ClownFellas (9 page)

When Vinnie arrived at the Rainbow Gardens clown brothel, Miss Tina was waiting outside.

“What took you so long?” she yelled at him.

A crowd of clown girls and their customers filled the sidewalk, staring into the windows of the historic downtown parlor.

“I just got your call,” he said. “Is he still in there?”

She didn't have to answer that question. He could hear Jimmy's voice echo through the building as he yelled unintelligible nonsense at nobody in particular.

“What do you think?” she replied.

Miss Tina was a majestic clown. Statuesque. Her emerald-green hair styled into a tall beehive, her long eyelashes stretched all the way up her forehead, her lips like shiny ropes of red licorice. She'd been the madam at the brothel long before Vinnie was in the clowning business. And although she was in her late fifties, she was still drop-dead sexy.

She said, “The son of a bitch has gone crazy. You've got to get him out of there.”

“I'll handle it,” Vinnie said, stepping through the crowd of half-naked women.

The madam stayed where she was, smoking a long clove cigarette, trying to keep her cool around her employees. “And while you're at it, get rid of the body, too.”

“What body?”

But he didn't hear a response. The sound of an air horn blast drowned out her voice, shattering the windows and sending shards of glass over the crowd. Vinnie crouched down as he went in.

“Step right up, folks! Welcome to the Bozo Family circus!” Jimmy screamed as Vinnie Blue Nose crept into the brothel's lobby.

The place was a mess. Broken bottles were all over the floor. Chairs were overturned. A frightened clown girl hid beneath one of the tables as the mad clown shot up the place. When she caught sight of Vinnie, she begged him for help with her eyes.

“I've got a joke for you, boys and girls!”

Jimmy poured a bottle of whiskey down his throat, then smashed it against the floor. He pointed his 12-gauge air horn at the bar and fired, blasting a hole through the front.

“What's blue and red and running for his fucking life?”

When Jimmy looked through the hole, he saw a cowering blue-haired bartender. The man cried out when he saw Jimmy's sinister smile beaming back at him.

“Give up?” Jimmy laughed. “It's John, the asshole who had the nerve to tell me I had too much to drink!”

As the bartender ran for the door, Jimmy fired his air horn. The blast went over the bartender's head, shattering a row of vodka bottles. Jimmy was thrown off balance and he fell onto his back, blasting a hole in the ceiling.

Plaster rained down on Vinnie's blue suit as he stepped forward.

“What the hell's wrong with you, Jimmy?” he asked, lighting a blueberry cigarette. “Yer a capo now, for chrissake.”

When Jimmy saw his old boss, he chuckled and pointed his air horn at him while still lying on his back. “You! I've got some words for you, Blue Nose!”

Vinnie kicked the air horn out of his hands.

“You're a disgrace, you know that?” Vinnie said, picking up the weapon and shoving it in the back of his pants.

He looked over at the clown girl hiding beneath the table and nodded at her to leave. She hesitated only for a second before she bolted for the door.

“Don't talk to me like that,” Jimmy moaned, getting to his knees. “You think you're better than me, don't you? You think you're better than everyone.”

“And you don't?”

Jimmy staggered to his feet. “I'm going to wipe that smug look off your face.”

Vinnie grabbed a bucket of ice from the bar and dumped it down the back of Jimmy's collar.

“What the hell, asshole?” Jimmy cried as the freezing water hit his white clown flesh.

“You need to sober up,” Vinnie said. “The cops will probably be here any minute.”

The clown shook the ice out of his suit. “I don't have to do jack.”

At first, Vinnie didn't see the body Miss Tina was talking about. He saw the blood sprayed across the floor, but no corpse. He had to follow the blood trail around to the back of a booth to find the poor sap crinkled up like an old newspaper under a mound of broken furniture.

“What happened here?” Vinnie asked.

Jimmy Bozo looked over and snorted. “He pissed me off.”

That's what he always said whenever he killed somebody for no reason.

“So you murdered him?”

“He was disrespecting me. What do you think I'm going to do, just take it like some kind of vanilla fruitcake?”

Jimmy turned away and took a hit of laughy-gas.

“Maybe if you were a more respectable person then people wouldn't disrespect you so much. This is the third time this year you pulled this shit.”

Vinnie turned the body over. The guy's face was completely obliterated by an air horn blast. He went into his wallet and pulled out an ID. When Vinnie read the name, the cigarette dropped from his lips.

“Shit…,” Vinnie said. “You damn idiot, Jimmy…”

The clown prince looked up at Blue Nose. “What?”

Vinnie shook his head. “You really messed up this time.”

Jimmy staggered forward. “What?”

“Don't you know who this is? You just killed Pierre Beaumont.”

“So?” Jimmy giggled. The laughy-gas was kicking in.

