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

and so he pretended I hadn’t spoken. Then he said, with some condescension: “You take him everywhere? He’s a support dog?”

“Yeah, because of my face cancer.”

That threw him, and I could see he was thinking I was half nuts, but cancer gives people pause. He shrugged without realizing it, brushing the whole odd conversation to the side. He was ready to get down to business. He said: “Can I see the diamond?”

I handed it to him and he produced a cloth and tweezers from his desk drawer. He wiped the stone with the cloth and took hold of it with the tweezers and held the diamond under the lamp, which I realized was a special lamp, with probably a very specific spectrum of light.

Then a small jeweler’s loupe seemed to materialize from nowhere in his other hand and he looked at the stone with the seriousness of an expert. “I saw this diamond yesterday,” he said, still admiring it under the loupe, and then he deposited the diamond in the metal cup on the scale and said: “Yeah. Seven carats. Same diamond.”

He left it in the cup and didn’t hand it back to me. Another power move. “So why are you here?” he asked.

“Lou Shelton died last night. In the hospital. A brain aneurysm. He was awake for a little while and gave me the diamond and asked me to sell it. For his daughter. An hour later, he died.”

“He was your friend?”

“My best friend.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a trace of feeling behind it. Then he said: “Strange I should meet him yesterday and now he’s dead. He said he found us in the phone book. First time I heard this. I didn’t know there were phone books anymore.”

That sounded right. Lou was from another generation. There are late adopters and no adopters and that’s what Lou was, a no adopter. He always kept a phone book in his room at the motel, and I could see him looking up “diamonds” in the Yellow Pages, running his finger down the line and stopping at Raz Diamonds just because he might have liked the sound of the name.

“He was an old-fashioned sort of guy,” I said. “We were cops together.”

“He told me he was an ex-cop.”

“I was a rookie when I met him. He actually saved my life. Took a bullet for me.”

I thought all this would appeal to the ex-soldier, make me trustworthy, even though my jaw was swiveling, and he nodded at my sob story, just as he had at my cancer story, and then he said: “It’s a very beautiful diamond. Mr. Shelton said it was his grandmother’s, in the family a long time, and I offered to buy it yesterday, but he said he wanted to shop it around.”

“I don’t know about that. He told me to come to you.”

“You have the cert?”

I took it out and handed it to him. He looked at it. The cert seemed to complete his transformation from wary to trusting. It was as Rafi said: the cert was a passport, a golden ticket. He said: “So you want to sell it?”

“Lou didn’t tell me how much you offered. Just told me to come to you. He was pretty weak and kept going in and out of consciousness.”

“Two hundred thousand dollars is what I offered. It’s what anyone in this building would offer. I told him that. In the diamond business we don’t lie. It’s the only way to survive.”

“Blue Nile says it could go for two eighty-nine.”

“You did some research. That’s nice. But that’s retail. I have to make a living. Go shop around if you want—everyone will tell you two hundred. But I’ll offer cash. Most places don’t do that, but I know people prefer cash.”

“Two twenty?” I said. I was flying by the seat of my pants. I had gotten out of him what I thought I needed—Lou had been here, didn’t take his offer, and shopped it elsewhere. On Belden Drive? But why?

Maybe Rafi was wrong and Lou had wanted to go to a fence. Maybe he’d come here just to get a price, to get a sense of the marketplace, and then he’d gone to the fence because he’d stolen the diamond forty-five years ago, was still afraid to get caught, and thought a fence was safer than a legit dealer. I knew for a fact that the grandmother story was a lie: Lou was raised in an old-fashioned orphanage and never even got adopted, maybe because he was a runt.

“I can’t do two twenty,” he said. “Two hundred cash. You go somewhere else, they will tell you the same. We all know each other. Also, Blue Nile gives the absolute highest price possible, which you almost never get. You can shave twenty thousand off their prices every time. So I’m not trying to steal from you. Also think about it: with cash you can avoid taxes, so two hundred cash is like two sixty, two eighty. It’s a very good offer, my friend.”

I looked at him and then made a stab in the dark: “Do you live in Beachwood Canyon on Belden Drive? I feel like I’ve seen you when I walk my dog.”

His look of utter bewilderment told me that he had no connection to the house with the two dead blondes, and he said, dismissively: “I live in Calabasas. So are we doing business?” He was a good salesman—or in this case buyer—and he was trying to close.

“Can I think about it a second?”

He stood up quickly, like a knife opening. “Sure. Think about it. You want an espresso? I love espresso. It’s the one thing I hate about America. The coffee.”

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “I’d like an espresso.”

He came around the desk, and George stood up and put his paws on Yair’s tailored blue slacks and sniffed his zipper for traces of urine.

Yair smiled and petted him and said: “Handsome dog.”

“No flirting,” I repeated, and Yair’s eyes crinkled at