The Comedy is Finished (6 page)

What if—Koo isn’t sure he even dares to phrase this question, the answer means so much to him—what if, now... What if (all in a rush) these people go to
Barry
, or to
Frank
? “We’ve got your father. Mortgage your house, empty your bank accounts, convert everything you own to cash, give it all to us, and we’ll give your father back.” Back? Have they ever actually had Koo, have they ever really thought of themselves as having a father, who happens to be this fellow here, this Koo Davis?

What would they do? Barry and Frank, how would they react? Do they love Koo Davis? Do they love him enough to trade all their money for him?

Well, that isn’t even a sensible question, and Koo knows it, because he knows who’ll pay. He himself, he’ll pay; that’s who. These people grabbed him because he’s supposed to’ve piled up a lot of bucks over the years and they want some. The only question is who they’ll deal with on the outside, and the fear in Koo’s mind is not that Barry and Frank don’t love him enough to buy him back; the fear in his mind is that the boys don’t love him enough to
deal
: “Who? The old man? Why not talk to his agent? Her name is Lynsey Rayne, she’s the one closest to him. Hold on, I’ll give you the number.”

Oh, Jesus, Jesus, would they do that? Koo can’t bear the question, much less the answer. He can’t bear any questions, locked away here in this cavern under the waves—imprisoned king, in the cave beneath the sea. “I refuse to ask myself any more questions,” Koo says aloud, “on the grounds I may incriminate myself.”

The fact is, Lynsey Rayne really
is
closer to Koo than anybody else in his life. She used to be Max Berry’s assistant, and when
Max retired Lynsey came to Koo and said, “I’m taking over Max’s client list.”

Koo was already looking around among established agents for a Max replacement, so all he said was, “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And there’s two reasons why I want you to stick with me.”

“Name them.”

“Number one, you’re easy. Everybody knows who you are, I don’t have to go out and sell you. I just sit in the office, say yes to one offer in ten, skim my percentage and live fat.”

Laughing, Koo said, “Now I
got
to hear the other one.”

“Max has been sick a long time,” she said. “I’ve
been
your agent for the last five years. Nobody knows you better than me.”

And she was right, wasn’t she? “Nobody knows you better than me.” Jesus Christ, when Koo casts around in his mind for his closest relation, his nearest and dearest, he comes up with his
agent
. Lynsey’s a terrific lady, one of the best—
not
one of the blondes to be trouped and shtupped—but is this any way to run a life? Your next of kin is your agent?

A distraction, a distraction. He paces his small soft-surfaced carpeted prison, trying to push all the bad thoughts, the horrible questions, right out of his mind. Death, love, money...

Hunger. How about that one?
There’s
something he can think about, because the fact of the matter is, Koo is getting damn hungry.

There’s a lot of food in his room, bread and cereal and milk and even what smells like bargain basement Scotch, but Koo won’t touch any of it. It’s the booze that makes him nervous about the rest. Why give him so much, and why throw in whiskey? Maybe it’s drugged, huh? They’ve left him alone a couple hours, so maybe they’re just waiting for the drug to take effect. Koo doesn’t
know how or if he can help himself out of this jam, but one thing is sure: if he’s doped up, he can’t take advantage of any break that
might
come along.

As for his cell, his cage, his prison, Koo looks around and says out loud, “I been in worse places, and paid forty bucks a night.” It has become his habit in recent years to talk to himself, but only in the form of one-liners, asides, comments on the action of his life. This remark is unfortunate, though, because it leads his thoughts directly to the next question, which is: how much will
this
room cost? All or most of his assets? His life?

“Then there’s the view,” Koo says, hurriedly. “It overlooks the garden. Completely. And the weather’s been so
wet
recently.” Turning, pacing the small room, making fretful hand gestures, he says, “I wish I had a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. I’d use it to point at things.”

