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

hate and terror, and then all of a sudden his jaw slid out of place, like a typewriter carriage, and half his face went to one side, it was grotesque, and then his jaw slid back into place, and it was his face again, but then his whole body went slack and the lights went off in his good eye—no more terror, no more hate—and I was sure he was dead.

But I started CPR on his chest, and it was like pushing down on a bag of hangers.

Then I got his mouth open—finally—and pinched his nose and put my mouth on his and gave him the kiss of life, but got nothing. After that, I pounded on his chest some more and then I stood up and ran down the hall to 5H. I pressed the buzzer and the redhead came to the door.

“Mr. Maurais in 5F had a stroke. Call 911!”

She looked at me, confused. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“Fucking call 911!” I shouted. “In 5F. The man’s dying!”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Fear had made her stupid, and she couldn’t get past the idea that a stranger coming to her door must have something to do with her. I slammed my hand against the wall, scaring her more, and shouted: “Call 911! Maurais in 5F is dying!”

She got it then and ran back into her apartment, and I ran back to Maurais and he hadn’t moved and I checked his pulse, just to be sure, and he was gone. No more real estate deals. No more bread and butter. No more looking at that Hockney poster and having secret thoughts.

So I ran out of there like I was on fire. I certainly didn’t want to stick around for the cops, and having no patience for the elevator—I didn’t want to be stuck in a box—I took the staircase at the end of the hall and ran down all five flights, which was one flight for each dead man I had seen in the past three days: Carl Lusk, Lou, the two blondes, and now Maurais.

I hit the lobby and went calmly across it and didn’t encounter any more residents. I walked to the Caprice like I was an innocent man, and it was fully dark out now.

I got in the car and drove us out of there.

In my rearview mirror, I saw flashing police lights. A squad car must have been nearby. I had gotten away just in time. But poor Maurais. My face was the last thing he ever saw. I had scared him to death.

19.

George and I went up the steps of my house, and I was counting on him barking in case anyone was inside. In the past, when we came home from a walk and the gas man or somebody else was there, George would know it right away and sound the alarm. But he was silent as he trotted up the stairs and so most likely the coast was clear. Still, I got Lou’s gun out just in case.

But the front door hadn’t been tampered with, and nobody was inside.

I hid the money in the linen closet—it was too big for the ironing board—and I plugged my phone in by the socket over the kitchen counter. It was almost seven—traffic had been bad from West Hollywood—and I was exhausted and hungry and my face wanted to die.

I gave George some food, finally took a Dilaudid, and spooned some yogurt into my mouth. Then my phone came alive and the thing was loaded.

Text messages. Missed calls. Voice mails. The ones I cared about were from: Monica, Dr. Lavich, Thode and Mullen, Aram (Lou’s boss), and Rick Alvarez.

Monica and Dr. Lavich were worried about me, and Monica had tried me multiple times. Aram had called early in the afternoon, wanted to know if I had heard about Lou.

Thode and Mullen needed to talk to me right away, and that was three hours ago.

And Rick Alvarez had done some more digging and had come through, after all, with some very interesting dirt. He had texted me several links—some old newspaper articles about a murder and an old obituary—but I cut to the chase and called him to make sense of it all.

“Where you been?” he said.

“My phone died.”

“Did you see the links I sent you? Heard my voice mail?”

“Was too much. Spell it out for me.”

What he told me was this: He followed a hunch and looked into the previous owner of 2803 Belden, which the records showed was a woman named Caroline Hagen. Then he did a little research on her and discovered that she was from an old oil family, with plenty of money. He also learned, more importantly, that she had died twelve years ago and that her husband, Eric Madvig, a well-respected doctor at USC, had been arrested for her murder. He overdosed her on fentanyl and claimed it was an accident. His presumed motive: money.

At the time of her death, it had been a front-page story, which I vaguely recalled, but the trial of Madvig, two years later, had been overshadowed, in Rick’s opinion, by the second Phil Spector trial.

Spector was convicted of murder, whereas Madvig’s high-priced lawyers got his charges reduced to manslaughter. Madvig then did sixteen months at a rich man’s jail, an easy sentence, but lost his license and his position at USC, and his reputation was destroyed.

What came next from Rick was the kicker: the law firm that repped Madvig at his murder trial was the same firm in charge of the private trust that owned 2803 Belden.

But that wasn’t all he had dug up: Caroline Hagen had owned another property, which was part of the same private trust, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that its address was 1479 Encinal Canyon Road, in Malibu.

“So what I figure,” Rick said toward the end of his rundown, “is that this Dr. Madvig owns the house on Belden. He must have inherited it from his wife,