Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (2 page)

His place covered nearly enough land to qualify it for statehood. The house proper sat far back on the property, and a jumbo herd of bib-overalled ‘toon goat gardeners puttered about the grounds, nibbling back the grass and shrubs.

The ultimate ‘toon status symbol, a human servant, in this case a butler in full regalia, opened the door. He ushered me through to a den furnished in sophisticated playpen.

A Barcelona chair rested beside a rocking horse. Abstract metal sculptures straddled wobbly towers of alphabet blocks. A fine, post-impressionistic painting hung just above a wooden peg supporting a tatty security blanket, one end well chewed.

Baby Herman, two feet high, wearing only a diaper, and bald save for one dark hair sprouting from the precise center of his crown, sat in a highchair in front of the TV. A good portion of his lunch—strained peas, pureed beef, and applesauce—still clung to his chin and to the tray in front of him.

He was watching his own show, giggling happily every time one of his ‘toon foils took a clout to the chops.

The butler announced me as Eddie Valiant, private investigator representing Roger Rabbit, then left me and Baby Herman alone.

I had no idea how to proceed. I didn’t have much of a way with kids. They generally react to me as they would to the man who shot Bambi’s mother.

On the TV screen, a tuxedoed racoon struggled vainly to extricate himself from the inside of a trombone. Baby Herman laughed uproariously and pounded his tray with a silver spoon, splattering the front of my coat with a fine layer of goo. I steeled myself for a long, hard afternoon.

Just then the butler returned bearing a cigar box, full of robust Havanas. I helped myself. And so, to my surprise, did Baby Herman.

“Kind of young for that stuff, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Hah, hah,” appeared over Baby Herman’s head in the lettering style found on a preschooler’s handmade valentine. He lit up and exhaled a cloud that would have done credit to a locomotive. “That’s rich. Just how old do you think I am?” When he turned his head so I could examine his profile, he also twisted his word balloon around one hundred and eighty degrees, thus flopping his words into mirror images of themselves.

“I never play guessing games.”

“Come on. just this once. Try.”

“Sorry.”

“OK, then I’ll tell you anyway.” Baby Herman unsnapped his tray and climbed to the floor where he stood, puffing his cigar, one chubby hand on each hip. “I’m thirty-six. Don’t look it, do I?”

I admitted that he didn’t.

“Most people guess me between two and four. Of course, most people don’t know enough about ‘toons to realize that some age and some don’t.”

“And you’re one of the lucky ones?”

Baby Herman plopped down on his hind end and zigzagged his fingers across the rug. “Depends on your point of view. Eternal youth isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Imagine going through life eating mush, wearing diapers, and sucking on plastic doodads.” He displayed the teething ring hung on a gold chain around his neck. “And women. Need I even mention women? Here I sit with a thirty-six-year-old lust, and a three-year-old dinky.” He climbed aboard his rocking horse and began a bouncy journey to nowhere. “Why does the funny bunny need a detective? He decided to file for divorce? That what you do? Bust into motel rooms and shoot quickie photos of cheating wives?” An obscene musing encased in a fluffy, cherubic balloon floated above the kid’s head. It bob-bled around playfully awhile before impaling itself on his single wiry hair, and bursting in a shower of dust that layered his shoulders with the fine powder unknowledgeable humans mistook for dandruff. He immediately conjured up a second image even worse.

“Roger Rabbit has a wife?”

“He did until she left him.” Baby Herman dismounted his rocking horse and waddled out from under his pornographic fantasy. “Jessica Rabbit.” His second vision turned to sand and dirtied the carpet behind him. “Gorgeous creature. Does a lot of commercials. Wouldn’t mind taking her for a hop myself.”

“How long they been split up?”

“I guess two, maybe three, weeks.”

“What caused the breakup?”

“How should I know? What do I look like, Mary Worth? I mind my business, let other people mind theirs.” He crawled to the wall and pulled his blanket off its peg. He bundled it around his legs, torso, and head, enveloping himself so completely that only the end of his cigar remained uncovered.

“Confidentially,” he whispered from out of the snuggly depths of his blanket, “I hear she left Roger for Rocco DeGreasy.”

Rocco DeGreasy and a female ‘toon rabbit? Sounded ridiculous, but I’d heard of guys with stranger tastes in women. “Actually, I’m not really interested in Roger’s wife. I’m investigating Roger’s treatment by the DeGreasy syndicate. I understand you heard Rocco promise Roger his own strip.”

