I sat down, and the girl glanced at George. “Cute dog,” she said. “Beautiful eyes. It’s like he’s got eyeliner.”
“I know,” I said. “I love him very much.”
That made her nod uncomfortably, and then she picked up her phone to study it some more, to kill more seconds and minutes and years of her life, which made me think of my phone and yearn for it.
Which is how it works: you see someone playing with their phone and then you want to play with yours, like an addictive yawn, and so I got mine out and of course the battery was dead.
“Could you charge my phone by any chance?” I asked the young woman, and she said, “Yes,” but then Ken Maurais came through the glass door.
He was about five nine, early seventies, and his frosted hair was between dye jobs. It was half gray, half blonde, and he had a big horsey face, losing its fight with gravity. He was nicely dressed in a wool blazer, gray slacks, and a dark purple shirt. George lunged for his crotch and Maurais stepped back, not happy about it.
I then stood up and reached out my hand. “George Mendes,” I said. “We have a twelve o’clock appointment, but sorry about the dog. He loves good-looking people.”
My little joke made Maurais smile, and he displayed a rather large set of white chompers, an expensive implant job. He gave me his hand to shake and it was thin and practically boneless, which is always disturbing.
“Ken Maurais,” he said, and as we held hands, George got his nose against Maurais’s zipper, but now Maurais didn’t mind, and he let go of my hand to caress George and said to me: “What’s the dog’s name?”
“George,” I said, and as soon as it came out of my mouth, I wanted to scream.
“You’re both named George?” he asked, sharp on his feet, unlike me, who was doped in two different directions, north with the Adderall and south with the Dilaudid.
But then I rallied, somewhat, and said, “I know it’s peculiar, naming him after myself, but more important, I really want to buy a house with a pool and was hoping you could help me.”
As a follow-up, I then gave him my best winning smile, and he gave me the once-over, but since realtors are very forgiving of the human race—they have to be to sell houses—he said to the receptionist, “Julie, can you bring us some water?” and then to George and me, he said, “Come into my office.”
We followed him in and he had a nice view of Hillhurst, and on the walls were various diplomas and licenses, along with a David Hockney poster of a naked young man, with exposed buttocks, lifting himself out of a Los Angeles pool.
It was a handsome painting—actually a poster reproduction from the Liverpool Museum—but I wondered what Maurais’s other clients thought of it. It was certainly bold, and I imagined it gave Maurais great pleasure to sit at his desk and look at the young man and remember old love affairs, which in my own way I was all for: better than staring at a phone.
I put my Trader Joe’s bag of cash on the floor and lowered myself into the customer’s chair. My face and arm were throbbing, but not too bad, and I could control my jaw swivel if I remembered to. “I like the Hockney,” I said.
“I know it’s scandalous,” he said, easing himself into his chair, “but to me it says: LA! And that’s what I’m in the business of: selling Los Angeles.” I noticed a stack of his FOR SALE signs in the corner: the airbrushed photo of him must have been ten years old.
Julie came in with our waters—two small bottles of Perrier and two drinking glasses—and then left us, closing the door behind her. We poured our drinks and Maurais took a pill bottle out of his blazer pocket and knocked back a tablet with the Perrier.
“Nitro,” he said, indicating the pill, with some embarrassment. “Unfortunately my heart is 50 percent butter. Maybe more. Could be all butter. And I’ve had a busy morning, too much for this ticker.”
I wondered what he had been busy with and said: “I like a butter sandwich myself.”
“Don’t even say it! I could live on bread and butter. Who needs dinner? Just give me the bread. So how can I help you, Mr.…oh, God, please tell me your name again. I’m so sorry.”
“No problem,” I said. “It’s Mendes with an s. The same thing happens to me: I always forget people’s names the second they tell me.”
“Me, too,” he said. “If I don’t get a person’s name the first time, I can go years without knowing it and it’s very embarrassing. Though lately I’ve mostly given up and just tell everyone I have dementia.”