Koo used to smoke. For nearly thirty years, one of his trademarks was the cigarette between the first two fingers of his left hand, used in casual gestures, mostly with gag lines where something was being dismissed. “I told him, Sergeant, I don’t want to be in the Army at
all
.” A silhouette drawing used in the logo of his weekly television show back in the fifties showed his profile and his waving left hand with the cigarette and a curl of smoke coming up around his face. But seven years ago his doctor told him to stop, giving him a lot of medical reasons that Koo refused to hear, and Koo stopped. Like that. He’s never been willing to think about death, about his own mortality or any of the grimmer steps along the path, the aches and pains, the accidents and illnesses and gradual wasting away that must come to every human being in time. He doesn’t want to think about all that shit, and he won’t think about all that shit, and there’s nothing more to be said about it. He’s got enough money to hire good doctors, so he hires good
doctors, and he does what they tell him to do, and if they insist on telling him
why
he just nods and grins and doesn’t listen.

There’s no way out of this room. The door is securely locked, and it opens outward so there’s no way to get at the hinges. Shortly after he was left alone in here Koo did some poking at the fabric covering the wall, working low on the corner nearest the door, and behind the cloth he found Sheetrock and behind that concrete block. “No way am I gonna dig through concrete block,” he told himself, and searched no further.

The next question was the window. After the bitch with the scars vacated the pool, Koo spent a while studying that window, considering the possibility of maybe throwing a chair through it or something. Water would rush through the opening, but long before the room filled up the pool would have emptied below the window level. It would be like a James Bond flick; heave the chair, brace himself against the side wall until the water level in room and pool equalized, then
swim to freedom!

Yeah; carrying an American flag and shooting Roman candles out his ass. “When I was
twenty
I couldn’t pull a stunt like that.” Also even when he was twenty the noise and racket involved in wrecking a swimming pool would attract a certain amount of attention.
Also
also, this window happens to be two thicknesses of very heavy-grade plate glass, and if he did throw a chair at it probably the chair would bounce off and crack open the Koo Davis skull. “I got trouble enough,” Koo reluctantly decided, and since then he’s had no further thought of escape. He’s stuck here with these meatheads until they decide to do something else.

Scrabble click
. Koo looks over at the door, where the sound came from, the sound of a key in the lock, and he can’t help a little thrill of fear, that buzzing adrenalin surge like when you’ve just had a near miss on the freeway. “Company,” Koo says. “And me not dressed.”

The door opens and two of them come in. One is the sarcastic-looking fellow who was in here the last time, and the other is the sullen-faced bearded character who showed him the gun at the studio. The bitch with the scars isn’t along, for which Koo is grateful, but on the other hand neither is the worried-looking guy who apologized for Koo’s nosebleed. Koo misses that one, he was the only touch of common humanity in the whole mob. And speaking of mobs, just how many of these people are there?

The two young men come in, closing the door behind themselves. The bearded one puts a small cassette tape recorder on the nearest table, then stands silently with his back against the door and his arms folded over his chest, like a harem guard in a comedy, while the sarcastic-looking fellow says, “How you doing, Koo?”

“I got nothing to say, warden,” Koo snarls. “To you
or
the D.A.”

“That’s good,” the fellow says, then looks in mild surprise at the plastic container with the whiskey in it. “Not drinking? Wait a minute—not eating either?”

“I’m on a diet.”

The fellow frowns at Koo, apparently not understanding, then suddenly laughs and says, “You think we’re trying to
poison
you? Or drugs maybe, is that it?”

Koo doesn’t have a comic answer, and there’s no point giving a straight answer, so he just stands there.

The fellow shakes his head, amused but impatient. “What’s the percentage, Koo? We’ve already got you.” Then he goes to the counter beside the bar, lines up three plastic glasses, and pours a finger of whiskey in each. “Choose,” he says.

“I won’t drink it.”

“Just
pick
one, Koo.”

“How come you call me by my first name? You’re no traffic cop.”

“
I’m
sorry, Koo,” the fellow says, with his most sarcastic smile.
“I’m just trying for a more relaxed atmosphere, that’s all. For instance, you can call me Peter, and this is Mark. Now we’re all friends, am I right?” He gestures at the three glasses. “So decide. Which one?”

“My mother says I can’t play with you guys anymore. I got to go home now.”

The bearded one—Mark—says, “Pick a glass.” There’s nothing comic in his manner at all. In fact, there’s the implication in his voice that if Koo
doesn’t
pick a glass, this guy is going to start using his fists again.

Shrugging, Koo says, “Okay. I say the pea is under the one on the left.”

