A Man Named Doll

by Jonathan Ames

  I had shot Madvig in the face and he went straight back, falling to the ground. Ben shrieked and ran back to Madvig, and I fired at him twice and missed both times, and he put his shotgun down and picked Madvig up and ran through the French doors, carrying Madvig in his arms like a child, and I shot at him two more times, missing him again, and then the clip was empty.

  “Let’s go!” said Monica, and she went running down the hill, and I followed after her, holding the empty gun, but I still couldn’t move fast. She ran around the side of the house and I followed.

  We came around to the front and Monica was racing up the lawn alongside the driveway, and I was a good twenty yards behind, and then I heard a noise: it was Ben running out the front door after me.

  But I couldn’t move at all now.

  My legs were dead.

  I had been drugged for hours and was bleeding profusely, and I threw the empty gun at him and he rammed into me, knocking me to the ground.

  He straddled my chest and punched me in the face, and my poor wound erupted yet again, and then he began to choke me, those huge hands around my neck, and his eyes were enraged, I must have killed Madvig, and the port in the side of my neck was squirting blood, and Ben was getting very far away, he was killing me, and then Monica hurled herself at him, and he let go of my neck and swatted her away, and she went facedown into the grass, and I was able to rise up and his neck was exposed, and just like I had practiced in my mind, and just like I had with Carl Lusk, I drove my hand, like the blade of a knife, into his Adam’s apple, and I could feel it explode in his neck, it was a perfect strike, and he toppled off me and fell to his side, gurgling, his hands grasping at his throat, and his legs were kicking spastically in panic, and I stood up and Monica stood up, and she got a large flagstone from the side of the driveway, and she was going to bring it down on his head and put him out of his misery, and for a second his eye caught mine, we knew each other, and then his eye went dead, and his legs stopped kicking, and Monica dropped the rock; it was no longer needed.

  Epilogue

  In the end, I made out all right.

  The lucky streak that began that night with throwing the poker just perfectly at Madvig’s son kept on coming, like a once-in-a-lifetime run in cards.

  Looking for a landline in the main house to call the cops, we found a phone in Madvig’s office, but we also found his safes—there were two of them—and we changed our plan.

  Both safes were about five feet high and deep, and on a whim, I tried both handles—I had learned a long time ago, when I was a cop, that people are often lazy and don’t lock their safes. They just close them without going through the necessary steps, and sure enough the second safe had been left open.

  We cleared out nearly $500,000 in cash, took the Land Rover, and stashed the money at Monica’s house, using her key under the mat to get in.

  After that she took me to Good Samaritan Hospital downtown and it was then that we called the police, and, overall, I did pretty well with the law. Thode and Mullen were happy to see me, if you could call it that, and I got charged with a number of things that didn’t stick, though I did lose my PI license.

  But on the upside, the LA Times and the local news affiliates credited me and Monica, not the LAPD, with exposing what Madvig had been up to, and the story went national.

  At first the internet went the most wild when it was revealed that it was the old actor with the big nose who had bought my kidney—he had been found alive in the back house, up in Malibu—but then the bigger story twenty-four hours later was the police digging up twenty-five bodies on Madvig’s property: the twenty-three donors, who had been murdered, plus the two sons who had gotten killed on Belden Drive. Which was one part of my story I left out: throwing Paul Madvig off the balcony.

  Of the money we grabbed, I gave $200K to Lou’s daughter for the diamond, and the rest went to Monica, which she accepted and has begun to slowly launder with Rafi at the pawnshop.

  After we got that process in place, I took her out for an intimate dinner at a little French restaurant downtown, Mignon, and I said, as we drank our first glass of wine: “I have to say it again: I’m so sorry for all I put you through.”

  She shook her head and said: “Stop saying you’re sorry, Hap. You’ve said it enough. I mean it.”

  I nodded and sipped my wine, and then I blurted out, because I’m a fool: “Then there’s something else I want to tell you. I’m crazy about you. Could I…could I court you?”

  That came out all stilted and weird when I had been aiming for chivalrous and respectful, but she rolled with it. She looked down, thought about it a second, and then, looking up, she told me that everything that had happened was what her girlfriends would call “a big red flag.” Probably the biggest of all time. What with nearly getting her harvested for organs being the tip of the iceberg.

  “So for now all I can handle is being friends,” she said. “I’m just so glad we’re both alive.”

  I nodded my understanding and, of course, she was right.

  And what she was offering—friendship—was much more than I deserved and plenty to be grateful for, and I said: “I completely understand. And just so you know, I’m going to keep on working on myself…and if it’s all right with you, I’ll leave the porch light on. Just in case.”

  “Leave it on,” she said, and there was something in the tone of her voice and the way she looked at me that gave me a flicker of hope.

  Then a few days later something else special happened. An elegant handwritten letter arrived from the old actor, thanking me for saving his life. It couldn’t have been more lovely and gracious, and we subsequently spoke on the phone and hit it off, and when he’s no longer under house arrest we plan to meet. I always did like him in that sitcom when I was a kid.

