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

a fulcrum in the middle of my back—and the stitches in my arm and in my face felt like they were going to burst from the strain.

Then the man lifted his head from my shoulder and we looked at each other and it was blondie, and my adrenaline spiked, fueled by terror, and I had the greatest surge of strength in my life, and I lifted blondie, all six feet of him, all 180 pounds of him, and tossed him off the balcony, and he didn’t have time to scream, and he hit one of the pieces of metal furniture, bounced off it in the moonlight, seemed to shudder, and then went still. Heaving, I stared down at him, and there was a roar in my head that lasted awhile and then there was silence, like when Lou had died.

Then, moving very slowly, in shock, I turned and went back into the house, and blondie was still on the floor with a bullet hole still in his head.

My legs buckled, but I quickly righted myself and ran down the six flights and went out to the patio, and the thing that had been a man had landed on its belly, and his head was on its side. The neck was at a disturbing angle, but the face somehow hadn’t been damaged on the metal lounge chair.

I took out the Maglite and looked closely at the man on the ground. It wasn’t blondie but another blonde. Only darker blonde and older. The drugs and fear had made me see things, and I leaned over, put my hands on my knees, and took some deep breaths.

Get your shit together, Hapless, I said to myself.

Hapless was what my father had called me for the first eighteen years of my life, and it only stopped when he died. And the way I had said Hapless in my mind was exactly how he used to say it, full of contempt, and hearing his voice in my head sobered me up a little—just a little—and I took another look at the corpse:

This blonde was dressed in expensive jeans and a light ski jacket. He was as big as the other one—at least that part I hadn’t hallucinated—and he had the same aura of richness and privilege. The quality of the skin, the haircut. The handsomeness, even in death.

I searched the body and found house keys and a fob to a BMW, a silver money clip with about five hundred in cash and the initials PM embossed on it, and what looked like a burner phone with a security code. I couldn’t get in the phone.

Then I pocketed all of this for my powwow with the cops. I had all sorts of things to show them now. Like three dead bodies.

2.

I took the elevator back up, and on the top floor, I went out to the balcony to try to figure out where the second blonde had come from.

In the far left-hand corner, opposite from where I had been standing, was the old rusted cooking grill, and it was mostly flush with the railing, but the end had been pushed out, and it hadn’t been like that before.

Earlier it had appeared to be even with the railing, but there actually had been just enough space for the second blonde to squeeze behind it and be completely hidden, and that screeching sound I’d heard was him moving the grill out of the way when he decided to make his move. He probably had been hiding there the whole time I was in the house. I’d gotten lucky.

I left the front door open as I had found it, moved quickly through the hedges, and walked back up the desolate road to the Maverick, rehearsing my speech to the cops: “I was all fucked up on pain pills and marijuana and then my friend shows up and dies, and I can’t explain it—I lost my head and went after this guy in a Dodgers hat with a gun. I guess I was trying to play the hero…”

It sounded bad, and I got in Lou’s car and noticed something I hadn’t before. On the passenger seat, along with a lot of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and empty coffee cups—Lou wasn’t a neat person—was a brochure of some kind with a picture of a diamond on the front and the letters GIA in caps.

Inside the brochure, on the first page, was Lou’s name and address at the top, and below that was a diagram of a diamond, which was rectangular, like the one in the folded square of blue paper. And below the diagram was a heading—DIAMOND GRADING REPORT—and down a line was a series of words like carat weight, color, clarity, depth, girdle, shape, and fluorescence, all followed by letters and numbers, grades or codes of some kind.

There were also numeric measurements and other verbiage that was specific, I imagined, to the world of jewels. The diamond’s “shape” was listed as an “emerald cut,” and the one thing I could understand clearly was that Lou’s diamond was a big one: seven carats.

And this brochure/grading report listed a Carlsbad address, 5345 Armada Drive, and Lou had that train ticket from Carlsbad. Maybe that’s where he had been when he didn’t show up for work, and so however it tied into everything, this report was more evidence, and I shoved it in my jacket pocket, got the car started, and began to drive back down the hill.

A minute later there was a ding: it was a text message on the burner phone. I had left my phone charging at the house. I put my foot on the brake just before a curve and pulled the cell phone out of my pocket. Even though the phone was locked, it showed the text on the screen. It had come in at 2:51 a.m., the current time, and was from a number without a name, 818-678-5564, and it said, in all caps:

ALL DONE. ALMOST BACK.