The Comedy is Finished

28

There are many different kinds of bribe in this world. Money, actual cash, is the bluntest and often the least effective bribe of all, since each of the participants finishes with a sense of contempt for the other. At the other extreme, mutual back-scratching is the noblest and cleanest form of bribery, because the participants—if all goes well—finish by being grateful to one another.

One of the policewomen manning the phones on the Koo Davis case was named Betty Austin, and her secret vice was songwriting; Dory Previn, with a touch of Bessie Smith. With no suggestion of return, Lynsey Rayne had offered to see to it that Marty Rubelman, musical director of Koo’s TV specials, was shown some of Policewoman Austin’s material. With no suggestion of return, Policewoman Austin had offered to let Lynsey know the instant there were any new development in the kidnapping case. Each was made happy by the offer of the other.

Phone. Telephone. Clanging again and again. Lynsey opened her eyes in the dark bedroom of her small house in Westwood, and for the longest time she couldn’t understand what that noise was or why it was going on for so long. There was no sleep-over man in her life right now—hadn’t been for nearly a year—so the phone would continue until either she answered it or the caller gave up; but she’d had so little sleep the last two nights that she just couldn’t seem to break through this grogginess. Damn! Damn!

Tossing her head, trying to clear it, she saw the illuminated numerals on the digital clock-radio, but without her glasses couldn’t read the numbers. The desire to know what time it was drove her up that extra little bit toward consciousness so that suddenly, on about the tenth ring, she cried out loud, “The phone!” and lunged to answer it.

The caller, a woman, spoke quietly, as though afraid of being overheard: “You ought to come over now.”

“What? What?”

“You know who this is.”

And then Lynsey did; it was Policewoman Austin. “What’s happened?”

“Just come over.” Click.

“Oh, my God,” Lynsey said. In the darkness she couldn’t hang up the phone, find her glasses, find the light-switch, read the clock—“Oh, my God, oh my God.” Glasses. Clock reading 4:07. “Oh, my God.”

The receptionist in the outer office at ten minutes to five in the morning was male and uniformed and initially unresponsive. “Something’s happened,” Lynsey insisted, “and I want to know what it is. Who’s here? Inspector Cayzer? Is the FBI man here, Mr. Wiskiel?”

“Ma’am, if there’s anything new, I’m sure they’ll get in touch with—”

“Go in and tell them I’m here. Just tell them.”

He didn’t want to, but finally he shrugged and said, “I’ll see if there’s anybody here.”

There was somebody here; Lynsey heard voices when the policeman opened the inner office door. He looked back at her, grudgingly, and closed the door behind himself.

What was happening? What was going on? It wasn’t that Koo had been rescued; there’d be no secrecy about that. Had they found him dead? Terribly injured? Did they know where the kidnappers were keeping him? What was going on?

The policeman returned, followed by Mike Wiskiel, looking irritated and upset. The irritation was because of her presence, but why was he upset? He seemed troubled, disturbed, unhappy. Afraid of what that might mean, needing to know the worst right now, she stepped forward before he had a chance to speak, saying, “What’s happened? Something bad, I can see it in your face.”

He would try, of course, to deflect the conversation: “Ms. Rayne, how did you know to come here?”

“Mr. Wiskiel, please. What’s happened?”

He was closed away from her. “Davis isn’t dead, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said, as though that crumb would satisfy her. “Believe me, I’d tell you.”

“There’s something,” she insisted. “If I were family, would you tell me?”

His laugh was surprisingly harsh: “You mean you’ll drag Mrs. Davis down here to ask the questions? You’re more family than she is.”

Lynsey was surprised that Wiskiel had had the wit to make that assessment, but she wouldn’t be distracted. “Then tell me,” she said.

He shook his head. “Ms. Rayne, you’re not accomplishing anything by coming here this way. When there’s something constructive, I’ll let you know.”

“It has to be very bad,” she said. “All right, he isn’t dead, I accept that, but it has to be very bad for you to fight me like this.”

He hesitated, indecision finally appearing in his eyes. Was he acting from the old macho idea that grimness should be kept as much as possible away from the sight of females? He was certainly capable of such an attitude. Should she reassure him, promise him she could deal with whatever he was keeping from her? No; it was best to let him work it through for himself. Her part would be to make it absolutely clear she wasn’t going away.

And at last he sighed and shook his head and said, “Okay. I was sent out here to not tell you, but you’re right, if you were family I’d have no choice.”

But at that point he ran out of words and stopped. She looked at him, waiting, and saw that he was helpless, trying in vain to find the right combination of words. After half a minute of silence, while the fear built in her, she gave him a sad smile and said, “There’s no soft way, is there? So just say it, whatever it is.”

“They cut off his ear.”

She stared at him, at first failing to understand the meaning of those words, and then she heard herself laugh, as though it was a joke: “They didn’t!”

“I’m sorry. They want to show the world how tough they are.”

“They—His ear?” It was still meaningless, incomprehensible. “That’s—That’s like savages, it’s primitive man, it’s...”

“Once people lose the social thread,” he said, obviously telling her something he deeply believed, “they’re capable of anything.”

“But his—” Floundering toward something recognizable, she said, “Is there another message?”

“Not his voice. A new voice.”

“I want to hear it.”

“Ms. Rayne, I don’t—”

“And I want to see the ear.”

