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

you. I’m at Cedars-Sinai. The good news is that I’m O positive, which means we’re a go on the kidney. Call me back.”

Then I tried the front desk of the Mirage, spoke to Aram again, and asked if he’d seen or heard from Lou. He hadn’t and was getting worried.

I said: “He’ll turn up soon,” and we hung up, and there was a pinprick of fear at the back of my neck, wondering what Lou was up to, but I shrugged it off and it quickly subsided in the warm bath of the painkiller. Then I asked Nancy, who was hovering, messing with my chart and my tube of blood, if she could charge my phone.

She said yes, started to leave with it, then turned at the door and said, “Would it be okay if I asked you something?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Is your name really Happy Doll?”

I took a breath and said, “Yeah, Happy Doll, that’s me,” and I gave her a sad-clown smile, and she nodded, looked embarrassed now that she had asked the question, which hadn’t been my intention, and left the room.

I fell asleep again for about an hour, and then two homicide detectives paid me a visit. One was fat and one was skinny.

The fat one said: “Can you talk?” He indicated my bandages.

“Yeah.”

“I’m Mullen,” said the fat cop, who had a fringe of hair around his bald head, and then he jerked his thumb at his partner. “This is Thode.”

Thode smiled at me, but it was a nasty smile. His lips were sensuous and purple, and he had dark, pretty eyelashes, but his eyes were unkind. He’d seen the worst in people and thought the worst of people. Being a cop had made him that way; it had done other things to me.

“So you know the drill,” said Mullen, breathing hard because of his weight. His round face was red and his eyes were red; his whole body was aggrieved. “Tell us what happened. And try not to lie.”

I didn’t understand his attitude or the way Thode was looking at me. But I shrugged it all off—maybe the Dilaudid was making me read things the wrong way—and I kept it simple. I said: “The guy went berserk. He was on meth and threatening one of the girls, and I got my face carved. Had to put him down.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” said Thode. He took out his notepad; he was the stenographer of the pair. “We gotta see if your story matches the girl’s. Now tell it. In detail.” More attitude. So I gave some back:

“Well, I was sitting in the front, reading a really good book,” and I said this in a singsong kind of voice to annoy them, but Mullen cut me off before I could go any further.

“Quit fooling around,” he snapped. “And why the fuck were you working there in the first place? You should be ashamed. You were a cop once. You make us all look bad.”

Now I understood their animosity: they saw me as a cautionary tale, what life might be like after the badge, and it scared them. You ended up working at a spa. Fine—let them be scared.

“You want my story or not?” I rasped; my throat was dry.

“Go ahead,” said Thode.

I looked at them and then I launched into it: “So I’m sitting there—reading a really good book—and I hear a scream. I run to the back and there’s another scream. Room 8. I go in and he’s strangling the girl with the shower hose. I had my baton out and he grabs a big hunting knife out of his bag. I don’t know why he had that knife—but he must have been planning something; maybe he was going to cut the girl—and he had been smoking meth and was going haywire. I got in one whack with the baton, but he was a bull and cut me twice and then brought me down. I managed to get him off me, but he was still swinging the knife and I shot him.” I left out the part about not meaning to kill him. Didn’t think that would win their favor one way or the other.

“Do you know who you killed?” said Thode.

“A meth head.”

“Not exactly, asshole,” he said. “His name was Carl Lusk. Played for USC ten years ago. Was going to the NFL but blew out his knee senior year. Drug problems since and a couple of arrests for assault and solicitation.” Then he blinked his girly eyelashes twice even though he didn’t mean to; he was a twitcher.

“So why are you coming down on me?” I said. “Okay, he’s an ex–football star, but he’s also a felon and he would have killed that girl.” I had never heard of Lusk.

“He’s not just an ex–football star,” said Mullen. “His dad’s a cop. We know him. Bill Lusk. Works downtown. Also Homicide.”

Now their attitudes were really starting to make sense: I was a cautionary tale and I’d killed the son of one of their friends, a fellow cop, though I’d never heard of the father, either. I had worked the Missing Persons Unit in Hollywood for the bulk of my years on the force, specifically, the juvie division: runaways, homeless teens, stolen children. But that ended a long time ago and I had never crossed paths with a detective named Lusk.

“I don’t know him,” I said, “and I wish I hadn’t shot his son, but that football star was big, and if he got through me, he was going to kill one of those girls, maybe all of them. Why’d he have that knife? Not for protection.”

“Bullshit,” said Mullen, his eyes angry in his round face. “You snapped. We asked around about you. They said you were weird and cracked at the end of your tour. Is that what happened last night? You couldn’t just put Lusk down? We found your little wand.” He pantomimed a swing with the baton. “You had to kill him? Really?”

“I tried