“Fine,” says the sarcastic-looking fellow: Peter. He picks up the other two glasses and hands one to Mark. “Happy days,” he says, toasting Koo, and then they both drink the whiskey. “Not bad,” the leader says, and extends the third glass toward Koo, saying, “Sure you won’t join us?”

Oh, the hell with it. “I’ll hate myself in the morning,” Koo says, taking the glass, and he sips a little. It tastes nothing at all like Jack Daniel’s, Koo’s favorite whiskey, but it does spread an immediate warm alcohol glow through his body.

Peter has now taken some folded sheets of typewriter paper from his jacket pocket. “You’re going to make a recording for us now, Koo,” he says.

Koo had guessed that from the cassette recorder. He gives Peter what’s supposed to be a defiant look. “I am?”

Peter glances over his shoulder at the tough guy, Mark, then grins again at Koo. “Yes, you are,” he says. Holding out the sheets of paper toward Koo, he says, “You may want to look it over first. You’ll begin with some personal remarks of your own, some statement to convince your family and your close friends that it’s
really you, and then you’ll follow up by reading this. Exactly as written, Koo.”

Koo takes the papers. There are three sheets, messily typewritten, with many pen and pencil alterations in various handwritings. It isn’t easy to read, but very soon the thrust of the message makes itself clear, and Koo looks up at these bastards and says, “You’re out of your fucking minds.”

“That’s okay, Koo,” Peter says, unruffled. “You don’t have to agree with it, you just read it. Like it was a movie script.”

“They’ll say no,” Koo tells him. “And then what happens?”

“Tough for you,” says Mark.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Oh, don’t be pessimistic,” Peter says. “You’re an important man, Koo, you’ve got a lot of important friends. I think they’ll come through for you, pal, I really do. That’s why I picked you.”

“They won’t do it,” Koo says.

Peter looks a bit troubled, a bit grim. “I hope you’re wrong, Koo. For your sake, I hope so.” Turning, he says, “Mark, get the machine ready.”

Koo can’t believe this is happening to him. “Killed,” he mutters. “Murdered to death by assholes.”

Lynsey Rayne parked her Porsche Targa behind the Burbank Police Headquarters annex. A tall and fashionably dressed woman of forty-one, wearing many bracelets, she entered the building through the rear door, and asked directions to “the Koo Davis office.” That was what Inspector Cayzer had told her to ask for, on the phone, and it produced a uniformed policewoman to escort her down brightly lit bare corridors to a small crowded office with the hastily assembled air of a campaign headquarters, where she identified herself to another policewoman working as receptionist: “Lynsey Rayne. I’m Koo Davis’ agent, I spoke to Inspector Cayzer earlier.”

“One minute, please.”

Apparently this set-up was not yet organized enough to have intercoms; but the kidnapping and its investigation were still less than two hours old. Lynsey waited while the policewoman went to an inner office to report, then came back and said, “Yes, Miss Rayne, you can go in.”

Entering the inner office, equally small and ramshackle but somewhat less crowded, Lynsey saw two men rising from their desks. The one on the right was Inspector Cayzer, an old man but, she had been assured by Mayor Pilocki, a good one. “So you found us,” he said, smiling, and extended his hand, which she took, saying, “Any news?”

“Not yet, Ms. Rayne.”

“Inspector,” she said, and echoed his own earlier words to her, “surely they’ve gone to ground by now.”

“Kidnappers work at their own pace, Ms. Rayne,” Cayzer said. “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do to hurry them along. May I introduce Agent Michael Wiskiel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Agent Wiskiel, this is Ms. Lynsey Rayne, Koo Davis’ agent.”

“How do you do,” Wiskiel said. He had come around from behind his desk in anticipation of the introduction, and as Lynsey shook his hand she studied him carefully, needing to understand him; he had suddenly become very important to Koo. The reports she’d gotten on Wiskiel from her calls to friends in Washington, after Cayzer had mentioned his name, had been ambivalent. He’d had something minor to do with Watergate, and had been demoted. He had a reputation as a hotshot, a right-winger, a tough man but not a subtle one. Nothing in his heavy good looks did anything to dispel this impression. Feeling the need to let him know at once that she was not easily dismissible, she said, “You haven’t been out here long, have you?”