Bix looked up then, the first time the detective could see some life in his eyes, and he said, “Don’t you believe her?”
“I guess I’ll have to,” the detective said. “The stories fit like a glove. A latex glove. But I’ll always wonder about a few things. That woman told no less than half a dozen cops from Hollywood Station and Hollywood South that her husband was threatening her. She may as well have made a video for YouTube entitled My Husband Wants Me Dead. She even took a shooting lesson and wanted to buy a gun. And finally, she managed to get the greatest corroboration in the world. A veteran married police officer, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, was right there as a witness to the event.”
Bix looked at the detective and said gravely, “Do you actually think we conspired to murder her husband?”
“No, I don’t think you conspired with anybody,” the detective said. “You wouldn’t be dumb enough to put yourself right in the bedroom during a capital murder. There’d be lots better ways for you to get it done. But buddy, you were dumb enough to destroy your career. Yet I got this very uneasy feeling about a woman who manages to get her boyfriend in bed for the first time on the very night that her husband decides to murder her in her sleep.”
“I’m not her boyfriend,” Bix said.
“What are you, then?”
“I don’t know what I am anymore,” Bix Ramstead said. “Are we through here?”
“We’re through, except that Internal Affairs is outside, waiting to get at you next.”
Bix gave the detective a bitter smile then and said, “Why would I bother to talk to IA? As you’ve pointed out, my career is over. My pension is lost. My children will be seeing this filthy story on the news. Their classmates will ask them humiliating questions. And my wife, she…”
He stopped there and Bino Villaseñor said, “You’re not gonna talk to them?”
Bix took his badge and ID card from his badge holder, put them on the table, and said, “You talk to them.”
Bino looked in those despairing eyes and instantly thought of the Behavioral Science Services shrink. “Okay, Bix, screw IA. But there’s a couple of news teams outside, waiting to jump all over you. How about letting me call the BSS guy for you? You need to talk to somebody right now, buddy.”
Bix said, “No, I have to go home now and feed Annie.”
Before the detective could say anything further, Bix Ramstead stood and walked out the door of the interview room, out of the detectives’ squad room, and out the front door of the station, toward his minivan in the north lot, where the surfer cops had driven it.
He hadn’t gotten to the parking lot when one of the on-scene reporters, a tall guy with a full head of flaxen hair, wearing light foundation that had smudged the collar of his starched white shirt, leaped from a van, holding a mike. He ran after Bix Ramstead with a camera operator trailing behind.
Bix looked around for a moment until he spotted where the surfer cops had parked his van and was halfway to it when the reporter caught up with him, saying, “Officer Ramstead! Officer Ramstead! Can you tell us how long you and Margot Aziz have been lovers?”
Bix ignored him and kept walking.
The reporter matched him stride for stride and said, “Do you and Mrs. Aziz have future plans?”
Bix ignored him and kept walking.
The reporter said, “Have you phoned your wife about this yet? Have you spoken to your children?”
Bix ignored him and kept walking.
As they reached Bix’s minivan, the reporter asked the ultimate cliché question that Bix Ramstead had personally heard a hundred media hacks ask victims at terrible events.
The reporter said, “How do you feel right now?”
And that got Bix Ramstead’s attention. He turned and said, “How do you feel right now?” And he swung a roundhouse right that caught the reporter on the side of the jaw, knocking him back against the camera operator and sending them both sprawling onto the asphalt of the parking lot.
As Bix was driving away, the reporter picked himself up and yelled, “Man, you are really in trouble now!”
It was late morning by the time Bix got home. The killing of Ali Aziz had happened too late to make the morning newspaper, but he was certain it would’ve been on the morning TV news. He had feared that his brother might be waiting for him.
When he unlocked the door, Annie ran from the bedroom and leaped on him with energy he hadn’t thought she had at her age. She was bursting with joyful whimpers, licking him and bouncing like a puppy. He knelt down and held her in his arms and said, “Oh, Annie, I didn’t feed you last night. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”
Then Bix sat down on the floor, his face in Annie’s fur, his arms around her neck, and wept.
When he was able to get up, Bix ignored the flashing on his answering machine. Instead, he went to the kitchen and prepared a huge breakfast for Annie, giving her two hard-boiled eggs, several ounces of boiled chicken breast, and her kibble. He mixed some nonfat cottage cheese in the bowl and put it down on the kitchen floor.
While Annie’s face was buried in the food, he walked out the back door and filled her water bowl to the brim. But while he was doing it, he heard the flap in the doggy door open, and Annie poked her head out to make sure he wasn’t leaving her again.
“Oh, Annie,” he said. “I’m here.”
Then Bix went back inside, and Annie returned happily to her breakfast while he entered his son’s bedroom. Bix looked at a baseball trophy and at photos of Patrick playing ball with Annie when she was a pup, and one of Patrick graduating from middle school. Then he entered his daughter’s room and picked up a photo of Janie and his wife, Darcey, sitting side by side on the piano bench. He couldn’t remember what they were playing when he’d taken the photo and he was surprised to see that Janie had inherited her mother’s lips. How had he never noticed that before?
He entered their bedroom then, his and Darcey’s. She’d never liked the photo of her when she was pregnant with Janie, but he loved that photo for the serenity in her face. He was very glad that his daughter’s features favored Darcey and not himself.
Bix opened the closet door and reached on the high shelf, back behind a pair of hiking boots he wore whenever they went camping. He opened a zipper case and removed his off-duty gun, a two-inch stainless-steel revolver. When he got to the kitchen, he saw that Annie had cleaned the bowl, so he opened the refrigerator and put all of the remaining chicken into the bowl along with more kibble and cottage cheese.
He went to the wall phone and called the LAPD emergency number, got a PSR on the line, and gave his name and address. He asked that a patrol unit be sent code 2. Then he opened the front door quietly, not wanting Annie to see him leaving again. He walked to the front yard and took the revolver from his pocket.
When Annie heard the gunshot she stopped eating. She ran to the living room and looked out the window. Then she bolted through the doggy door into the backyard and ran along the side of the house to the chain-link fence that prevented her from going into the front yard. She stood up on the fence with her front paws until she could clearly see him lying on the grass.
Then Annie started howling. She was still howling when the first black-and-white arrived.
TWENTY-THREE
HE’D FALLEN ASLEEP watching TV and awoke feeling like Rosie O’Donnell was sitting on his head. He had a humongous headache when he got up that morning. He was looking for something to blame it on besides the two pipeloads of rock he’d smoked, and all those 40s he’d guzzled. Then he remembered those little capsules that Ali Aziz had given him. He vaguely recalled popping two of them before he passed out.
Leonard Stilwell turned on the TV, since he couldn’t stand silence, and began drinking ice water. After that he drank a glass of orange juice before going back for more water. He’d never been so thirsty in his life and his head was killing him. It had to have been the sleeping meds. Leonard opened the drawer of the lopsided chest of drawers that contained two pots, a frying pan, two dinner dishes, a bowl, a few knives, forks, spoons, socks, some underwear, and two clean T-shirts. On top of the T-shirts he found the envelope with the magenta-and-turquoise capsules.