“So there's going to be war if Le Mystère finds out about this.”

“He's not in Le Mystère. The prick isn't even a clown.”

“But he's still related. His uncle is a damn captain. His cousins are the Juggler Brothers.”

Jimmy froze. Even after another hit of laughy-gas, the smile disappeared from his face.

“Yeah,
those
Juggler Brothers. And if they find out you killed their cousin, they're coming after you.”

As he went silent, Vinnie wondered if the clown prince finally understood the severity of the situation. The Juggler Brothers were the most deadly soldiers in the French clown family. With their cousin dead, they would stop at nothing to get revenge. And Vinnie had no idea if he would be capable of protecting the sorry excuse for a Bozo.

“We have to get rid of the body,” Vinnie said. “Nobody can find out you were the one who killed him.”

Jimmy was sobering up fast. “But what about all the witnesses?”

“Despite the damage you caused, Miss Tina and her girls are loyal to your father. They're not going to say anything. Hopefully, none of their other customers was from the French side of town.”

As the two clowns moved the body, taking it out the back to put it into the trunk of Jimmy's clown car, they didn't see the man watching them from the shadows on the second-floor balcony. Pierre Beaumont hadn't come alone that night. His friend was upstairs, having some fun with one of Miss Tina's girls, when Pierre got into the fight with Jimmy Bozo. He was already on the phone with Pierre's cousins by the time Vinnie got there. The Juggler Brothers were on their way.

The first day Jimmy Bozo joined the Blue Nose crew, there was already trouble. Jimmy was born a clown and didn't respect anyone who wasn't purebred, as he called it. Half clowns and humans who became clowns later in life by taking Happy Juice to alter their DNA were considered lesser by his standards. But Vinnie and his crew didn't come from clown families. They had to earn their clownship. They had to prove they were worthy of wearing the nose.

“But what about your father and Uncle Jojo?” Vinnie Blue Nose asked Jimmy. “They're not purebred. They had to take Happy Juice just like we did. Nobody from their generation was born a clown.”

They were working a birthday party for some senator upstate. Don Bozo owed the politician a favor and so he sent Vinnie's crew in to show his guests some Little Bigtop–style entertainment. A group of Miss Tina's girls were also in attendance as well as some of Buggy Buttons's best comedians. Vinnie, Jimmy Bozo, and Captain Spotty were hanging around the bar outside, keeping an eye on the clown girls as they flirted with the senator's wealthy friends.

“That's different,” Jimmy responded. “They were the
original
clowns. There wasn't any Happy Juice until after they were born.”

“But there wasn't any Happy Juice until after
I
was born, either,” Spotty said. The cockroaches crawling in and out of his sleeves freaked out the passing party guests. “I just took it thirty years later than your parents did.”

Spotty and Vinnie had been ganging up on the clown prince all day, trying to get him to admit that his prejudice wasn't justified. But no matter what they said, Jimmy would not open his mind.

“You see, that's why we're not equals. You didn't grow up as a clown like I did. You weren't a clown as a child. You didn't go through clown puberty. Unless you're a purebred, you have no idea what it's like to be a true clown.”

Jimmy set his drink down on the bar.

“Not even my father understands,” he said.

Then he walked away to join the company of his two purebred associates, Tickles and Spanky. Although he was forced to work under an impure capo, all the guys who worked under Jimmy were born clowns. He made sure of that. And not a single one of them got along with the rest of the Blue Nose crew, even those of a higher rank.

“What the heck are we going to do with that kid?” Captain Spotty asked.

Vinnie looked over at the hobo clown, then back at the untouched drink in his hand.

“We've got to teach him respect,” Vinnie said.

“And how do we do that when he holds us in contempt?”

“He won't listen to us, so we don't
tell
him how to behave. We
show
him. Respond to his immaturity with absolute professionalism. He'll eventually realize that our way makes him money and his way makes him broke.”

“But what about all of the money he gets from his father? Won't he be loaded no matter what?”

“I had his father cut him off.”

“You what?”

Captain Spotty looked back at the clown prince on the other side of the pool. He was wondering why the kid had been in such an irritable mood. It wasn't just because he had to work with impure clowns. It was also because he actually had to
work
instead of living off his father's money as he'd done most of his life.

“I told Bozo that it was the only way I'd let him join my crew,” Vinnie said.

“And he actually agreed?”

Spotty watched Jimmy Bozo and his friends hassling Hats Rizzo across the pool. Rizzo was entertaining party guests, removing his layers of oversized hats to reveal an assortment of colorful fruit-based appetizers, cut into the shape of the senator's head. When Hats wandered too close to the purebred clowns, they taunted him and flicked the appetizers off the top of his hat when he wasn't looking.

