Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (4 page)

All of which only served to deepen the mystery. What had a woman like this ever seen in a dippy ‘toon rabbit?

I approached her. “Mrs. Rabbit? My name’s Eddie Valiant. I’m a private investigator. I’d like to have a word with you about your husband.”

“My husband?” She inclined her head, squinted her eyes, and up-tilted the corners of her mouth into the amused yet perplexed expression of someone confronted by an especially ridiculous riddle. “I’m afraid you have the wrong person. I’ve never been married. I have no husband.”

Surely I couldn’t have made a mistake. There couldn’t be two women this gorgeous. “You are Jessica Rabbit?”

“Correct.”

“Then what, if I may ask, is your relationship to Roger Rabbit?”

“Who?” In the best Orphan Annie tradition, Jessica demonstrated her innocent bewilderment by revolving her eyes upward and tucking them out of sight underneath her open eyelids. “Roger Rabbit? Sorry, I never heard of him.” A blatant lie, no question about it, and, as though to illustrate what happens to people who lie, her brilliant smile dribbled off her chin and fluttered to the ground like a bicuspid butterfly. I reacted the way I would have had she dropped her hankie. I reached down, scooped up her smile, and handed it back, only to find that, while I had been bent over, other assorted portions of her anatomy, including both ears and her nose, had also fallen off. I gallantly scrambled to retrieve these bits and pieces for her too, but they disintegrated before I could reach them. I stood upright just in time to witness the rest of her disappear the same way.

My hand still shaped to the bow of her smile, I circled the spot where she had stood, kicking my toe against the concrete. Not a smidgeon of her remained.

Suddenly I heard bemused, husky, feminine laughter be•

hind me. “I take it you’ve never seen a doppelganger erode before?”

I turned around and found myself facing—
Jessica Rabbitl

Of course. What I saw wasn’t really her. It was a mentally projected duplicate of her, or doppelganger as ‘toons call them. Identical to her in every regard, physically and mentally, but existing only by the energy of her mind. ‘Toons can create doppelgangers more or less at will. They merely relax, channel their thoughts in that direction, and magically one of them appears. ‘Toons use them as doubles in risky shots. When you see a ‘toon stuffed into a trombone or run over by a steamroller or crushed by a falling safe, it’s really a doppelganger. And she was right. I never had seen one erode before.

“Isn’t it kind of traumatic to see a part of you just wither away like that?”

“Not particularly. No more so than I imagine it might be for you to throw one of your fingernail clippings into a trash can. Oh, I’m sure there are primitive tribes in Africa or somewhere who treat their doppelgangers as mystic offshoots of their soul, but we modern, civilized ‘toons regard our doppelgangers as animated mannequins, nothing more.”

She leaned gracefully against the Mercedes’s rear fender, instinctively adjusting her posture to display herself to best advantage. She needn’t have bothered. A woman as beautiful as this could have stood on one leg, flapped her arms, stuck out her tongue, and still held my interest. Like most human-oid ‘toons, Jessica suppressed her word-balloons and spoke vocally only, thus enhancing even further her human image. “I heard you tell my doppel that you wanted to see me about Roger. What’s his problem now?”

“What was his problem before?”

She replied quickly, as though she had been asked the same question so many times that she had committed the answer to memory. “He couldn’t cope with being a celebrity. He turned moody, conceited, belligerent. So I left him.”

A bit of a discrepancy there between Jessica and her husband. Had it been Jessica Rabbit or Roger who had undergone the Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation that had scuttled the marriage? By rights, I should believe my client. That was by rights. From experience, I knew that the one caught with the stolen macaroons often wound up being the same one who had hired me to stake out the cookie jar. “You might be interested to know that Roger says he wants a reconciliation. He says he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get you back.”

She crossed one perfect arm over the other. “If that’s why he hired you, to corne here and tell me that, I’m afraid he’s wasted your time. I left Roger for someone else.”

“I guess that translates to Rocco DeGreasy.”

She dipped her chin and held it there, the way a fighter would to protect himself from an uppercut. “That’s right, though I don’t see where it’s any concern of yours.”

