Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

She saw him lurching naked toward the open doorway, toward the lamp outside, just as she got her hand down inside Ali’s crotch and worked the gun up and out, using the sheets of tissue between her fingers and the steel. She picked up the pistol and placed it beside Ali’s outstretched right hand.

Margot wadded the tissue in her left hand and, putting her right hand on Ali’s bloody chest, smeared some blood on her own chest and cheek for dramatic effect, screaming, “Ali! Ali! Bix, I think he’s dead!”

Bix Ramstead found the wall switch by the door, turned on the bedroom lights, and said, “Get away from him! Don’t touch him!”

Margot stood up, put her bloody hand to her face, and screamed, “He’s dead! Ali’s dead! Oh, dear god!”

Bix Ramstead swayed and scrutinized the scene in horror, saying, “Where’s my clothes? Where’s my goddamn clothes?”

“Ali!” Margot screamed, running into the bathroom, kneeling at the toilet, and making gagging sounds, while Bix found his clothes in the closet and picked up the telephone that had fallen onto the floor beside the bed.

When Margot heard him making the call, she stopped gagging and put the tissues in the toilet and flushed them away. When she came out, Bix was talking to the watch commander at Hollywood Station.

Margot washed Ali’s blood from her hands but not from her face or chest. She went to the closet and put on suitable pajamas, a full-length satin robe, and bedroom slippers. Then she walked toward Nicky’s room to sit and prepare herself for the questioning.

The last words she would ever speak to Bix Ramstead were uttered when he was downstairs in the foyer, waiting in the doorway for the arrival of police. She was upstairs, standing at the railing outside Nicky’s room, and she looked down at him.

“You were right, Bix,” she said. “We were very bad for each other. But I want you to know that I’d rather he’d killed me tonight than see you brought into this horrible nightmare. I’m very, very sorry.”

The call was given to 6-A-15 of Watch 3, the morning watch, but when midwatch unit 6-X-66 heard the location, Gert Von Braun said to Dan Applewhite, “Hey, that’s the address that was on that guy’s driver’s license!”

When midwatch unit 6-X-46 heard it, Jetsam said to Flotsam, “Bro, that’s the house on Mount Olympus!”

Soon there were four black-and-whites parked on the street in front, one of them belonging to the watch commander. And Bix Ramstead was standing on the porch in front of the house, telling them not to come inside but to keep the street clear for the coroner’s van, criminalists from Scientific Investigation Division, and the two Hollywood homicide teams that were coming from home. Only a successful telephonic argument by the area captain, who said that this incident should be contained as much as possible, kept Robbery-Homicide detectives downtown from being called out, as they often are in high-profile cases. With an LAPD cop involved, this was very high profile.

The surfer cops stood in the driveway, and Jetsam looked up at the moon illuminating the tile roof on the two-story house. For a few seconds, cobwebs of cloud floated across that dazzling white ball high in the velvety black sky over Hollywood.

And Jetsam said to his partner, “The Oracle would have told us to beware tonight. There’s a Hollywood moon up there. And bro, this fucking house is full of bad juju.”

FLOTSAM SAID TO JETSAM, “One of the corpse cops just arrived.”

Hollywood homicide D2, Albino Villaseñor, was the first detective to arrive from home. He parked on the street and emerged from the car with a plastic briefcase and a flashlight, wearing the same brown Men’s Wearhouse suit that he’d worn every time Flotsam had seen him.

His bald head glinted under the luminescence provided by the Hollywood moon, and his white mustache looked wild and feline from his having slept facedown in bed. He nodded to the surfer cops and plodded toward the arched doorway in no particular hurry to see another of the multitude of dead bodies he’d seen during his long career.

He turned toward the street when a white van with a TV news logo on the door climbed the steep street and parked as near as it could get to the driveway. And close behind it was a news van from another Los Angeles TV station. The toney Mt. Olympus address on the police band was drawing them from their beds.

After the detective was inside the foyer, Flotsam said to Jetsam, “Dude, do you think a homicide dick gets a secret high when someone else gets laid low? Wouldn’t that, like, give you the guilts?”

“It’d creep me out, bro,” Jetsam said. “And it looks like there’s gonna be an opening in the Crow office, for sure.”

By this time, the forensics van had arrived and criminalists wearing latex gloves and booties were in the bedroom, treating the situation like a full-scale murder investigation, even though Bino Villaseñor had been informed by the patrol watch commander that the only crime committed had been perpetrated by the decedent. But with an LAPD cop even peripherally involved, great investigative care was to be taken, per orders from the West Bureau deputy chief. Just in case things turned out to be more dicey than they seemed.

“Here come the body snatchers,” Flotsam said when the coroner’s van was waved into the driveway by one of the morning-watch officers who’d received the original call.

When Bino Villaseñor got inside, he found Dan Applewhite in the kitchen with Bix Ramstead, who sat staring at his coffee cup, eyes red and ravaged.

The detective, who did not know the Crow personally, nodded at him. Bino Villaseñor, speaking in the lilting cadence of the East Los Angeles barrio where he’d grown up, said to Bix, “Soon as somebody else from our homicide team arrives, I’d like them to take you to the station. I’ll get down there as soon as I can.”

Bix Ramstead nodded and continued to stare. The detective had seen it before: the unnerving, hopeless look into the abyss.

The detective said to another of the morning-watch cops standing in the foyer by the staircase, “Where’s the lady of the house?”

“Up in one of the bedrooms to your left,” the cop said. “She’s with a woman officer from the midwatch.”

Bino Villaseñor climbed the stairs to the upper floor, looked in the master bedroom where lights had been set up, and did not enter while the criminalists were at work, but he could see that blood had drenched the carpet under Ali’s body. The detective turned left and walked to Nicky’s bedroom, where he found Margot Aziz, still in pajamas and robe, dried blood on her cheek and chest, sitting on the bed, apparently weeping into a handful of tissues. He didn’t know the burly female officer with her, but he indicated with a motion of his head that she could leave. Gert Von Braun walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs.

“I’m Detective Villaseñor, Mrs. Aziz,” he said to Margot. “We might need you to come to the station for a more formal statement, but I have a few preliminary questions I’d like to ask.”

“Of course,” Margot said. “I’ll tell you whatever I can.”

Bino looked around the huge bedroom, at the mountain of toys and gadgets and picture books and the biggest TV set he’d ever seen in a child’s bedroom, and he said, “Where is your son?”

“He’s spending the night with my au pair,” she said. “That’s why I…well, that’s why Bix and I…you know.”

“How long have you and Officer Ramstead been intimate?” the detective asked, sitting on a chair in front of a PlayStation and opening his notebook folder.

“For about five months.” She almost said “on and off” but realized how inappropriate that would sound and said, “More or less.”