  And the biggest, craziest, unexpected Ace in my lucky streak was that George wasn’t dead. He had been badly poisoned and his whole body had shut down, but later he had managed to crawl through his doggie door out to the chicken coop and was discovered by a neighbor, who heard him crying.

  She then rushed him to an animal hospital and, thankfully, after just a few months of vitamin K therapy to clean his blood, he’s made a complete recovery, is as full of joie de vivre as ever, and still seems to love me despite everything I put him through. In fact, we’ve never been more in love with each other. It’s like a second honeymoon.

  I’ve also started up my analysis again with Dr. Lavich, which we’re both happy about, and I’ve even gone back to work, calling myself a Security Specialist. You don’t need a license for such a thing, but it can be a way to help people, just like a PI, and because of my notoriety, business has never been better. I do have a nasty scar on my face, but in my line of work that’s not such a bad thing.

  So, like I said, in the end, I made out all right.

  All it cost me was a kidney.

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  Don’t miss Happy’s return, next year, in

  The Wheel of Doll.

  Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.

  One of my flaws is that I’m a great one for asking questions, but I’m mediocre-to-poor at answers. Which isn’t the best trait for a detective.

  Though it may be why, of late, I’ve become an armchair Buddhist.

  In Buddhism, you’re meant to question everything, including the idea of questioning everything.

  And really there are no answers, anyway.

  But that’s in nirvana. Which is where you get to go when you become enlightened. I hear it’s very peaceful there.

  But in this messy realm—the realm of women and men and all their myriad problems—there are some answers to some questions.

  You can figure some things out.

  Which is why you need detectives. Even mediocre-to-poor ones like me.

  Because finding
a killer can be like finding an answer.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The afternoon when all this began, it seemed like just another nice, cold Los Angeles day—and by cold I mean sixty-five degrees—early in 2020. January third, 2020, to be exact, a Friday.

  It was around 4:40 and I had just left my house and gotten into my car, a 1985 royal-blue Chevy Caprice Classic, once the preferred vehicle for police forces around the country. In the twentieth century. Which was a long time ago now and not just in years.

  I started the Caprice and let it warm up a second, since it’s an old car like an old man, and it always needs a moment to gather itself and get its pants on. But despite its age and three hundred thousand miles, it’s not ready to die. Very few of us are.

  To pass the time, I lit a joint.

  Then I took a sip of coffee from my thermos. I’m one of those people—maybe the only one—that lives on coffee and pot and small fish: pickled herring, sardines, and kippers.

  As I took a second sip, I put the radio on, which was already tuned to 88.9—a strange college station, my favorite—and then I took another hit of my joint and another sip of my coffee, and feeling that wonderful alchemy of the cannabis and the caffeine—you’re ready to go somewhere but don’t care too much if you make it—I backed out of the garage and rolled down my dead-end street, Glen Alder.

  I was on my way to my office to meet a potential new client—we had a 5:30 appointment—and I needed the business.

  From Glen Alder, I turned right onto Beachwood Canyon Drive, and a black Challenger with tinted windows, parked on the corner, swung in behind me, reckless-like and urgent, and I felt a small tingle of alarm.

  Since marijuana doesn’t make me paranoid, except when I eat it, I had to assume that the tingle was coming—like a preconscious telegram—from that special part of the brain that knows things before it knows things. But that part of the brain doesn’t use words. It uses feelings. Like foreboding. And fear.

  Then again, I told myself, a muscle car like a Challenger isn’t great for a tail job—it’s too conspicuous and sticks out too much. So maybe it is the pot, I thought. Nobody would follow me in that car.

  Or maybe whoever was in the Challenger didn’t care if I spotted them. Maybe they didn’t care about being discreet, which could make them cops. Undercover but showing themselves. The undercover units like muscle cars, and so it was worrisome if it was detectives. The LAPD wasn’t fond of me. Hadn’t been for a while.

  I tried to see who was driving the car, but the sun—which was already starting to set—was glinting off the Challenger’s windshield, just about blinding me, but I could distinguish that there were two shapes in the front seat.

  Which would make sense if they were police. They always travel in pairs.

  When I turned left on Franklin, the Challenger turned left, which wasn’t so unusual, one goes right or left there, and I told myself to forget about it. Told myself I was being jumpy.

  Franklin has four narrow lanes and I went to the far-right lane, nice and slow, which is often how I drive—senior citizen–like and methodical, because I’m usually smoking a joint, like I was just then, and so I try to be extra careful, giving myself plenty of room for error and delayed marijuana reaction time.

  But I also drive slowly because I try, as a fledgling student of Buddhism, to be mindful.

  I try to do that thing where when you’re driving, you’re driving; like when you’re washing the dishes, you’re washing the dishes.

  The result is that between the mindfulness and the marijuana, I’m an annoyingly slow driver, and yet the Challenger didn’t get into the left lane to pass me, as numerous other cars did.

