Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (12 page)

I wanted to kid myself, but no dice. Granted, she had married a rabbit, and I had to be better than that, but no way could I ever picture myself a winner in this girl’s romantic sweepstakes. She wanted something else from me, I didn’t have to wait long to find out what.

“Since you’re going to keep pursuing this case anyway,” she purred, “there’s a favor you might be able to do for me.”

“Name it,” I said, surprised at how hard I found it to talk without gasping.

“During my marriage to Roger, the two of us once bought an antique at auction. I always had a special fondness for it. Roger told me to take it with me when I left, but I forgot it. I would like very much to retrieve it before the courts dispose of Roger’s personal belongings. I asked the police about it, but they told me there was no such object in the house. I wonder, if you should come across it during your investigation, could you see that I get it? It has a great deal of sentimental value to me.”

“What is this object?” I asked, although I already had a pretty fair idea what her answer would be.

“Nothing particularly valuable. An antique teakettle. Roger kept it on the stove in his kitchen.” “Sounds simple enough. I’ll see what I can do.” “I would appreciate it. A great deal.” To show me just how much a great deal could be, she kissed me full on the lips. She tasted of rose petals and honey. Her tongue caressed mine like a cool breeze on a steamy night.

She let me go and stepped back from me with a self-satisfied smile on her face that told me she thought she had my number.

And I have a hunch the lustful smirk on my face told her she was absolutely right.

Whatever that teakettle turned out to be, I knew who had first dibs on it in my book.

I went back to my office and let my bottom desk drawer buy me a drink.

On the other side of the wall, I could hear my next-door neighbor, an accountant with thick glasses, clickety-clacking his adding machine. I envied the guy. Must be nice to have a job where everything added up. Rarely see it in my line of work.

For instance, Jessica Rabbit could easily have had her pick of any human guy she wanted. Yet she ran off and married a nobody ‘toon rabbit. Why? To get his teakettle? Hardly seemed likely. She could have spent one night with him, or even just stroked his nose, and he’d have given her his teakettle plus his house and all his money to boot.

And what about that teakettle? What made it so important? Who had it,- and how did they get it?

I sank a well into my bottom drawer, and struck more bourbon.

I opened my closet door and flipped on the old black and white TV set I keep in there out of sight of clients.

There was a football game on I wanted to catch, the Rams against the Bears with the Rams trying something new, a ‘toon gorilla as linebacker. Nothing particularly unusual about that. Last statistics I saw, nearly seventy-five percent of all pro players were ‘toons. According to some people, it’s ruined the game, made it not so much football as barnyard brawling.

Anyway, what makes this new Rams player different is that she’s not only a ‘toon, she’s also a female, the first woman to break into the pros. A lot of sportswriters dismiss it as nothing but a desperate gimmick on the part of a bottom-division team, but I don’t know. I don’t see how you can call anybody a gimmick who’s eight feet tall, three hundred pounds, and can lift the back end of a car with her toes.

The game had barely gotten under way, and the new girl on the block had just thrown the Bears’ quarterback for a ten-yard loss, when Roger came in, floating two feet off the ground as usual. “What a hectic day I had,” he said. His words collapsed inside their balloon like so many beanbags. He took off his coat, walked to the open closet, hung it up, and shut the door on a football sailing toward a wide receiver all alone in the end zone.

“Hey, I was watching that,” I said.

He looked at me, and at where I was pointing. “You were watching the closet door?” he asked.

I didn’t have the strength to explain. “Tell me what you found,” I said.

“I hit every one of those gun dealers you sent me to and came up absolutely blank. No luck on the thirty-eight.”

He sat down across the desk from me, leaned back in his chair the same way I was, and crossed his feet on the desk top just like mine. It was almost like talking to my reflection in the mirror, except even on my worst morning I never looked as fuzzy as that. “Too bad. That means it probably came from some minor dealer. It would take us a week to hit those. Tell you what, drop the gun angle for the time being and concentrate on the teakettle instead.”

The rabbit overlapped his upper lip with his lower, achieving exactly the same facial posture he would have if I had bopped him in the jaw. “The teakettle? You can’t be serious.

