A Man Named Doll

by Jonathan Ames

  Then I climbed the stairs to my house, and I greeted Frimma and the plants and the trees. “Hello, everyone,” I said. “I’m home. You’re all looking so beautiful.”

  And from inside the house, George barked his greeting, and the Painted Ladies, like auguries of good things, I thought, fluttered around me.

  9.

  While Monica and I had been sitting in the car, Lou finally called me back—my ringer was off—and left a message. He sounded exuberant. He said:

  “What happened, Hank? Somebody cut you? But listen, I got everything worked out! Some things came through and I won’t need your help after all. But thank you, son, for being willing. That means a lot. I’ll call you later. I got things to do. Hope you’re not cut too bad.”

  I wondered what things had come through. Someone else was going to give him a kidney? I listened to the message again. He had never called me son before, and he didn’t say anything about where he had been since Tuesday.

  I tried him back but got the damn machine again. I didn’t bother leaving a message this time, and my face was starting to throb bad, so I took a Dilaudid and crawled into bed with George.

  I slept for more than six hours and woke up around nine. I got dressed and thought of getting an Uber and retrieving my Caprice, which was still at the spa, but I decided I was too loopy from the pill and took another one. Dilaudid, they say, is the closest there is to heroin. Makes Oxycontin look like a weak sister.

  Feeling a little hungry, but not too much, because of the pill, I had a can of lentil soup and some pickles. My usual dinner. Then I ate a marijuana gummy for dessert, thinking it would mix nice with the Dilaudid. I made the mistake of checking my phone, which was nearly dead again, and there were a number of missed calls and text messages. Much more than usual. People must have seen the article in the paper. I didn’t listen to any of the voice mails or read any of the texts, and I didn’t bother to charge the thing.

  Stoned, I watched a Lakers game, and all the while images of me shooting Lusk hovered on the edge of my consciousness, like this thing I should be attending to, but I kept pushing it out of my mind.

  Then after the Lakers game, I went to the bathroom to look at myself, which I had managed not to do at the hospital.

  I removed my bandage, and even on the drugs, I nearly swooned. The skin was all purple and green and yellow, and the black stitches formed a hideous pucker down the middle of my cheek, like a raised seam on a baseball glove.

  I quickly put the bandage back on, and there in the mirror were my father’s blue eyes and my mother’s black hair, cut short; my busted big nose and my chin with stubble. But I didn’t seem to know this guy and I didn’t like him.

  I said to the face: What did you do? You killed a man.

  I know, the face said. But he was going to kill Mei, and he was suicidal. He used me to die.

  George, hearing me talk to someone, came into the bathroom, and I felt a little more sane. “George, I killed a man,” I said.

  He looked at me with compassion, and so then I treated myself to half a Dilaudid and half a marijuana gummy and took George for a walk. Glen Alder is a dead-end street with a cul-de-sac—which is where my house is, on the right side of the cul-de-sac—and we went down to Beachwood and up to Glen Holly, our usual route.

  Back at the house, I grabbed a blanket and we lay down on the couch I have on the side porch, which is on the other side of the house from George’s little chicken coop. I hooked George up to the lead I keep on the porch—otherwise he’d dash off into the woods after skunks and coyotes—and he lay on my chest, under the blanket, with his face poking out and resting by my chin, and together we listened to the night birds and the night wind and the far-off sounds of the city: sirens and traffic rumble and revving motorcycles.

  And in the sky the full moon was unusually large and beautiful.

  At two a.m. I woke up. I was still high as hell and George was barking and I realized he’d been barking for a while. Someone was banging at the front door. I unhooked George and we went back into the house. I opened the front door and it was Lou.

  He smiled weakly at me and then did a half twist and fell into my arms.

  I pulled him inside and dragged him to the couch in the living room. I lay him down and his raincoat flopped open and the front of his white shirt was red with blood.

  “Got shot,” he whispered.

  His right hand flopped to the floor and George started licking the blood off it.

