The Comedy is Finished

Frank Davis came cheerfully forward, having parked Mike’s car just behind the limousine. “Nice car you’ve got there, Mike,” he said.

Frank seemed somehow a bit more human than his mother and brother, but should he be quite this cheerful under the circumstances? “Yours is okay, too,” Mike said.

Frank laughed. “Keep in touch,” he said, and got into the limousine. Not on the jumpseat; his mother made room for him beside her.

Frank had left the Buick’s engine running, the shift lever in Park. As Mike got behind the wheel the chauffeur also re-entered the limousine, which rolled serenely through the open doorway. As Mike watched, the limousine nosed along the drive into the jungle lushness, and the broad wooden door slid downward again, snicking shut. “Drink me,” Mike muttered.

As a matter of fact, after the Davis family that was a very good idea. If he were to return to Beverly Glen Boulevard and continue north, over the hills, he would come down on the other side of Sherman Oaks. And just to the west of Sherman Oaks was Encino, home of the El Sueno de Suerte Country Club. It wasn’t yet five o’clock, and Mike didn’t have to be in the Metromedia Studios in Hollywood until quarter after seven. “Drink,” he repeated, and swung the Buick in a tight U-turn.

Jerry Lawson, Mike’s realtor friend, was just getting into his car when Mike steered into the country club parking lot. Mike honked to get his attention, waved, and yelled out the window, “Stick around, I’ll buy you a drink!”

Jerry waved in agreement. Mike parked the Buick and walked over to Jerry, who said, “How you doing?”

This was the first time Mike had seen his friend since the tracking device disaster and his later reinstatement. “Rolling with the punches,” Mike said. “Some of them, anyway.”

“That was rough, what you went through. I felt for you, Mike, I didn’t know this morning if I should phone or not. I figured you wanted to be left alone.”

“Thanks, Jerry, you’re a good friend.” Mike was truly touched, and he patted the other man’s arm as they walked toward the clubhouse. “I was really low this morning, I don’t think I could have talked to anybody.”

“It was just rotten luck.”

“Well, I’ve got another chance.” Mike held the door, then followed Jerry into the cooler, dimmer interior. “Just so I don’t screw up again.”

“You won’t, Mike.”

They went down the broad hallway together to the bar, their shoes squeaking on the composition floor. The bar was nearly empty, standard for this time of day, though in half an hour or so it would begin to fill up. Mike and Jerry took their usual table, ordered drinks, and Mike talked for a while about the Davis family and the dislike he’d taken to them. “They just think the whole thing’s a pain in the ass,” he said.

Eventually that topic ran down, and Jerry said, “There’s nothing new at all, huh?”

“Actually, there is something.” Mike leaned closer over the table. “Keep this under your hat, Jerry, it isn’t public knowledge, and you’ll see why when I tell you.”

“You know me, Mike.”

So Mike told him about the Gilbert Freeman message in the second tape—if in fact the reference to Freeman was a message. On the way here, Mike had stopped at a phone booth in Sherman Oaks to call the office and Jock Cayzer had told him all seven houses had checked out negative. “Still,” he told Jerry, “there seems to be something in it. We’re trying to figure out what other location Gilbert Freeman might be connected with.”

“Gee, that’s a strange one,” Jerry said. “Seems as though it ought to mean something.”

“We’ve been figuring it the same way.” Mike shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe it’s something from one of his movies.”

“You know,” Jerry said, casually, anecdotally, “I sold a house of Freeman’s once, up here in Woodland Hills. The one with the underground room.”

“Oh, yeah?” Then Mike did a doubletake: “The what?”

“Room under the house.”

“You mean a basement?”

“No, it extended out from the house to the swimming pool. Window at the end, you could look right out at the pool. Underwater, you know. People in the pool could dive and look through the window into the room.” Jerry laughed, lasciviously. “You’d be amazed how many dirty thoughts a setup like that can put in a person’s mind. Added eight or ten thousand to the purchase price, let me tell you.”

But Mike’s mind was on neither sex nor money. His eyes intent on Jerry’s amiable face, he said, “This room. How obvious is it?”

“Obvious? It’s underground!”

“I mean, from inside the house. It’s a regular room, right?”

“Well, not exactly. In fact, from a sales point of view that was the only drawback. You got to it through the utility room; not exactly a romantic or an elegant approach.”

“Jesus,” Mike breathed, and quoted from memory: “This is what’s left of Koo Davis, speaking to you from inside the whale.” He punched the table with the side of his fist, angrily saying, “God damn it, he told us! Inside the whale! Underground! Under water!”

Jerry gaped at him. “Mike?”

But Mike had turned his head, “Rick! A phone!”

19

Blindfolded, Koo stumbles up the stairs, urged on by nervous hands. Their nervousness is the only thing he finds reassuring about all this; it suggests circumstances aren’t quite as hopeless for Koo as they seem. On the other hand, maybe the nervousness simply means they’re taking him away now to kill him; after all, it’s easier to dispose of a body if you can keep it alive long enough to walk to the disposal site.

Koo wishes he could get his mind off such things, but death is in his thoughts at the moment, what with one thing and another. The “one thing” being the fact, the indubitable fact, that Peter’s arrival in the underground room interrupted a murder; Mark was going to strangle Koo at that moment, there’s no question. And “another” being the additional fact that he is still a kidnap victim in the hands—nervous or not—of crazies.

Head of the stairs. As well as being blindfolded, Koo has his hands tied behind his back, so that when his shoulder bumps painfully into a doorpost he very nearly falls backwards down the stairs; but impatient hands shove at him from behind, he brushes through the doorway, and now he’s marched for the second time through this house he’s never seen, and out to warm, somewhat moist air, and over a path that has the unevenness of brick. The hands stop him, and Peter’s voice says, close to his ear, “You’ll be traveling in the trunk of the car now, Koo. We’re going to lift you into it, so just relax.”

“Oh, I’m relaxed. It’s the suit that’s tense.”

“That’s right, Koo.”

Hands grasp him, shoulders and legs and waist, lifting him off the ground. His knee hits something metal, the top of his head grazes something else, and then he feels the rough hardness below him as they deposit him on his left side, knees bent. “Don’t move, Koo,” Peter’s voice says, from farther away, and the trunk lid slams, with a disagreeable implosion feeling in Koo’s ears and eyes. And in his nostrils there’s a rank oil-and-rubber odor. “I never was a rubber freak,” Koo mutters, and sings quietly to himself, “I was stuffed in a trunk, in Pocatello, I-daho.” But then he stops, and his mouth corners turn down, and he mumbles, “I may be losing my sense of humor.”

His clever message to the FBI; useless. Obviously nobody caught it, or they’d have been here by now, and if they ever do notice it’ll be too late.

The others are getting into the car; back here, the jounce as the weight of each body is added to the car is very pronounced. Bunk-bunk-bunk-bunk-bunk; all five of them coming along for the ride. And the slamming of four doors, and then the surprisingly loud sound of the engine starting up, followed by the heavy-seas motion as the car first backs in a half-circle and then moves forward.

Carbon monoxide? Death has so many threads tied to Koo, it’s positively