Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

“All right!” Jetsam said.

“He said he won the thousand betting on the Giants against our Dodgers with a stranger he met at a pool hall,” Compassionate Charlie said with disgust. “Any resident of this town who’d even think up such a disloyal fucking story deserves to go to jail.”

Margot Aziz tried reaching Bix Ramstead yet again. She was acutely aware that his wife and family would be returning home in a few days. That’s all the time she had. All the time she would ever have with that man, she was sure of it. If it didn’t work with Bix, she’d have to come up with an entirely new plan. But would Jasmine hold still for it? Her greed was being overwhelmed by fear and she was already talking about aborting the scheme, even after Margot had put so much time and effort into Bix Ramstead in recent months. Never once in all that time would Bix agree to spend the entire night in her bed. Never once did she have the opportunity to put the plan in motion. It was giving her a headache thinking about it. The stress was getting unbearable.

People thought she could survive forever on a $7 million net worth. Her lawyer estimated that $7 million, more or less, would be her share after all the real property and other assets, including a growing stock portfolio, were divided. But this was before the lawyer’s exorbitant fees would be deducted at the end of the ordeal.

The attorney had told her that with proper investments, she and Nicky could live “comfortably.” And she’d laughed in his face.

Margot had reminded him that hundreds of homes in the Hollywood Hills were presently for sale for more money than the “comfortable” amount, a few of them for twice that. How could Nicky be raised in his present living standard if she had to spend at least four or five million on a decent house? And did the lawyer know what house maintenance costs were around here? And did the bachelor lawyer have any idea what a trustworthy au pair charged? And how about the fees at a good school? Nicky would be in kindergarten come September, and the annual fees would cost more than the Barstow home her parents bought when they’d gotten married. Margot told him that she understood very well what a day-to-day money struggle was all about, but she was determined that Nicky never would.

About Nicky. That’s where she and her lawyer had their biggest disagreements. He told her that when he was through with Ali Aziz, the nightclub proprietor would be afraid to ever be a day late with child support payments. She’d told him that was a joke, that she knew Ali Aziz as well as she knew herself. And there was no doubt whatsoever that he would secretly divest himself of his entire net worth and make clandestine plans to convert all his holdings to cash. And then to take his son away from her, away from America, forever.

The lawyer had insisted that Ali Aziz, a naturalized citizen, would never do any such thing. Living in a Middle East country again after having lived a lavish Hollywood lifestyle was beyond the attorney’s imagining.

Margot had reminded the lawyer that Osama bin Laden had also been rich and had given it up to live in a cave. And she doubted that Osama would have to spend big bucks on cocaine in order to get his blow jobs. And then she’d asked the lawyer to verify a supposition. She’d asked it casually enough: If Ali passed away at any time during or after the divorce settlement, would his fortune go to Nicky with her as executor?

The lawyer had answered that, as far as he knew, Ali’s new will named his attorney as executor, but that, yes, his fortune would go to Nicky. And then she thought about Ali’s attorney. He seemed like a reasonable man, as lawyers go. He’d blush when she’d stare at him for too long. She could work with him on behalf of her son. There would be approximately $14 million for her and Nicky. They could get by on that. She was still young, still had her looks. There’d be lots of wealthy men out there after she extracted Jasmine from her life.

And even if she never found the right man, Nicky would come into his inheritance in thirteen years. Margot could not guess what his $7 million, properly invested by Ali’s lawyer/executor, would look like by that time. Nicky would take care of his mother then. She’d be forty-three years old and her ass would be falling like a bag of wet laundry, and she’d need someone to take care of her.

Margot looked in Nicky’s room and saw that he was sound asleep. She went to her bedroom and undressed, then had a hot shower, and, turning on the bedroom TV, channel surfed. She gave up and switched to one of the easy-listening cable channels, then set the burglar alarm, deciding to turn in early.

Margot went to the closet and brought down the jewelry box where she’d been keeping her sleep aids after catching Nicky one afternoon up on her bathroom sink rummaging through her medicine cabinet looking for cough drops. She got a glass of water from the bathroom and sat in front of her vanity mirror, brushing her hair for a few minutes. Then she removed the top from the vial.

Margot thought of Ali then, of how he didn’t like her taking the sleeping capsules for fear that any drugs would cause her to revert to the cocaine use that she’d conquered years before. She turned the vial on its side in order to shake a capsule into her hand. And at that very moment, when she was thinking of Ali, Rod Stewart began singing “We’ll Be Together Again.” And she felt a shiver jetting through her neck and shoulders.

Margot thought, No, we will never be together again. Not in this world, not in the next, if there is one. The very thought of Ali Aziz and what she must do made her hands tremble. She dropped the vial on the dresser top and all of the magenta-and-turquoise capsules spilled out.

Margot scooped the capsules back into the vial. One was left on the dresser top and she put it in her mouth and swallowed it. Then she swallowed another, despite her doctor’s admonition that one was enough. Tonight she needed to sleep uninterrupted.

Before retiring for the night, she called Bix Ramstead’s private cell number one more time and left a message saying, “Bix, I beg you to call me!”

VIOLENT NIGHTMARES tormented Leonard Stilwell all through the night. He’d been in a cell with three other guys, including a tatted Latino strong-arm robber who’d somehow learned that a prisoner late in arriving-a thirty-two-year-old insurance agent-had been booked for sexually abusing his girlfriend’s eight-year-old daughter.

The Latino had been minding his own business until then and hadn’t said anything to anyone the whole time that Leonard had been in the cell with him. But when he received the word about the child molestation, he got up and without warning began beating the insurance agent’s head against the wall of the tank, causing a laceration on his skull that spattered blood onto Leonard’s T-shirt.

When the jailers heard the screams, both men were pulled from the tank. And as the attacker was being led away, Leonard heard him yelling to the jailers, “Me, I’m a robber! That’s what I do! Him, he’s garbage!”

Later, Leonard was on his bunk, sleeping fitfully, waking often with night sweats. During one of those waking periods, he decided that he was getting too old for this life. He was through doing petty stings and scrounging for rent money. When he got out, he was going to get a stake and begin life anew, and he thought he knew how to do it.

After they were awakened for what Leonard called fried roadkill and fake eggs, he uttered a spontaneous comment to his remaining cellmate, an old con artist with refined features and a mane of white hair who had bilked three elderly women out of their life savings.