His car, a maroon Buick Riviera, was a barely restrained beast in his uncertain hands. It lunged from the garage, swayed dangerously as it made the turn out of the driveway, and raced heedlessly down out of the quiet sleeping residential hills of Sherman Oaks. In an all-night taco joint on Ventura Boulevard Mike got a rotten cup of coffee to go, and up on the Freeway heading east he gradually came awake.
It had been a strange experience earlier tonight, listening to that Koo Davis tape. Mike was just old enough to remember Koo Davis as a regular weekly voice on the radio, so listening to that tape had been for him an eerie double-layered experience in which present drama and past comedy, his own middle-aged self sitting there in that Burbank office and his past self as a skinny child sprawled on the living room carpet in his parents’ home in Troy, New York, had combined like a movie montage in his emotional reactions. He’d found himself smiling, ready to chuckle, ready to laugh out loud, half expecting to hear the old regulars from that distant radio program—the sharp-tongued nasal-voiced script girl constantly correcting Koo’s grammar or pronunciation, the get-rich-quick brother-in-law with the voice like mashed potatoes and the endless series of goofy inventions and dumb money-making schemes, the bad-tempered neighbor with the weirdly roaring power mower—and it had been very hard to replace those voices (and his own childhood idea of what those people must look like) with the faces and the unfunniness and the grim intentions of the Identikit girl and the two sullen young men.
And now something else had happened; but what? “We’ve heard from them again,” was all Jock Cayzer had said on the phone.
When Mike arrived the office contained, in addition to Jock and Lynsey Rayne, an elderly stoop-shouldered man with a Sigmund Freud goatee, and another agent from the local Bureau Headquarters, Dave Kerman. Lynsey Rayne, who had been here all along, was apparently prepared to stay until Koo Davis was released; surely service above and beyond the call of an actor’s agent. She was gaunt and hollow-eyed by now, but showed no sign of weakening resolve.
Was there something sexual between this woman and Koo Davis? Of course, Davis was an old man and Lynsey Rayne probably wasn’t much over forty, but even an old man likes to have a woman around, and the real Mrs. Davis was more than three thousand miles away. Lynsey Rayne wasn’t behaving like a simple business associate, but did that necessarily mean it was sex? Somehow the style of her reaction wasn’t like the tenterhooks fear of a loved one. She was more like...like an intensely involved nurse, like the competent older sister in a parentless household, or (farther afield, maybe ridiculous) like the bomber squadron commander in World War Two movies, waiting by the landing field to see how many of his “boys” have made it “home.”
Jock Cayzer introduced the dapper bearded man. He was Doctor Stephen Answin, Koo Davis’ personal physician. “I came as quickly as I could,” the doctor said. He had a habit of ducking his head, as though apologetic, shooting quick glances over the tops of his spectacles, but the hesitant self-conscious manner was belied by his appearance; the goatee was as neat as a freshly clipped hedge, and his blue cashmere suit, raw silk ascot and gleaming pointed-toe shoes (all crying out their origin in male boutiques along Camden or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills) suggested a rather dandyish self-assurance.
“The kidnapper’s due to call back soon,” Jock said, looking at his watch.
Mike said, “Call back? You’ve got an appointment?”
“To talk to the doctor. Come listen.”
They trooped into the workroom, where all incoming calls were being put on tape. An FBI technician named Menaged was there, with the earlier conversation already cued up. He played it, and Mike listened to the voices.
Receptionist: “Seven seven hundred.”
Caller (cold emotionless male voice, in something of a hurry): “This the Koo Davis number?”
Receptionist: “Yes, sir.”
Caller: “Davis is sick.”
Receptionist: “Beg pardon?”
Caller: “You’ve got two minutes on this call, then I hang up. We checked Davis a while ago, and he’s all of a sudden in bad shape. We didn’t hurt him, but he’s sick. He’s throwing up, sweating, can’t move. He’s muttering something about pills in a dressing room. Is he on some kind of maintenance medicine?”
Receptionist: “Sir, I couldn’t possibly—”
Caller: “Not you. This is going on tape, right? Get Davis’ doctor, get those pills if he’s got pills. I’ll call back at two o’clock.”
Receptionist: “I’m not sure I can—Hello? Hello?”
The technician switched it off, saying, “He’d hung up by then.”
Mike checked his watch, and it was not ten minutes before two. Turning to the doctor, he said, “Does that make sense to you?”
“I’m afraid it does, yes.”
“Davis is on some kind of medicine? What does he have?”
“It isn’t that simple,” the doctor said. Between his assured appearance and his bashful manner it was hard to get a coherent reading on the man, but Mike suspected in him a kind of embarrassment. Why?
The doctor was going on, saying, “If Koo were a diabetic, or had leukemia in remission, something along those lines, it would be much easier to define for you what the problem is. Let me explain; Koo Davis is not a young man. He’s sixty-three, but he refuses to behave as though he were. He pushes himself far too hard, and he doesn’t want to be hampered by illness in any way. He was medically unfit during the Second World War, you know, and one of his problems was with his digestion. He takes— I admit he takes a great deal of medicine. Half the things I’ve prescribed are to counteract the side-effects of some of the other things. He’s lived that way for years, and so long as he has his medicines he can continue in the same fashion for many years more. But it has been a long long time since his stomach, his liver, his intestines, have been asked to deal with his food, for instance, in a completely natural way. They can’t do it. Until he gets his medication, he won’t be able to eat a thing, he won’t be able to sleep or have proper elimination or even breathe without difficulty. If he doesn’t receive his medicines, and I would say proper medical care, within the next several hours, the consequences could be very serious.”
All of which was said with the doctor’s combination of confidence and sheepishness, though it did seem to Mike that a true sense of unease came through the mixture. As perhaps it should; what the doctor was saying was that Koo Davis was a prescription junkie, a man hooked on preventive medicines, who simply couldn’t live his normal life without them.
All of which had been created by this doctor, or by several doctors; or created by Davis with their acquiescence. There was undoubtedly some ethical ambivalence in the position in which Doctor Answin now found himself. “These consequences,” Mike said, not particularly interested in smoothing things for the doctor, “how serious could they be?”
“He won’t live.” The doctor blinked behind his stylish spectacles, shrugged his shoulders, spread well-washed hands crosshatched with thick black hairs. “Within a week, possibly a bit more, he would simply die, from starvation, from shock, from any number of complications and contributing factors. In less time than that, in say two days, there could be irretrievable damage. Koo’s health is a very delicate balance, between what his body can stand and what he insists on doing. We have made it possible for him to exceed his body’s potential for years; this event could be extremely damaging.”