A Man Named Doll

by Jonathan Ames

  We got out of the car and started walking and George urinated several times where other dogs, like Masons, had left secret messages, and then we got to 550 and sailed across the lobby, where a large sign informed me that this building was the International Jewelry Center.

  There was security behind a counter, but you didn’t have to check in; you could go straight to the elevator bank, and no one made a fuss about George, perhaps because he was so elegant looking, though, of course, dogs are everywhere these days. People are so insane and confused that they need them more than ever.

  In the crowded elevator, I noticed that the man in front of me had in his hand a thick roll of money, the width of a soup can. He got off at the sixth floor, and George and I got off at the eighth.

  The hallway was long and nondescript and wrapped around the building in a gigantic rectangle, which I discovered since we took the long way to suite 834, passing many office doors, including one with a plaque that said: DIAMOND CENTER SYNAGOGUE.

  I stopped for a moment in front of the synagogue and touched the mezuzah on the doorframe in honor of my dead Jewish mother, with the selfish intention that maybe she or God might look after me.

  Finally, we found 834. The door had no signage, but there was a button to push and another mezuzah. I pushed the button, and the lock clicked.

  I opened the door and on my way in I touched this second mezuzah for another dose of good luck and blessing, and then put my fingers to my mouth and kissed them in case I was on camera, which I imagined I was.

  A friend told me once that you first touch the mezuzah to remind you of God, and then you kiss your fingers to show your love for God, and I thought it might be good, if anyone was watching, to exhibit familiarity with this custom, and on the other side of the door George and I found ourselves in a small vestibule with a bulletproof glass window, and next to that was a connecting door to the interior of the office.

  I stood in front of the window, which had a thin opening at the bottom for passing thin items. An accented voice spoke to me out of a speaker, which I couldn’t locate, and the voice said: “What do you want? Do you have an appointment?”

  I fished the diamond out of my pocket, found a camera lens in the corner of the vestibule, and held up the glinting piece of carbon to the camera’s glass eye. I became aware that I was starting to grind my teeth and swivel my jaw from the Adderall, and I said: “I’m looking to sell this diamond.”

  There was no response from the Wizard of Oz, and then a man, early thirties, dark-haired and trim, appeared on the other side of the glass and said, with an Israeli accent: “We don’t see people without appointments.”

  “Lou Shelton told me to come here,” I offered by way of explanation, and then took a risk and said, even though I couldn’t be sure it was true: “He came here yesterday, with this,” and I held up the big diamond again, like $289,000 worth of bait.

  The diamond intrigued him for sure, and he looked me over, taking in the stained bandage on my face and the attractive dog on the leash.

  And while he looked at me, I looked at him.

  He was wearing an expensive tailored white shirt, and he wasn’t tall, but he was built like a knife. I figured that not too long ago he would have been a soldier in the IDF, and he still looked like a soldier: his hair was cut close to his head; his dark features were handsome and severe.

  After a few seconds of our staring contest, he nodded, which was his way of saying he trusted me enough to let me in, and his hand reached down below my line of sight, and he must have pushed a button, because the lock on the connecting door clicked loudly.

  George and I went through the door, and the dark-haired man was already walking down the hallway ahead of us and said over his shoulder: “Come into my office.” To go with his crisp white shirt, he wore tailored blue pants and Italian loafers the color of raw steak. He moved catlike and easy.

  We passed two closed doors, and then at the end of the corridor was his office, which had a view overlooking Pershing Square and all of downtown, but that was it for frills. The carpet was old and thin, and the walls were bare and scuffed and needed painting. One got the sense that the goal here was to make money, not spend it.

  The only thing in the room was a large black desk, with an office chair on each side, and even the desk was mostly barren. The only things on it were a lamp, a scale, and in the corner of the desk—angled so that I could just about see the whole thing—was a very small CCTV monitor, which was split into four live feeds: the vestibule, the interior hallway, and two offices, which were probably behind the doors we passed.

  In the two offices, men sat at desks, looking at computer monitors. The dark man in front of me could watch his colleagues, and they could probably watch him, and if he had been looking he had probably seen me kiss my fingers when I entered the vestibule.

  He sat down and I sat down and he looked me over again. He liked to do a lot of looking. It was a power move, and it came to him naturally. Then he said: “What’s your name?” He spoke with a kind of hoarseness in his voice.

  “Hank Doll,” I said.

  “Doll?”

