A Man Named Doll

by Jonathan Ames

  She followed me as far as her driveway and called out: “Hank, please, let me help you!”

  But I didn’t turn. I got into the car and drove away without looking back.

  11.

  It was twenty minutes north on the 101 to Tarzana and the Vault Pawn Shop, which had a big glittery sign in its window: WE WILL BUY YOUR GOLD.

  The owner of the shop, Rafael Mendes, who goes by Rafi, likes to tell people that his last name is spelled with an s and not a z. It’s a real sore spot for him—we all have our areas of frustration—but, regardless, he’s a good friend of mine and always behind the counter.

  I met him in 2001 when his niece, Dolores, ran away, and he came to Hollywood looking for her—a family friend had spotted her on a bus. My partner and I were assigned the case—I was still a cop then—and we found her working in a strip club off Hollywood Boulevard. She was fifteen years old.

  Rafi and his sister, the girl’s mother, collected her at the station, and Rafi and I had stayed in touch all these years, initially bonding over an old Rolex I was wearing back then. I had won the watch at a poker game with a bunch of other cops during my Texas Hold’em phase, and Rafi had given me his card and told me if I ever wanted to sell it to come see him. He collects and repairs Rolexes, as a hobby and a business, and holds on to them, selling one off every once in a while, like playing the stock market, when the timing—no pun intended—seems right.

  So a few months after finding his niece, Dolores, I had started to bottom out on my little gambling phase, racking up some nice debt, and I remembered his card in my wallet. I drove out to Tarzana and sold him the watch for two grand. Ten years later, he sold it for $4K. Which is why he’s a Rolex man. They age well.

  Anyway, I got a kick out of him from the very first time he came into the station: he’s eccentric and pint-size, but the way he carries himself, he seems a lot bigger, and I like eccentrics, people with style, always have, and over the years, I’ve pawned a few things with him and we’ve had a few meals together, and every now and then he’s assisted me on a case. A pawnbroker, like a real estate agent but in different ways, can be helpful in the detective business. Rafi knows where to get things, and he understands people: their vulnerability, their corruption, and if they have any good in them. He takes their confessions—and their possessions—like a pawnshop priest.

  His store is in a little strip mall on Reseda Boulevard, and as I parked in the spot right in front of his glass doors, I realized that what I had just executed was more of a swerve than a direct line. The Dilaudid I had taken earlier was circulating freely now, impairing my driving, and my legs felt heavy.

  I then cracked the window, got out of the Caprice, and told George to stay.

  Rafi had a cat hidden somewhere in the store, and George would sniff him out in a second and tear the place apart.

  He looked heartbroken to be left behind, and I said, trying to be firm, “You’ll be all right, George. I won’t be too long—I promise.” But I wasn’t able to maintain eye contact, and I closed the door, locking him in.

  As I entered the pawnshop, I dared to look back and George was standing with his paws on the dashboard, staring at me intently.

  “I love you! I won’t be long,” I said loudly, trying to reassure him.

  Then I walked into the Vault—it was just a little before 9:30—and it was empty except for Rafi, behind the glass counter.

  “Oh, my God, Hank,” he said. “What happened to your face? Skin cancer?”

  There was a mirror behind the counter—behind Rafi—and I could see that my bandage was turning a little pink with seepage. “It’s a long story, but I got cut bad,” I said. “You didn’t see the paper?”

  “I never look at it anymore; too depressing,” he said.

  Rafi’s in his early sixties, gray-haired, cherub-faced, and all of five four, which makes the sapphires and gold rings on his hands look even bigger. His large brown eyes hide behind orange-framed women’s glasses, and he’s in possession of a perfectly round little belly, which he’s always cupping with his bejeweled hands.

  He also has beautiful white teeth, which he puts in a cup at night, and he’s been with the same man, Manuel, for forty years, but his mother is still alive so they haven’t gotten married. Though they do live with her, in her house, and she gives them dinner in front of the television every night.