  “George,” I shouted, and I pushed him away and opened up Lou’s shirt. There was a black puncture, a hole about the size of a nickel, and dark-red blood was oozing out of it. I took Lou’s hand and put it over the hole.

  “Keep pressure on it!” I said, then ran into the kitchen, where my phone was, and it was dead! “Goddamn it!” I screamed.

  I nearly lost control and threw the thing against the wall, but I had sense enough not to. I cursed myself for not having a landline, and I plugged the phone in, grabbed a dish towel, and ran back to Lou. My panic was rubbery. The Dilaudid and the marijuana had me all messed up, like the volume inside me was set much too loud. I knew I had to keep my head, but my head was gone.

  Lou’s eyes were closed and his blood-smeared hand had flopped back to the floor, and George was licking it again. I pushed George away and knelt next to Lou and applied pressure to the hole in his belly with the dish towel.

  I said: “I’m going to call 911 in a second, Lou. Just have to charge the damn fucking phone.”

  His eyes opened. He looked at me sideways. He whispered: “I don’t think it matters.”

  I ignored that and said: “Who shot you, Lou? What happened?”

  “Don’t know their names. That was the deal. But I got the one who got me.” He seemed to smile and he was going to say something else, but a vicious pain shot through him and he bared his little yellow teeth, and then he exhaled and closed his eyes and his face smoothed out.

  I thought maybe he had died—he didn’t seem to be breathing—and I dug a finger into his neck and didn’t feel a pulse, but then he opened his eyes again and shoved his bloody hand into the pocket of his raincoat and came out with a folded square of blue paper, now smeared with blood.

  “For my daughter,” he whispered, passing me the blue square. “Worth a lot more than I thought. Sell it for her, get the money—”

  Then suddenly his head went back unnaturally and the crown of his skull dug into the back of the couch, like he was trying to get away from something, and then as quick as that happened, he suddenly went still, much too still, and I could smell wretched feces, and then his head relaxed and fell to the side, like a bird with a broken neck, and Lou Shelton was dead.

  Like I said, he was a hard man to kill.

  Until he wasn’t.

  Part II

  1.

  I was kneeling by the couch and my hand was still pressed against the wound.

  We’d been like that for a while. Several minutes at least. Lou was dead but hadn’t left my house, and there was a lull in the noise in my head, a deep silence.

  But then George started barking loudly and broke the spell. I thought maybe he was barking because Lou had died, and I turned and said, “George!”

  But George was facing the door. That meant he was barking at something outside. I stood up and looked out the window and there was a man paused midway up the stairs, hesitating to come forward because of the barking, and there was a gun in his hand down by his thigh. I could see him clearly in the moonlight, and he saw me in the window.

  He was wearing a Dodgers baseball hat pulled low, obscuring his face, but he was tall and wide, and he raised his gun—it looked like a .22 and Lou was likely shot with a .22; the wound in his gut had been small but lethal—and I ducked down and flipped off the light, which had framed me in the window like a target.

  But no bullet came crashing through the glass, which would have alerted the neighbors and probably not killed me. A .22 is good for close-in work, exe
cution work. So the man had been smart not to fire, and I peeked out the window, and he was running, in a controlled way, back down the stairs to the fence and the gate. He had lost the element of surprise—I could be armed for all he knew—and he was retreating, like a professional. He had raised the gun as a feint, a way to buy himself time to get away.

  I whipped the front door open and went flying after him in my socks, but there’s too many damn stairs, and as I got to the street, a black Land Rover was already halfway down the block, and it had dealer plates, which made it useless to trace. Lou’s car, an old yellow Maverick, was parked haphazardly by the curb.

  “Fuck,” I said, and I started to run up the stairs, thinking I’d get in my car and chase the Land Rover—it would go either left or right on Beachwood and maybe I could catch it.