Good looks could distract me only so long. “Roger hired me to investigate irregularities in his contract. Rather an odd coincidence that his estranged wife would have such a close relationship with one of the people who gave it to him. You have anything to do with the DeGreasys signing Roger?”

She shook her head, pushed herself away from the car, and assumed a square stance that, even in its belligerence, gave a certain graceful beauty to her tiny clenched fists and firmly set jaw. “Absolutely not. I never understood why they did it. Roger has no talent whatsoever. I suspect Rocco thought it would please me and perhaps win me back. Or possibly Rocco feared Roger might move to another part of the country and take me with him. A contract tying Roger down might have seemed the easiest way to prevent that.”

“Did the DeGreasys ever promise Roger his own strip?”

Too bad she suppressed her balloons. Her tinkling laugh could have reoutfitted a Swiss bell-ringer. “No, never. That’s nothing more than a story Roger concocted. You should not take Roger too seriously. He does see a psychiatrist, you know.”

“You ever hear of anyone wanting to buy out Roger’s contract and give him his own strip?”

“Yes, I heard a rumor to that effect, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to star Roger in anything. Believe me, the rabbit has absolutely no talent. None.”

The director interrupted us before I could follow up. “Jessica, sweetheart,” the director said, “the agency man wants to shoot a slightly different angle. Could you give us another doppel?”

“Of course. Would you excuse me?” she said to me. She stepped into a nearby dressing trailer and several minutes later emerged as twins.

“Ready to shoot,” she told the director.

The two indistinguishable Jessicas climbed into the helicopter and flew off into the morning sky.

While I waited for her to return, I located the nearest pay phone and called my client, hoping to maybe clarify a few of the inconsistencies Jessica had lobbed into the ballgame.

Roger answered in a state of near panic. “My God, am I glad it’s you! You have to get over here. This isn’t just a matter of a broken promise anymore. It’s escalated drastically.”

“How so?”

Roger gulped audibly. “Somebody just tried to kill me.”

I sat in Roger’s living room doing my best to swallow a chuckle. “Somebody attacked you with what?”

“A custard cream pie,” Roger repeated, nervously fidgeting with the pie tin balanced on his lap. “I was on my way home from an early photo session at Carol Masters’s when somebody jumped out from behind a tree and smacked me in the face with a custard cream pie.”

“It must have been a practical joke. Nobody could kill you with a pie.”

“Oh, you’re wrong. Indeed, they could. In the classic comic pie toss, somebody plops you in the kisser, coming straight in to get maximum splatter, and then pulls up short so as not to mash in your nose. The pie tin slithers off, and that’s it. But not this fellow.” Roger fanned out his fingers and scrunched them into his face to demonstrate the angle of attack. “He came in from about shoulder level so the custard blocked off my mouth and nose, then he gave it kind of a half twist so the whipped cream flew up and covered my eyes. And he didn’t let go. He held that pie so tightly against my face that I couldn’t breathe. I kicked him a hearty one in the shins, and I guess I connected, because he grunted, dropped his pie, and ran away.”

“You get a look at him?”

“No. He had turned a corner before I got my eyes scooped off.”

“Human or ‘toon? Could you tell that?”

“No. I’m sorry. I checked around for witnesses but drew a blank.” He held up a standard nine-inch aluminum pie tin covered with half an inch of dried custard. The custard had solidified into a perfect outline of his mouth and nose. “I did retrieve the weapon, though.” He handed me the tin.

I examined it front and back. No prints evident, but it did bear the stamped-in name and address of a nearby neighborhood pie shop. I wrapped the tin as best I could into my handkerchief. “I’ll check it out,” I said, “even though I suspect this was most likely nothing more than a juvenile prank.”

“Prank?” Angry whipcords of steam puffed out of the rabbit’s nostrils and heated his nose to the color of an apple. “How can you say prank? It was those DeGreasy brothers. They tried to smother me. If we don’t stop them, they’ll try again. And next time they might not miss.”

“Believe what you want, just be aware that in my opinion this pie guy has no connection with your other predicament, and chasing after him will most likely be a big waste of effort.” Pie tin in hand, I got up and headed for the door, where I stopped, turned, and almost as an afterthought said, “By the way, I talked to your wife today.”

