The Comedy is Finished

by Donald E. Westlake

  “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 stand somewhere? Thirty or more years ago?

  Still in the same dispassionate manner, Mark says, “You knew her as Honeydew Leontine.”

  “Honeydew!” Surprise is almost immediately succeeded by pleasure, at the simple reminder of Honeydew Leontine. She was the first, the very first blonde on the very first USO tour; the first and in many ways the best. For six years she’d traveled with Koo—not always
, not every trip, there had been other blondes on other tours along the way—and when she’d quit show business he’d been briefly saddened, because he already knew that most of the blondes were cold and tough and barely worth getting a hard-on over, while Honeydew Leontine had been warm and sweet and natural. Not the brightest girl in the world, but good-hearted. A friend as much as a fuck. But then she’d quit and...

  She quit because she was pregnant; that’s right. Koo had an office on the MGM lot then, and he came in one afternoon to find a message from Honeydew, whom he’d last seen two months earlier on their return from a tour to Alaska and the Aleutians; ’47 or ’48, that was, between wars. He almost never saw Honeydew socially, had virtually no contact with her other than the tours, so he was surprised to get her call, and not at all happy when he phoned back and the first words out of her mouth were, “I think I’m in trouble.”

  Koo’s response was immediate: “Let’s have dinner. How many you eating for?”

  “I think, two.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  He took her to Musso & Frank, because it was a prominent place, full of show business people. If he’d taken her to some out-of-the-way joint (as had been his first impulse) she’d start feeling sorry for herself, and maybe she’d take it out on Koo. Besides, he knew what he wanted her to do, and Musso & Frank was the proper setting for the discussion. “Your career,” he kept saying, and the word abortion was never actually spoken aloud. She cried a little into her veal parmigiana, not enough to be noticed by anybody but the waiter, whose job it was to mind his own business, but except for the tears and a general aura of sadness and one wistful comment—“Gee, it seems too bad”—she didn’t argue back or disagree very forcefully at all. (Now he realizes he should have mistrusted such easy compliance; at the time, he was simply relieved she wasn’t going to cause a lot of trouble.) At the end of the meal he said, “There’s a doctor I can call,” but she shook her head: “I’ll take care of it, Koo, don’t worry about that. It’s just the—finances. I’m sorry, I’ll need a little help with that.”

  “Sure,” he said, and drove her home, and sent her into her house with a chaste kiss; then the next day he mailed her a check for five hundred dollars and a note containing a crass joke: “Hope everything comes out all right.” And that was the last he ever saw or heard of Honeydew Leontine. The next time it occurred to him to get in touch with her, a couple years later when he was putting together his first Korean tour, her agent said Honeydew had quit the business, so he got somebody else. And that was that.

  “You’re smiling,” Mark says. “I didn’t expect you to smile, I don’t know what it means.”

  “Honeydew,” Koo explains. “I liked her.” He very nearly said I loved her, which is ridiculous. Also, he doesn’t know how far he can trust this new calmness of Mark’s, and he suspects the phrase I loved her might be just the thing to trigger Dr. Jekyll’s next transformation. Feeling nervous, a bit confused, he scrabbles in his memory for a fact about Honeydew, and comes out with the first thing he finds: “The stones,” he says. “She had that incredible collection of stones, one from every beach she ever walked on. Carried them all around in little cloth bags. Carried them everywhere.”

  “That’s right,” Mark says, and now one corner of his mouth lifts in a not-pleasant smile. Is this Mr. Hyde returning? “I threw them away,” he says.

  Koo frowns at him, not sure he understands. “The stones?”

  “When I was fifteen.” Mark shrugs, almost as though embarrassed. “It was very hard to make her cry.”

  “She cried the last time I saw her.”

  “Did she? Too bad I wasn’t there.”

  “You were there.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I see what you mean.” The shrug again, of just one shoulder; Mark is embarrassed. “She didn’t cry when I threw the stones away. Tough old bitch.”

  “Wait a minute. You were trying to make her cry?”

  “I’ve had two goals,” Mark says, “since the day I was born. One to make her cry, and the other to make you dead.”

  “Well, you do work at them.”

  “I’d see you in the movies, I’d see you on television. That’s my father. I never said that to anybody, but I’d sit and stare at you and try to kill you with my mind. But you were too far up, and I was too far down.”

  Dangerous territory; Koo eases them away from it, saying, “But what did you have against your mother?”

  “Me.” The coldness of his memories is seeping into Mark’s face; it’s like watching a chill breeze ruffle icy water. “I ruined her life, to hear her tell it. So I figured I might as well make it a good job.”

  “Ruined her life?”

  “ ‘You ruined my life! I was a star!’ ” Mark’s falsetto imitation of a woman’s voice contains all the fury of his normal self. “ ‘I didn’t have to have you, you little brat! Your father gave me five hundred dollars to get rid of you, and I swear I wish I’d done it!’”

