The Comedy is Finished

Mark was flinging himself backward. Damn! Peter fired, knowing it was no good, too late, then fired a second time even more uselessly, as the door slammed shut.

Liz was shouting something, Larry was shouting something. Peter bounded up the stairs, twisted the knob, but the door was locked from the inside. Enraged, he emptied the Cobra into the closed door, hoping the bullets would go through the wood and glass, would hit something in there, and then he turned to fling the empty pistol in rage and frustration down the stairs at Larry, who merely sidestepped it, crying out, “Peter, have you gone crazy?”

“That son of a bitch,” Peter growled, and he wasn’t sure himself whether he meant Mark or Larry. To Liz he said, “Does Mark have a gun in there, do you know?”

“What a mess this is,” Liz said, as though it was Peter she blamed.

“Does he have a gun?”

“How would I know?”

“We have to assume—Oh, Jesus, can’t anything go right?”

Larry by now had reached the head of the stairs, his expression astounded and disapproving. “You were going to shoot Mark!”

“Yes, by Jesus, I was, and you fouled it up!”

“But why?”

“Because we have to kill Davis, and Mark’s in the way.”

“But we don’t have to—”

“Don’t argue tactics with me,” Peter said, his finger poking out at Larry, his patience finally gone for good. “You’re a weak sister, you always have been a weak sister, and you won’t tell me how to run this operation.”

Larry’s face closed down; he made an obvious effort to attain dignity. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I came in to report. They’ve cleared everybody away from our area of beach.”

“They? Who?”

“I don’t know. Lifeguards, police, what difference does it make?”

“Maybe somebody saw a shark.”

“They haven’t just cleared everybody out of the water, they’ve moved them away from the beach, too. It looks as though they’re setting up sawhorse barriers two or three houses away on both sides.”

“There’s got to be some—” But then it all overflowed, and Peter yelled, “You did call the police! You bastard, bastard, bastard—”

Liz got between them, preventing Peter from hitting Larry, while Larry stumbled backward, as angry as Peter himself, crying, “I didn’t call anybody! I should have, I should have, but I never—”

Liz turned on him, saying, “Shut up, Larry. Let’s find out about this.”

“Look for yourself,” Larry told her.

“I intend to.”

Peter watched Liz enter the master bedroom, followed by Larry, saying something to her, justifying himself in some way. Was it Ginger, then, who’d turned them in? The strange thing was, it didn’t even matter. Peter wished he still had the pistol in his hand, wished the pistol were still full of bullets; he would shoot Larry now, in the back, shoot him down and then put another bullet in his worrying head; not for any specific crime but out of years of frustration; and because someone had to die.

Liz slid open one of the glass doors on the far side of the bedroom, leading out to the upper deck. Cautiously she looked out, to left and right, while Larry nattered behind her. Peter moved forward, his eyes and attention on Liz, waiting for her to say the word, and after a minute she turned back into the room, looking at Peter in a closed and somber way, saying, “It’s them, all right.”

“We haven’t run in luck this time, have we?” Peter felt cold, remote from himself, aloof from the consequences of the world around him. There was no fear or panic in him, no thought that he personally was in danger; whatever happened, he remained convinced he would end the day in Vancouver, he and Liz, prepared to await a more propitious moment, a more fortunate operation, a more successful plan. A miserable humiliating failure (which could be risen above) was the worst he visualized in his own personal future.

Again Liz and Larry both spoke to him; again he didn’t listen. Stepping around Liz, he carelessly slid the glass door completely open and stepped out onto the upper deck, squinting against the bright sunlight as he moved unhesitatingly across the deck to the rail. The blinding pain in his cheeks seemed to belong to someone else.

Directly below was the cantilevered main deck, empty but for the orange canvas butterfly chair in which Larry had been doing his brooding. The width of sand between here and the water was, as Larry had said, empty of people, as was the immediate vicinity of ocean. Joyce is buried, just about there, Peter thought, his eyes glancing off the spot, and then he turned to look to the right.

A crowd of people, gaping this way. The sawhorses, perhaps a hundred fifty feet from here, stretched from house-line to water-line, damming up a flow of curious humanity. There were no obvious policemen visible, but they were undoubtedly close by. “If we had rifles,” Peter muttered aloud, staring from under his sun-shielding hand at the people beyond the sawhorses, “we could pot a few of those gawkers.” Then, with merely a quick establishing glance at the similar barrier-plus-spectators down the beach in the opposite direction, he went back into the house.

The bedroom was empty, but Larry was vacillating in the hallway; when Peter emerged, Larry said, “Maybe we could still make a run for it. Malibu Canyon Road is just down that way, we could—”

“Don’t be foolish,” Peter said. “We hold out till dark, then we slip away. Probably down the beach, swim around behind the police line. Where’s Liz?”

“She went downstairs for guns, but I don’t—”

“She’s right. Good girl.” Then Peter noticed Larry staring at him in a peculiar horrified way. “What’s the matter?”

“There’s blood coming out of your mouth.”

Peter swallowed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I cut myself.” Then he turned his attention to the bullet-pocked door protecting Davis and Mark. “We have to break that door down.”

“What for? Before the police are set up, we still could—”

“They’re already in place, get that through your head. Besides, whatever else does or does not happen, Davis dies.” Peter saw Liz coming up the stairs, pistols in her hands. Speaking over Larry’s objections, he said, “Good. We finish Davis now.”

34

Ginger’s bank was in Woodland Hills, down in the flat part of the Valley, not far from his house. However, he was barely a quarter mile up Topanga Canyon Boulevard from the Coast Highway when he saw the flashing red light in his rearview mirror.

Was he speeding? No; but there were cops who liked to hassle expensive or unusual cars just for the hell of it. Irritated, thinking of this as simply more of the bad luck dogging him lately, Ginger pulled into a gravel turnout and rolled to a stop. The Sheriff’s Department car stopped behind him, its red warning lights still revolving, and the driver—deliberately intimidating in his crease-ironed khaki uniform and dark sunglasses—came striding forward in the unhurried fashion of traffic cops everywhere.

Ginger already had his window rolled down and his license and registration waiting in his hand; the object was to get this interruption over with as quickly as possible. The policeman arrived, Ginger wordlessly handed him the documents, and the policeman wordlessly took them. He studied both with glacial slowness until Ginger, hunching his neck so he could look out the window at a steep angle upward to see the policeman’s blank tanned face, finally said, “What’s the trouble, officer?”

“You’re Mr. Merville?”

“Yes, sir.” Ginger was always very polite when under the direct gaze of Authority.

“And this is your vehicle?”

“Yes, sir.” Ginger was faintly aware that another car, a maroon Buick Riviera, had also pulled off onto this turnout, and was stopping ahead of the Thunderbird; but his primary attention remained on the policeman.

“Just wait here a moment,” the policeman said, and crunched away across the gravel toward his own car.