Roger couldn’t have brightened up any quicker had he plugged his tail into an electrical outlet. “Jessica? You saw Jessica? Did you give her my message?”

“Yes.”

“And what did she say?”

I hit him with it the only way I knew how—hard, fast, and straight to the chops. Leave tact to the slick talkers wearing pressed three-piece suits. If you had a terminal illness, I’d tell you point-blank not to start any all-day suckers. “She’s not coming back to you. And she says the reason she’s not is because it was you, not her, that changed. She said you used to be a fun guy, but that, after you got your contract, you turned into an ogre. She said she couldn’t take it, so she left you.”

“She said that? Jessica said that?” The tiny dots that gave color to Roger’s skin coalesced into splotches so large that, given an ear bob and a transplanted tail, he could have passed for a calico cat. “Well, that’s the silliest thing I ever heard. Me? An ogre?” He launched a partial balloon, but the feigned hah-hah inside fizzled out through the balloon’s stem and, with a resounding
blat,
splattered across the rug.

“She also said a few other things.”

“Such as?”

“I’m not so sure you want to hear them.”

“I’m a big bunny. I can take it.”

“Suit yourself. She said you were nuts. She also said you had no talent.”

“She doesn’t mean that, not any of it. Rocco is pressuring her to say those things.”

“She also insisted that you made up the part about the DeGreasys promising you your own strip.”

“Widdle on that Rocco DeGreasy!” Roger’s word balloon had originally contained something far stronger, but, always conscious of his family-rated image, he had hastily X’d it out and replaced it with a statement less profane. “He has some evil hold over Jessica. For the year Jessica and I were together, we were as in love as two people can be. There was no faking how she felt about me. She couldn’t possibly have reversed herself so quickly. Rocco forced her to leave me, and he’s forcing her to say things about me that she doesn’t mean. I want you to find out how he’s doing it, and I want you to make him stop.” Roger crossed his hands over his head but couldn’t cork the flood of tear-shaped balloons blubbering out of him.

I nodded as though I really took seriously this whole monumental bit of goofiness. “Exactly what I planned to do next.”

Carol Masters wasn’t at her studio, so I tried her at home. She lived in a partially ‘toon, partially human neighborhood that real estate agents called ethnically enriched, and urban renewers called blighted. Depending on which way you happened to be facing—toward the gossiping, front-stoop ‘toon and human housewives or toward the babbling, back-alley ‘toon and human drunks—either term could apply.

Carol’s apartment occupied half a floor in what had been, in the late forties, a fashionable row house. Now it and the houses linked together on either side of it resembled a rickety roller coaster already well over its summit and plunging pell-mell on its long run downhill.

Carol’s door-bell wires drooped stiffly out of their housing like twin copper fangs, so I rapped on the door. Carol answered it, dressed as she had been at her studio, and invited me in.

I took an immediate liking to her home decoration. No wall to wall furniture to trip you up every time you went to the kitchen for a late-night beer. No chintz to gather dust. A few comfortable chairs placed for easy face-to-face conversation, some scattered end tables, and a colorful rainbow painted across two walls, culminating on each end in framed displays of Carol’s photographs. Her record collection filled most of a six-foot-long shelf, bluegrass to the center with a few rock records tacking down either end.

She told me to pour myself a drink while she finished processing some photos in a darkroom she had rigged up in her bedroom closet.

I checked my watch. I never drink until after six. It was then four-fifteen. Close enough. I buried the bottom of a glass under three fingers of bourbon, walked into the bedroom after her, and sat down on her bed.

There wasn’t much to be said for this room’s decor. Her clothes, mostly sweaters, shirts, and jeans hyphenated at irregular intervals by a few frilly party numbers, hung on a trapeze-style bar suspended from the ceiling. She had cameras, lenses, carrying cases, and other equipment I couldn’t identify scattered everywhere. I could smell her photographic chemicals even through the closed closet door.

She came out after a few minutes carrying some wet prints. “Let me just put these in the dryer,” she said. She placed the prints into a small contraption set on top of her dresser.

I came up behind her and looked over her shoulder at her prints, five copies of the same Baby Herman strip. “How come you don’t do this at your studio?”