A Man Named Doll

by Jonathan Ames

  And when he toppled over, Mei sat up, like it was choreographed, like they were puppets, one dead, one alive, and then I sat down, like a yogi, in the blood pooling around his body. I think I was in shock: I had never killed a man before, and the girls were crowding the door to the room, and I turned to look at them and could feel something tickling my neck. It was the flap of my face. I tried to put it back in place and one of the girls screamed.

  I said, all calm and relaxed and in shock: “Has anyone called 911?”

  6.

  After the cops arrived, Mrs. Pak called her son and he pulled strings and the EMTs brought me to Cedars-Sinai instead of the Presbyterian hospital on Vermont, which was closer.

  Mei wasn’t injured, just badly shaken up, so she stayed with Mrs. Pak and her mother. Her son, Dr. Pak, met my ambulance in the driveway outside the ER at Cedars, escorted me inside, and had already arranged for a top plastic surgeon to put my face back on.

  Before I went into surgery, I called Monica at the Dresden and told her what had happened, without getting too gory, and she said she’d get George and take him back to her place. She knew where I hid my key.

  And before she hung up, she said it again: “You know, I love you, Hap.”

  I got thirty stitches in my arm and thirty in my face—nice and symmetrical. The good news—not that I really cared at that time—was that with both cuts the blade hadn’t gone too deep and there was minimal nerve damage.

  In the morning, Dr. Pak came to see me—my face was heavily bandaged—and he switched my pain meds, unsolicited, to the good stuff: Dilaudid. He explained to me that the face has a lot of nerves and I should anticipate a fair amount of pain, but that the meds should get me through it. He also told me that his mother would pick up any additional expenses that my insurance wouldn’t cover, and I didn’t say no.

  After he left, I did feel a little embarrassed that I hadn’t offered any kind of protest to this offer of financial assistance, but my pride was as thin as my bank account. I had no savings and my only asset was my house, and the only reason it was paid off was because it was willed to me in 2011 by a client, Mrs. Rubenstein, after she died.

  I had come to know her because for a long time most of my work as a private investigator had been for the elderly. When I first hung out my shingle, I got hooked up with a gerontologist, a Dr. Schine, who sent me a lot of his patients. Senior citizens are ripe for all sorts of scams and it became kind of a niche market for me, albeit a small one.

  Then in 2017, Dr. Schine, sadly and ironically, got hit with early-onset dementia, retired, and closed his practice. Overnight he went from caring for old people to being one—it was strange karma—and without him feeding me work, I slowly went broke and ended up at the Miracle.

  But long before all that happened, Dr. Schine sent me Mrs. Fanny Rubenstein, a ninety-year-old Austrian émigré, a retired violin teacher who had been married to a violin maker, Irving Rubenstein.

  Irving was from a long line of Viennese violin makers, and when Hitler annexed Austria, in ’38, Mr. Rubenstein—they were living in Vienna at the time—took a big risk and mailed a precious violin that had been in the family for several generations to a cousin in America for safekeeping. The cousin, a costume designer, was in the movie business in Los Angeles.

  So they sent their violin to California, and they sent their little girl, six years old, to relatives in France who lived in Lyon. They didn’t want their child too far away, and no one thought then that France would fall so easily, or fall at all.

  In 1940, Mr. and Mrs. Rubenstein got carted off to Buchenwald but somehow survived. Their daughter and their relatives in Lyon didn’t.

  Then in 1950, after a few years in Israel, the Rubensteins came to Los Angeles, got the violin, and made a new life on Glen Alder Street, where they bought, on the side of the hill, my little bungalow, which they named after their daughter, Frimma, the little girl they had sent to France and never saw again.

  They had forty years together on Glen Alder—he made and repaired violins, and she taught—and then Irving died in the early ’90s. After he passed, Mrs. Rubenstein withdrew from the world, stopped teaching, and became a recluse. Then in 2011, her home health aide figured out that the old violin, hidden in a special humidor in the linen closet, was worth something, and so she quit her job, took the thing, and tried to sell it.

  Mrs. Rubenstein told Dr. Schine what had happened and then he told me, and without too much effort, I was able to get the violin back. Then Mrs. Rubenstein gave it to the LA Phil—it was called a Guarneri and the Phil sold it to the Louvre for four million. All of which, Mrs. Rubenstein said, would have pleased her husband very much. They had gone to the LA Phil for decades, and it was Irving’s passion.

  A few months after the sale to the Louvre, Mrs. Rubenstein died and left me the house on Glen Alder—left me Frimma—as a way to thank me.

  7.

  Around two p.m., a nurse—a sweet gal named Nancy—came to take more blood. I looked away because I’m squeamish, and then I had a eureka moment of sorts.

  “What’s my blood type?” I asked her, excited. That is, as excited as you can get when you’re on Dilaudid, just got thirty stitches in your face, and have killed a man.

  Florence told me it was O positive, and when she was done drawing my blood I asked for my phone. She found it in the closet—where they were also keeping my blood-soaked clothes in a plastic bag—and it had only 3 percent battery. I realized that something must be draining the phone more than usual, some app or something, when I wasn’t using the damn thing, but I didn’t have the slightest idea how to go about fixing it.