  But as I got inside, I remembered, cursing myself, that my car, which I had been too lazy to get, was still at the spa, and so then I went like a madman to Lou’s body to get his keys and started frantically rifling around in his pockets, taking far too long, and, of course, the last thing I actually found were his keys, and by then I knew there was no chance of catching anybody. But Lou’s pockets, amid a bunch of crap—coins, tissues, lighters, matches, cigarettes, lottery tickets, chewing gum—did turn up three things of interest:

  His gun. A 9mm Glock: with nine bullets in the clip, one missing.

  A train ticket stub: a return trip to LA from Carlsbad that morning.

  And a little blue spiral notebook with the binding at the top: the kind cops and reporters used to use, back in the day, which Lou still carried all the time for phone numbers and to-do lists, addresses, and other miscellany.

  The cover was flipped back to the last page Lou had written on, and there in his chicken scratch was a list of what looked to be departure or arrival times, which jibed with the ticket stub, and two addresses: 550 Hill Street, suite 834, which was a downtown address, and 2803 Belden Drive, which was about a mile from my house.

  Reading that second address gave me a jolt. Is that where Lou had just come from? Is that where he was shot? It made sense: he couldn’t have gone too far with that bullet in his gut, and I was nearby, so he came to me, and the tall man in the Dodgers hat must have followed him from there. But what had Lou been doing on Belden?

  Then I remembered the square piece of blue paper, which I had shoved into my pocket when George started barking. I got the thing out and unfolded the paper and in the center of it was a fat rectangular diamond, about half an inch long. It gleamed in my palm. Like money.

  Like something you might get killed for.

  I rewrapped it and shoved it back in my pocket. Then I took Lou’s car keys and gun—mine had been confiscated at the spa—and started to run out to go to 2803 Belden to see what I could find. Maybe Dodgers Hat had gone back there. And I was halfway down the steps when I realized I still didn’t have any shoes on.

  How fucking high am I? I wondered, and it was like I was operating on two planes. Screwing up. And watching myself screw up.

  What I should have been doing—the sane thing to do—was call the cops and put all of Lou’s stuff, especially the gun, back in his pockets, but instead I ran up the stairs to my bedroom, threw on a jacket, got my shoes, and came back down.

  George was licking Lou’s fingers again and I shooed him away. Then I threw the blanket from the porch over Lou’s body, got his hand off the floor and tucked it under the blanket, and said to George, “Leave Lou alone.”

  Then I was out of there, down the stairs, and Lou’s car reeked like an ashtray and the old engine coughed twice—like a smoker, like Lou—before turning over, and in two minutes, after speeding north on Beachwood, I was climbing Belden Drive, which went straight up the canyon. Near the very top, 2803 stood alone on the right-hand side of an S curve, high above a culvert.

  I slowed the Maverick down, and the house was a long rectangular white box, set back just a few feet from the street, with an attached garage and a tall hedge that shrouded the entrance in privacy. In the glaring moonlight, the whiteness of the house seemed to glow.

  Across the way, on the left-hand side, was a large Spanish house elevated high above the road, on the side of the hill, and that house was dark, as was 2803. There were no other neighbors on this twisted bit of road and no cars parked on the street, no Land Rovers.

  I kept on going and stashed Lou’s car about a hundred yards away, around another curve, where some houses had clustered, lined up along the cliff’s edge.

  Then I walked back toward the house.

  My hand was in my pocket, on Lou’s gun, and it was very quiet up there at the top of the mountain—it was like a narrow country road, trees everywhere—and my shoes made that movie sound of a man walking on pavement.

  But aware that my click-clacking heels could be a liability, I began to walk quietly as I approached 2803, which was now on my left. No cars were coming or could be seen down below, and there were no streetlights up here, but the world was perfectly visible with the full moon like a white sun, and because of the marijuana and the Dilaudid, it all seemed to be extra luminous and even vibrational.

  I passed the hedges near the entrance to take a look at the garage. There were leaves piled up where the garage door met the pavement, and so it didn’t seem likely that the Land Rover or any other car was parked inside. Those leaves, blown by the wind, had been there awhile.

