The Comedy is Finished

twist at the left corner. “Less you’d rather wait till tomorrow.”

“Anything I can do to help,” Mike promised, “just let me know.”

“Fine. Think I oughta let that audience go home?”

“Did you talk to them about pictures?”

Cayzer looked blank. “Pictures?”

“Snapshots.”

“Well, god damn it,” Cayzer said. “Sometimes I don’t know if I was stupid all my life or if I’m just getting stupid with old age. Come on along, you can ask them yourself.”

Mike followed Cayzer to a large soundstage full of sets and cameras, with an audience-full line of bleachers along one side. A technician gave him a hand mike, and he stepped out into the floodlights, where forty minutes ago Koo Davis had been making people laugh. Now his absence was making the same people wide-eyed with anticipation, and Mike was strongly aware of all those eyes glittering at him out of the semi-dark. He was also strongly aware of the floodlights; they were making his headache worse. His eyes felt as though the pressure behind them would make them pop out onto the floor; and good riddance.

With the bleachers so broad and shallow, the audience was much closer to the stage than in a normal theater, and Mike immediately had the sense that these people were still an audience, still spectators rather than participants. They were waiting for him to amuse them, thrill them, capture their interest.

He did the latter merely by introducing himself: “Ladies and gentleman, my name is Michael Wiskiel. I’m an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, here to assist Chief Inspector Cayzer in his inquiry.” His inquiry; the social niceties are important everywhere. “Now, I imagine some of you nice people are tourists in this area, and all of you have your own lives you want to get on with, so we’ll try not to hold you up very much longer. I suppose some of you brought cameras along today, I wonder if any of you have Polaroids. Anybody?”

A scattering of hands was raised; Mike counted six.

“Fine. So any pictures you folks took today, you’ve already got them in your pocket or purse, all developed and ready to be looked at. I wonder, did any of you people happen to take any pictures while you were out on line, before you got in here, and would those pictures show anybody else in the line?”

A stir in the audience, as two hundred forty-two people turned in their seats to watch six people self- consciously leaf through little clusters of photographs. Four of them eventually turned out to have pictures of the sort Mike had in mind, and ushers brought these photographs to the stage.

Seven snaps. Mike looked at the first, and saw four more-or-less distinguishable people behind the smiling squinting foreground lady who was the obvious subject of the photograph. He called out, “Could we have some light on the audience?” and immediately a bank of overhead spots came up, lighting the audience as though it had become the stage.

“Let’s see now,” Mike said. “Here’s a young man in a pale blue sweater, black hair, wearing sunglasses. Anybody?”

The young man was found, and when he stood and put on his sunglasses Mike matched him to the photograph. Also the lady wearing the white scarf and green polka dots. And also the elderly couple in matching white turtleneck shirts.

And so on through the seven Polaroids. Every identifiable face was still among the two hundred forty-eight. Either the two kidnappers had been very careful or very lucky.

“Well, it was worth a try,” Mike told the audience, when the pictures had been returned to their owners. “So now let me ask about other cameras, where you’ve still got the film inside. Anybody?”

More: thirty-five hands went up. Mike arranged with Cayzer to have police officers collect the film rolls, identifying the owner of each, and promising that the pictures would be developed, all developed prints and negatives would be returned to their owners, and reimbursement would be made for unused parts of rolls.

“Now, one last thing,” Mike said, when the film had been collected. “We’ll want group pictures of you all. If you were wearing something outside on line that you’re not wearing now, like sunglasses or a hat, please wear it in the picture.” There’s something about standing on stage with a hand mike that compulsively brings out the ham in everybody; Mike couldn’t resist adding, “And if you’re here with somebody you shouldn’t be, don’t worry, we won’t say a word to your wife.” The answering chuckle, from two hundred forty-eight throats, delighted him.

While Cayzer’s men took the pictures, section by section, and copied down the names and addresses of everybody present, with their location in each photograph, Mike and Cayzer had a talk behind the set, Cayzer saying, “My people finished their search of the lot. Nothing, nobody, no report.”

“What we expected.”

“That’s right. You want to talk to Janet Grey’s co-workers?”

In a cracking, terrible falsetto, Mike said, “Oh, I just can’t believe Janet would be involved in anything like this. She was always such a quiet girl, she just kept to herself all the time, a very good worker, never made any trouble or called attention to herself in any way.”

Grinning, nodding, Cayzer said, “You just saved yourself an hour and a half. So what do you want to do next?”

“Hear from the kidnappers,” Mike said.

4

Koo Davis is in trouble, and he knows it, but he doesn’t know why. And he doesn’t know who, or how, or even where. Where the hell is this place? An underground room with a bar and a john and a cunt-level view of a swimming pool; the naked girl with the scars on her back spent half an hour paddling around in the water out there, after Koo was locked in. She swam and dove, the whole time pretending there wasn’t any window or anybody watching, and all in all Koo was very happy when she finally got her ass out of the pool and left him in peace. She has a fantastic body when you can’t see the scars, but she doesn’t turn him on. Just the opposite: having that cold bitch flaunt herself like that shows just how little he matters to these people. They kidnapped him, they probably figure to sell him back for a nice profit, but other than as merchandise they couldn’t care shit about him, and that makes Koo very nervous.

Why me? he asks himself, over and over, but he never comes up with an answer. Because he has a few bucks? But Jesus, a lot of people have a few bucks. Do they think he’s a millionaire or something? If they ask for too much money, and if they don’t believe the answer they get, what will they do?

Koo doesn’t like to think about that. Every time his thoughts bring him this far, he quickly switches to another of his questions; like, for instance, Where am I? Still somewhere in the Greater Los Angeles area, that’s for sure. He estimates he was no more than half an hour in that truck or whatever it was. From the turns, this way and that, when they took him away from Triple S, he’s come to the conclusion they drove first on the Hollywood Freeway and then either the Ventura Freeway west or the Pasadena Freeway east; probably Ventura, out across the Valley. Then at the very end they did some climbing, with a particularly steep part after one fairly long stop. So he’s most likely on an estate somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, on the north slope, overlooking the Valley. And not some cheapjack place either, not with this room next to the pool. Somebody spent money on this layout.

Why do they want to keep him from identifying this place, yet they don’t care if he sees their faces? And why the fuck would rich people play kidnapper? These clowns operate like they’re at home here, they’re not worried about the owners coming back and interrupting the operation, so they must—

Unless they killed the owners.

Time to switch to another question. Like: Who exactly do they deal with, these kidnappers, who do they put the arm on? The network? Chairman Williams and the vice-presidents, that crowd of Easter Island statues? You can’t get blood from stone faces; if Koo knew his businessmen—and he did—Williams wouldn’t pay more than three bucks to get his sister back from Charles Manson.

But who else was there? Lily? “Hello, we got your husband Koo here, you remember him. He’s for sale.” How much would Lily pay for a living Koo Davis?

Koo is something of a showbiz oddity, a man who’s been married to the same woman for forty-one years; but