  There were several texts and missed calls from Monica. She wanted to know if she could come see me and was I okay? There was also a voice mail from my analyst, Dr. Lavich, wondering where I was that morning. I certainly had a reasonable excuse, but I had completely forgotten about our morning session and it had never occurred to me to call her. This would have to be discussed in our next session, along with other pressing headlines, like what had happened last night at the spa.

  In the meantime, I left her a brief message on her answering machine: “Dr. Lavich, it’s Hank—Happy—Doll. I’m so sorry I missed today’s session. Something unexpected happened. Will fill you in when I see you. I also can’t make it tomorrow morning, but I’ll be there Friday.” I had analysis four times a week, Tuesday through Friday, at nine a.m.

  Then I texted Monica that I was fine and that today I needed to rest, but that maybe tomorrow, when they let me out, she could come get me with some clothes. I didn’t mention that all my clothes in the plastic bag in the closet were covered in blood. And most of it not mine.

  There were no missed calls or voice mails from Lou, and before the phone died I tried his number and got the answering machine again. I left another message: “Lou, it’s Hank. Where are you? Listen—ran into some trouble at the spa. Got cut bad. And the other guy…well, I’ll tell you when I see you. I’m at Cedars-Sinai. The good news is that I’m O positive, which means we’re a go on the kidney. Call me back.”

  Then I tried the front desk of the Mirage, spoke to Aram again, and asked if he’d seen or heard from Lou. He hadn’t and was getting worried.

  I said: “He’ll turn up soon,” and we hung up, and there was a pinprick of fear at the back of my neck, wondering what Lou was up to, but I shrugged it off and it quickly subsided in the warm bath of the painkiller. Then I asked Nancy, who was hovering, messing with my chart and my tube of blood, if she could charge my phone.

  She said yes, started to leave with it, then turned at the door and said, “Would it be okay if I asked you something?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Is your name really Happy Doll?”

  I took a breath and said, “Yeah, Happy Doll, that’s me,” and I gave her a sad-clown smile, and she nodded, looked embarrassed now that she had asked the question, which hadn’t been my intention, and left the room.

  I fell asleep aga
in for about an hour, and then two homicide detectives paid me a visit. One was fat and one was skinny.

  The fat one said: “Can you talk?” He indicated my bandages.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Mullen,” said the fat cop, who had a fringe of hair around his bald head, and then he jerked his thumb at his partner. “This is Thode.”

  Thode smiled at me, but it was a nasty smile. His lips were sensuous and purple, and he had dark, pretty eyelashes, but his eyes were unkind. He’d seen the worst in people and thought the worst of people. Being a cop had made him that way; it had done other things to me.

  “So you know the drill,” said Mullen, breathing hard because of his weight. His round face was red and his eyes were red; his whole body was aggrieved. “Tell us what happened. And try not to lie.”

  I didn’t understand his attitude or the way Thode was looking at me. But I shrugged it all off—maybe the Dilaudid was making me read things the wrong way—and I kept it simple. I said: “The guy went berserk. He was on meth and threatening one of the girls, and I got my face carved. Had to put him down.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” said Thode. He took out his notepad; he was the stenographer of the pair. “We gotta see if your story matches the girl’s. Now tell it. In detail.” More attitude. So I gave some back:

  “Well, I was sitting in the front, reading a really good book,” and I said this in a singsong kind of voice to annoy them, but Mullen cut me off before I could go any further.

  “Quit fooling around,” he snapped. “And why the fuck were you working there in the first place? You should be ashamed. You were a cop once. You make us all look bad.”

  Now I understood their animosity: they saw me as a cautionary tale, what life might be like after the badge, and it scared them. You ended up working at a spa. Fine—let them be scared.

  “You want my story or not?” I rasped; my throat was dry.

  “Go ahead,” said Thode.

  I looked at them and then I launched into it: “So I’m sitting there—reading a really good book—and I hear a scream. I run to the back and there’s another scream. Room 8. I go in and he’s strangling the girl with the shower hose. I had my baton out and he grabs a big hunting knife out of his bag. I don’t know why he had that knife—but he must have been planning something; maybe he was going to cut the girl—and he had been smoking meth and was going haywire. I got in one whack with the baton, but he was a bull and cut me twice and then brought me down. I managed to get him off me, but he was still swinging the knife and I shot him.” I left out the part about not meaning to kill him. Didn’t think that would win their favor one way or the other.

  “Do you know who you killed?” said Thode.

  “A meth head.”

  “Not exactly, asshole,” he said. “His name was Carl Lusk. Played for USC ten years ago. Was going to the NFL but blew out his knee senior year. Drug problems since and a couple of arrests for assault and solicitation.” Then he blinked his girly eyelashes twice even though he didn’t mean to; he was a twitcher.

  “So why are you coming down on me?” I said. “Okay, he’s an ex–football star, but he’s also a felon and he would have killed that girl.” I had never heard of Lusk.

