The Further Adventures of The Joker (24 page)

Boonie gave me his hillbilly grin. “Yeah, y’all can see me hang out my dirty linen then.
I
ain’t got no hangups about talkin’ about my miserable upbringin’ and poor but honest family.”

“Yeah,” I said, pausing at the door. “Tell us again about how you slept on bare mattresses with burlap for a cover . . . too poor to buy sheets or blankets.”

Boonie grinned more broadly. “Shee-it. We had sheets. But they was cut full a holes ’cause of all the Klan meetin’s we had to go to.”

I shook my head. “See you tomorrow, Bruce. I’ll watch
you
bomb, my cracker friend.”

Instead, I watched Boonie die.

We were uptown, at the ritzy
Chez
Harpo, and the place was crawling with cops. We were only a day away from the selection deadline for the joke-off, and there must have been forty comics competing for mike time that night. Bruce didn’t survive the auditions for
Chez,
but he was there that night. So were about fifty cops: on the roof, backstage, in the audience, in uniform out front, and monitoring things from a trailer command center out back.

The mayor and the commissioner of police . . . what’s-his-name . . . Gordon, had decided that the Joker comedy killings were making Gotham look bad. Whatever the reason for the security, I didn’t see any way the Joker could get through it.

He did.

Boonie had them laughing. He was riding the wave real well, letting the laughter build and then punching it up higher, pausing at just the right spots, using the silences, when suddenly one of the silences stretched too far. The audience paused to breathe, waiting for the next funny bit.

Boonie started smiling as if he had just thought of something funnier than the story he’d planned to tell. The audience tittered in anticipation. Boonie’s smile grew wider. His lips stretched back over his rear teeth. Some of the audience’s laughter fell away, turned to gasps.

Boonie’s color drained until his sunburned Georgia look gave way to a deathly pallor, grew paler still—by the time people started screaming, Boonie’s complexion was the kind of white a corpse might show after a week in the water. His lips were stretched from ear to ear as if someone had pulled his cheeks back with meat hooks.

Boonie dropped the mike, gurgled something, and collapsed.

The cops went nuts. Bruce was the first one to Boonie, but I was there a second later. My friend was dead, already cooling to the touch.

Bruce pounded his fist on his knee. “Damn, damn, damn . . .”

“What?” I said. “How?”

Bruce touched Boonie’s neck where the tiniest dart was visible, barely larger than a mosquito. “Joker Venom. He’s used it for years. Keeps altering the formula so no antidote works. Hardly elegant, but very effective. A message.”

The cops were sealing all exits, searching the premises, frisking patrons, shouting orders.

Bruce shook his head. “The Joker’s gone by now. Probably disguised as a police officer.”

I was crying. I couldn’t help it. “But why Boonie? Why him?” I spread my jacket over my friend’s face to hide the terrible rictus. “I mean, he wasn’t the best comic tonight. Certainly not the worst. Why’d that bastard choose
him?”

Bruce seemed elsewhere—not in shock like the rest of us, merely—elsewhere. “I thought the Joker might be eliminating competitors,” he said, almost speaking to himself, “but now I know it’s something else.”

I wiped away tears with the back of my hand. “What, dammit? Is he trying to sabotage the joke-off?”

“No. Definitely not.”

Paramedics and cops had shoved through and pushed Bruce and me away from Boonie. They worked fast, tossing IVs, syringe cases, and technical terms around . . . but Boonie stayed dead.

I stood up and looked out over the heads of the crowd. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m going to enter that damn contest and win. Win for Boonie and for me. No way that this homicidal asshole is going to scare us away.”

“You’re right,” said Bruce. “We do have to be in it. Both of us. And we will.”

The word came just like a summons from the Almighty. Uncle Louis would have loved it. He always wanted me to be someone genuinely significant—like an African Methodist preacher-man. Becoming a fast-track management clone at Burger Biggie was sort of okay—but a no-account stand-up comic didn’t cut it.

Anyhow, the message from God arrived via Gotham Bonded Messenger. No bicycle delivery here—nosirree. I was just heading out of my apartment to cover the night shift for an asshole buddy whose plane had gotten stranded in Cleveland when he’d gone home to see his father. Dad had started that long day’s journey into kidney cancer . . . Anyhow, I saw the sparkling silver BMW pull up to the curb. I figured it had to be a crack dealer, so I ignored it.