Then he showed me his teeth again and I smiled back, and he said: “So what are you looking for, Mr. Mendes? A house with a pool? Julie did tell me over the phone that you’re perhaps looking at the two to three million range.”
“Yes, that’s right. Or four million.”
“Even better,” he said, but I could see a little something in his eyes. He wasn’t a dummy, this man, and he knew what people with money looked like, what they smelled like, and I wasn’t pulling it off. I had come in with a Trader Joe’s bag, was wearing old khaki pants and my second-string blue blazer, and there was something very wrong with my face. None of this said rich person. None of this said: I can buy a four-million-dollar house. The one thing in my favor was that George was with me and we had the same name. That might signal rich.
“Where are you living now?” he then asked, gently probing to see if his instinct was correct.
“I’m over in Topanga,” I said. “But I need to be closer to Paramount. I direct television and we’re going to be filming a series there.”
“Excellent. Congratulations. So you’re a TV director. Wonderful. That’s a nice living…Did you get hurt on set or something? I hope you’re all right. That’s a very big bandage.”
“It looks worse than it is,” I said. “Just had a little something frozen off at the dermatologist.”
He shook his head sympathetically. “I understand completely,” he said. “Every time I go in there, they do that to me. Last time, I told them just freeze my whole face and be done with it. But I love the sun! Always have. I’m a decadent person.”
“It’s good to enjoy life,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, and he looked at me shrewdly. He still wasn’t buying that I had any money. “And how did you find me, Mr.…oh, my God. I knew it a second ago.”
“Mendes. But just call me George,” I said, and George, thinking he had been summoned, jumped in my lap.
“No, not you George, me George,” I said.
“Charming dog,” Maurais said.
“Yes. A real lover,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “And how did you find me…George?” George looked at Maurais when he said that, wondering what Maurais wanted, and so I put George on the floor to maintain some professionalism, and the realtor continued: “It was a referral? Julie said a client of mine was a friend of yours.”
“Well, not exactly,” I said. “The thing is, I’ve been staying in Beachwood Canyon, with a friend, while I house-hunt, and I was walking my dog and I saw your FOR SALE sign on a wonderful house.” I pointed to his signs in the corner. “And it doesn’t have a pool but it looks like it would have a fantastic view, and I’m very interested in it.”
This confused him and made him a little nervous. “Beachwood Canyon?”
“Yes—2803 Belden Drive.”
I saw fear flash across his eyes, like birds in sudden flight. “Oh, there’s been a mistake,” he said. “That house isn’t for sale.”
“But your sign was there.”
“Well, it’s been taken off the market,” he said coolly, regaining his composure. “We can look at other properties.”
“That’s too bad it’s off the market. Why?”
“Because the owners don’t want to sell. That’s why.” He was now quite rigid in his chair, and all chumminess was gone.
“So it’s empty. What a waste. Do you think if I wrote a letter to the owners, I could convince them otherwise? Tell them it’s my dream house?”
“No. They really don
’t want to sell. There are plenty of other houses for you to consider—”
“But I really do like that house, the view, the neighborhood.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just really not possible.” He looked at his watch. “You know, I have a call at 12:15, so why don’t you give me your email, and I’ll send you some listings in your price range, and we’ll go from there?”
“But I really like that house. So what’s the owners’ name? It doesn’t hurt to write a personal note—”
“Mr. Mendes—” he said, cutting me off, and I said, cutting him off, “You remembered!”
I was hoping to get things back on friendlier ground, but he ignored my remark and said, “You can send a note to me and I will pass it on.”
Then he looked at me, trying to put it all together: I didn’t have money, of that he was sure now, and why was I so hell-bent on that house? A house where two dead bodies had been at two o’clock in the morning but were now gone because somebody had them taken away. Maurais? He said he’d been busy that morning. Needed a nitro to get over it. And so he had to be wondering if I knew something. Then he looked at his watch again—signaling to me that his phony 12:15 call was imminent—and the whites of his eyes were yellow, the color of butter.