  And now that we were heading east, with the sun at a different angle, I could see who was maybe following me: a white male was on the passenger side and a brown-skinned man was driving. And they looked large and wide. Too big for the front seat of the Challenger. So maybe they were detectives. Cops often come in large.

  They were close on my tail, and I opened my window—it was getting pretty hazy in the car from my joint—and I sent them an obscure smoke signal, written in Cheech and Chong, which didn’t merit a response.

  So there we were, my Caprice and their Challenger, meandering like a tandem—if we were a tandem—down Franklin, and my office was five minutes away on Vermont, but wanting to test something, I hung a quick right onto Garfield Place without putting on my signal.

  Following so close, the Challenger seemed to take the turn a little late, but still managed to make the right onto Garfield and have it look somewhat intentional.

  Fifty yards later, I pulled over to the side of the road.

  They drove on past, feigning disinterest, I imagined.

  But because of their tinted windows, I couldn’t get a look at the white man on the passenger side, which was frustrating, and maybe it was all a coincidence.

  So I just sat there, smoking, and watched the muscle car make its way down Garfield, a street of squat apartment buildings, and the light in the sky was violet-hued and beautiful. The sun must have just dipped into the Pacific, cooling itself and turning Los Angeles, as it did each day, into a purple city.

  Then the Challenger crossed Hollywood Boulevard, disappearing from my line of sight, and so I did a quick U-turn and headed back up to Franklin.

  Five minutes later, I turned right on Vermont, went down two blocks, and then parked my car in the quiet, narrow alleyway behind the Dresden bar.

  I put my joint in the ashtray, grabbed my thermos, and as I slammed my door, it didn’t really surprise me to see the Challenger coming down the alley, glowering in its dark paint job.

  I could have run or gotten back into my car, but there was the feeling that I would only be delaying the inevitable, and so I waited for them in the beautiful light. It was what they call in the movie business magic hour.

  The Challenger parked right behind my Caprice, blocking it, and the two men boiled out, moving fast for their size. They were both about six four, 250, like brother slabs of beef in a meat market.

  The white beef looked like a farmboy from the Midwest, and the brown beef looked Hawaiian. Midwest had blonde hair buzzed down like a peach, and Hawaii had black hair pulled back tight in a ponytail.

  They both were wearing jeans and sneakers and hoodies, and they had that look. A look that said they wanted to hurt someone. That someone being me.

  I did a quick scan of the alley for witnesses, but we were all alone. On the plus side, these two didn’t seem to be cops. Their eyes were too eager: violent but maybe not cruel.

  So I put my thermos on the roof of my car, like it was a casual thing to do, and I fingered the steel baton I was carrying in my sport jacket pocket, because I needed something to even the odds. There were 500 pounds of them and only 190 pounds of me, most of it alchemized silvery fish from a can.

  “You boys seem to know where I live and where I work,” I said, as they came to the front of the Challenger, about six feet away. “How can I help you?”

  I pegged them to be in their early thirties, and I called them ‘boys’ because I was fifty-one and missing a kidney, which made me more like sixty-one. When you lose an organ, you lose a decade of your life, someone told me. Which is probably not true but it’s a good line when you’re looking for sympathy.

  “Yeah, you can help us,” said Midwest. “You can help us remember Carl Lusk.”

  That’s when I knew for certain the baton needed to make an appearance, and I brought it out and snapped it to its full sixteen-inch length. It’s one of those extendable steel batons you can buy on the internet if you’re a wannabe fascist or in the security business like me.

  Midwest saw my weapon but it didn’t scare him—probably because he had never been hit by one—and he took two big steps forward, with his fist cocked, and as he threw his haymaker, I took a step to my right and slashed down on his wrist, breaking something, and he went straight to the ground, mewling.

&
nbsp; Then Hawaii charged me, going for a tackle, and I squatted and swiped at his knees with the baton and heard a nice crunch, which made him come up short and fall, but he still was able to knock me to the asphalt, and I landed hard on my ass, with half of him on top of me.

  I then hit him brutally across the back of his broad shoulders, which he definitely felt, and I was able to push him off, like pushing off a piano, and Midwest was still on his knees, wailing; his hand was hanging from his wrist at a weird angle.

  I stood up, a little slowly, panting from the adrenaline and the fear and hitting the ground hard, and Hawaii also stood up, quicker than I expected, and he punched me in the face, a nice shot to the right cheekbone, and I staggered back and faltered, which made him hopeful.

  He then rushed me with a looping punch and I jumped up—I don’t know where the instinct came from—and I hit him on the top of his head with the baton, like chopping a piece of wood, and he went down face-first into the pavement.

  He wasn’t knocked out, but he didn’t get up. He curled into a ball, grabbed the top of his head, and vomited. Then I looked around. My fight with these two had lasted less than a minute, and the alleyway was still empty: no one had seen anything.