Glen Charlock’s death is the concealed center of the Channel View Estates violence: Bigfoot Bjornsen tells Doc Sportello that Glen, not Mickey Wolfmann, was the intended target. The revelation recasts the apparent confusion around the gathering as a deliberate attack, while Bigfoot’s admission that he helped set Glen up makes the killing inseparable from betrayal and belated remorse.

The Intended Target

Bigfoot explains that Glen had become distrusted by both sides: the outfit he was running guns for no longer trusted him, and the Brothers had blacklisted him as a traitor to his race. Glen was therefore exposed not by a single allegiance but by the collapse of his standing among competing groups. Bigfoot’s account identifies him as the target all along, turning what Doc had understood as violence amid the commotion at Channel View Estates into a planned hit.

The disclosure also overturns the assumption that the violence was principally about Mickey. Bigfoot says Puck had described the commotion at Chick Planet Massage as cover for the attack on Glen, and that it was never about Mickey. Mickey, he says, stumbled onto something he should not have seen; the men in the John Wayne outfits panicked and hustled him away. The two strands of the incident thus separate: Glen was targeted, while Mickey’s removal followed his accidental discovery of something dangerous.

Bigfoot’s Betrayal

Bigfoot’s knowledge is personal as well as professional. He tells Doc that he and Glen had once been close allies: Bigfoot took shank cuts for Glen, and Glen did time in the hole for him. He nevertheless helped set Glen up. His admission is not an excuse; he calls his own conduct shameful and says that at least he owed Glen a warning call. He claims to have warned him just before the attack, a last gesture of loyalty that could not undo his prior role in the setup.

Bigfoot chooses to tell Doc because Doc is the only person he knows who ever cared about Glen. The confession therefore brings together two different kinds of obligation: Bigfoot’s belated debt to a former friend, and Doc’s concern for the dead man. The revelation gives Doc an explanation for the killing, but not a remedy for the betrayal or a clear path to identifying the shooter.

The Unresolved Killing

Later, an envelope left under Doc’s kitchen door contains enlargements of film from the Channel View Estates gathering. The images show close-ups of the gunman who killed Glen, but the ski mask makes the face unreadable. Doc examines the pictures through a lens until their features seem to separate into colored blobs; the evidence yields no reliable identification. Art Tweedle is one possibility, but Doc cannot rule out anyone else.

The photographs leave the death without a definitive killer, even after the motive and intended target have been clarified. Doc compares the uncertainty to an unavoidable defect, and Sauncho Smilax explains that marine insurance calls such a defect inherent vice: a vulnerability that cannot be avoided, sometimes belonging not only to cargo but to the vessel carrying it. The analogy gives the investigation’s failure a larger resonance. The return to the past does not restore a whole, legible account; it produces a mosaic of doubt in which Glen’s targeting is known, but the identity behind his masked killer remains uncertain.