The Comedy is Finished by Donald E. Westlake Page A

introduction, and as Lynsey shook his hand she studied him carefully, needing to understand him; he had suddenly become very important to Koo. The reports she’d gotten on Wiskiel from her calls to friends in Washington, after Cayzer had mentioned his name, had been ambivalent. He’d had something minor to do with Watergate, and had been demoted. He had a reputation as a hotshot, a right-winger, a tough man but not a subtle one. Nothing in his heavy good looks did anything to dispel this impression. Feeling the need to let him know at once that she was not easily dismissible, she said, “You haven’t been out here long, have you?”
    “About a year.” His grin was easy, loose, sensual. “What told you? Not enough tan?”
    “I’m an old friend of Webster’s,” she said, releasing his hand, referring to Wiskiel’s immediate boss, Webster Redburn. “I spoke with him on the phone about an hour ago.”
    A film seemed to settle over Wiskiel’s face, though his expression hardly changed at all; perhaps something faintly mocking entered his smile. “Is that right,” he said, and turned away to gesture at something on the side wall. “I don’t suppose that face means anything to you.”
    “Is she one of them?” Lynsey stepped closer to the drawing, holding her glasses at a tight angle to her face. The sketch showed an anonymous standard type; about thirty, long straight hair parted in the middle, and a plain half-formed slightly worried face, asthough she’d been taken from the oven before ready. “She doesn’t look the part, does she?”
    “That’s why they had her out front. She was the one worked at the studio.”
    “More like a flower child,” Lynsey said. “In fact...” Struck by something, she leaned closer to the drawing, trying to capture the brief impression that had just flashed by. But it was no good; stepping back, releasing her glasses, shaking her head, she said, “No.”
    “Don’t tell me you thought you recognized her.”
    “Not from actually seeing her, no,” Lynsey said. “Not in the flesh. But I thought—For just a second she reminded me of a newspaper photo, or something on television. Was it the anti-war people? Or, you remember the period when they were attacking banks.”
    “Very well,” he said.
    “Could she have been involved in that?”
    He looked at the sketch, something moving behind his eyes, some old battle still not resolved. She turned to gaze again too at that characterless Identikit face, the smooth plain features untouched by experience, the flat expressionless eyes. A flower child, yes; but it’s been winter a long time.
    “She could have been involved in anything,” Wiskiel said.
    Lynsey waited in the office, even though there was nothing happening and Jock Cayzer several times promised to call her the instant they heard anything new. The phone number here had been announced over the radio and television as the place to call “if you have any information on the disappearance of Koo Davis,” so it was likeliest this was the way the kidnappers would make contact. “The minute they call, Ms. Rayne,” Cayzer said, “I’ll let you know.”
    But she wasn’t to be moved. “They’ll call tonight,” she answered, matter-of-fact but determined. “I want to be here, in case they let Koo say anything. I’ll know...how he is, from the way he sounds.”
    During the next two hours the phone did ring from time to time, and Lynsey on each occasion became once more tense, all concentrated eyes and ears, but it was only the usual cranks and clowns. Then, a little before eight-thirty, the next event came, not from the phone but from the workroom next door, where three police officers studying snapshots taken from Koo’s audience suddenly hit paydirt. Two faces had emerged that were not to be found anywhere in the main group photographs. In the darkened workroom they all stood looking at the blown-up slide on the wall, the two strangers clearly visible behind and to