A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

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