“I am always first to give plenty of my time to the Community Police Advisory Board,” he said. “I give always donations to the holiday party for children. Everyone knows Ali.”
“Just curious,” Gert said. “Why’re you picking up your son at this time of night? Won’t he be asleep?”
“Yes, you are correct,” Ali said. “I work late at the nightclub and this is how I must do. Nicky is going to sleep in my car when I drive with him to my condo.”
Gert Von Braun didn’t like his plastered-on smile and she didn’t like the beads of sweat forming at his hairline. Her blue antenna was sending signals, but the address on his license was up the hill near the top of Mt. Olympus, and everything he said made sense. She looked over the roof of the Jaguar to Dan Applewhite, who shrugged.
“Drive more carefully when you have your son in the car, Mr. Aziz,” she said, handing Ali back his license.
“Yes, yes, Officer,” Ali said. “I shall drive with great care.”
When the cops returned to their black-and-white, Ali drove slowly up the hill to the house on Mt. Olympus.
Margot had received the two-ring warning call from Jasmine twenty-five minutes earlier. It meant that Ali was on his way. The go phone was on vibrate and she didn’t need to answer it. She had been seated naked on the lounge in the darkened master bedroom, on the opposite side of the king-size bed in which Bix Ramstead slept. She got up, went to his side of the bed, and removed his pistol from the holster on the nightstand. She walked back around the bed and out to the terrace through the sliding door that she’d kept open. After she got to the railing, she looked out into the canyon and hurled the throwaway phone into the brush below.
She walked softly to her walk-in closet for a robe and laid it across the lounge. But she would not put it on. Bix had last seen her naked, not that he’d remember. Then she sat back down on the lounge and waited for the sound of a car in front.
Ali Aziz parked in the driveway rather than on the street in case he had to get away fast, with his son in one hand and a gun in the other. He closed the door of the Jaguar quietly and walked to Margot’s door, grateful that the security lights in the garden had not been turned on but there was moonlight. He looked up at the bright, glowing moon.
The door was unlocked and Ali blessed Jasmine for it. He entered, leaving the door open for his fast exit. He’d decided to go straight to Nicky’s room, take him out of bed, and run with him down the stairs and out. Tomorrow, he and his lawyer, with Jasmine’s help-and she would help when he offered her $25,000-would go to the police, as well as to the judge who’d presided over their divorce proceedings. And if there was any justice at all, he would never have to return Nicky to her again. He prayed that the drug-dealing monster had not harmed his son.
There was a light on. The lamp at the top of the staircase on a marble table under the huge mirror that had cost him a fortune. He ascended, turned left, and crept along the hallway to Nicky’s room, finding the door wide open. He stepped inside, but the bed was made and Nicky was gone! What had they done with him? He returned along the hall to the master bedroom. Could Nicky be in bed with them? The double doors were wide open. He adjusted the gun inside his belt so that it was more accessible. A few more quiet steps and he’d be through the double doorway into the master bedroom.
He stood in the doorway. He could hear faint snoring, but it was very dark in there. He took another step forward. There was only one person lying there, sleeping on what he knew to be her side of the bed. Was it Margot? Was she alone in the bedroom? Where was the man? Where was Nicky? He was confused. He took another step inside. And another, his pupils adjusting to the darkness. And then he heard the loudest shout he had ever heard from the lips of Margot Aziz.
“ALI, DON’T SHOOT! PLEASE DON’T SHOOT! DON’T SHOOT!”
“What?” he said. “What? Margot?”
And Ali Aziz saw three fireballs and perhaps heard three explosions, but perhaps not. He was slammed down onto his back by the fireballs. It was a tight pattern fired from a distance of four feet after Margot stepped from behind the closet door and stood between Ali and the bed, crouching slightly and firing two-handed, just as the instructor had shown her at the pistol range. Ali’s chest heaved and began leaking blood, then bubbled from an arterial spurt. His heart stopped almost instantly, pierced by one of the 9-millimeter rounds.
The explosions that smashed Ali Aziz to the floor also brought Bix Ramstead onto the floor, feet first. He leaped from bed and stumbled to his knees, not knowing where he was.
“Bix! Bix!” Margot screamed. “The lights! Turn on the lights!”
But Bix didn’t know where the lights were. Bix was trying to decide where he was, and he wasn’t even sure who was yelling his name. He saw a lamp and reached for it but knocked it from the nightstand.
Margot Aziz did not want light. She had dropped Bix’s pistol onto the floor and, with tissue in her left hand, was feeling around Ali’s waist and in his pockets. But there was no gun! Where was the fucking gun? Working frantically in the darkness, she managed to get her hand under him but it wasn’t there either! Then she accidentally touched his crotch and felt hard metal inside. The gun had slipped down inside his briefs when he’d fallen.
Bix Ramstead figured out that he was in the bedroom of Margot Aziz, and he yelled, “Margot! Where are you! Where’s the light switch!”
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!”