A Man Named Doll

by Jonathan Ames

  It was a little past 1:40—we had been driving for almost ninety minutes—and George and I got out of the car, both of us desperate to urinate.

  Blinking in the overbearing sun and using the Caprice to shield us—or me, anyway—from any cars driving by, we passed our water.

  I finished before George, and he seemed to make a deliberate point, midstream, of shifting his angle to cover over what I had done, replacing my mark with his mark.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” I said, but he couldn’t have cared less, and he pulled on his leash, wanting to sniff about after the long, torturous ride.

  So we walked around the dirt overlook, and the wind was cold up there on the edge of the world, high above the sea, but it felt good on my face—it was numbing—and I kept an eye on the black gate two hundred yards away.

  And I had the feeling that we might be there awhile, that an old-fashioned stakeout had begun, which George then christened with a well-formed number two.

  “Good boy!” I said, and I nudged his offering—without getting any stuck on my shoe—off the side of the cliff, and George, delighted with himself and mentally relieved, joyfully kicked up a lot of sand, with all four paws at once.

  16.

  After a few more minutes of letting George sniff and mark, two hobbies from which he derives great meaning and pleasure, it was getting a little too cold in the wind, and we went back to the Caprice, officially on the next stage of our stakeout: sitting in the car and wondering one thing: What was Maurais going to do next?

  Settling in, George put his head in my lap and looked a little forlorn, and I said with concern, “Are you thirsty?” And he said yes from his mind to my mind, and so I checked, but my coffee cup from the deli was empty; I had finished it during the long trafficky quest on the 101.

  I thought maybe he could have licked the cup—there was water in coffee, after all—but that wasn’t a possibility, and I was angry at myself for not being better prepared.

  Dehydration is not good for a dog or an out-of-control individual on a variety of pharmaceuticals, and then I remembered that for a few weeks I’d been hearing my old thermos rattle around on the floor in the back and kept not doing anything about it, and I reached over the seat and dug around in a bunch of refuse and came up with it.

  I looked down in the well of the thing and there was maybe an inch of stale H2O, and then I put my nose in the thermos and it didn’t smell too bad. So, thinking it was more or less safe, I poured most of the precious liquid into the lid, which serves as a cup, and said to George, “This is it for a while,” and he nodded, resolute, like a good soldier, and went at it.

  When he was finished, I poured a meager drip into the cup for myself—George’s germs didn’t concern me—and I drank from it like an old-time ham in a desert movie, and that was it for our water supply. I screwed the thermos closed and dropped it back over the seat.

  Then, as the numbing from the wind wore off, the fire ants really started up in my face again, and the pain was a cross between a relentless sting and a relentless throb.

  At this point, I hadn’t taken a Dilaudid for about five hours, and I got the bottle out of my pocket and stared at it, very tempted to indulge. But if Maurais left all of a sudden and I had to do more driving, I didn’t think I could chance another pill just yet, even if I paired it with more Adderall.

  So, showing some resolve despite the escalating pain, I hid the bottle from myself in the glove compartment, and I said to George, “Don’t let me weaken.”

  But he didn’t bother to answer. He was busy lying seductively in the sun on the front seat, and his eyes, filled with light, were as beautiful as thousand-year-old amber.

  I then lasted all of a minute, weakening in record time, and opened the glove compartment and reached for the Dilaudid, but then I remembered that there was something else in there that could help me and not be as debilitating: a tin of pre-rolled joints from the cannabis store.

  Inside the tin, unfortunately, there were no whole joints, but there were six roaches I had saved, which I had planned, like a good pothead, to break up and put in a pipe. But this was an emergency.

  So I smoked four of them, one after the other, rather furiously, and all they did was amplify the pain tremendously. “Oh, my God,” I said to George. “The pot made it much worse!”