She wasn’t going to be stopped, and he must have seen that. With another sigh, he shrugged and said, “Come along, then.”

In the workroom were three men: Jock Cayzer, the tape technician, and Maurice St. Clair, the FBI Deputy Director from Washington, whom Lynsey hadn’t yet met but had seen on that television program. As Lynsey and Mike Wiskiel walked in, the technician was saying, “—interesting about this tape.” But then he stopped, as the three men became aware of Lynsey’s presence.

St. Clair, big and meaty and red-faced, lunged up from the folding chair he’d been sitting on, shouting, “For Christ’s sake! Mike, Mike—”

“It’s all right, Murray,” Wiskiel said.

She had already seen the box. That had to be it, sitting alone on a worktable, a small black box bearing the stylized white letters “i magnin.” As Wiskiel went through the stupid formalities of introducing Lynsey to St. Clair, she crossed directly to the box, opened the lid, and looked inside.

How awful. How pitiable. It was small, wrinkled, pale, fleshy, stained with rust-colored dry blood, and utterly pathetic. Lynsey pressed her palms onto the table to both sides of the small box, clenched her jaw, stood unblinking, and gazed into the box.

The men had become silent, and it was Jock Cayzer who came over to stand beside her, saying nothing, also looking into the box. Quietly, Lynsey said, “It’s so small.”

“Well, it’s off a living man,” he said, “so it would have bled some; that’d shrink it.” His manner was calm, sympathetic but unemotional, reducing this horrible thing to something that could be looked at, discussed, absorbed into one’s mind and memory.

She needed that. She needed something to make this ordinary, so she could go on from it. “I’ve never seen a thing like this before,” she said.

“Oh, I have.” And still he was calm, judicious, merely reporting a fact.

“Tell me about it.”

She felt him glance at her, study her profile, make a decision about her. Then he said, “Some of the boys back from Nam, they brought Cong ears with them. Anyway, they said they were Cong ears, and they were sure ears. And what they mostly looked like was dried peaches.”

“This one is fresher.”

“Yes,” he said, and reached out as though casually to close the lid on the box.

She looked at him, seeing a man who was truly strong without making a point of it. “Thank you,” she said.

“My pleasure, Ms. Rayne.”

“May I hear the tape?”

“Of course.”

The technician already had it cued up, and this new harsh voice snarled from the loudspeakers with its self-serving self-righteousness. Lynsey listened unmoving—she was deadened, at least for now, free from high emotional reactions—and at the end she said, quietly, “They are just beasts, aren’t they?”

Cayzer said, “The television broadcast must have been a shock to them.”

Obviously uncomfortable, St. Clair said, “Miss Rayne, there just wasn’t any way to soften that blow. I mean, telling these bastards what answers we got from their former friends. We simply had to tell them the truth.”

“I realize that.” Then she sighed, and shook her head, and said, “What happens now?”

“We’ll send this tape to Washington,” St. Clair told her, “for the next response.”

“But there is no next response, is there?”

St. Clair frowned unhappily at her—the third man in five minutes to wonder if she could survive the truth—and then he said, “Myself, Miss Rayne, I can’t think of any.”

“What they ask is impossible.”

Beneath his restraint St. Clair was very angry. “And they know it,” he said. “In the first place, we can’t just talk half a dozen people out of jail against their will and deport them out of the country. Maybe in Russia you can do that, but not here. There’s such a thing as due process, and if we tried any such stunt there wouldn’t be a lawyer in the nation out of work for the next two years. And in the second place, even if we could do such a thing we wouldn’t, because what this son of a bitch Rock really wants is other buddies of his in Algeria to take revenge on those people for standing him up.”

“Showing him up,” Wiskiel said.

“Both.”

“So this is just propaganda,” Lynsey said. “They’re going to kill Koo and they’ll try to put the blame on the government.”

Wiskiel said, “So we’ve got to find them before they do it.”

Lynsey shook her head. “If the deadline isn’t real, if they’re going to kill him anyway, why would they wait?”

“One last propaganda blitz,” St. Clair suggested. “Another tape, or maybe even a phone call to a television station, something like that, just at the deadline. Davis will be useful to them right up until twelve noon.”

“But how are you going to find them? They left that house in Woodland Hills, and this time there’s no message from Koo.”

Wiskiel said, “We have one lead. There was something funny about the Woodland Hills house being so available, and we’re trying to find the owner.”

“Trying to find him?”

“He’s a rock musician named Ginger Merville,” Wiskiel said, “and he’s supposed to be in Paris on tour, but he and his tour manager both checked out of their hotel two days ago. The manager flew to Tokyo, where Merville is supposed to perform this weekend, but Merville himself flew to New York. So far, we haven’t been able to find out where he went after that.”

“Ginger Merville.” Lynsey knew the name, knew something of the man’s career. She said, “Did you check with his agent?”

“One of my men saw him this afternoon. Or yesterday afternoon, I guess, by now. He didn’t know where Merville was.”

“Nonsense,” Lynsey said.

Wiskiel looked surprised. “Beg pardon?”

“The agent knows where Merville is,” Lynsey said. “People hide from their wives, their creditors, their employers and the police, but they don’t hide from their agents.”

“Are you suggesting the agent is part of it?”

“No, I’m not.” Lynsey paused, choosing her words carefully. She didn’t particularly want to antagonize Wiskiel 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!”