Hollywood Crows (42 page)

“It’s not him I’m thinking about. It’s that Crow, Bix Ramstead. How well do you know him?”

“I’ve seen him around for years, but I never worked partners with him,” Dan Applewhite said.

“He’s through, for sure,” Gert said.

“Bix Ramstead made his choices, just like Ali Aziz,” Dan said. “What happened to both those guys has nothing to do with you and me.”

“I guess so,” Gert said. “But I don’t feel right about it.”

“We’re off tomorrow,” Dan Applewhite reminded her. “So how about doing a Hollywood thing? How about going with me to one of those old movies I told you about? Maybe one starring Tyrone Power. If you wouldn’t mind going out with a geezer.”

“You’re not so old,” she said.

It was still an hour from sunrise when Bino Villaseñor was seated across the table from Bix Ramstead in one of the interview rooms at the Hollywood detectives’ squad room. They had talked for forty-five minutes uninterrupted, all of it recorded.

Bix Ramstead’s eyes seemed sunken in their sockets. He still had the unsettling stare when he wasn’t directly answering a question, what the detective called “the stare of despair.” His mouth was dry and gluey, and when he spoke, the dryness made his lips pop.

Bino Villaseñor said, “You must need a cold drink bad. And so do I.”

The detective left the interview room for several minutes, and Bix put his head down on his arms and closed his eyes, seeing strange images flashing in his mind. When the door opened again, Bix could hear voices outside talking quietly.

Bino Villaseñor put two cold sodas in front of Bix, who was dehydrated from so much alcohol. Bix popped one open and drank it down, then the other. The detective sipped at his and watched Bix Ramstead.

“Is that better?”

Bix nodded.

“We’ve pretty much covered it,” the detective said, “unless you have any more to offer.”

Bix took a deep breath and said, “No. To summarize: I was stinking blind drunk and I don’t remember much of anything after going upstairs. I did hear her yelling ‘Don’t shoot.’ I’m sure of that much. And I damn sure heard the shots. And I saw him dead on the floor, or seconds from death, with blood gushing from chest wounds, and a gun by his hand. Nothing could’ve saved him. I did not talk to Margot about anything after that and did not contaminate the scene in any way. I told her to sit in her son’s room until police arrived. I went downstairs and waited. And I’d give my right arm or both of them if I could set the clock back to seven last night, when I decided I could handle one shot of vodka.”

“Okay, Bix,” Bino Villaseñor said. “I believe you.”

Bix looked up then, the first time the detective could see some life in his eyes, and he said, “Don’t you believe
her
?”

“I guess I’ll have to,” the detective said. “The stories fit like a glove. A latex glove. But I’ll always wonder about a few things. That woman told no less than half a dozen cops from Hollywood Station and Hollywood South that her husband was threatening her. She may as well have made a video for YouTube entitled
My Husband Wants Me Dead
. She even took a shooting lesson and wanted to buy a gun. And finally, she managed to get the greatest corroboration in the world. A veteran married police officer, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, was right there as a witness to the event.”

Bix looked at the detective and said gravely, “Do you actually think we conspired to murder her husband?”

“No, I don’t think
you
conspired with anybody,” the detective said. “You wouldn’t be dumb enough to put yourself right in the bedroom during a capital murder. There’d be lots better ways for you to get it done. But buddy, you
were
dumb enough to destroy your career. Yet I got this very uneasy feeling about a woman who manages to get her boyfriend in bed for the first time on the very night that her husband decides to murder her in her sleep.”

“I’m not her boyfriend,” Bix said.

“What are you, then?”

“I don’t know what I am anymore,” Bix Ramstead said. “Are we through here?”

“We’re through, except that Internal Affairs is outside, waiting to get at you next.”

Bix gave the detective a bitter smile then and said, “Why would I bother to talk to IA? As you’ve pointed out, my career is over. My pension is lost. My children will be seeing this filthy story on the news. Their classmates will ask them humiliating questions. And my wife, she…”

He stopped there and Bino Villaseñor said, “You’re not gonna talk to them?”

Bix took his badge and ID card from his badge holder, put them on the table, and said, “You talk to them.”

