The Comedy is Finished

18

At ten past four, Mike Wiskiel was in the Butler Aviation waiting room at Los Angeles International Airport, awkwardly shaking hands with Lily Davis, wife of the kidnapped man, who had flown with her two sons out from New York in a private plane owned by one of the companies that sponsored her husband’s TV specials. Mike was awkward because he knew Lily Davis had a lot of friends back in Washington, and he didn’t know how severely the fuck-up with the transmitter had hurt his chances for getting back there himself. It could be he smelled too bad now for any recovery, no matter how brilliantly he handled the Koo Davis case from this point forward, but if there was even the slightest chance he could recoup his losses he wanted to be sure he had no unnecessary enemies with D.C. strings to pull. Lily Davis, a powerful figure in her own right as well as Koo Davis’ wife, could help or hurt Mike’s comeback with a casual lift of the eyebrow.

Meeting the problem head-on, Mike said, “Mrs. Davis, I’m the man who did it wrong last night. I hope very soon to be able to apologize to your husband; in the meantime, let me assure you just how sorry I am for what happened.”

“Mr. Wiskiel,” Lily Davis said, her manner calm and her handshake strong, “there’s no apology needed. You have an excellent reputation, and you did what you thought best under the circumstances.”

The word for Lily Davis was magisterial. A stocky, compact woman of not quite sixty, she carried herself with a patrician grace; a matron of ancient Rome, shopping at the slave market. (There was in her no remnant of that timid hausfrau abandoned all those years ago by her husband.) A committeewoman, active in any number of worthy organizations, she possessed the rather forbidding calm of a person who has learned how to control people in groups. Her assurances to Mike seemed sincere but impersonal, as though at bottom she didn’t really give a damn, not about Mike and not about her husband. Mike said, “Thank you, Mrs. Davis. It was still a mistake, and a bad one. I hope to make up for it.”

“I’m sure you will.” Calmly dismissing that subject, she said, “May I introduce my sons. Barry, and Frank.”

Both men were probably under forty. Barry, fastidious in blue suit with vest, white shirt and narrow striped tie, was the one who lived in London as part-owner of an antique business; there were odd traces of English accent in his voice, and his manner seemed to Mike obviously homosexual. Frank, on the other hand, the television network executive from New York, less formal in tweed jacket and open-collared blue shirt and slacks, showed a hearty easygoing masculinity that mostly suggested some kind of salesman; anything from insurance to used cars. Both men had, in their very different ways, firm handshakes, and neither seemed particularly broken up by what had happened to their father.

After the introductions, Lily Davis said, “Mr. Wiskiel, would you ride along in our car and tell us the current situation?”

“My own car is here.”

Lily Davis was a long-time professional organizer: “Frank can follow us in your car.”

But wouldn’t Frank also like to be told the current situation? Apparently not; a willing smile on his amiable salesman’s face, Frank said, “Good idea, Mom. You can fill me in at the house.”

“Okay, then,” Mike said.

As they moved toward the exit Lily Davis said, “You’ve managed to keep us free of reporters. Thank you.”

“Part of our job, Mrs. Davis.”

A black Cadillac limousine was waiting just outside. While Lily and Barry were handed into the back seat by the chauffeur, Mike gave his car keys to Frank and pointed out his Buick Riviera parked just across the way. “I’ll take good care of it, Mike,” Frank said cheerfully, and trotted off.

Didn’t any of these people care? Taking the limousine’s fur-covered jump seat, just ahead of Lily and Barry Davis’ knees, it occurred to Mike that neither son looked very much like the father. In fact, not at all. Koo Davis’ rubbery face was so well known that surely any trace of it in these men would be immediately obvious. Salesman Frank had some of his mother’s square-jawed heavy-boned look, but exquisite Barry’s face was a series of delicate ovals, reminiscent of neither parent.

The glass partition was up between the chauffeur and the passenger compartment; but apparently the man knew the way, and required no instructions. As the limousine moved out, Mike half-turned in the jump seat (seeing his own Buick obediently following) and said, “As a matter of fact, we have a hopeful clue that Koo Davis himself gave us.”

“Koo gave it?” Even her surprise was even-tempered. “How did he manage that?”