  Gun out in front of me, I then went through the portal cut into the hedges, and leaning against the house—hidden from the street—was a weather-beaten FOR SALE sign, the kind where the agent has included a picture, like an actor’s head shot. The realty company was called Ken Maurais, and the airbrushed agent—who had feathered-back frosted hair and fake teeth and was giving a look meant to inspire trust but which did the opposite—was also someone named Ken Maurais.

  He must have been a one-man operation, and I stared at his picture for a second, and then I crouched below the front window and crab-walked my way to the edge of the house. When the wall came to an end, there was a deep, vertiginous drop into the culvert below.

  So this was one of those places, when seen from the street, you think is just a single-story ranch house, but get past its hedges and you realize the “ground floor” is actually the penthouse and that the building goes down and down and down, a vertical mansion built against the side of a hill, with no land to speak of.

  I crouched back under the window and went to the front door. On my house-key chain there’s a small but powerful Maglite and a little doohickey that’s good for opening locks, but that wasn’t necessary. The door was already open a crack, and using my foot, I eased it open farther and went in, with Lou’s gun leading the way.

  The room I entered was devoid of furniture and was well lit by the moon, and the impression, as you stepped in, was of being high on a cliff in a special glass box. Across from the entrance, twenty feet away, was an enormous picture window, which could slide open like a glass door, and it was nearly as wide as the whole house, and beyond that was a balcony and beyond the balcony was a dazzling rich man’s view: the dark canyon with its scattered house lights, like a hillside in Italy, and then in the distance, the skyline of downtown LA, a jagged crown of light.

  It was mesmerizing and you could see for miles.

  But up close there was also something to see. A dead man. A little to my right, he was on the floor, laid out flat on his back. I walked over to the body and there was a black hole in the middle of his forehead. I nudged the body with my foot. It was my second dead man of the night and third in two days. I was getting jaded.

  He was a blonde kid, midtwenties, handsome, except for the black hole bored into his skull. And I wondered if that hole had been caused by the missing round in Lou’s gun, which was now the gun in my hand, getting covered in my prints.

  I checked the blonde’s pockets, but they were empty—no wallet, no cell phone, no keys, no gun. He’d been stripped.

  The floor was a pale wood, and
there was a vivid trail of blood that started at his head and went to the right, down a short hallway. It seemed like someone had grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him along the floor toward the front door. The leaking wound in the back of his head—matching the hole in the front of his head—had left a smear, and I followed the blood trail down the hallway to a narrow elevator door, where the blood trail ended.

  I stopped and listened a moment. Had I heard something? Was anyone else here? I went back out to the empty room, but there was no one there and no one on the balcony, just a rusted cooking grill. I stood quietly, hardly breathing, but didn’t hear anything and decided to keep exploring. I needed to understand what had happened to Lou.

  I went back to the elevator, pushed the button, and the door opened. The narrow compartment lit up and there was blood on the elevator floor, continuing the blood trail from the hallway. I stepped into the elevator, to the side of the blood, and in the corner there was a bullet shell, which I picked up and looked at. It matched the bullets in Lou’s gun.

  Let’s touch all the evidence, I said to myself, and pocketed the thing. At some point soon, I was going to have a lot of explaining to do. But I was putting it off. I seemed to know only one direction: forward.

  Recklessly forward.

  I was on 6 and pushed the buttons for all the floors, 5 through 1.

  At each floor, the door opened, but there was no blood trail until the bottom floor, where it picked up again and led to the far left side of a table, which was across from the elevator. There were five folding chairs around the table and a water glass in front of each chair, with a Pellegrino bottle in the middle. Some kind of meeting had happened here, and there was no other furniture in the room.

  In the corner was a sliding glass door, which the moonlight was coming through, lighting everything like an X-ray. I slid the door open and stepped outside onto a concrete patio about half the size of a basketball court. This was the bottom of the steep culvert, and there were a few pieces of metal patio furniture lying about, just their skeletons, no cushions, all of it rusted. Craning my neck, I looked to the top of the house, all six stories. You really did need an elevator.