Vinnie said, “I convinced the boss it was the only way to turn a spoiled brat into a reputable clown. He had to have his wealth taken away from him so that he'd be motivated to earn. It's the only way I could think of to change the guy.”

As Hats Rizzo walked away, Jimmy Bozo tripped him and the clown fell into the pool with a splash so big it hit several party guests. Rizzo's seven layers off hats fell off and floated on top of the water, along with all the fruit appetizers. The three purebreds laughed at the chubby clown as he swam through the pool. The senator saw it happen and he did not look happy. Jimmy Bozo didn't care.

Captain Spotty said, “So you really think he's going to fit in?”

Rizzo pulled himself out of the pool and walked toward Vinnie and Spotty. He was sopping wet, dripping all over the pavement and holding his soggy hats in his hands with a miserable look on his face.

When Rizzo reached Vinnie and Spotty, he said, “I don't care if he's the boss's son. I'm going to kill that little shit.”

“He'll fit in,” Vinnie said. “Eventually…”

Then Rizzo squeezed water out of his collection of hats, pretending he was wringing Jimmy Bozo's scrawny little neck.

“We need to dump the body on the French side of town,” Vinnie said as he drove Jimmy's clown car into enemy territory. “It has to look like a couple of street clowns took him out. They can't suspect anything else.”

Jimmy snorted a line of glitter, trying to overwhelm the alcohol in his system with a more powerful drug.

“People are going to see us if we go driving on the French side of town,” Jimmy said. “Let's just dump the body and get out of here.”

“We'll take the back roads,” Vinnie said.

The little red car beeped and chugged through the French ghetto, passing hoboes and junkie clowns, unable to avoid their attention. It was obvious Jimmy's car didn't belong there. The French side of Little Bigtop was like a completely different place than Bozo territory. Instead of bright reds and yellows, this area of town was colored with the darkest blues and deepest purples. The architecture was surreal, with black-and-white-striped pillars, ornate doorways, and circular windows revealing expressionless mimelike children in eggplant-colored pajamas.

“We should have paid somebody to do this,” Jimmy said, licking glitter from his fingers.

Vinnie shook his head. “That would've created a loose end.”

They turned down a darker, less populated road.

“Don't worry about it,” Vinnie said. “We'll find a deserted area and drop the body off. We'll make it look like a mugging. It happens all the time here.”

When they found a quiet enough spot, they pulled over. Vinnie waited outside the car for a few minutes, just to make sure it was all clear. Then he had Jimmy help him move the body and stuff it behind a dumpster.

“So we make it look like a mugging?” Jimmy asked.

Vinnie nodded.

Jimmy took the money out of Pierre's wallet and tossed it on the ground next to him. Then he kicked the corpse in the chest.

“What are you doing?” Vinnie asked.

Jimmy kicked the corpse again. Blood exploded from its throat.

“Making it look like a mugging,” Jimmy said.

He continued stomping on the body until its ribs were caved in.

“Why would a mugger break his rib cage?”

Jimmy shrugged. “That's what I've always done when I mugged people.”

“Beating somebody to death for fun and then taking their money afterward is not the same as mugging.”

Jimmy wiped the blood from his size 20 shoe. “It is to me.”

“This is why you're the smallest-earning capo in the family. You're lazy when it comes to details.”

“Oh yeah?” Jimmy asked, raising his voice. “And you think I'd be the top earner if I were more like you?”

“It wouldn't hurt.”

Jimmy raised his voice even louder, loud enough to wake the people in the apartments above. “The only reason I don't earn as much as you is because my crew is small and inexperienced. You have the largest crew in the family. Of course you're going to bring in more money.”

“Keep it down, all right?” Vinnie said, looking up at the apartment windows above them, making sure none of their lights turned on. “We should get going. We can argue on the way home.”

Jimmy pushed him.

“Fuck you, Blue Nose. I'll keep it down when you stop talking to me like I'm an idiot.”

“You're not an idiot,” Vinnie said. “You're a capo. You should act like one.”

“You see what I mean? That's what pisses me off more than anything. You still treat me like I'm your dumb underling.”

“After you were promoted, your father asked me to continue looking out for you. I'm just respecting his wishes. And I'll keep looking out for you for as long as you need looking out for, even after your old man retires and you become the new boss.”

“You think I'll keep you around once I'm boss?”

“Yeah, I do,” Vinnie said. “I believe you'll make a great boss one day. And a great boss doesn't get rid of his prime assets.”

Jimmy snickered. “You're a prime asset?”

“Let's just go,” Vinnie said.

Vinnie was done arguing. He got into the car and started the engine. Jimmy had to follow him inside so his words could be heard.

Jimmy said, “Fuck that. You're no prime asset in my book. You'll be the first thing to go. You can count on that.”