What can possibly be so important about that crummy old teakettle?” His next words came out in the close-set, legalistic lettering you see in the contract for a set of encyclopedias. “You promised me we would go partners in this. I assumed that meant we would share the work evenly, good and bad alike. So far you’ve taken the glamour jobs, and I’ve done the doggy stuff. How about giving me some real detective work for a change? Something that really matters.”

I opened the closet door just in time to miss an eighty-six-yard punt return, catching instead Plastic Man’s spiel for his brand of garbage sacks. Lucky me. “You got it wrong, bunny boy,” I told the rabbit. “This teakettle looks like it might be the most important angle of the case.”

“Pish, posh. I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true.” The TV showed a closeup of a Rams cheerleader wiggling her fanny, although I couldn’t get too excited by the sight of a possum in tight pink shorts.

“How can you be so sure? Just because Dominick De-Greasy’s after the teakettle, that doesn’t make it the Holy Grail.”

“It’s not just Dominick anymore. Your ex-wife has a yearning for that teakettle, too.”

“Jessica? You saw Jessica?”

“Less than an hour ago. She says that you and she bought that teakettle at an antique auction. She says she always had a particular fondness for it, that you told her to take it with her when she left, but she forgot it. She asked me to scout it up and give it to her. Any of that sound familiar to you?”

Roger wore the dumbfounded look you see on the face of somebody who walks into a darkened room, flips on the lights, and finds thirty people in there with him all yelling “Surprise!” “She told you the two of us bought it at auction?”

“So she said.”

“That’s a flat-out lie.” His large black eyeballs took a big hop with every word. Almost made me want to sing along. “I got that teakettle where I said I got it.”

“So you see, the teakettle shapes up as being very significant.”

Roger bent his ears forward ninety degrees, like he was caught in a brisk wind pushing him forward into some place he had no desire to go. “Fine. No more static. Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.”

“Good. Check with the studio prop man who bought the teakettle. Find out where he got it from and work backward from there.”

“Right.”

“Also, something else.” I wrote out a name and telephone number and passed it to him. “This is a contact I have at the phone company. Give him a call, set up a meeting, and tell him I want the phone records for Rocco’s house on the night he died. All calls both in and out.”

“He just gives you that kind of data?”

“Not exactly.” I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. “In return I supplement his income slightly.”

“Wow!” Roger’s buoyant balloon sailed up so high, it wrapped itself around the single light bulb that illuminated my office. I had to stand on my desk to peel it off. “Bribery,” said Roger. “That’s what I call real detective work.”

I crushed Roger’s balloon, which the heat from the light bulb had baked into the crackly consistency of a fortune cookie, and dropped it into my ashtray. “How have you done with the double-S initialed characters?” I asked.

Roger pulled out his notebook and studied it, although I don’t know why. Anybody who could memorize a cartoon script shouldn’t have any trouble remembering a report as short as the one he gave me. “I checked Sam Spud and Sad Sack. Both of them had ironclad alibis for the time Rocco died.”

“OK. Keep trying. Make that your number-two priority after the teakettle.” I debated whether or not to let Roger in on the piece of negative I’d found in Rocco’s fireplace, but decided not to. It would only encourage him to stick around longer. This way, he put on his hat and coat and got back to business.

I spent the next few hours lowering the alcohol content in my bottle of bourbon.

Oh, yeah. The Rams won fourteen to twelve, they awarded the game ball to Priscilla Gorilla, and a million guys on a million bar stools mourned another fallen tradition.

The outside of the DeGreasy Gallery was done up in what they call understated elegance. The gallery had no name on its window and only a scrolly golden street number and the single initial D on its heavy, carved walnut door.

Inside, a gaggle of sallow-faced, artsy-craftsy types scurried around arranging punch bowls and cocktail napkins just so for a reception to be held that night in honor of Hagar the Horrible and his photographer, Dik Browne. I saw Hagar and Browne off to one side chatting with a pair of early-bird country bumpkins. At the rubes’ request, Hagar donned his Viking helmet, and he and Browne posed with the two crackers for a photo they could show the folks back home in Podunk, Iowa. As their way of saying thanks, the hayseeds pasted sold labels on Browne’s three most expensive framed original strips. Must have been a good year for sweet com.

