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

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.

I went back inside and looked at the blood trail some more. Someone had dragged blondie from the table to the elevator and up to the sixth floor, and then for some reason had left him there and taken off.

Or, alternatively, that person was somewhere inside, hiding, and not making themselves known.

So I had a dilemma: Should I search the whole house? Or should I go home immediately and call the cops and tell them everything? Every stupid thing I had done?

I decided to search the house.

On the first level, in addition to the denlike room with the table, there were three other empty rooms and an empty bathroom, and I got out the Maglite and nobody was hiding in the closets.

I went back to the elevator and this time I noticed that on the far wall of the compartment there was a bullet hole, but not that big. Like a .22. The hole in Lou’s belly hadn’t been that big, either. And Dodgers Hat had been carrying what looked like a .22. Did he kill Lou? But Lou said he got the one who got him, so it was probably blondie who had shot him. And maybe Dodgers Hat was carrying blondie’s gun when he came to my house.

Then I went to the second floor, and as I searched around—more empty rooms and closets—I started seeing in my stoned mind how it might have gone down:

Lou’s in the elevator and blondie is on the other side of the table.

For some reason, blondie shoots at Lou twice and hits him once before Lou can get a shot off. And blondie would’ve had to fire first since Lou’s shot was a kill shot and blondie wouldn’t have been snapping off any rounds after taking one in the head.

So blondie fires twice, and then Lou, in the elevator, fires back and kills blondie. Then the elevator door closes, and Lou is gone, and then Dodgers Hat and whoever else was at that meeting—and there were probably three others, judging by the water glasses—would have had to run up six flights to catch up to Lou, which gives him a head start.

But not enough of a head start, not with the winding roads, and so Dodgers Hat follows him straight to my place, but Lou doesn’t know it. He’s taken a gut shot and not thinking good.

But who was I to judge about not thinking good?

I searched the rest of the house but found no one and nothing of interest: the place was empty and hadn’t been lived in for a long time.

The whole thing took me about fifteen minutes, and back on the sixth floor, I looked again at the corpse: he was a good-size boy, maybe six feet, 180, an athlete, and he was wearing a nice leather jacket and good shoes. He looked rich, well fed. Was he there to buy Lou’s diamond? Was that the purpose of the meeting?

Then I went out to the balcony to think a second, to formulate the story I was going to tell the cops to explain my behavior, and I leaned against the railing and looked out at the view. Directly to the east was the Griffith Observatory, and at night, lit from within, it looked like a skull with a candle inside, and I was high above Los Angeles, like a king or a hawk, and then there was a metal screeching sound behind me, and I started to turn and something slammed into me hard, tackling me.

It was a man trying to drive me over the railing, and his head was buried in my shoulder, and all I could do was wrap my arms around him and pull him in close to negate his leverage, and I was fighting, instinctively, not to go over—to not let the railing be