The Comedy is Finished

and the others, but she wanted them to understand. “Back in the sixties,” she said, “when law enforcement was being used against the wrong people, many people lost the habit of cooperating with the authorities. A rock musician’s agent would undoubtedly have sour memories of the FBI.”

Wiskiel obviously couldn’t believe it. “To the extent,” he said, “that a legitimate theatrical agent would refuse to help us save Koo Davis? We told him what we wanted Merville for.”

“He didn’t believe you,” Lynsey said. “He assumed you were lying, which is something else lawmen did a lot in the sixties.” Maurice St. Clair was looking thunderous, she saw, while Jock Cayzer was almost but not quite grinning. Smiling thinly, she said, “It’s called chickens coming home to roost. You people treated the entire American public as an enemy population. You were the garrison force, foreign conquerors. And now you want cooperation.”

“But that’s all over now,” Wiskiel said. (St. Clair nodded emphatically.) “Whatever mistakes people made, excesses that maybe happened, they’re all over now.”

“Maybe,” Lynsey said. “Give me the agent’s name, I’ll see him first thing in the morning.”

Wiskiel was very angry about this, but there wasn’t much he could do. He glanced at St. Clair, who was also red-faced and angry, and who nodded curtly. “All right,” Wiskiel said. “His name is Hunningdale.”

“Chuck Hunningdale. I know him slightly.”

“Fine.” Apparently needing a distraction, Wiskiel turned away, saying to the technician. “When we came in you were saying something about the tape.”

“Yes, sir. It’s not like the other two.”

“In what way?”

“Well, it’s much better quality. Those other two, you could buy them in Woolworth’s. Not this one.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“Well, it’s high bias,” the technician explained. “The brand is TDK, which is very good, and it’s rated SA, that’s the highest quality there is. This is an expensive piece of tape.”

They were all interested now. St. Clair said, “Who could use that sort of thing?”

“Musicians. Record industry people. People who have professional recording and playback equipment in their own homes.”

Lynsey said, “Ginger Merville.”

But Wiskiel shook his head. “No, there wasn’t anything like that in Merville’s house.”

The technician said, “Excuse me.” When he had their attention he said, “I heard something else this time. In the tape. I’d like to try an experiment; all right?”

“Try anything you want,” St. Clair told him.

“Thank you, sir. What I’ve done, I’ve damped the bass and boosted the treble. You see, I’m not interested in the voice this time, but the background. I’ll also have to play it louder. Listen behind the voice.” And he started the tape.

The voice sounded even more hysterical this way, very loud and with its low tones gone; reminiscent in a strange way of old recordings of Hitler making speeches. Lynsey tried to hear past this haranguing repulsive voice, tried to hear whatever it was the technician had found in the background...

...and there it was. Faint, irregular, slowly paced, a kind of rushing hiss, rising and falling, irregular but continuous. Lynsey frowned, listening, trying to figure out what it was. It sounded familiar, somehow: hhhhiiiiIISSSssssshhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSHHHHHHhhhhhhiiiissssSSSSSS—

“The ocean,” Jock Cayzer said.

The technician snapped his fingers. “I knew I knew it.”

“By God,” Wiskiel said, “you’re right. That’s what it is. Waves, on a beach.”

The technician switched off the tape, and they all looked at one another. Cayzer said, “A beach house somewhere.”

“Filled with professional recording equipment. But somebody didn’t know how to use it. They left a door open.” Wiskiel frowned, saying, “Does that narrow it enough? Who do we go through? Equipment suppliers. Jock, can we set that up with your people? First thing in the morning, we canvass every wholesale and retail outlet of high-quality recording equipment in the Greater Los Angeles area.”

“And repairmen,” the technician suggested.

“Right. We want the address of every customer with a beach house. Somebody must have installed that equipment, and somebody services it.”

St. Clair said, “Mike, it’s needle-in-the-haystack time.”

Cayzer said, “I could maybe put forty people on it, in the morning.”

While the others talked, Lynsey drifted over to the worktable again, unable to keep away from the small box and its grim contents, and now as she looked down into the box, holding the lid open with one hand, she suddenly laughed aloud, saying, “Why—! It’s a joke!”

Turning to smile broadly at the men, she saw them all staring at her. Feeling a kind of hysterical relief, she said, “It isn’t Koo.”

Wiskiel came forward, expression troubled, saying, “Ms. Rayne. I’m sorry, but no. There’s no way you can recognize an ear.”

“Oh, yes, there is.” She could hardly keep from peals of laughter. “You look at that ear,” she said. “Look at the lobe. You can take my word for it, Mr. Wiskiel, Koo Davis does not have pierced ears!”

29

Koo’s arms hurt. They don’t sting or burn, the way you’d expect from a cut, they hurt, with a heavy mean aching pain, as though he’d given himself a very bad bruise. Under the covers he can feel the bandages swathing him from wrist to elbow, and inside the bandages is the throbbing pain, as unrelenting as a cramp. And his side, right above his hip, where the knife went in, feels like the blade is still in there, cutting him apart.

Koo has been awake for some time, but he doesn’t want to admit it, not with Mark sitting right there on the edge of the bed. Who knows what Mark might do next? The goddamn boy can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants Koo alive or dead, and Koo is in no hurry to get the latest bulletin. So he’s lying here under this mound of blankets, peeking at Mark from time to time through slitted eyes, and pretending to be asleep. While Mark just sits there, a bit to the right of Koo’s feet, hunched forward, brooding, gazing away at nothing in particular.

Koo remembers everything, and wishes he didn’t. Joyce, the only one he’d ever thought normal enough to maybe help him, had turned out to be the craziest of them all. The memory of that knife blade flashing in the moonlight is terrifyingly clear in his brain, and his arms hurt, his whole body hurts. Joyce was determined to kill him, and he’s been lying here trying to figure out why, and now he believes he’s worked out at last what she had in her excuse for a mind. She’d felt the kidnapping was causing too much stress for her pals and she wanted it to end—particularly after that show on television—but the others wouldn’t agree to just quit. If she’d released Koo on her own hook they would have been sore at her, so she planned to get Koo out of the house and down to the water’s edge, kill him there and let the waves carry the body out to sea. Then, so far as her friends would ever know, Koo had escaped on his own and disappeared.

Jesus H. Christ, but these arms hurt! By the time I get out of this, Koo tells himself, I won’t have any resale value left at all.

“We can talk now.”

Koo is so startled by the quiet sudden sound of Mark’s voice that his eyes automatically pop open; and then it’s too late to go on faking sleep because Mark has turned half around and is looking at him.

Well, it was too late anyway; Mark obviously has known for some time that Koo was conscious. Needing to know what Mark is like at this moment, Koo apprehensively studies that face and sees it calm, almost blank. The rage that usually suffuses and informs those features is gone, at least for now, leaving emptiness in its wake; without his passion, Mark seems as personless as a department store mannequin. And when he speaks his voice is soft, rather light in timbre, barely recognizable when not choked with fury. He says, “My mother’s name was Ruth Timmons.”

The name means nothing. Koo frowns, gazing at Mark, trying to remember a Ruth Timmons. A one-night