  “So who cut you?” he asked. “It was in the paper?”

  “You know I’ve been working over at that spa, and a client went berserk,” I said. “But to be honest, it’s too much to go into, and there’s something I really need you to look at.”

  “Have you been drinking? You sound funny.”

  “Sorry—it’s the pill for my face,” I said. “It’s as strong as heroin, but you take it like Motrin.” Then, with thick fingers, I took the folded blue piece of paper out of my pocket—the bloodstains had turned brown—and he said: “What’s on the paper? Mud?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and showed him the diamond. His eyes widened, and I said, “What do you think of it?”

  “If it’s real—and it looks real—it’s worth a lot of money,” he said in awe. “Let’s go to my office.”

  He locked his front door, and we went to the back, past the long glass cases of jewelry and watches—that’s primarily what Rafi trades in—and we settled ourselves in his cluttered little work space, him behind the desk, me in front of it. An old oil painting of Jesus, dim with age, was on the wall behind Rafi, watching over us.

  He took some tweezers and put the diamond in a small metal cup on a scale. He peered closely at the instrument and said: “This is a very big and beautiful girl. Seven carats. And if she weighs this much, she’s real.”

  “How much would that go for?”

  “On weight alone we’re talking fifty, sixty thousand dollars,” he said, which was the amount that Lou had been tossing around when he came to see me. “But this diamond has other qualities. Let’s take a closer look.”

  Rafi then swiveled in his chair. To his left, on a wing of his desk, was a large microscope. He put the diamond where it needed to go and bent over the lens and fiddled with the thing. He was still a moment. Then he said: “Magnificent. Come see.”

  I came around the desk, feeling a little wobbly, like a drunk, and I peered through the microscope at the diamond, and it was like looking into the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.

  “So beautiful,” I said, and it was moving to look at, this glimpse of nature from deep in the earth. I had never seen a diamond under a microscope before, and then I noticed that at the edge of the Hall of Mirrors there seemed to be lettering of some kind. “What’s that marking on the side?”

  We switched places, and Rafi, his eye still on the microscope, said: “I didn’t see it before, but you’re right. It’s been lasered. On what you call the girdle. Lasered by GIA.” He said each letter like you’d say CIA. “That’s the highest standard there is. This diamond’s been certified.”

  I went back to my chair, and Rafi, with great respect, returned the diamond to the middle of the blue piece of paper, which lay on the center of his desk between us. I said: “I also have this,” and I took out the brochure with the letters GIA on the front.

  “Yeah, that’s the cert,” he said, looking at the brochure. “GIA grades diamonds, jewels, everything, and what they say goes, and the laser marks it, like a cattle brand. They just started doing that a few years ago.”

  “It doesn’t lessen the value?”

  “No. It increases it.”

  “And this place is down in Carlsbad?” He said it was, and I asked him: “Does GIA stand for something?”

  “Gemological Institute of America,” he said. “They’re like the Fort Knox of jewels. Where did you get this diamond? The cert says Louis Shelton.”

  “That’s my friend. He died last night and gave it to me.”

  Rafi looked at me. “Gave it to you?”

  “He asked me to sell it for his daughter. Kind of a dea
thbed request. So does that report say how much it’s worth? I didn’t see a price.”

  “GIA doesn’t estimate prices. They just grade the diamond, based on industry standards, and then the market determines the price. What I can do is put what’s in this report”—he lifted the brochure—“into a website, Blue Nile Diamonds. I’ve used it before but never for anything this big, and they give you a price, based on other diamonds in the market with similar ratings. It’s like a search engine.”

  He studied the report for a moment and then said: “See? It has a D rating for color, which is the highest, means it’s without color, and it’s VVS1, which means it’s nearly flawless, no little puckers or marks of any kind. I think we’re looking at a lot of money here.”

  Excited, he took a laptop out of his desk drawer, did some typing, and his rings made little metallic noises that were pleasing. Then he pivoted the computer so I could see the Blue Nile web page. “See? It says its diamonds are all GIA graded.”

