Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

When Jaime Salgando and the dancers were gone, Ali locked the door and took the green capsules out of his desk drawer and looked at them. For what this evening was costing him, he wished he could have put one of them in the pharmacist’s tequila.

Ali reached into the back of the drawer and brought out the magenta-and-turquoise capsule he had stolen from Margot’s medicine cabinet, along with the coke spoon and razor blade that he used when he had to give the girls a toot in exchange for services. He put the items on a clean sheet of bond paper along with the two green capsules and a funnel he’d fashioned from a sheet of heavier bond. He carefully pulled open the sleep aid and dumped the contents into the trash basket. Then he wiped his hands and held them palms down in front of him to make sure they were not trembling.

He very carefully pulled open the green capsule and poured the contents into the homemade funnel. It looked something like a mixture of cocaine and sugar might look. Then he picked up the empty magenta-and-turquoise capsule with tweezers and funneled the lethal dose into it. The green capsule contained a bit more than 50 milligrams, so there were some granules left over and it concerned him. But the pharmacist had seemed very confident that this would kill a 50-kilo animal, so there must be more than enough to do the job.

He was going to dump the remaining granules from the green capsule into his trash basket, but instead he took the residue into his bathroom and flushed it away. He washed his hands thoroughly and for no logical reason burned the paper he had used. He put the lethal capsule, which now looked like just another of Margot’s sleep aids, into an envelope along with the other deadly green sister and stored them far back in his middle drawer alongside the full vial of capsules.

His only concern now was that Margot might only have a few capsules left in her sleep aid vial. And that would mean he’d be afraid to add too many more, for fear of making it obvious. If that was the case, she’d die in the next few weeks rather than in the next few months, after she had gone to wherever it was that she was taking his son. Ali feared that outcome. He wanted her to be found dead in that other place, so that there would be little reason for investigators to look for answers back in Hollywood.

Then he felt his heart go hollow as he thought of where she might go to live when the house closed escrow, those places she had talked about. San Francisco? New York? If the judge permitted this, he might not be able to see his precious boy from the time she moved away until she died. The thought of not seeing Nicky for two months or more made Ali Aziz put his face down on his folded arms and weep.

MAN, YOU AIN’T RIGHT for this work,” his neighbor known as Junior said to Leonard Stilwell that evening while Ali Aziz wept and the Mexican pharmacist partied.

Leonard and Junior had been practicing for twenty minutes with a TR4 tension bar and a double-diamond pick that Leonard was planning to borrow from Junior for the job tomorrow. Junior’s apartment, three doors down the hall from Leonard’s, was about what Leonard had always found in a parolee’s crib: Cuervo bottles, porn mags, a half-eaten chocolate cake, candy wrappers everywhere. The room was so small, the giant Fijian would have had to stand in the kitchenette to make the bed, which he never did. He had huge hands and lots of jailhouse tatts that were nearly invisible on his dark skin.

After getting Junior away from the cartoon channel, Leonard was kneeling on the floor with the door open, trying to unlock the double-sided dead bolt with a thumb-turn on the inside. He was interrupted when a fat cockroach crawled up his neck, causing him to yelp and do a roach dance, slapping at his neck and shaking like a wet dog.

“They do not hurt you, bro,” Junior said. “Back home we eat them bugs if they too dumb to get off our food.”

“I’m scared of roaches,” Leonard said. “I grew up in Yuma with six brothers and sisters and a drunk old man that never worked. Cockroaches crawled all over us when we were sleeping, and so did the rats.”

“Bro, back home we eat them rats too. No problem.”

“Okay, lemme try again,” Leonard said.

The tension bar looked to Leonard like a very slender Allen wrench, and the pick, which Junior called a rake, was like a four-inch needle with what looked like a couple of camel humps on the end of it. The fact of the matter was, Leonard had never picked a lock in his entire life and had never bothered to learn from Whitey Dawson, not even once on the dozen jobs they’d done together.

“Man, you was not born for this work,” Junior said. “You sure you wanna take the job? You gonna fuck up and get busted.”

“I seen it done lots of times when I had a partner,” Leonard said. “It looked easy when he did it.”

“Why don’t you cut that partner in on this job, bro? I don’t think you gonna be teachable.”

“He’s dead.”

“Too bad, man. Wish I could help you but I promise my mommy I ain’t gonna do no crime no more.”

“Show me again,” Leonard said. “One more time.”

The big Fijian held the tension bar in his massive hand, inserted it, and said, “See, bro, the tension bar turn the cylinder.” He slid the pick inside with the other hand and said, “The rake, it lift up the pin.” Then he turned the knob easily and handed the little tools to Leonard, saying, “My granddaddy could do this, and he lost one hand to a mako shark.”

“Lemme try once more,” Leonard said, and he concentrated on copying the big Fijian’s finger moves.

He inserted the tension bar and said, “With this I turn the cylinder.” Then he inserted the pick and said, “With this I lift the pin.” And he felt it.

“Yes!” he said when he turned the knob.

He did it once more, and again it worked.

“You there, bro!” the Fijian said.

“I’ll bring them back to you tomorrow night,” Leonard said, putting the instruments in his pocket.

“You get caught, man, you don’t know me. You never heard of nobody from Fiji. Not even Vijay Singh.”

“I’m good with that,” Leonard said. “And when I bring the tools back, you’ll get the President Grant, like I promised.”

“If you ain’t in jail,” the Fijian said.

“Later, man,” Leonard said, walking out.

“Hey, bro,” the Fijian said, “I just remember. Could you gimme a ride to the clinic? I caught the clap from some whore, and the doc say come back for a checkup.”

“Yeah, I’ll drop you,” Leonard said. “Where you being treated?”

The Fijian aimed a fat index finger at his genitals and said, “Down there.”

When Ronnie and Bix returned to Hollywood South to turn in their car and check out, Hollywood Nate was waiting with his feet up on a desk, reading Daily Variety . Bix didn’t look happy to see him.

“Go on ahead,” Bix said to Ronnie. “I gotta talk to Nate for a minute. I’ll meet you at the restaurant, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, glancing at Nate, but he just gave her a little wave, betraying nothing.

Ronnie entered the women’s locker room to change out of her uniform, more uncertain than ever about her partner. There was something going on other than secret drinking. But what would it have to do with Hollywood Nate Weiss, who was sitting there like a sphinx? If she only knew Bix a little better, she’d just grab him and blurt out some questions she wanted answered. But for now she didn’t feel she had the right to intrude.

Bix and Nate walked outside and stood on the step in front of Hollywood South. Traffic was light on Fountain Avenue for such a balmy summer evening. At times like these, old residents of the neighborhood could almost smell the flower gardens and citrus trees that everyone used to cultivate back in the day. But now, in the most traffic-choked city in North America, there was only the smell of engine exhaust.