He Who Laughs Last

CH 7: A Death in the Family

The man stood on the meager back deck of his townhome, smoking. He knew it was a bad habit, hell, his wife certainly told him as much, but it was practically tradition at this point. A habit passed down from father to son just as the old wooden pipe used for it was passed. He thought that maybe his son would be the one to break the generational habit. Heh, probably would by default, given that they hadn't seen him in some years at this point. His wife came out, briefly frowning that her husband was smoking, again. He couldn't help that it helped him think. She told him some of his men were at the door, asking for him. The man sighed. He'd hoped to have had a night with his family. Duty always calls at the worst times. He slipped his coat on and prepared himself to head back to the precinct, but when he met his men at the front door, their looks gave him pause. They weren't here to collect him, they were here on business. He knew the look all too well. He'd given it more times than he could count. "No..." His men felt for him. No parent should outlive their child. "Sir, I am so sorry, but your son has been in an accident." James Gordon Sr. crumpled in on himself. His father's and grandfather's and great-grandfather's pipe hit the ground.

The worst week of Jim Gordon's life only got worse from there. His son, who he hadn't seen in years, hadn't even known he was in the city, had been killing people. Lots and lots of people. His son, who bore his name, was probably the worst serial killer in the city's last decade. The commissioner wanted to stay home and mourn his son who was so much more lost than he had thought. The public didn't care. There were investigations into every one of his family, into James himself, and so, so much press. His political rivals paid for smear campaigns against him, the paparazzi hounded him, and all he wanted to do was mourn the loss of his son. He was forced to testify, he was forced to talk to the damned journalists, to lawyers, to PR reps, to all manner of bureaucrats and he hated all of it. He saw the man who his son had pushed, and then dived after, just in passing. He wanted to pity the poor man, scarred horribly and broken inside, but he couldn't make himself not blame him. He knew it wasn't the poor man's fault, but he hated him all the same. The poor guy, whose name no one knew, who could only giggle to himself and stare into nothingness.

It wasn't fair what they were doing to him. Jim knew the people who ran ACE. He'd been trying to get them shut down for ages, but they always seemed to pay all the right people just enough. He knew they were trying to get out of any trouble with this, foisting a bogus charge on a man who couldn't even talk to defend himself. He couldn't interfere with the case, but he did try to pull a few strings to get the man as fair a judge as you could find in Gotham. He deserved that much, at least. The strange man had still been sent to Arkham, that horrible lunatic asylum, whose experts had told him his son had some minor chemical imbalances that should sort themselves out with puberty. His son who was now dead. Jim could barely bear it.

His men kept him updated on how everything went with the investigation. He might not be able to work with them on the case himself, but that wouldn't keep him from keeping up with it. He was still the commissioner, after all. Despite how much he disliked the political aspect of the job. He often thought that he'd have much rather stayed as chief of police than have accepted the rank of commissioner, but he knew the people of this city. He knew her elected officials. He didn't trust anyone else to do the job of directing the entire police force of Gotham, and he wasn't about to have some corrupt official or another trying to tell him which laws he should ignore and for whom. That was beside the point, though. As the commissioner, he could very well insert himself into the daily goings-on of the force, and there were very few who could try to force him to do otherwise. And that slimeball Cobblepot didn't have the spine, nerve, or guts to force him to do anything, even as mayor. Barely a few months into his term and no one respected him. Jim wondered how he'd managed to make it anywhere in the ruthless city, let alone rise so high through the mob that he could force his way into politics. Because that was what he had done. Hell, Gordon would be surprised if nearly any mayor this city'd ever had had been unaffiliated.

Anyways. The investigation was a complete screwup from the moment it had started. ACE paid people at the hospital to have the laughing man's things burned, completely ruining forensic's chances at figuring out what he had fallen into. And of course they'd dumped the vat the guy had fallen into. Dangerous material, they'd said. Of course.

The detectives barely were able to get a half melted company ID card out of the ashes of the guy's stuff and were promptly told by the company that it was fake and they had no record of him on file. That last part had been true, but for a whole other slew of reasons than general corruption. The detectives were able to pull an address from it, though, and got a warrant all too easily after suspicious delays to search it. Jim once again expected ACE to have had a hand in that. There they found a variety of company secrets that made very little sense that a janitor with practically no security clearance could have gotten his hands on, and, presto, ACE had grounds for a charge. Add that onto the fact that the man supposedly did not work for them, and the fact that a fine, upstanding worker such as James Gordon jr had an instrumental part in bringing down such a foul company spy, and they had a just about watertight case. Certainly with the judicial system of Gotham, they did, anyways.

Only issue with that was that, according to their files, half the people who worked there didn't work there, they never bought half the chemicals they worked with, and their finances had more holes in it than his patrol cars had by the end of any given week. The source of the filing swiss cheese was probably the easiest part of the whole deal, the site foreman seemingly forgetting what he was doing in the middle of talking to the detectives and walking over to shred the files he was in the process of handing them. They'd managed to wrangle the files away from him, though one received a broken nose in the process. This foreman was a very stout man.

A very stout man with early onset dementia, according to the doctors who checked him out. Just about every time he would forget what he was doing and had a file in hand, he would apparently remember his boss had told him he needed to shred some files. Because of course. So, with that, the Mystery of the Practically Empty Filing Cabinets solved, now they had no way of knowing if nearly anyone there had been employed there, let alone this one specific guy. It also turned out a large portion of ACE's workers had some kind of mental health problem, and some tests resulted in a veritable cocktail of fumes filling the entire plant. Mystery of the Conveniently Forgetful Foreman solved. And when his son's apartment was checked out, grisly scene that it was, Jim had seen the pictures, another Mystery was removed from the growing pile. Immediately to be replaced by the Mystery of Why Did James Jump After the Guy? And judging that his son's brains were turned into goo when he hit the concrete, not one they would solve. Jim was tired of the whole ordeal.

And now, months later, the guy has broken out of Arkham, killing a guy on his way out, and another guy immediately after, with several injuries in a Walmart pointing to the same guy, only now armed with a bat. Terrific.