I said, all innocence: “So who do I address my note to?”
“Just address it to whom it may concern,” he said sharply, and stood up. “I really need to get ready for my call.” He walked over to his door and opened it. George and I made for the door and then I said: “Don’t you want my email for the listings?”
“Just give it to Julie on the way out, thank you,” and he herded George and me through the door and promptly closed it. Julie had looked up when she heard her name, and I said: “Mr. Maurais would like my email: it’s George Mendes five at AOL dot com. And it’s Mendes with an s.”
I’m still on AOL—I struggle with modernity—and that was the first thing that came to mind. Also, I emphasized the s again, like Rafi did, to stay in character, though it was futile, really, at this point, and I added the number 5 to make the email seem authentic, which was also futile, because Maurais knew I was wrong, very wrong, and Julie scribbled this nonsense email address onto a pad, and then George and I left, and Julie went back to studying her phone.
We hit the sidewalk outside of Maurais’s building and next door was a small Italian deli attached to a restaurant, Little Dom’s. I got a coffee to go to keep the Adderall company, and George lapped at a bowl of water they had for dogs.
Then we got in the car and I chastised myself for not handling things better with Maurais; I hadn’t extracted any information from him, except what was unspoken: the mention of the house had spooked him plenty and so he knew something. At least I had gotten that much.
My thought then was to plant myself there, follow Maurais when he left, and see if I could get him alone. In a more private setting, I might be able to squeeze something out of him, and I wondered how long I might have to wait before he made a move. Could be hours, and I thought of taking another Dilaudid or at least half of one; the throbbing in my face was starting to ramp up again.
But then Maurais came hurrying out of the building, looking quickly over his shoulder—maybe for me?—and then he disappeared behind the building into the parking lot.
Julie, when I first called, said he’d be in all afternoon, but now, just a few minutes after meeting me, he was rushing out, heading somewhere with urgency.
Then an old black two-door Mercedes emerged from the parking lot and Maurais was behind the wheel. He made a right and headed up to Los Feliz Boulevard. I got the Caprice in gear, swung a U-turn on Hillhurst, and fell in a few cars behind Maurais. The throbbing in my face was still there, but with adrenaline in my system the pain was noticeably less.
Maurais turned right on Los Feliz and was driving fast, but I didn’t lose him, and George, looking brave and sensing something, stood up and put his paws on the dash. He knew the hunt was on.
15.
After Los Feliz, the little Mercedes got on the 5, a ten-lane freeway, heading north. Traffic was heavy but moving, and there was no way Maurais would know I was on his tail, though it was important to keep a nice distance and that he not see me. Not too many drivers had big white bandages on their faces or dogs, like sentinels, with their paws on the dashboard.
From the 5, he took the 134, and I thought maybe he was going to Burbank, but then he got onto the 101 North, heading into the Valley, and I started wondering what the hell he was up to. Then we hit some truly nightmarish traffic and George lay down on the front seat; boredom had quickly set in.
It was bumper to bumper, thousands of cars jammed together, going nowhere and somewhere, reaching speeds as high as five miles per hour, ten if we were lucky, and even with the recent rain, the white smog, which we live in all the time, was especially thick, and you would never know that just a few miles to the east the whole valley basin was ringed by beautiful mountains, the San Gabriels.
But they were obscured by the white filth, and it’s old news, of course, but we are forced, in this modern life, to always hold two ideas in our mind at once: one, the natural world is beautiful, and two, we are destroying it.
When we passed through Woodland Hills, I had been tailing Maurais for nearly an hour because of the traffic and was growing increasingly worried that wherever he was going had nothing to do with Lou or Dodgers Hat or dead men in a house on Belden and that this was all a big waste of time.
But at least my driving was satisfactory.
I could operate the Caprice without killing anyone.