  “He’s not just an ex–football star,” said Mullen. “His dad’s a cop. We know him. Bill Lusk. Works downtown. Also Homicide.”

  Now their attitudes were really starting to make sense: I was a cautionary tale and I’d killed the son of one of their friends, a fellow cop, though I’d never heard of the father, either. I had worked the Missing Persons Unit in Hollywood for the bulk of my years on the force, specifically, the juvie division: runaways, homeless teens, stolen children. But that ended a long time ago and I had never crossed paths with a detective named Lusk.

  “I don’t know him,” I said, “and I wish I hadn’t shot his son, but that football star was big, and if he got through me, he was going to kill one of those girls, maybe all of them. Why’d he have that knife? Not for protection.”

  “Bullshit,” said Mullen, his eyes angry in his round face. “You snapped. We asked around about you. They said you were weird and cracked at the end of your tour. Is that what happened last night? You couldn’t just put Lusk down? We found your little wand.” He pantomimed a swing with the baton. “You had to kill him? Really?”

  “I tried to put him down. Couldn’t. He was too big. He nearly cut my face off.”

  “He was naked,” said Thode. “Should have been easy. I think you panicked.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that. There was no talking to these two, and they made a few threats about the DA and possible manslaughter charges and I didn’t really care. The Dilaudid had me feeling far, far away, and I had killed a man. No matter what they threatened, I couldn’t get any lower.

  When they finally left me alone, I tried to sleep but it wasn’t possible: I kept seeing Rat Eyes—Carl Lusk—coming at me. The knife raised. The knife coming down.

  8.

  Monica came for me around noon the next day, Thursday, and she brought me some fresh clothes, picked up at my house, to change into. I was given a printout of “wound-care” instructions and a prescription for more Dilaudid, which I was becoming quite fond of.

  I had a big white square bandage on my face, anchored by several horizontal strips of tape that went across my nose, and my arm was also trussed up.

  They wheeled me to the front door—protocol—and then I stood up and walked out of the hospital and my legs were a little wobbly, but it was good to be outside. It was bright and chilly and there was a strong wind. It was the best winter in LA in years: lots of rain and cold, and when the sun was out, like it was then, the light was crystalline and pure.

  When we got in her car, a dirty black Prius, she said: “Did you see the LA Times?”

  “No. Is it bad? I haven’t wanted to look at my phone.”

  “Front page,” she said. “The tragic story of a football player. There were a lot of quotes from the coach. But your name doesn’t come up until later in the paper. I don’t think people will read that far.”

  I nodded. Then: “What does it say about me?”

  “They said it was self-defense. That you saved the girl.”

  I lowered my head. If only I could have saved her without pulling my gun. Then Monica, trying to lighten things up, pointed at my bandage: “You know, we’re gonna be twins now. Scars on the left side.”

  And she traced her finger down her scar: the thin pink line that ran from just below her eye to her jawline. It was like she had cried so much one time that a path had been cut, like a riverbed.

  “Yeah, we’ll match,” I said, trying to be light, too. “They’re gonna love it at the bar.”

  Except it wasn’t light. Monica got her scar when her father, drunk, pushed her through a plate-glass window. She was six years old, and he went to jail for it and she never saw him again. When he got out, he disappeared, and she talked sometimes about finding him. She had heard once that he was in Ecuador, where he was from.

  We made a quick stop at the pharmacy for my drugs, and then when she pulled up in front of Glen Alder, she turned off the Prius and wanted to help me up the stairs.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I can manage. But thanks for getting me…and for George, and for everything.” George was already inside; Monica had dropped him off before coming to the hospital.

  “Of course,” she said, and then we hugged in the front seat and when I tried to pull away, she held on tight, wouldn’t let go, and so I exhaled and gave over to some deep need and put the right side of my face—my good side now—into her neck and her hair, and it felt so good. I hadn’t been that close to anyone since our night four years ago, and I wondered how I could have gone so long without this feeling.

  Then she began to let go of me, and we parted and looked at each other and she smiled, and I looked away, suddenly shy, and became aware that outside the windshield, we were surrounded by hundreds of fluttering oran
ge-and-black butterflies. They were flying courageously but somewhat spasmodically in the wind.

  “What’s going on?” I said to Monica.

  “It’s the Painted Ladies,” she said. “Started yesterday. They keep appearing all over the place. Flocks of them. Because of all the rain and climate change there are millions of them this year.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “Like flowers that can fly.”

  We sat there and looked at them. Then I opened the door and started to slide out, but Monica touched my arm, stopping me. “Don’t do that again,” she said. “No more fights.”

  Then she kissed my good cheek and restarted the car. I slid all the way out and then lowered my head into the still-open door. My bag of bloody clothes was in my hand.

  “Thank you again,” I said. “For taking care of George. For picking me up—”

  She cut me off. “You already said that and you don’t have to thank me. I love you.”

  Then I said, “I love you,” without hesitation or fear, and she smiled wide and her eyes twinkled like they do, and I closed the door. She pulled away, and my heart was pounding. I had given up on love.