Naturally I was surprised when a hunched-over guy in a blue uniform got out and said directly to me. “You would be Mr. Tulley?”

I resisted the impulse to say something like, “Why yes, Mr. Stanley?” and just nodded my head.

The old guy crabbed up to me and handed over an envelope. Then he produced a smoky-gray Lucite clipboard and said, “Sign here.” No “please.”

What the heck. I signed. Could be there was an inheritance, though far as I knew, nobody in the family had died. Maybe it was a desperate creditor. I checked the return address. Just a box number in Clovertide, up on the north side.

I shrugged and ran my right index fingernail under the flap. The folded letter felt like vellum. I straightened it, smoothed the creases, and read the calligraphy. Classy stuff. At first I didn’t register what it was I was seeing on that page. Then I let out a whoop that probably triggered all the car alarms on the block and raised at least a half-dozen of my more gris-gris—conscious dead kinfolk.

I was in. Damn. How about that. But I was supposed to report to some address up on the north side for an orientation. Tonight.

Faulkner said that when it came to sacrifice for writers, a good novel was worth any number of little old ladies. I figured I could extend that to artists of all kinds, so I kept it in mind when I called my understaffed B.B. and told the woman who answered that I was going to be a no-show tonight.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “You sick?”

“Nope,” I said. “I just got a formal notice saying I’m going to be competing in the big joke-off, the Gotham City Laughs of Tomorrow contest, the golden path to the Johnny Carson Show. There’s a heavy-duty meeting tonight.”

“Right,” she said, clearly sounding as if she didn’t believe the tone of my voice, much less a word I was saying. “Get in when you can, Pete. We really need you. Listen, take something, get better fast.” She clicked off the line.

Yeah, right. I’d
better
get better fast. The joke-off was only three days away. And me, I was going to be there. Son of a bitch. I started humming along with the tune on the oldies station I’d left on as a burglar deterrent: “Laugh, laugh, I thought I’d die . . .”

I took the train north and got off at a station just a little different than my usual stop. This one had spotless tile—and no graffiti—with tasteful turquoise accent stripes. Maybe the stations downtown did, too, but you would never notice for the krylon street art. When I got on the T-local at the Sprang Street station, I’d seen a jagged scream painted on the wall in Day-Glo purple: JOKER LIVES. Someone else had sprayed an
X
over the second word and added LAUGHS in bright scarlet.

The address on the invite was two blocks west. This was a business neighborhood, lots of low office blocks in brick and glass. It was getting dark now. I hardly saw anybody who looked like me—hell, there was hardly anybody at all on the street. They’d probably all headed home at five to the ’burbs.

My destination was a nondescript office tower that disappeared somewhere up there in the darkness. There weren’t any lit windows. When I walked past the alley that bordered one side, I caught a glimpse of a familiar vehicle—A European stretch limo parked in the back.

Bruce was here, too? I realized I was phrasing it in my head as a question. I hadn’t seen him perform since Boonie bought the farm, but I couldn’t imagine his improving sufficiently to make any kind of final cut for anything. I mean, he was a nice guy and he had heart, but Jesus what a stiff.

“I think I owe this to you, Pete.” The deep baritone came from the darkness behind my left shoulder. I jumped. A reassuring hand came down, the steel fingers wrapping around my scapula. I wasn’t reassured. “You taught me some first-rate lessons.”

“Holy shit!” I said. I knew who was there. “You scared the crap out of me.”

“I don’t recall you being so scatological in your delivery,” said Bruce. I could hear the trace of a smile in his voice. I turned and looked at him. He was dressed somberly in dark wool trousers and a black turtleneck. More like his namesake, it suddenly occurred to me. Good for him. Anything beat that Bozo zoot-suit he’d boasted the first time I’d seen him bomb. “Congratulations on jumping the final hurdle to the joke-off.”

“You, too,” I said. He put out his hand and I took it. Again, I felt like I was sticking my fingers in a walnut crusher. “Do you know what we’re getting tonight?”

Bruce shook his head and motioned toward the dark building with the folded letter in his left hand. “I know only as much as you do.”