Bino looked in those despairing eyes and instantly thought of the Behavioral Science Services shrink. “Okay, Bix, screw IA. But there’s a couple of news teams outside, waiting to jump all over you. How about letting me call the BSS guy for you? You need to talk to somebody right now, buddy.”

Bix said, “No, I have to go home now and feed Annie.”

Before the detective could say anything further, Bix Ramstead stood and walked out the door of the interview room, out of the detectives’ squad room, and out the front door of the station, toward his minivan in the north lot, where the surfer cops had driven it.

He hadn’t gotten to the parking lot when one of the on-scene reporters, a tall guy with a full head of flaxen hair, wearing light foundation that had smudged the collar of his starched white shirt, leaped from a van, holding a mike. He ran after Bix Ramstead with a camera operator trailing behind.

Bix looked around for a moment until he spotted where the surfer cops had parked his van and was halfway to it when the reporter caught up with him, saying, “Officer Ramstead! Officer Ramstead! Can you tell us how long you and Margot Aziz have been lovers?”

Bix ignored him and kept walking.

The reporter matched him stride for stride and said, “Do you and Mrs. Aziz have future plans?”

Bix ignored him and kept walking.

The reporter said, “Have you phoned your wife about this yet? Have you spoken to your children?”

Bix ignored him and kept walking.

As they reached Bix’s minivan, the reporter asked the ultimate cliché question that Bix Ramstead had personally heard a hundred media hacks ask victims at terrible events.

The reporter said, “How do you feel right now?”

And that got Bix Ramstead’s attention. He turned and said, “How do
you
feel right now?” And he swung a roundhouse right that caught the reporter on the side of the jaw, knocking him back against the camera operator and sending them both sprawling onto the asphalt of the parking lot.

As Bix was driving away, the reporter picked himself up and yelled, “Man, you are
really
in trouble now!”

It was late morning by the time Bix got home. The killing of Ali Aziz had happened too late to make the morning newspaper, but he was certain it would’ve been on the morning TV news. He had feared that his brother might be waiting for him.

When he unlocked the door, Annie ran from the bedroom and leaped on him with energy he hadn’t thought she had at her age. She was bursting with joyful whimpers, licking him and bouncing like a puppy. He knelt down and held her in his arms and said, “Oh, Annie, I didn’t feed you last night. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

Then Bix sat down on the floor, his face in Annie’s fur, his arms around her neck, and wept.

When he was able to get up, Bix ignored the flashing on his answering machine. Instead, he went to the kitchen and prepared a huge breakfast for Annie, giving her two hard-boiled eggs, several ounces of boiled chicken breast, and her kibble. He mixed some nonfat cottage cheese in the bowl and put it down on the kitchen floor.

While Annie’s face was buried in the food, he walked out the back door and filled her water bowl to the brim. But while he was doing it, he heard the flap in the doggy door open, and Annie poked her head out to make sure he wasn’t leaving her again.

“Oh, Annie,” he said. “I’m here.”

Then Bix went back inside, and Annie returned happily to her breakfast while he entered his son’s bedroom. Bix looked at a baseball trophy and at photos of Patrick playing ball with Annie when she was a pup, and one of Patrick graduating from middle school. Then he entered his daughter’s room and picked up a photo of Janie and his wife, Darcey, sitting side by side on the piano bench. He couldn’t remember what they were playing when he’d taken the photo and he was surprised to see that Janie had inherited her mother’s lips. How had he never noticed that before?

He entered their bedroom then, his and Darcey’s. She’d never liked the photo of her when she was pregnant with Janie, but he loved that photo for the serenity in her face. He was very glad that his daughter’s features favored Darcey and not himself.

Bix opened the closet door and reached on the high shelf, back behind a pair of hiking boots he wore whenever they went camping. He opened a zipper case and removed his off-duty gun, a two-inch stainless-steel revolver. When he got to the kitchen, he saw that Annie had cleaned the bowl, so he opened the refrigerator and put all of the remaining chicken into the bowl along with more kibble and cottage cheese.

He went to the wall phone and called the LAPD emergency number, got a PSR on the line, and gave his name and address. He asked that a patrol unit be sent code 2. Then he opened the front door quietly, not wanting Annie to see him leaving again. He walked to the front yard and took the revolver from his pocket.