The blanket bobbed up and down. “Sure. Day before yesterday at a photo session, but only because the bunny was threatening to hit him over the head with his lunch box. It was the first time they’d met since Roger’s marital breakup. Roger accused Rocco of putting pressure on Jessica to leave him. Rocco denied it, and Roger went for him. Carol Masters, our photographer, jumped in between them and kept them apart. Rocco came up with that bit about giving Roger his own strip mainly to cool him off, but it didn’t work. I never saw Roger so riled. He kept threatening to kill Rocco. Can you imagine that coming from a pussycat like Roger Rabbit? After Carol finally got Roger calmed down, Rocco offered to drive him home. He suggested they could sit down there and discuss their differences rationally until they had them all worked out. A fair and classy guy, that Rocco. Anybody else would have canned Roger on the spot.”

“Did Roger and Rocco leave together?”

“No, Roger stormed out of the studio in a huff. Darned inconsiderate of him. We still had half a day’s shooting left that we had to cancel. Threw my feeding and nap-time schedule into a complete tizzy.”

“So Rocco wasn’t serious when he offered Roger his own strip.”

“Nope. Rocco was scared, plain and simple. When Roger threatened to kill him, I believe he meant it, and Rocco believed it, too.”

The butler entered and gave the lumpy blanket a courtly bow. “Don’t forget your two-o’clock photo session, sir.” Right.” Baby Herman unwrapped himself and stood. “I’m doing some baby-food spots.” He ground his cigar out on the rug. “I sold eight million jars of that junk last year. My wholesome image.” He extended his pudgy arms to Eddie. “Carry me to my limousine?”

Outside, I set him into an infant seat strapped in the right front bucket of a white Mercedes. “Hey, detective,” said Baby Herman as I shut the door. “I like you. You come back sometime, and we’ll have us a party. I’ll supply the funny hats, the cake, and the noisemakers. You supply the broads. Just make sure they go for younger men.”

Baby Herman waved bye-bye, and his Mercedes pulled away.

I’ll say one thing for the rabbit, he certainly was a persistent little bugger. As soon as I got back to the city, I spotted him again, hanging maybe half a block back, matching me move for move. He wore a trench coat slightly open, exposing purple lederhosen and an orange shirt. His hat brim scaled up on both sides against fully unfurled ears. Inconspicuous? Maybe at a clown convention. Certainly not on Sunset Boulevard at two in the afternoon.

I debated whether or not to brace him again and give him another ultimatum. He’d probably just ignore it the same way he had the last. Obviously not one to give up easily, that Roger, a trait I admired in anybody, ‘toon rabbits included. What the heck, if he insisted on wasting his time hopping along in my footsteps, let him. So long as he kept his distance and didn’t interfere.

I entered a big downtown office building. The rabbit ducked behind a lamp post across the street, doing his best to appear unconcerned in the presence of a small poodle sniffing at his hydrant-red sneakers. On the building’s directory, I found the listing for Carol Masters, photographer.

I boarded a humans-only elevator and rode it up to Mas-ters’s floor.

I opened the door to her studio and ran smack into a pile of props big enough to challenge Sir Edmund Hillary.

Masters herself, a human, thank God, since I didn’t know if I could handle another ‘toon today, stood in the studio’s only uncluttered space, a rectangular whitewashed area about ten feet long by five feet wide, positioning her lights and camera.

She had her lean, athletic body nicely displayed in tight jeans and a blue T-shirt sporting an autographed photo of Casper the Friendly Ghost. Baby-soft brown hair played tag with her shoulders. Her tongue underscored her concentration with a thin layer of moisture traced across her creamy red lips. For the sake of male sanity, I hoped she changed perfumes after sundown, since the one she had on could send every male within sniffing range out into the streets to bay at the moon. The lenses in her big, round glasses were the kind that reacted to skin temperature, changing color according to the wearer’s mood, going from dark amber to a rosy pink. Right now they fluttered somewhere in between, not happy, not sad, just doing a good day’s work. “Something I can help you with?” she said.

I laid a card on her and waited for her to read it. She held it up between us, as though comparing the written description with the real thing. Apparently I measured up to my printed notice, since she motioned for me to sit.