Both of us started walking toward the front door. I realized there was a light inside, the dim glow from a gang of security monitors behind a lobby desk. The glass door opened as we approached. There were two big guys in rent-a-cop uniforms waiting for us. Both had mean eyes, though they each smiled. “Mr. Tulley? Mr., ah, Bruce?” said the bigger of the pair. At our nods, the other guy checked his clipboard and made marks. Obviously they’d been well-briefed. “Please take the elevator on the left and go up to the thirtieth floor. You both want room one-oh-one.”

Bruce cocked his head. “Why is room one-oh-one on the thirtieth floor?”

The first guard shrugged. “I didn’t set up the numbering system. I just know which place you’re supposed to go.

“I was just wondering.”

“You two are the last,” said the second guard. “You better hurry. Mr. Carson’s waiting.”

We got in the elevator and punched thirty. As the doors slid shut, I said to Bruce, “Something significant about room one-oh-one?”

“Aside from the fact one wouldn’t expect it to be on the thirtieth floor, it’s also the designation of the room in
1984
where prisoners encounter the thing they fear most.”

“Swell,” I said. The elevator car suddenly seemed smaller, more claustrophobic.

Actually, room 101 turned out to be a respectably sized suite that didn’t seem sinister at all. Nearly a dozen and a half comics were there, all ones I knew and a few I was friends with. Then there was Johnny. It was kind of weird seeing him without Ed or Doc. He was surrounded with four or five harried-looking aides. He was taller than I expected, but what can you expect when you’ve only seen someone on a nineteen-inch tube? I guess maybe I was expecting him to be nattily dressed in an Armani. Nope. He was wearing a perfectly tailored suit that I was pretty sure was from his own line. I couldn’t be positive because I wasn’t in that shopping bracket, but I figured Johnny wouldn’t be disloyal to his own label.

One of his assistants raised his voice and said, “If you’ll all find a seat, Mr. Carson would like to have a few words with you.”

I sat on a leather-upholstered couch with Bruce on one side of me, Diana Mulhollen on the other. She’s such a sweet kid. I was glad she’d made the final cut. As long as I still won.

Johnny got up in front of us and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’ll keep this short. You’re all here because you’ve been selected from among all of Gotham City’s considerable ranks of the comically gifted.” He grinned. “You’re all among that select group of folks who end up going to parties that have been primed by some friend who told everybody else there, ‘Hey, you’ve got to talk to so-and-so, he’s the funniest guy you’ll ever meet.’ So what happens? You get there and everyone’s looking at you expectantly, waiting for you to knock ’em dead.” We smiled. Some of us snickered. Johnny smiled back and continued, “It’s a tough life, being funny. It’s our hope that the Gotham City Laughs of Tomorrow competition will make that life easier for some of you.”

He went on to talk about the charities that would benefit, and about the live national TV hookup that would carry the proceedings across all America. Then he got to what I suspected most of us really wanted to hear about.

“The winner will be on the show the following week. We’ll fly you out to Burbank and put you up like a king—or queen. And if that works out . . .” Johnny grinned and spread his hands beneficently. “There’s no telling where you’ll go. This will be the break of a lifetime.”

I sensed eighteen indrawn breaths being held. Well, maybe seventeen, including mine. I’d glanced aside at Bruce. He didn’t seem quite as mesmerized as the rest of us.

“My associates,” said Johnny, “will give you full details about your time leading up to the competition. There will be,” he added, “no formal rehearsals as such. The director will want to block out times with you, but you won’t deliver your material.” Diane and I exchanged glances. “The idea is to keep your humor as fresh as you can, as topical as you wish. Besides, most of you are already familiar with your fellow comics’ routines.”

Someone laughed appreciatively. There were smiles.

The rest was pretty much pro forma, with the exception of a revelation that stirred some enthusiasm. Robin Williams would make a special appearance at the beginning of the show. Very brief, but very funny, Johnny said. That was great. I couldn’t think of anyone living I would rather have as a comedy role model.

Johnny asked for questions. There weren’t many. Then he excused himself and turned us over to his aides, who passed out laminated photo passes and rehearsal schedules. It turned out the telecast was originating from the Aladdin Theater, the very same place where Tiffany was drowned in
flop sweat.

That didn’t make anybody happy. Fast Eddie Teck brought it up. Johnny suggested we all just consider the competition a dedicatory memorial to Tiffany, George Marlin, Boonie, and the others in our little community who had died as the butts of the Joker’s sadistic jokes.