A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames

Author:Jonathan Ames [Ames, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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