  “Yeah. It’s Irish. But my mother was Jewish.”

  He said, noncommittal: “That’s nice.”

  “And you’re Israeli?” I said. “Ex-military?”

  “Yes. We’re all ex-military.”

  “You’ve got a military bearing.”

  He shrugged that off and said: “Your name is really Doll?”

  “Yes. It really is.”

  A smile, which he then tried to suppress, cracked his facade. To a foreigner the name Doll can be especially funny, but he had seen the diamond, and while my showing up unannounced had made him wary, he also didn’t want to offend me. It was a very big diamond.

  So he covered the smile by reaching his hand across the desk and saying: “I’m Yair. Yair Raz.”

  “The Raz of Raz Diamonds?”

  “No. That’s my father. But he lives in Antwerp. I run the Los Angeles office.”

  We shook—he had a strong grip—and then he leaned back in his chair and did some more appraising. When he tired himself out with that, he said: “What happened to your face?”

  “Skin cancer,” I said.

  He nodded as if he understood, and then he said, still wondering if he should trust me: “And why is your mouth moving like that? Are you on drugs?”

  “No. Nothing like that. It’s Adderall for the pain. My skin cancer.”

  “For the pain?”

  “You’re right. I’m taking something else for the pain and the Adderall is so that I’m not sleepy from the pain pill. See what I mean? They work together. On the pain. But it’s got me a little speedy.”

  Then George jumped on my lap, and Yair said: “What’s your dog’s name?”

  “George,” I said, and I put him back down on the floor.

  “He has beautiful eyes.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But no flirting. I get jealous.” The Adderall was really enjoying itself, had me flapping my mouth, had me feeling blithe and clever.

  But Yair didn’t understand my joke and so he pretended I hadn’t spoken. Then he said, with some condescension: “You take him everywhere? He’s a support dog?”

  “Yeah, because of my face cancer.”

  That threw him, and I could see he was thinking I was half nuts, but cancer gives people pause. He shrugged without realizing it, brushing the whole odd conversation to the side. He was ready to get down to business. He said: “Can I see the diamond?”

  I handed it to him and he produced a cloth and tweezers from his desk drawer. He wiped the stone with the cloth and took hold of it with the tweezers and held the diamond under the lamp, which I realized was a special lamp, with probably a very specific spectrum of light.

  Then a small jeweler’s loupe seemed to materialize from nowhere in his other hand and he looked at the stone with the seriousness of an expert. “I saw this diamond yesterday,” he said, still admiring it u
nder the loupe, and then he deposited the diamond in the metal cup on the scale and said: “Yeah. Seven carats. Same diamond.”

  He left it in the cup and didn’t hand it back to me. Another power move. “So why are you here?” he asked.

  “Lou Shelton died last night. In the hospital. A brain aneurysm. He was awake for a little while and gave me the diamond and asked me to sell it. For his daughter. An hour later, he died.”

  “He was your friend?”

  “My best friend.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a trace of feeling behind it. Then he said: “Strange I should meet him yesterday and now he’s dead. He said he found us in the phone book. First time I heard this. I didn’t know there were phone books anymore.”

  That sounded right. Lou was from another generation. There are late adopters and no adopters and that’s what Lou was, a no adopter. He always kept a phone book in his room at the motel, and I could see him looking up “diamonds” in the Yellow Pages, running his finger down the line and stopping at Raz Diamonds just because he might have liked the sound of the name.

  “He was an old-fashioned sort of guy,” I said. “We were cops together.”

  “He told me he was an ex-cop.”

  “I was a rookie when I met him. He actually saved my life. Took a bullet for me.”

  I thought all this would appeal to the ex-soldier, make me trustworthy, even though my jaw was swiveling, and he nodded at my sob story, just as he had at my cancer story, and then he said: “It’s a very beautiful diamond. Mr. Shelton said it was his grandmother’s, in the family a long time, and I offered to buy it yesterday, but he said he wanted to shop it around.”

  “I don’t know about that. He told me to come to you.”

  “You have the cert?”

  I took it out and handed it to him. He looked at it. The cert seemed to complete his transformation from wary to trusting. It was as Rafi said: the cert was a passport, a golden ticket. He said: “So you want to sell it?”

  “Lou didn’t tell me how much you offered. Just told me to come to you. He was pretty weak and kept going in and out of consciousness.”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars is what I offered. It’s what anyone in this building would offer. I told him that. In the diamond business we don’t lie. It’s the only way to survive.”