  He turned away from me, which was his way of saying, “Of course it did,” and a long, painful hour passed like this: my face throbbing madly and crying for help, and me wondering impatiently what the hell Maurais was doing up there, and what if his business in Malibu had nothing to do with Belden Drive and Lou being shot and killed? Then I’d really be going nowhere fast.

  But it felt like his coming here was connected, and I reviewed in my mind the assumptions I had made so far: (1) Maurais knew about the dead bodies and might have even helped get the house in order early that morning, which is why he needed the nitro; (2) my asking about Belden Drive had spooked him, and he’d gone running to the owners of the house—or to someone else connected to what had happened—to tell them I was snooping around; (3) whatever Maurais wanted to talk about had to be done in person, either because he didn’t trust the phones or because what he wanted to express was of such seriousness that it had to be said face-to-face.

  And so then what was my play? Stick to my original plan and wait for Maurais to leave, follow him, get him alone, and make him talk? Make him tell me who he went to see and what he knows? Or do I go up to the gate and bluff my way in?

  Or do I go in after he leaves and see what I discover without him around? Maybe Dodgers Hat and the man with the gray hair who had been stooped over like a vulture would be up there.

  The risk with that play was that if it was a client of Maurais’s who had nothing to do with Belden Drive or diamonds or dead blondes, then I would lose Maurais until I could find him again, and in this moment he was still my best lead.

  So the smart move was to wait for Maurais and stick to the plan. Best to confront him somewhere without other people around, and if he told me Dodgers Hat was up on that ridge, then I would know what I was walking into and I might decide that the front gate was not the best approach.

  Clear on the game plan, I then gave George another little walk, and the cold wind did some good work on my face, and George sniffed the ocean air and seemed very content, and I realized there were no butterflies around, probably because of the wind.

  Then we got back in the car and it was a little past three. After a few more minutes of playing stakeout, the throbbing and stinging in my face kicked into an even higher gear, and so I smoked the last two roaches to make it all worse.

  George sneezed because of the pot fog, and I cracked the windows and said, “I’m sorry,” and he rubbed his eyes with his white paws, which looked like opera gloves.

  Then I stared out at the ocean to distract myself from the pain, but with each throb a different image came before my eyes: Carl Lusk, his knife in the air; Lou, black blood oozing out of the puncture in his belly; the tall blonde boy on the floor with a bullet hole in his head, like a third eye; and the other blonde with his neck broken sideways after I threw him to his death.

  I was on an unholy streak of dead men, and who was next? Me? And was I a good guy in all this or a bad guy? I had killed two men, and I had more or less killed Lou. That didn’t seem to put me on the good-guy side of the ledger.

  Meanwhile, the pain in my face was relentless, hateful, and I must have been higher than I realized from smoking all the roaches because then I thought I heard a squeal come out from under my bandage, like the noise a rat makes in a wall, and I said to George, feeling myself getting hysterical, “Something’s trying to come out of my face!”

  And I had a desperate wish to itch at the thing, scratch it, something, and feeling crazy, I eased the bandage off to at least see what was happening, what was coming alive underneath there, and what I saw in the rearview mirror horrified me:

  My wound, already disgusting,
had become a hideous red-and-yellow tumor the size of a dead baby rat, about four inches long, and it was distended out from my face at least two inches, and down the middle of the tumor was the zipper of black stitches, and along the zipper I could see white pus just starting to crawl out, like maggot eggs, and I said to George, “Holy shit! It’s infected!”

  Then, as if this would make it all better, I tried to put the bandage back on, but the adhesive had lost its will, and, frustrated, I threw it angrily in the back of the car, and George jumped over the seat and retrieved the thing. Then he hopped back over to the front seat—he was a springy and athletic dog—and he started sucking on the bandage.

  “Don’t do that!” I said, disgusted, and I yanked the infected bandage out of his mouth and, like an idiot, threw it in the back again, and George, naturally, thought this was a game, and he hopped back over the seat, got his prize, and came back with it and began shaking the bandage back and forth in his mouth like it was a dead animal.