Rummaging through the prop pile, I hauled a chair out from between a plastic palm tree and a bus-stop sign. I reversed and straddled it so I faced her across its back. “I represent Roger Rabbit,” I told her. “I’d like to ask you a few questions concerning his relationship to the syndicate.”

“Ask away.” She opened a corner cupboard and, from behind half a dozen jugs of ‘toonshine, produced a bottle of Burgundy, which she held up with an empty glass.

I nodded.

She splashed out a healthy slug.

I tilted it back, tossed it down in one fast swallow, and extended my empty glass for a refill. “You photograph the Baby Herman strip, right?”

Carol joined me this round, sipping her wine slowly. “I photograph Baby Herman, yes, as well as a number of other DeGreasy strips.”

“And you were present a few days back when Roger went after Rocco DeGreasy with a lunch box?”

She nodded. “Roger accused Rocco of pressuring his wife to leave him. I’ve never seen a rabbit so angry. If I hadn’t stepped between them, I think he might have done Rocco some serious harm.”

“Any truth to Roger’s allegation?”

She studied a hanging photo of Roger Rabbit. It bore the cutesy-pie inscription you’d expect from a professional buffoon. “A sweet bunny, that one,” she said fondly. “My absolute favorite subject. No big-star hangups. Never moody or temperamental. A joy to work with. I absolutely adore him.” She flicked on several spotlights to see how many dark corners she could illuminate without lengthening her own shado’w. She pulled over two easy chairs, one for Dagwood, one for Blondie, and set a floor lamp between them. “I believe Jessica left Roger of her own free will without the slightest bit of coercion from anybody.”

“Why do you think that?”

I had seen men break other men’s fingers with less force than Carol used to snap in her wide-angle lens. “Who knows?” She squinted into her camera, but jerked her face instantly away, as though repulsed by the nastiness she saw on the other side. “A real bitch, that Jessica. You ever meet her?”

“No. Kind of hard for me to picture so much allure and such a devious nature in a female rabbit.”

“Rabbit? No, don’t be misled by her name. She isn’t a rabbit. She’s humanoid. Does mainly high-fashion, cosmetic, and car ads.” She went to her file cabinet, removed a portfolio, and passed it to me. “Jessica Rabbit.”

A knockout. Every line perfection. Creamy skin, a hundred and twenty pounds well distributed on a statuesque frame, stunning red hair. Easily able to pass for human. “What did someone like this ever see in a ‘toon rabbit?”

Carol retrieved the photos and studied them for a moment, as though trying to decide whether to return them to her files or pepper them with voodoo pins. “Nobody knows. Before Roger, she dated humans and other humanoid ‘toons exclusively. Their marriage came as a total shock to everybody who knew them.” She slipped Jessica’s photos back into the darkness where she seemed to feel they belonged. “For about a year it appeared to work. Jessica totally changed. She quit her carousing, quit bad-mouthing her rivals, knocked off her on-the-set temper tantrums. She even went to several of Blondie Bumstead’s Tupperware parties.” She made a bowl out of her hands and extended it toward the right-hand chair. Then she decreased the cup of her hands to about the size of a rancid tart. “Suddenly, almost overnight, the old Jessica came roaring back. Shrieking at her photographers. Back-stabbing everybody who disagreed with her in the slightest. She and Roger broke up shortly thereafter, and she went back to living with Rocco DeGreasy.”

“She went
back
to living with him? You mean she had lived with him before?”

“Sure. She left him to marry Roger. Considering that Roger had just stolen Rocco’s girl, nobody in the industry could understand why, a few weeks after the marriage, the De-Greasys signed Roger to a long-term contract. Everybody figured that Jessica must have gone to them on Roger’s behalf. Rocco would have done anything, even given Jessica’s new husband a contract, if he thought it would get her back.” Carol picked up my card and reread the inscription, apparently concerned about my competence to practice my stated profession. “I’m surprised your client neglected to tell you any of this.”

“He apparently didn’t consider it relevant.” I walked to the window, where I could see the rabbit still trying to protect his sneakers from the poodle in the street below. “Guess I’d better ask him why.”

“Will you talk to Jessica, too?”

“Probably.”

“Then let me give you some advice. Be careful. She has a nasty way of sinking hooks into photogenic men.” Carol smiled, pointed her camera at me, and clicked the shutter. My luck held. The lens didn’t break.