  Then he swung the laptop back around and did some more typing, stared a moment at the computer, while it must have been searching, and then he slid back in his chair. “Jesus, Hank,” he said. “A comparable diamond, emerald cut, that weight, has sold for $289,000. Now, that’s retail. So wholesale, what you could get is more like two hundred, probably. This is way above anything I do.”

  We both stared at the little chip of ice on his desk, at $289,000 worth of sparkling carbon. Which up close, under a microscope, looked like a palace.

  Then I said: “Where would I sell it? A fence?” I was thinking that the team operating out of the house on Belden was some kind of high-end fence.

  Rafi looked at me like I was crazy. “A fence? No! You’ve got a cert! You’re legit. You want to sell it, you should go to the diamond district, a diamond dealer, or I guess you could go to an auction house, like Christie’s, but they would take a cut. Probably 20 percent. Best bet is a diamond dealer. No cut.”

  “So my friend wouldn’t have gone to a fence if he was looking to raise some cash?”

  “No—no reason to go to a fence,” Rafi said, and he lowered his orange glasses and looked at me with something behind his eyes. “This cert is like a passport or a birth certificate. He could just go downtown to the diamond district.”

  When he said “downtown,” an idea sparked in my dull head. I took Lou’s notebook out of my pocket and said: “Can you google something for me?”

  He said he would, and I read him the first address Lou had scrawled: 550 Hill Street, suite 834. Rafi’s fingers made their noise on the keypad and then he said: “Yes, that’s a diamond dealer. Raz Diamonds. Probably Israeli. And that address is at the center of the district.”

  I nodded and folded the diamond into the blue paper and sat there a moment, thinking. I was deep in the Dilaudid and everything going on. Lou. The two dead blonde men. A stolen diamond. Then Rafi said: “Are you all right, Hank? You seem…I don’t know.”

  “I apologize, Raf. It’s the pill; it’s got me feeling a little loopy,” I said.

  “I’m worried about you, Hank. Who takes care of you?”

  “What do you mean? Nobody takes care of me. I have my dog.”

  “A dog is good, but a person is better. I wish you had a person.”

  I stood up, pocketed the diamond and the cert, and said: “Don’t worry about me, Rafi. You know I’m always all right.”

  “But what have you gotten into this time? How did your friend die?”

  “I’ll tell you later, okay?”

  He knew I was protecting him—better he not know too much—and he shook his head, concerned but also stoic. He’s survived a long time in that pawnshop and always has a nice little Beretta strapped to his ankle.

  He pushed himself up from his desk and walked me out, and as he unlocked the door, he said: “You need to get that somewhere safe. Diamonds get people hurt.”

  Then he noticed the butterflies in the parking lot, swirling about like drunken particles, and he gestured toward them and said: “Must be the end of the world.”

  “Must be,” I said, and we shook hands goodbye.

  12.

  I got in the Caprice and George gave me lots of kisses, grateful for my return, and Rafi was still standing behind his glass doors, looking at me. Our eyes met and then he disappeared into the shadows of his pawnshop, and then my phone started ringing. It was Rick Alvarez.

  “Got anything?” I said by way of answering.

  “Not anything too good,” he said. “The Belden house is owned by a private anonymous trust. I was able to find out that the trust is repped by a Beverly Hills law firm: Stamm, Baker, Landis, and at least eight other names. I’m not kidding. So I called the firm and the receptionist sent me to the voice mail of one of their lawyers. Thing is, if he does get back to me, I doubt he’ll tell me anything. And because it’s private, there are really no public records I can access. Wish I had more for you.”

  “It’s all right; I appreciate it,” I said. “I’ll go up against that Ken Maurais, see what he can tell me.”