When Annie heard the gunshot she stopped eating. She ran to the living room and looked out the window. Then she bolted through the doggy door into the backyard and ran along the side of the house to the chain-link fence that prevented her from going into the front yard. She stood up on the fence with her front paws until she could clearly see him lying on the grass.

Then Annie started howling. She was still howling when the first black-and-white arrived.

H
E
’
D FALLEN ASLEEP
watching TV and awoke feeling like Rosie O’Donnell was sitting on his head. He had a humongous headache when he got up that morning. He was looking for something to blame it on besides the two pipeloads of rock he’d smoked, and all those 40s he’d guzzled. Then he remembered those little capsules that Ali Aziz had given him. He vaguely recalled popping two of them before he passed out.

Leonard Stilwell turned on the TV, since he couldn’t stand silence, and began drinking ice water. After that he drank a glass of orange juice before going back for more water. He’d never been so thirsty in his life and his head was killing him. It had to have been the sleeping meds. Leonard opened the drawer of the lopsided chest of drawers that contained two pots, a frying pan, two dinner dishes, a bowl, a few knives, forks, spoons, socks, some underwear, and two clean T-shirts. On top of the T-shirts he found the envelope with the magenta-and-turquoise capsules.

He should’ve known better than to use anything that fucking Ay-rab had given him. He took the envelope into his tiny bathroom and dumped the remaining capsules into the toilet. It took two tries to get them all flushed away.

When he came back into the kitchen, one of the local morning news anchors, a hottie whose heavily penciled eyebrows were used as emphasis, was talking about a killing. Leonard felt like adjusting the TV vertical to keep those bouncing fucking eyebrows in one place. When he turned up the volume to hear if for once she had something sensible to say, he heard “Ali Aziz.” Then she went on to the next story.

“Holy shit!” Leonard said, switching to every other local channel. But the news was either over or somebody was talking about some horrible fucking recipe you couldn’t get Junior the Fijian giant to choose in place of a bowl of cockroaches.

He quickly got dressed, took four aspirins, and ran downstairs to his car, driving a couple of blocks to a residential street where he could steal an
L.A
.
Times
. Then he drove back to his apartment and looked all through the newspaper, but he saw nothing about Ali Aziz. He turned on a local channel again and saw an LAPD spokesperson just winding up his brief statement on the suicide of some LAPD cop and the fatal shooting of nightclub owner Ali Aziz by his former wife, who’d been mixed up romantically with the dead cop.

The first thing that Leonard Stilwell thought was, There goes my chance at another Ali Aziz shakedown! The second thing he thought was, How can I make a buck from this by telling the rich widow that Ali bugged her house? The answer was obvious: He couldn’t. Not without revealing his own part in it. And he’d seen enough of Hollywood jail.

Leonard Stilwell told himself to look on the bright side. He had ten grand plus. He had the stake he needed to get out of crime and go into the business he’d been contemplating. Still, it was a goddamn shame that the hotheaded Ay-rab had to get himself smoked like that just because some cop was porking his old lady. It was the only time in his life that Leonard Stilwell had found himself right in the middle of a big-time soap opera, and he couldn’t figure out how to squeeze a fucking dime out of it!

Late that morning, Detective Bino Villaseñor had nearly completed his reports and was eager to go home, when he got the word that Officer Bix Ramstead had shot himself. Everything changed in an instant. Both the area captain and station captain were in meetings with the West Bureau commander. And the detective knew without a doubt that this thing was going to be discussed with the chief of police himself before Bino Villaseñor ever slept in his own bed.

The detective called the law offices of William T. Goodman, Esq., and was politely told that Mr. Goodman’s client Margot Aziz would be making no further comment to anyone unless compelled to do so by court order. Mr. Goodman said that he would accept any subpoena pertaining to this terrible tragedy on behalf of his client at any time in the future.

At 2
P.M
. that day, after spokespersons for the chief of police had been badgered and hounded by reporters, Detective Villaseñor found himself in a conference room on the sixth floor at Parker Center with police brass and representatives from the district attorney’s office. Bino Villaseñor had been preparing himself for this meeting all day and had expected dozens, if not hundreds, of detailed questions. But by the time he arrived, all of them had already read his reports and seemed satisfied. The questions were few.