunately, a sting involving a friend who cowrote a screenplay about parent murder with Erik before the killings (!!!) fails to produce any actionable results. By this point, Erik is nearly as accomplished a liar as Lyle.
But thereâs a parallel plot playing out all along, one which will have disastrous consequences for Erik and Lyle. Their therapist, Dr. Oziel, agrees to put his mistress Judalon (Leslie Grossman) in his and his wifeâs guest house for a few days so she can feel safe from the brothers, who might place her as the witness Oziel staged in the lobby during their confessions back in the previous episode. But she waaaay overreaches, in an off-screen reign of psychological/emotional terror that ends with her telling Ozielâs daughter sheâll be her new mommy soon. The good doctor kicks her outâ¦and she runs right to the cops with the truth about Erik and Lyle. All of Ozielâs constant proclamations of doctor-patient confidentiality are laugh lines, in other words.
The irony of all of this is, in what I canât help but imagine will be a pretty serious problem for them, that their dad did leave everything to them in the event of his and Kittyâs death. Itâs unclear whether Lyle his the will when his uncles permitted him to scan his dadâs safe for dirty pics first, or if the will never existed, but at any rate a housekeeper finds a crumpled copy of the one-page document in a closet somewhere. It names Lyle and Erik as the inheritors of everything.
Erik, unsurprisingly, feels guilty. But his plight is nothing more or less than the fundamental plight of childhood writ large. Are we obligated to be grateful to our parents for all they have given us, even as we suffer from everything else they have given us?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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