Mike told her about the reference to Gilbert Freeman in the second tape. “We’ve checked Freeman and there’s just no way he can be involved. So the thinking is, maybe your husband meant he’s being held in a house that used to be owned by Freeman. Unfortunately, Freeman moves a lot; we’ve got seven houses to check.”

“That’s being done now?”

“Right. So it’s possible we’ll end this thing any minute. On the other hand, most of life isn’t that easy.” And he went on to tell them about the four o’clock radio announcement, which he himself had taped at three-thirty and then heard over the car radio as he was arriving at the airport.

It was Barry who asked the obvious question: “What will this seven-thirty program have to say?”

“I have no idea,” Mike told him. “Deputy Director St. Clair is on the way out now, bringing it with him. At this moment, nobody in Los Angeles even knows if the answer’s yes or no.”

“If it’s no,” Lily said, “will they murder my husband?”

It was a very coolly phrased question. Mike tried to see behind or beneath the composed manner to some sort of emotion; surely the woman was feeling something. Simply asking the question showed she wasn’t as calm as she behaved. On the other hand, she didn’t act like someone on tranquilizers. Was she thinking only of the inconvenience? Mike said, “We don’t know what they’ll do. My guess is, they’ll keep him alive at least a while longer, trying to pressure us to change our mind.”

“So this could go on—indefinitely.”

“I hope not,” Mike said.

Barry said, “We all hope not, Mr. Wiskiel, but it does happen. In Europe we’ve had kidnap victims held for months. In Italy, for instance, and Germany.”

“These people seem more impatient than that,” Mike said. Then the other implications of the remark struck him, and he very much regretted having said it.

Not that it made any evident difference to the family. Their manner remained serene, imperturbable, as the limousine bore them north on the San Diego Freeway. The discussion continued, placid, speculative, considering the possibilities with a minimum—no, an absolute absence—of emotion. It was partly to try to force some response from them that Mike said, as the chauffeur angled the limousine down the exit ramp at Sunset Boulevard, “This is where the car carrying your husband’s medicines got on the Freeway.”

“And the tracking device,” Barry Davis mentioned casually. There seemed no particular meaning in the words, no particular expression on the man’s face. The eyes, when Mike peered at them, seemed merely bored.

“That’s right,” Mike said.

The limousine, with Mike’s Buick trailing, followed the hilly curve of Sunset eastward to Beverly Glen Boulevard, and there turned north once more, into Bel Air. The houses became more and more grand, the individual pieces of property larger and more elaborately landscaped, the fences and other security measures more common, and the limousine purring up into these hills evidently felt very much at home.

In Los Angeles, Beverly Hills is the well-known seat of luxury, but Bel Air to its west is as much more sumptuous as it is less recognized. And north of Bel Air, higher in the Santa Monica Mountains, is Beverly Glen, which is to Bel Air as Bel Air is to Beverly Hills. It was toward Beverly Glen that the limousine was directing itself, as though General Motors had built into the car some sort of electronic racial memory. This sleek black vehicle belonged in these hills the way elephants belong on the African veldt.

Here the glimpses of habitation were rare, particularly after they turned off Beverly Glen Boulevard itself onto curving climbing streets named for flowers and women. Tall fences guarding tangled lush foliage gave way to high blank stucco-faced walls of coral or peach, with here and there a Spanish-motif broad wooden garage door. It was at one of these windowless garage doors that the limousine came to an eventual stop, and the chauffeur got out to identify himself via the speaker grid beside the door.

In the car, Lily Davis extended her hand to Mike in a dismissing handshake, saying, “I do appreciate your giving us your time, Mr. Wiskiel. Do keep us informed of developments, won’t you?” Not waiting for an answer, she turned to her son: “Barry, give Mr. Wiskiel our phone number here.”

“Certainly.” Barry withdrew from his inside pocket a gold pen and a small notebook in a gold case.

Mike released Lily Davis’ cool dry non-trembling hand as soon as it was polite to do so, and took from Barry the square of paper on which a phone number had been jotted in a tiny precise hand. “I’ll let you know what happens,” he promised, and climbed from the car.

The wide garage door in the eight foot high stucco wall had now opened, revealing not the interior of a garage but a sunny jungle; crowded tropical trees and shrubbery through which a blacktop drive meandered, disappearing toward unimaginable splendor. It was like a scene in a children’s book—Alice in Wonderland, perhaps—in which the opening in the wall leads to a completely different world.

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!”