  So I yanked it away again but didn’t want to throw it out the window and litter, so I put it in the visor above the steering wheel, but that made George jump all over me to get at it, and he nearly clawed my suppurating tumor, and so then I shoved the bandage in the glove compartment and he scratched at that, going nuts, and I said, “Stop it, George! Stop it!”

  And I thought I was going to lose my mind, but just then, thankfully, Maurais came rolling down the long driveway, and the black gate swung open. It was almost 3:30, and Maurais made a right onto Encinal, heading for the coast, and I counted to sixty and then followed after him.

  George then forgot about the bandage, and he put his paws again on the dashboard and stared ahead intently, like a handsome sea captain at the prow of his ship.

  17.

  Thirty minutes later, we hit soul-crushing traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, just south of Topanga, and George was asleep, snoring gently, and I had taken to moaning, clutching the steering wheel, and rocking in my seat.

  When I wasn’t doing that, I was trying not to touch my wound, but every few minutes I couldn’t help myself and would probe it gently. There was a morbid fascination with feeling it and I kept glancing at it in the rearview mirror to disgust myself.

  Between the elder Lusk and the younger Lusk and two go-rounds of surgery, my face had been turned into a piece of rotten meat. Something found in an alley outside a butcher shop. Behind a garbage can.

  To mix things up, stuck in the deadly traffic, I also played, once in a while, with the goose egg on my scalp where Lusk Sr. had kicked me in the head.

  But to my credit, I never weakened and reached for the Dilaudid, and at all times, I kept about six to eight cars between myself and the little Mercedes.

  In total, we were on the PCH for about thirty miles, with the ocean to our right, and all along the coast, surfers in black wet suits waited in the water for the last few waves of the day, lined up like crows on a wire.

  Things finally picked up a little when Maurais cut through the Palisades and headed east on Sunset Boulevard, but then we hit another dose of excruciating congestion and I thought for sure I was going to lose my mind this time, that this was it, but then I hit some sort of transcendent place with the face pain—like getting used to a teakettle whistle that never shuts up.

  Then around 5:30, after two very long hours in the car, Maurais pulled into the driveway of a midsize apartment building on Doheny, just a little off Sunset, in West Hollywood.

  As I went past the building, the garage gate had just finished sliding open, and the Mercedes drove in, went to the left, and disappeared beneath the building: it was a basement garage.

  The sun was just about down and everything was purple again, which happens in Los Angeles at sunset, either because of pollution or the tilt of the world or the combination of the two, and I kept moving on Doheny. Then I did a U-turn, doubled back, and found a parking spot on a leafy side street kitty-corner to Maurais’s building, about midway down the block.

  I parked facing his building and looked the place over. It was six stories, made of white bricks, and every apartment on the street side had a sliding glass door onto a balcony, with an elegant green canvas awning for shade.

  There were palm trees in front, and a sign in script on the wall of the building said: THE OLIVE. The place looked well maintained and pricey, and I figured this for Maurais’s home, maybe because it looked like him. Old and from another time.

  I took George out of the car but kept my eye on the entrance to the garage in case the Mercedes suddenly popped out.

  We walked up the street in the violet light, in the direction of the Olive, and it was a miracle, but one of the houses we passed had a water bowl out in front for dogs, and George, very thirsty, the poor boy, made a dive for it.

  I always love it when people do that for dogs, never more so than at that moment, and I wished I could drink from the bowl myself and nearly considered it. I was dry as hell.

  After George had his fill, we went back to the car and watched the building for a few more minutes to give Maurais a little more time to get to his apartment, if this was in fact where he lived. Most likely there was an elevator in the garage that had access to the interior of the building.

  My face was still doing its teakettle act, screaming at a high pitch, but I was focused and angrily determined: Maurais was close at hand, and he was going to tell me things.

