2 The Midnight Show Murders by Al Roker

Author:Al Roker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780440339786
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter

TWENTY-EIGHT

The hour ended not with a bang or even a whimper. More like a thud.

Specifically, it ended with Gibby’s decision to replace the final joke he’d told at rehearsal with one about a guy whose golfing partner drops dead from a heart attack on the twelfth hole. You probably remember it. Back at the clubhouse, somebody asks him what happened after that. “Not much,” he replies. “From there on in, it was pretty much the same. Hit the ball, drag Charlie. Hit the ball, drag Charlie.” In itself, a good joke. Old but good. It would probably have prompted a wave of laughter at almost any time other than immediately following a discussion involving the death of the show’s previous host.

Oblivious to his lapse in sensitivity, Gibby was thrown off cue by the lack of audience response. Still, he gamely waved the show’s few lingering participants back onstage for a group goodbye. Then he performed what he hoped would become his under-the-credits signature, a standing backflip, ending with a semi-grotesque little-boy grin and a wiggling-fingers wave.

As soon as the camera’s red light went off, he rushed to the wings. I had him pegged as the kind of despotic twit who’d start blaming everyone in sight for the shambles he himself had made of his first show. Instead, he brushed past us and went directly to his dressing room without a word.

Marcus Oliphant turned to me with a surprised look on his pan-caked face. “Did you see that?”

I nodded.

What we had both seen was Gibby Lewis, not only looking like an unhappy baby but crying like one.

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