  “Okay. Next couple of hours, I gotta show some houses to this client over in Echo Park and then Highland Park, but then I’ll do some more digging for you. Some other angles. See if I can find anything. It’s unlikely, but I’ll try. And just so you know, tomorrow I’m going down with my wife to Costa Rica. But maybe I can find something today.”

  I thanked him and we hung up, and then on my phone I searched “Ken Maurais” and got his office number and address, which was on Hillhurst over in Los Feliz. My battery was running low again—I was already at 10 percent—but I didn’t have time to go to a Sprint store and get the thing fixed. I called the Maurais number—putting in *67 first to set my phone to “private”—and a young-sounding woman answered: “Ken Maurais.”

  “May I speak to Mr. Maurais?”

  “He’s not in right now, but can I take a message?”

  “I was hoping to meet with Mr. Maurais. A friend recommended your agency, said Ken did a great job, and I’m looking for a house in the two to three to four million range, something with a pool.” I wanted to sound like an enticing potential client.

  “We can help you with that, definitely. Mr. Maurais can call you. What’s your number—”

  “What if I just swing by today? What time will he be in?”

  “He can call you first if you like—”

  “I’ll just come by. What time will he be in?”

  “Well…he should be back around twelve, and he’s here all afternoon—”

  “Great. I’ll come by at noon.”

  “Are you sure he can’t call you first—”

  “I’m sure,” I said firmly.

  There was silence. Then, worn down, she said: “Your name, sir?”

  I looked at George. “George,” I said, and George perked up his ears. “George Mendes. With an s, not a z. But you know what? My phone is dying, so I better go. Thank you so much; see you at twelve,” I said, and hung up.

  It was now 9:50, and I got back on the 101 and pointed the Caprice south to downtown, to Hill Street and Raz Diamonds.

  13.

  Traffic was light, but I wasn’t happy with the way I was driving.

  The accelerator felt like it was made of thick rubber and I had no feel for it. The Dilaudid had me hidden inside myself, far away from my extremities, and the coffee I had drunk earlier had died on me completely.

  It was like I was pushing all four thousand pounds of the Caprice myself. Everyone was passing me, and I wanted to go faster but I was also scared to.

  Nervous, I stayed in the right-hand lane and tried not to kill anyone.

  Then I remembered I had a few Adderall in the glove compartment. A friend had given them to me during the previous tax season when I couldn’t stop procrastinating, but I had never taken any.

  Normally, I don’t like speed, but I thought the Adderall and the Dilaudid might balance each other out. The Dilaudid would be for the pain and the Adderall would keep me
going, which is all to say that when Carl Lusk had cut me, he must have nicked some of my brain, because I was on a record streak of stupidity.

  One hand on the wheel, I reached across George and in doing so nearly drove into the embankment, but then I righted the car, while horns blared, and I fished the bottle out of the glove compartment, wading through a ton of crap I had shoved in there.

  The bottle said to take one pill, but that’s if you’re not on Dilaudid, and so I took two, and George looked at me and said, “What are you doing? I’ve never seen you like this,” and then Dr. Lavich called, which was perfect timing.

  I felt caught like a child and, of course, I didn’t pick up, but I listened to her voice mail. She sounded upset, in a way I had never heard before: all her training had made her unflappable, but I had rattled her with my dramatics, and in her voice mail she insisted that I check in with her and let her know that I was all right.

  I hated upsetting her, but I wasn’t going to call her back. I was officially off the rails, which was the only way I could keep doing what I was doing, which, on a conscious level, was to retrace Lou’s movements until they led me to Dodgers Hat and the gray-haired man and which, on an unconscious level, was to make a very bad situation far worse.

  But the act of taking the double dose of Adderall, before it could even kick in, did seem to wake me up in a placebo sort of way, and we made it downtown, thankfully, without killing anyone, in twenty-five minutes. The LA freeway system, when it works, is a marvel, on the order of the Great Wall of China.

  At 3rd Street, we exited the 101, and I found an open meter about a block from 550 Hill, which was a large modern glass building across from Pershing Square.