Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

“Where’re you going?”

“He might open the door for me. I established some rapport with him.”

“Bix, you’re off duty,” Ronnie said. “Let a supervisor deal with it. You shouldn’t get involved.”

“Finish your dinner, Ronnie,” Bix said. “I’ll call you when I check it out.”

“This is not your responsibility,” Ronnie said.

“I feel I should’ve done more,” he said, turning toward the door. “I had a gut feeling.”

“We did what we could at the time,” Ronnie called after him. “If something bad happened there, it’s not your tragedy, Bix!”

She didn’t know if he heard that last part or not. Bix Ramstead was running out the door to the parking lot.

Mrs. Farnsworth was standing on the street by the black-and-white. She’d given Gert and Dan each a cup of coffee, which they were finishing when Bix Ramstead drove up and parked his personal car, a family-friendly Dodge minivan.

The cops gave their empty cups to Mrs. Farnsworth, who said, “Evening, Officer Ramstead.”

“Hello, Mrs. Farnsworth,” Bix said. “I’m glad you kept my card.”

“It’s real quiet in there,” she said to Bix. “And it’s never quiet in there. And he got real mad at her last week when a young white man she works for gave her a ride home. If he’d hit her, I woulda called you. But he just grabbed her arm and got in her face and yelled angry Somali talk. And she took the bus home the next day without the young white man. It shouldn’t be so quiet in there like it is tonight, Officer Ramstead. I’m scared for that girl.”

A moment later, all three cops were back on the front porch of the wood-frame cottage. They stood silently and listened. There was only the hum of traffic on the nearby four-lane avenue and the sound of a dog barking nearby and the whirring of cicadas in the yard next door and faint salsa music from somewhere down the block. Then they heard the sound of a deep male voice, chanting prayers.

Bix knocked at the door and said, “Mr. Benawi, it’s Officer Ramstead. I spoke to you last week about the shopping carts, remember?”

They listened again. The chanting stopped.

Bix said, “Mr. Benawi, please open the door. I need to talk to you. It’s okay about the shopping carts. I just need to know that everything else is all right. Open the door, Mr. Benawi.”

The chanting started again and Gert Von Braun felt a shiver, but it was a warm, dry summer evening with a Santa Ana blowing hot wind from the desert to the sea. Dan Applewhite felt the hair on his neck tingle and he knew it wasn’t caused by the Santa Ana.

Bix Ramstead said, “We’re not leaving until you open the door, Mr. Benawi. Don’t make us do a forced entry.”

The chanting stopped again. They heard padded footsteps. Then Omar Hasan Benawi’s rumbling voice on the other side of the door said, “There is nothing for you here. Please leave my home.”

“We will, Mr. Benawi,” Bix said. “But first I need to talk to you face-to-face. And I need to see your wife. Then we’ll all go away.”

“She will not talk to you,” the voice said. “This is my home. Please go away now. There is nothing for you here.”

They heard the padded footsteps retreat away from the door, and the chanting began once more.

“Well, shit!” Dan said.

“Now what?” Gert said.

“This is what the federal consent decree has done to the LAPD,” Bix said to Doomsday Dan. “What would you have done back when we were real cops?”

Dan looked at Bix Ramstead and said, “We’re white, he’s black. We better not do something hasty. I can’t afford a suspension right now.”

“Answer my question,” Bix said to Dan. “What would you have done six years ago, before a federal judge and a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats emasculated us?”

Dan Applewhite glanced at Gert Von Braun and said, “I’da kicked the fucking door clear off the hinges and gone in there to see if that woman is okay.”

“Exactly,” Bix Ramstead said.

And he took three steps back, then ran forward and kicked just to the right of the doorknob, and the door crashed open and slammed against the plasterboard wall.

Bix Ramstead’s momentum carried him into the darkened living room. Gert Von Braun and Dan Applewhite drew their nines and followed him, casting narrow beams of light around the shabby room. Dan took the lead, trying to illuminate the ominous hallway leading to other rooms at the rear of the cottage.

The chanting had stopped. Now there was no sound at all, except for the traffic on the busy avenue half a block away. The first room was stacked with cardboard cartons, aluminum cans, and refundable bottles. Their flashlight beams played over the boxes, and then the cops advanced one behind the other to the last room, where a dim light was burning. Dan Applewhite pressed his back to the wall, his Beretta semiautomatic in his right hand now, and he crouched and peered around the corner.

“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, and he leaped upright, dropping his little flashlight and holding the Beretta in both hands. “Down! Get down on your belly!”

Gert, holding her light in one hand and her Glock in the other, sprang forward, crouching below Dan’s extended arms, and yelled, “Down, goddamn you!”

Bix Ramstead edged into the crowded space and looked in the room.

The Somalian was on his knees then, wearing only the black trousers he wore when last Bix saw him. He was also wearing half-glasses, his eyes looking like tarnished dimes, and he clutched a Koran in his right hand when he slid down into the prone position.

Bix Ramstead mumbled, “In the name of god!”

Lying prone, Omar Hasan Benawi said, “Yes, in the name of the one true god. She did the shameful thing with a white man. Now I give her to the white man.”

There was dried white paint spatter on one wall, and puddles of paint on the threadbare carpet had dried and were hardening. Dried paint smeared the other walls and had dried in streaks on the window blinds. The Somalian’s hands were white with dried paint and there were smears on his bare torso and on the tops of his bare feet, and the front of his trousers was caked with white paint. A cheap table lamp lay broken on the floor, and an empty five-gallon can of paint was lying on the floor beside the bed alongside an eight-inch paintbrush. There was dried white paint all over the coppery bedspread.

And on the bedspread was Safia, the wife of Omar Hasan Benawi. She had been strangled with the cord he’d jerked from the table lamp, and the ligature lay coiled like a serpent on the pillow beside her head. Naked, she looked tinier, more frail and fragile and vulnerable, than Bix Ramstead had remembered her. And more childlike. She was lying supine on the bed with her head on a pillow, and her arms were crossed over her small breasts, as her husband had posed them. And she was white.

He had painted every inch of her white. From the bottoms of her delicate feet to the crown of her small round head, she had been painted dead white. Even her opened lifeless eyes had not been spared. Dried paint clogged the cavernous orbs that Bix Ramstead remembered so well.

When Dan was handcuffing the Somalian’s hands behind his back, the prisoner said, “Now she is yours to bury with other white dogs in your infidel places of the dead.”

“Shut the fuck up!” Gert Von Braun said. “And listen while I advise you of your rights.”

There were dozens of employees of the Los Angeles Police Department at that crime scene before the sun rose. One of the first was the night-watch detective Compassionate Charlie Gilford, who was about to go end-of-watch when he got the call from Bix Ramstead. He just had to see this one, so he jumped into a detective unit and drove to Southeast Hollywood as fast as he could.