  Then I got out of the car with the bag of money and hid it in the trunk. I left George behind with the windows cracked open, and his eyes, of course, were sad, but I didn’t take him with me as I wanted my hands free in case I needed to put them on Maurais.

  18.

  The building entrance had double glass doors, and at one time there might have been a doorman in the lobby, but instead there was a vestibule with another set of double glass doors, which were locked and kept me from entering all the way in.

  On the wall of the vestibule was an old-fashioned brass directory of the residents with their names on little typed cards, and next to each card was a buzzer, a small brass button. There were no cameras.

  I saw K. MAURAIS 5F on a card and pushed the corresponding button. Built into the directory was an intercom, with a speaker in the shape of a circle made of many small holes in the metal.

  There was no response to my first push of the bell, so I pushed it again, and a few seconds passed, each marked by a nasty pulsation in my face. Then Maurais’s distorted voice came through the speaker: “Who is it?”

  I pushed a button so that I could talk and said: “FedEx. For Maurais, 5F.”

  I heard Maurais say, “Oh, God,” and he sounded exhausted, which I didn’t blame him for—it had taken us, after all, two hours to drive forty-odd miles from Malibu—and then the lock on the second set of doors clicked open.

  I walked across the soft lobby carpet and put my hand in my pocket, on Lou’s gun. I pushed the button for the elevator, waited a minute, and then an old man in a wheelchair with an aide behind him rolled out.

  The aide, a young Spanish woman, was looking at her phone and didn’t notice me and the man in the chair didn’t look up. His head was down—he was half-asleep—and I recognized him because of his fantastically large nose. He had been on a long-running sitcom in the ’70s and I’d seen him in a bunch of movies, all comedies. That schnoz had made him a lot of money, and LA was like that—ghosts all over the place.

  I went in and pushed 5, and then before the elevator could close, a hand shot into the opening, alerting the electric eye, and the door opened back up.

  The owner of the hand was a middle-aged woman with a halo of curly red hair. She was wearing a conservative dress and low heels, the attire of a lawyer, I felt, and as she stepped in to join me, I said to her: “Which floor?” I was standing next to the panel.

  “Five,” she said, and I could see her grimace as she looked at my face. I hadn’t forgotten the pain I was in but I had forgotten that visible on my cheek was my tumor, looking like a skin
ned baby rat. I pushed the button, looked straight ahead, and the elevator began to ascend. “Thank you,” she said bravely.

  We both exited at five and I let her out first, but, unfortunately, her apartment was in the same direction as Maurais’s.

  I wanted her in and tucked away before I rang his bell in case he made a fuss of some sort, so I walked slowly, and when she got to 5H, she turned and saw me lingering there, not really making much progress down the hall.

  I tried to give her a little smile, which I imagined was gruesome, and then she opened up her door and went in.

  At 5F, I pushed the bell and stepped to the side, since there was a little glass eye in the door. Then the door swung open wide and I stepped into the breach and when Maurais saw me, he staggered backwards, speechless and scared.

  I stepped inside and closed the door, and his eyes bulged. My unexpected presence plus the thing on my face had him literally gasping, like someone in a dream who wants to scream for help but can’t get the words out.

  “Easy, Mr. Maurais,” I said. “I just want to talk to you.”

  We were in a little entrance alcove, and he leaned over a thin chestnut table, which was a repository for his mail and keys, and he was gripping the table, holding on for dear life, panting, and then he looked up at me, grimacing at the sight of my wound, and said in a nasty whisper: “Get out of here.”

  I took a step toward him and said: “I need to talk to you about the house on Belden.”

  He stepped away from the table, backing out of the alcove and into the living room, and he said, “Leave me alone, leave me alone,” and then his legs buckled and he went to his knees and then he toppled onto his side, oddly, like half of him wasn’t working.

  I knelt down next to him fast, and his face was already turning blue. One eye was looking at me and the other was off in the wrong direction.