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have a few bucks. Do they think he’s a millionaire or something? If they ask for too much money, and if they don’t believe the answer they get, what will they do?
    Koo doesn’t like to think about that. Every time his thoughts bring him this far, he quickly switches to another of his questions; like, for instance, Where am I? Still somewhere in the Greater Los Angeles area, that’s for sure. He estimates he was no more than half an hour in that truck or whatever it was. From the turns,this way and that, when they took him away from Triple S, he’s come to the conclusion they drove first on the Hollywood Freeway and then either the Ventura Freeway west or the Pasadena Freeway east; probably Ventura, out across the Valley. Then at the very end they did some climbing, with a particularly steep part after one fairly long stop. So he’s most likely on an estate somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, on the north slope, overlooking the Valley. And not some cheapjack place either, not with this room next to the pool. Somebody spent money on this layout.
    Why do they want to keep him from identifying this place, yet they don’t care if he sees their faces? And why the fuck would rich people play kidnapper? These clowns operate like they’re at home here, they’re not worried about the owners coming back and interrupting the operation, so they must—
    Unless they killed the owners.
    Time to switch to another question. Like: Who exactly do they deal with, these kidnappers, who do they put the arm on? The network? Chairman Williams and the vice-presidents, that crowd of Easter Island statues? You can’t get blood from stone faces; if Koo knew his businessmen—and he did—Williams wouldn’t pay more than three bucks to get his sister back from Charles Manson.
    But who else was there? Lily? “Hello, we got your husband Koo here, you remember him. He’s for sale.” How much would Lily pay for a living Koo Davis?
    Koo is something of a showbiz oddity, a man who’s been married to the same woman for forty-one years; but that isn’t quite the record it sounds. As he once explained to an interviewer (in an answer cut from the published interview at Koo’s insistence), “You want my formula for a happy marriage? Marry only once, leave town, and never go back.”
    Which is almost the truth. When twenty-two-year-old Koomarried seventeen-year-old Lily Palk, back there in nineteen thirty-six, how could he know he was going to be bigtime any minute? Naturally he had his dreams, every kid has dreams, but there was no reason to believe his dreams were any less bullshit than anybody else’s.
    If an insecure punk kid marries a practical girl, and if three years later the punk is a radio star in New York while the practical girl is a housewife and mother in Syosset, Long Island, the prognosis for the marriage is unlikely to be good: “I won’t be home tonight, honey, I’m staying here in town.” As he commented one time to a gagwriter pal named Mel Wolfe, “I got to put that on a record. Then somebody in the office can call the frau and play it at her. ‘Hi, honey, I won’t be home tonight, I’m staying in town.’ Then a little pause and I say, ‘Well, I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to. Everything okay there?’ Then another little pause and I say, ‘That’s fine.’ One more pause and I say, ‘You, too. Have a good night, honey.’ And meantime I’m in Sardi’s.”
    “Hey, listen,” Mel Wolfe said. “I got a terrific—Feed it to me. Do the record.”
    “Yeah?” Grinning in anticipation, Koo said, “Hi, honey, I won’t be home tonight, I’m staying in town.”
    In a shrill angry falsetto, Mel Wolfe replied, “I went to the doctor today, you bastard, and you gave me the clap ! ”
    “Heh heh,” Koo said, and went on with his script: “Well, I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to. Everything okay there?”
    “The house burned down this afternoon, you prick!”
    “That’s fine.”
    “You’ve got a woman