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

doorman in the lobby, but instead there was a vestibule with another set of double glass doors, which were locked and kept me from entering all the way in.

On the wall of the vestibule was an old-fashioned brass directory of the residents with their names on little typed cards, and next to each card was a buzzer, a small brass button. There were no cameras.

I saw K. MAURAIS 5F on a card and pushed the corresponding button. Built into the directory was an intercom, with a speaker in the shape of a circle made of many small holes in the metal.

There was no response to my first push of the bell, so I pushed it again, and a few seconds passed, each marked by a nasty pulsation in my face. Then Maurais’s distorted voice came through the speaker: “Who is it?”

I pushed a button so that I could talk and said: “FedEx. For Maurais, 5F.”

I heard Maurais say, “Oh, God,” and he sounded exhausted, which I didn’t blame him for—it had taken us, after all, two hours to drive forty-odd miles from Malibu—and then the lock on the second set of doors clicked open.

I walked across the soft lobby carpet and put my hand in my pocket, on Lou’s gun. I pushed the button for the elevator, waited a minute, and then an old man in a wheelchair with an aide behind him rolled out.

The aide, a young Spanish woman, was looking at her phone and didn’t notice me and the man in the chair didn’t look up. His head was down—he was half-asleep—and I recognized him because of his fantastically large nose. He had been on a long-running sitcom in the ’70s and I’d seen him in a bunch of movies, all comedies. That schnoz had made him a lot of money, and LA was like that—ghosts all over the place.

I went in and pushed 5, and then before the elevator could close, a hand shot into the opening, alerting the electric eye, and the door opened back up.

The owner of the hand was a middle-aged woman with a halo of curly red hair. She was wearing a conservative dress and low heels, the attire of a lawyer, I felt, and as she stepped in to join me, I said to her: “Which floor?” I was standing next to the panel.

“Five,” she said, and I could see her grimace as she looked at my face. I hadn’t forgotten the pain I was in but I had forgotten that visible on my cheek was my tumor, looking like a skinned baby rat. I pushed the button, looked straight ahead, and the elevator began to ascend. “Thank you,” she said bravely.

We both exited at five and I let her out first, but, unfortunately, her apartment was in the same direction as Maurais’s.

I wanted her in and tucked away before I rang his bell in case he made a fuss of some sort, so I walked slowly, and when she got to 5H, she turned and saw me lingering there, not really making much progress down the hall.

I tried to give her a little smile, which I imagined was gruesome, and then she opened up her door and went in.

At 5F, I pushed the bell and stepped to the side, since there was a little glass eye in the door. Then the door swung open wide and I stepped into the breach and when Maurais saw me, he staggered backwards, speechless and scared.

I stepped inside and closed the door, and his eyes bulged. My unexpected presence plus the thing on my face had him literally gasping, like someone in a dream who wants to scream for help but can’t get the words out.

“Easy, Mr. Maurais,” I said. “I just want to talk to you.”

We were in a little entrance alcove, and he leaned over a thin chestnut table, which was a repository for his mail and keys, and he was gripping the table, holding on for dear life, panting, and then he looked up at me, grimacing at the sight of my wound, and said in a nasty whisper: “Get out of here.”

I took a step toward him and said: “I need to talk to you about the house on Belden.”

He stepped away from the table, backing out of the alcove and into the living room, and he said, “Leave me alone, leave me alone,” and then his legs buckled and he went to his knees and then he toppled onto his side, oddly, like half of him wasn’t working.

I knelt down next to him fast, and his face was already turning blue. One eye was looking at me and the other was off in the wrong direction.

He was having a massive stroke, and his good eye was staring at me with all it had, and I dug frantically into the pockets of his blazer and found his nitro bottle. I hastily got a pill out and tried to put it in his mouth, but his lips were squeezed tight, and I shouted, “Come on, swallow this!”

But the mouth stayed closed—either he didn’t trust me or he couldn’t open it—and his one good eye just kept staring at me, like an eye in a keyhole in a prison cell, and I said, panicked: “I gotta call 911.”

I stood up and didn’t see a landline—this was the Lou situation all over again—and I took the place in with a quick scan: it was frozen in time in the ’80s, with a white leather couch, glass tables, mirrors, the color red, the color black, sculptures of Greek torsos.

But no fucking phone!

I knelt back down quick. “Where’s your cell phone?!”

He couldn’t answer, and he was making little sucking noises through his lips, and I patted his body, but his cell phone wasn’t in any of his pockets, and like a fool I tried to get the pill in his mouth again, but he still wouldn’t open up, and the eye kept staring at me, with