One of the artsy-craftsy types pointed out Little Rock DeGreasy to me.

The guy bore no resemblance whatsoever to his father. Where Rocco had been baked out of bread dough, his son had been carved in spun sugar. His delicate face gave him a boyish vulnerability. I could easily picture him napping at his school desk while his classmates tied his shoelaces together. He sported this season’s high-fashion outfit, what I call the flophouse bedsheet look: drab, loose, and wrinkled. I could almost see Rocco DeGreasy rolling over in his grave. “You yttle Rock?”

“One and the same,” he said, without looking at me. He told a pair of pretty young girls to raise up a particular strip and tilt it left, then right, then left again. I swear he put as much sweat into hanging the thing as Dik Browne had put into photographing it.

I stuck my license under his nose. “I’m Eddie Valiant, private detective. I’m investigating your father’s death.”

He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, and his two protégées locked their strip to the wall, a bit crookedly I thought, but I never did have much of an eye for art. “What’s to investigate?” Little Rock asked. “Roger Rabbit did it.”

“So say the police. I say otherwise.”

He made a sound halfway between a sigh and a gulp, the sound you’d hear from somebody who’d just discovered that the light at the end of their tunnel comes from an onrushing train. “As you can see, I’m awfully busy right now.” To illustrate, he took a bunch of strips stacked against the wall and stacked them against another wall. “I’ve still got
scads
of work to do before tonight’s reception, but I suppose I can spare you a moment. Let me just attend to some details, and I’ll be right with you.”

While he got in some last-minute whizzing around, I strolled through the gallery. A sign at the front door listed the photographers the gallery represented. The list included Carol Masters, although as I walked along I didn’t see a single one of her photos.

Little Rock rejoined me. “Shall we step into my office?” He indicated a door in the rear.

Some office. Storage shed would be more like it. He had framed and unframed strips, cardboard boxes, photos, and assorted papers piled everywhere. It made even my office look neat by comparison. Little Rock unburied a chair for me, and I sat down. “Sorry for the mess,” he said, “but we’re terribly cramped for space. I pestered my father for months to enlarge the gallery, but he never saw fit to do so.”

“You couldn’t go ahead without his OK?”

“Hardly. My father made all major decisions concerning gallery operation. I did exactly as he told me, no more, no less.” He squeezed between two filing cabinets and popped back out seconds later holding a tray of bottles. “Care for a drink?” he asked. He had liquor in about any color you could ask for, except the one I liked best, standard whiskey brown. I told him no thanks. He poured himself three fingers of emerald green and added equal portions of lemon yellow, sky blue, and sunset orange. I half expected him to stir it with a Crayola.

“Tongues are wagging because I’m here at the gallery today instead of home mourning,” he said. “But I considered my father a dreadful tyrant. I’m not the least bit sorry he’s dead.” He paused to give me a chance to fall off my chair, but, even if I’d been so inclined, in that crowded office there just wasn’t room.

“My father continually berated me for being lazy. Actually, I’m not the slightest bit adverse to good, hard work, so long as it takes me where I want to go.”

“And where might that be?”

He gave me a smile chock full of grand plans for better days to come. “I long to start my own cartoon syndicate. Nothing as unwieldy as Father’s. A quality line of high-class strips. Built perhaps around a single talented star. But in the meantime I run this gallery, and I run it well. I turned a profit every month. Yet Father refused to let me operate as I saw fit. He meddled in gallery affairs to the very end.” Little Rock finished his drink and made himself another, this round switching to blood red, straight up. “I still can’t believe it. After suffering through so many years of his domination, I’m finally free.” True, he no longer wore the shackles, yet I had a hunch his body would continue to sag for years from the accustomed weight of the chains. “Why do you suspect Father was killed by someone other than Roger Rabbit?”

“Because of some things that don’t figure.” I consulted my notebook. “For starters, the day he died, your father wrote a check to a gallery downtown. The Hi Tone Gallery of Comic Art. Ever hear of it?”