On the downside, though, my face was being difficult. The adrenaline of the chase had more than worn off, and it was like there were fire ants in my wound, and I said to George, who was half asleep, curled up like a croissant: “Where the hell is this asshole going? My face is killing me!”
In response, George turned and looked at me over his shoulder, and there was a bland sympathy in his eyes; he was in his own bored hell.
Then, finally, as we got closer to the Agoura Hills and Malibu exits, the traffic thinned considerably and the white smog cleared away and the 101 began to roll up and down through beautiful low foothills, empty of man-made structures.
In the fall and early winter, there had been catastrophic fires, wiping out thousands of acres all along here, but this had been followed by weeks of rain and so the landscape was now a mix of blackened trees and swaying grass so green and bright it was almost neon. Birth had followed death.
Then Maurais exited the 101 at Kanan Road, which he took in the direction of the coast. At first, there were a few cars separating my Caprice and his Mercedes, but Kanan quickly becomes a country road, and the cars between us kept going off onto side roads one by one, and it was getting trickier to follow Maurais and not be seen.
So I hung back as best I could and nearly missed him turning right, at a blind curve, onto the Mulholland Highway—I flew right past the intersection—but luckily I caught sight of the Mercedes, out of the corner of my eye, and changed course.
Between us now there was only one car, a white BMW with its top down, and I stayed about a quarter of a mile back.
The Mulholland Highway, despite its name, has only two lanes, and it comes equipped with dark tunnels through mountainsides, hairpin turns, and guardrails you don’t want to drive through, unless you’re feeling tragic, and all the while, it climbs steadily up its portion of the Santa Monica Mountains for about ten miles.
As we ascended, I would lose sight of Maurais and then spot him for a second when the road evened out momentarily, and behind my sunglasses, I was squinting.
The light, as we got closer to the ocean, was becoming more severe in its clarity, and all around us was beautiful, empty country, the neon grass an inland sea.
But also on the green hills and along the ridges were more and more fire-burned trees, with their blackened, skeletal arms reaching for the sky, frozen in supplication.
Then Ma
urais and the BMW both turned onto another winding road, Encinal Canyon, which steadily climbed for at least two miles until we crested, and then suddenly the Pacific loomed ahead, planetary in its immensity, and it was breathtaking in the bright sunlight, sparkling like a sea of stolen diamonds.
Then the road began to descend, hugging the mountain on the right, which had outcroppings of boulders and pink rock formations that wouldn’t have been out of place in Arizona, and on the left-hand side of the road was a sheer, frightening drop, down into the canyon far below, and then on the left there was a dirt overlook where cars could pull over and take in the view of the ocean.
There were no houses anywhere on Encinal, but about two hundred yards after the overlook, there was a driveway on the right, which Maurais pulled into, stopping in front of a large black gate with a call box.
First the BMW drove past him, and then I followed, glancing to my right, and Maurais’s big head was poking out of the Mercedes and he appeared to be talking into the box. The driveway in front of him, which was more like a private road, was steep and went up the side of the mountain at a forty-five-degree angle.
But whatever house the driveway led to wasn’t visible. It had to be over the ridge or set back from the ridge, but either way you couldn’t see it from Encinal, and as I continued down the mountain, I watched in the rearview mirror as the gate began to swing open; Maurais had been granted access.
A mile farther down the mountain, I was able to make a U-turn and drive back the way I had come. The imposing black gate was closed, and Maurais and his car had disappeared up the driveway. There was a number on the gate: this was 1479 Encinal Canyon Road. If my phone wasn’t dead, I could have called Rick Alvarez and asked who lived there.
But that wasn’t an option, and for all my bitching about phones, I was going to have to pretend I was in the past, when you couldn’t know everything right away and you had to be patient because time was different then. It lasted longer.
I went up to the dirt turnoff and parked the Caprice so that I had a good view of the driveway, not to mention the Pacific, which seemed to stretch halfway to Japan and its leaking nuclear reactors.
A Man Named Doll Page 10