  “She wasn’t like that,” Koo says. He’s actually shocked to hear Honeydew spoken of this way. “She wasn’t like that at all.”

  “You didn’t know her after I ruined her life.”

  “Jesus.” Koo can see it, the sentimental romantic decision to have the child, then to keep it. She would have had some money at the beginning, left over from her career; it would all have seemed possible at first. But it wasn’t possible, and by the time she understood the implications of her mistake it was too late to change. She must have been about thirty when the kid was born; a couple of years as a hausfrau, out of the business, quickly forgotten (starlets are always quickly forgotten, like the individual leaves on a tree), her blowsy good looks very easily going to seed, going to fat, the lost world irretrievably in the past and receding farther and farther every day; when a good old girl like that turns bitter she can undoubtedly be hell on wheels. Koo shakes his head; then, trying to find something good in it, something hopeful, he says, “Didn’t she ever marry?”

  “When I was two, a fella named Ralph Halliwell. I carry his last name.”

  “What happened?”

  “It didn’t last. He was part-owner of a restaurant in Santa Fe, I guess he married my mother because she’d been in the movies, he thought it would be an attraction for the restaurant. But something happened, I don’t know exactly, he was stealing from his partner or his partner was stealing from him. Something like that. And he thought my mother must have money because of being a movie star. So one day when I was four he beat the shit out of her and left.” Mark smiles, angrily and hopelessly. “I was present for that one. It’s just about my earliest memory.”

  “Where, uh. Where is she now?”

  “Dead.” The word is flat, spoken as though without meaning. “She died six years ago. Breast cancer. She wouldn’t do anything about it until it was too late, but that was her style, right?”

  All at once, the tears are coming. Koo blinks and blinks, turning his head from side to side as though to duck out of the way, but there’s no stopping them, they’re like a warm flood building up inside him, overflowing, feelings he didn’t even know he owned, emotions and remorses welling inside him, burning in his throat, groaning in his mouth, bursting out through his eyes. “Gah—God,” he says, struggling to say something that will paper over this crack, but there isn’t a joke in the world, all the jokes are told and gone. “Gah—Gah—God. God. Oh. Jee-sus.” And he’s sobbing, actual racking sobs that shake his whole body and grind like tanks through his throat.

  Mark has risen from the bed, is staring at him as though affronted, and now he says, “What’ve you got to cry about, you son of a bitch? You fucking hypocrite, what are you crying for?”

  “I never—” But the sobs are too much for him, he can’t push words through them, can’t stop them, can’t get away from all this misery. “I never—knew,” he cries, and drags his aching heavy arms out from under the blankets, trying to get the stiff cold fingers up over his face.

  But Mark
lunges forward, one knee on the bed, slapping at his hands, shouting, “Don’t you cover up! Never knew what? About me? My mother? Anybody?”

  “I just—” The worst of the attack is over, the sobs becoming half-gasps as Koo strains to catch his breath, recapture control. “—went through life,” he finishes, and gestures helplessly with his leaden arms, like a bug on its back.

  If there was a risk that Mark would explode into his usual rage it seems to have subsided as abruptly as it came. Still leaning forward with one knee on the bed, his expression now merely impatient, he says, “Don’t sentimentalize. If you loved everybody, you didn’t love anybody.”

  “But it could have been—” Koo wants to believe this, wants to find a way to phrase it that won’t sound false to himself. “Somehow.”

  “No,” Mark says. “If you’d ever learned about me, I’d simply have been an embarrassment. You’d have spread a few dollars on me, like Noxzema on a sunburn.”

  “But I’m not—now I’m not—”

  “Now you’re sick, and scared, and wounded, and old, and you’re probably gonna die. You’re a set-up for the sentimental reaction. Anything would break you down now; a puppy, a daffodil, an orphan boy.”

  Astonishingly, through the sobs and the gasping for breath, Koo finds himself smiling, looking up at this mad boy with something very like pleasure. “Where’d you get to—” He has to pause for a spell of coughing and snorting, then finishes: “—be such a smart-ass?”

  “It runs in the family,” Mark says, and turns abruptly away, leaving the bed. Koo watches him as Mark opens mirrored door after mirrored door, finally returning with a box of tissues, dropping them on the bed beside Koo and saying, “Here. Blow your nose. You look like a science-fiction monster.”

  Koo struggles upward to a semi-seated position against the padded headboard, using his elbows as he would normally use his hands, then takes several tissues to blow his nose and wipe his face. His fingers are fat white sausages with hardly any feeling, but he persists, while Mark stands beside the bed watching him, a faint smile on his lips. Finally Koo discards yet another tissue and lifts his face, saying, “How am I?”