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

me in confusion, and he left the room. I watched the monitor and saw him go into one of the offices. His colleague looked up from his computer, and Yair made his way to a counter, where there was an espresso machine.

Then I looked out the window and a few hapless butterflies went by like something out of a cartoon. The Dilaudid and the Adderall were having a wrestling match inside me to see who was in charge—I felt dull and sharp simultaneously—and there was also the constant sensation, which had started last night after Lou died, of watching myself at some remove, as if I were on CCTV in my own mind.

But I had a decision to make: sell the diamond and bring the money to Lou’s daughter, which was Lou’s actual deathbed request, or hold on to it for the inevitable reckoning with the cops. Or could I avoid a reckoning?

Yair came back into the room with the espressos and I said: “We’re in business.”

“Excellent,” he said, and there was a cocky gleam in his eye. He lived for moments like this: making the deal was confirmation of his abilities.

He put my espresso down in front of me. “You made the right decision,” he said, and went to his side of his desk, smiled at me, and raised his espresso cup. I raised mine in salute and we sipped our coffees.

Then he removed from his desk a small box for the diamond and picked it out of the metal cup with the tweezers, but he must have squeezed a little too hard—he was more excited than he wanted to let on—because the diamond flipped into the air and caught a few beams of light and then fell to the carpet. I gasped, and George made a lunge for it, but I yanked on his leash just in time and he came up short. I don’t think he would have swallowed it, but you never know.

Yair said something in Hebrew, must have been a curse of some sort, and he definitely blanched, but then he regained his composure, picked the diamond up, and put it in the little box.

“That’s how diamonds get lost,” he said. “They’re tiny and you drop them and you’re screwed. But you know what we say in the diamond business: when a diamond falls to the ground, it’s going to sell.”

“Well, it already has,” I said. “So where’s the cash?”

14.

The money came in thick packets of ten thousand dollars each, wrapped with rubber bands, and Yair dumped it all for me in a paper bag from Whole Foods.

Then he put that bag in one of those large-size reusable Trader Joe’s bags, which he gave me as a gift, and I said: “You must eat healthy. Whole Foods. Trader Joe’s. I try to eat healthy.”

“Only the best,” he said and smiled, and we shook hands and our business was done.

By 11:30, George and I were back in the car. I checked my phone and there was 3 percent battery left and more messages about the LA Times article, but the only message I paid attention to was from Monica—“How are you feeling? Were you able to rest?”—which I didn’t feel capable of responding to.

In her mind, I must have been home, recuperating from having my face and arm sliced open. But in the twenty-four hours since she had dropped me off from the hospital, Lou had died, I had found a blonde man with a bullet in his head, had thrown another blonde man off a balcony, had lied to the police, been beaten by the police and taken to another hospital, visited the house on Belden Drive, which had been wiped clean of dead bodies, ended my four years of analysis with Dr. Lavich, saw Rafi, and sold a stolen diamond for two hundred thousand dollars cash.

So it didn’t seem right to respond to her innocent text with something like, “Feeling fine,” and so I avoided the whole thing and got the car to the 101, in the direction of Los Feliz and the office of Ken Maurais.

George made himself comfortable on the floor by his seat, next to the Trader Joe’s bag of cash, and I didn’t have Lou’s daughter’s address or number, but I’d track her down when the time was right and give her this final gift from her father.

At 11:55, I parked the Caprice on Hillhurst, across the street from Maurais’s office, which was in a brown two-story brick cube with large windows and a glass front door.

I gave the place the hairy eyeball, and then George and I got out of the car, and I threw the Trader Joe’s bag in the trunk. Then we crossed the street and the butterflies were everywhere, like confetti, and I looked back at the Caprice and decided I didn’t feel comfortable leaving the money behind.

So we crossed back over, got the trunk open, and I looped the Trader Joe’s bag over my shoulder, like a purse.

Then we crossed again and George urinated on the wheel of a gleaming parked Tesla—I looked anxiously to the right and left for the owner, but no one showed—and then we went inside the brick cube. Maurais’s office was on the second floor, up an exposed black metal staircase—the place was going for an industrial look of some kind.

We went up the stairs and on the landing, to the left, was a Farmers Insurance agency and to the right was Maurais’s office, behind a glass door.

On the other side of the door was a receptionist, a young woman, blonde and pretty. She was staring down at her phone and then looked up as we came in. “Can I help you?”

“I’m George Mendes. I called earlier. I have a twelve o’clock appointment.”

“Oh, right,” she said, and her eyes got a strange look as she took in my face and the bandage. “Just have a seat. Ken should be here any minute.” She indicated two chairs across from her,