  “Blue Nile says it could go for two eighty-nine.”

  “You did some research. That’s nice. But that’s retail. I have to make a living. Go shop around if you want—everyone will tell you two hundred. But I’ll offer cash. Most places don’t do that, but I know people prefer cash.”

  “Two twenty?” I said. I was flying by the seat of my pants. I had gotten out of him what I thought I needed—Lou had been here, didn’t take his offer, and shopped it elsewhere. On Belden Drive? But why?

  Maybe Rafi was wrong and Lou had wanted to go to a fence. Maybe he’d come here just to get a price, to get a sense of the marketplace, and then he’d gone to the fence because he’d stolen the diamond forty-five years ago, was still afraid to get caught, and thought a fence was safer than a legit dealer. I knew for a fact that the grandmother story was a lie: Lou was raised in an old-fashioned orphanage and never even got adopted, maybe because he was a runt.

  “I can’t do two twenty,” he said. “Two hundred cash. You go somewhere else, they will tell you the same. We all know each other. Also, Blue Nile gives the absolute highest price possible, which you almost never get. You can shave twenty thousand off their prices every time. So I’m not trying to steal from you. Also think about it: with cash you can avoid taxes, so two hundred cash is like two sixty, two eighty. It’s a very good offer, my friend.”

  I looked at him and then made a stab in the dark: “Do you live in Beachwood Canyon on Belden Drive? I feel like I’ve seen you when I walk my dog.”

  His look of utter bewilderment told me that he had no connection to the house with the two dead blondes, and he said, dismissively: “I live in Calabasas. So are we doing business?” He was a good salesman—or in this case buyer—and he was trying to close.

  “Can I think about it a second?”

  He stood up quickly, like a knife opening. “Sure. Think about it. You want an espresso? I love espresso. It’s the one thing I hate about America. The coffee.”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. “I’d like an espresso.”

  He came around the desk, and George stood up and put his paws on Yair’s tailored blue slacks and sniffed his zipper for traces of urine.

  Yair smiled and petted him and said: “Handsome dog.”

  “No flirting,” I repeated, and Yair’s eyes crinkled at me in confusion, and he left the room. I watched the monitor and saw him go into one of the offices. His colleague looked up from his computer, and Yair made his way to a counter, where there was an espresso machine.

  Then I looked out the window and a few hapless butterflies went by like something out of a cartoon. The Dilaudid and the Adderall were having a wrestling match inside me to see who was in charge—I felt dull and sharp simultaneously—and there was also the constant sensation, which had started last night after Lou died, of watching myself at some remove, as if I were on CCTV in my own mind.

  But I had a decision to make: sell the diamond and bring the money to Lou’s daughter, which was Lou’s actual deathbed request, or hold on to it for the inevitable reckoning with the cops. Or could I avoid a reckoning?

  Yair came back into the room with the espressos and I said: “We’re in business.”

  “Excellent,” he said, and there was a cocky gleam in his eye. He lived for moments like this: making the deal was confirmation of his abilities.

  He put my espresso down in front of me. “You made the right decision,” he said, and went to his side of his desk, smiled at me, and raised his espresso cup. I raised mine in salute and we sipped our coffees.

  Then he removed from his desk a small box for the diamond and picked it out of the metal cup with the tweezers, but he must have squeezed a little too hard—he was more excited than he wanted to let on—because the diamond flipped into the air and caught a few beams of light and then fell to the carpet. I gasped, and George made a lunge for it, but I yanked on his leash just in time and he came up short. I don’t think he would have swallowed it, but you never know.

  Yair said something in Hebrew, must have been a curse of some sort, and he definitely blanched, but then he regained his composure, picked the diamond up, and put it in the little box.

  “That’s how diamonds get lost,” he said. “They’re tiny and you drop them and you’re screwed. But you know what we say in the diamond business: when a diamond falls to the ground, it’s going to sell.”

  “Well, it already has,” I said. “So where’s the cash?”

  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.

  On the other side of the door was a receptionist, a young woman, blonde and pretty. She was staring down at her phone and then looked up as we came in. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m George Mendes. I called earlier. I have a twelve o’clock appointment.”

  “Oh, right,” she said, and her eyes got a strange look as she took in my face and the bandage. “Just have a seat. Ken should be here any minute.” She indicated two chairs across from her, against the wall. Behind the young woman was a closed door, which must have led to Maurais’s private office.