Dead Mans Hand

3:00 P.M.

ACE-OF-SPADES KILLER SLAYS JOKERTOWN BARKEEP, the Post screamed.

The Jokertown Cry was less generic. CHRYSALIS MURDERED, it said beside a two-column picture. The Cry was the only paper in the city that regularly ran photographs of jokers.

JOKERS DESCEND ON ATLANTA AS DEMOCRATS CONVENE, said the front page of the Times. Thousands of them had headed south in support of Senator Gregg Hartma

Jay usually ranked politicians right alongside used-car salesmen, pimps, and the guy who invented pay toilets, but Hartma

The political bullshit took up the whole front page; he couldn't find any mention of Chrysalis anywhere. Knowing the Times, Jay figured tomorrow's edition would have a brief obit and that'd be it. Brutal joker murders weren't the kind of news that's fit to print. That made Jay angriest of all. "How do you know when a joker's been dead about three days?" the news vendor asked him. His voice was flat and lifeless, the voice of a man grimly going through a ritual that had lost its meaning. Jay looked up from the headlines. Jube Benson had been a fixture on the corners of Hester Street and the Bowery for as long as there had been a Jokertown. Walrus, they called him. He was a joker himself, three hundred pounds of greasy blue-black flesh, big curved tusks at the corners of his mouth, a broad domed skull covered with tufts of stiff red hair. Jube's wardrobe seemed to consist exclusively of Hawaiian shirts. This afternoon he was wearing a magenta item in a tasteful pineapple-and-banana print. Jay wondered what Hiram would say.

Jube knew more joker jokes than anyone else in Jokertown, but this time Jay had the punch line. "He smells a lot better," he said wearily. "That one's older than your hat, Walrus." Jube took the battered porkpie hat off his head and turned it over self-consciously in his thick, three-fingered hands. "I never made her laugh," he said. "All those years, I came by the Palace every night, always with a new joke. I never got a single laugh out of her."

"She didn't think being a joker was very fu

"Word gets around quick," Jay said.

"It gets around quick," Jube agreed.

"She phoned me last night," Jay told him. "She wanted to take me on as a bodyguard. I asked her how long and she couldn't tell me. Maybe she wouldn't tell me. I asked her what she was scared of. She laughed it off and said I'd found her out, it was just a ruse, she was really hot for my body. That was when I realized how shaky she was. She was trying her damnedest to sound wry and cool and British, like nothing was wrong, but her accent kept slipping. Something had frightened her badly. I want to know what, Jube."

"All I know is what I read in the papers," Jube said. Jay just gave him a look. As long as Chrysalis had been brokering information, the Walrus had been one of her chief snitches. All day long Jube stood in his kiosk, watching and listening, joking and gossiping with everyone who stopped to buy a paper. "C'mon," Jay said impatiently.

Jube glanced nervously up and down the street. No one was near them. "Not here," the fat joker said. "Let me close up. We'll go to my place."

Bre

A bright yellow crime-scene ribbon roped off the Palace's canopied entrance. The crowd gathered before it was gossipingmostly wildly and inaccurately-about the Crystal Palace and its mysterious proprietress. Newsies and street merchants were working the crowd along with the pickpocket, who suddenly turned with the sixth sense of the often-hunted and looked right at Bre

Bre

"Hello, Mr. Y," he murmured.

Bre

"Pretty awful, what happened, Mr. Y," he offered in his quiet, deferential ma

Bre

Tripod shrugged. It was a peculiar gesture for a man who had no arms.

"Maybe, Mr. Y, but it wasn't done in your style."

"How do you know how she was killed?"

"Man over there," Tripod said, gesturing at a derelict who sat on the curb by a hotdog cart, "said he saw her body when they brung her out to the coroners wagon."

Bre

"I was in the back when they brung her out. I was there all right. I got a nice place to sleep right by the dumpster and t the ambulance woke me up. I was scared. I didn't know what all the fuss was about, but pretty soon they brung her out. I could see it was Chrysalis. I seen her a lot of times and it was her. She was dead, all right." He lowered his voice and leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially to his two dozen or so listeners. "Her head was squashed. Just squashed. If it weren't for her invisible skin, you couldn't tell who it was. Squashed, just like a watermelon dropped from a ten-story building." He nodded with some satisfaction at his simile. "I was there all right. I saw her when they brung her out…"

Bre

Bre

Chrysalis had been killed by someone-an ace strong enough to smash her utterly. That was at least a place to start an investigation. But Bre