Read Online The Comedy is Finished by Donald E. Westlake - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Donald E. Westlake
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If it isn’t played according to these instructions, the People’s Revolutionary Army will take appropriate action toward me. These demands are not negotiable. So that was, uhhhh, the message from our sponsor. And from the way it looks here, my only hope is I flunk the audition and they send me home.”
6
Joyce and the others sat in the darkened living room together, all five of them, watching the eleven o’clock news on NBC, Channel 4. The lights outside the house were off, and through the long wall of glass doors at one side of the room moonlight reflected silver-gray from the breeze-ruffled surface of the pool. Beyond the pool and its cantilevered deck the Valley could be seen, a gridwork of dotted light-lines dividing the darkness into comprehensible bite-size chunks, while the greater darkness remained intact, surrounding and above.
The Koo Davis kidnapping was the major news story, the lead-in piece. The newscaster announced the fact of the kidnapping and then the cassette tape was played, in its entirety, while on the screen a photograph appeared, a publicity still; a smiling Koo Davis face, in color, confident and successful.
Joyce hadn’t listened to the tape before it went out, and she didn’t really listen now. This wasn’t her part of the work, and it didn’t interest her to know the details. She was content to be the one who entered the straight world, got the jobs, drove the van away from the studio, delivered the tape to the boy in Santa Monica, made the easy informational phone calls. And here in the house she was the den mother, she made the dinner, washed the dishes, did the laundry.
For Joyce, the group in the darkness around the flickering TV light was like some wonderful kind of camping out. In her childhood, in Racine, where the winters were so long and so cold, “campingout” had mostly meant what were known as “overnights”: half a dozen giggling girls on mattresses or folded blankets on a living room floor, the host parents far away in their own part of the house, the girls clustering together like tiny delighted animals at the dry hidden warm bottom of the world, whispering and shushing at one another, young small bodies in the nightgowns trembling with exhilaration.
It was the group that Joyce loved, the very idea of being part of a group. In her childhood she had been a Brownie, later a Girl Scout and for a while simultaneously a Campfire Girl, also member of a Junior Sodality at church, the 4-H Club, other groups at school and college; and tonight she sat with her feet curled up under her at one end of the sofa, the complete group around her, the television offering its flickering light to the room, and she was back where it had all begun: an “overnight,” with friends. Her hand over her mouth so no one would know, her eyes on the screen without seeing it, her ears ignoring the loping cadence of Koo Davis’ voice, she giggled.
When the tape came to its end—“and they send me home”—the Koo Davis photograph on the screen was replaced by film of an office, where two men stood behind a desk while several photographers snapped their picture and newsmen asked them questions, some extending microphones. A voice said, “In charge of the investigation into the Koo Davis kidnapping is Chief Inspector Cayzer of the Burbank Police. Representing the FBI is Michael Wiskiel, Assistant to the Chief of Station of the Los Angeles office of the FBI.”
“Wiskiel,” Mark said, while an old man in a Stetson said on-screen that they didn’t have much to go on so far. “He had something to do with Watergate.”
“Hush,” said Peter.
The announcer’s off-camera voice had returned: “Agent Wiskiel was asked if the ten named individuals would be released from prison.”
The scene cut from the old man in the Stetson to Wiskiel, a heavyset fortyish man with too much self-conscious actorish good looks. Wiskiel said, “Well, it’s early yet, and frankly I don’t recognize every one
6
Joyce and the others sat in the darkened living room together, all five of them, watching the eleven o’clock news on NBC, Channel 4. The lights outside the house were off, and through the long wall of glass doors at one side of the room moonlight reflected silver-gray from the breeze-ruffled surface of the pool. Beyond the pool and its cantilevered deck the Valley could be seen, a gridwork of dotted light-lines dividing the darkness into comprehensible bite-size chunks, while the greater darkness remained intact, surrounding and above.
The Koo Davis kidnapping was the major news story, the lead-in piece. The newscaster announced the fact of the kidnapping and then the cassette tape was played, in its entirety, while on the screen a photograph appeared, a publicity still; a smiling Koo Davis face, in color, confident and successful.
Joyce hadn’t listened to the tape before it went out, and she didn’t really listen now. This wasn’t her part of the work, and it didn’t interest her to know the details. She was content to be the one who entered the straight world, got the jobs, drove the van away from the studio, delivered the tape to the boy in Santa Monica, made the easy informational phone calls. And here in the house she was the den mother, she made the dinner, washed the dishes, did the laundry.
For Joyce, the group in the darkness around the flickering TV light was like some wonderful kind of camping out. In her childhood, in Racine, where the winters were so long and so cold, “campingout” had mostly meant what were known as “overnights”: half a dozen giggling girls on mattresses or folded blankets on a living room floor, the host parents far away in their own part of the house, the girls clustering together like tiny delighted animals at the dry hidden warm bottom of the world, whispering and shushing at one another, young small bodies in the nightgowns trembling with exhilaration.
It was the group that Joyce loved, the very idea of being part of a group. In her childhood she had been a Brownie, later a Girl Scout and for a while simultaneously a Campfire Girl, also member of a Junior Sodality at church, the 4-H Club, other groups at school and college; and tonight she sat with her feet curled up under her at one end of the sofa, the complete group around her, the television offering its flickering light to the room, and she was back where it had all begun: an “overnight,” with friends. Her hand over her mouth so no one would know, her eyes on the screen without seeing it, her ears ignoring the loping cadence of Koo Davis’ voice, she giggled.
When the tape came to its end—“and they send me home”—the Koo Davis photograph on the screen was replaced by film of an office, where two men stood behind a desk while several photographers snapped their picture and newsmen asked them questions, some extending microphones. A voice said, “In charge of the investigation into the Koo Davis kidnapping is Chief Inspector Cayzer of the Burbank Police. Representing the FBI is Michael Wiskiel, Assistant to the Chief of Station of the Los Angeles office of the FBI.”
“Wiskiel,” Mark said, while an old man in a Stetson said on-screen that they didn’t have much to go on so far. “He had something to do with Watergate.”
“Hush,” said Peter.
The announcer’s off-camera voice had returned: “Agent Wiskiel was asked if the ten named individuals would be released from prison.”
The scene cut from the old man in the Stetson to Wiskiel, a heavyset fortyish man with too much self-conscious actorish good looks. Wiskiel said, “Well, it’s early yet, and frankly I don’t recognize every one
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