Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (7 page)

“Which means that nobody got into this house unless Roger wanted them to.”

“Correct. Hence the likelihood that Roger knew his killer well enough to invite him inside.”

“So you figure the wife?”

“That would be my first guess. It would also explain how the killer got
out
without sounding the alarm. Since Jessica had lived here with the rabbit, she must know the code. She could easily have turned the system off and walked away.”

“Very logical,” I said politely. “Congratulations on your sound reasoning. You’ve overlooked only one teeny problem. According to Roger, he’d asked Jessica to meet with him many times before, and she had consistently refused. Why should she suddenly accept his offer now? When I talked to her yesterday, she made it quite clear she had no intention of pursuing a reconciliation. I suggested a get-together between her and Roger, and she gave me a firm no.”

Cleaver seemed quite relieved when another sergeant came up and saved him from having to tiptoe out of the corner he’d painted himself into. The sergeant showed Cleaver two items, both encased in plastic bags. One was the .38 pistol from Roger’s nightstand. The other was a hunk of metal, the fatal bullet, judging from the size of it. “One shot missing from the thirty-eight,” the sergeant said to Cleaver, but Cleaver took more of an interest in the slug.

“Hey, Butch. Ever see one like this?” He held the bullet where I could inspect it.

It looked like it had started life as a perfect sphere before running into Roger Rabbit and a wall. “Seems to be an old-fashioned musket ball from a black-powder long-rifle or a flintlock pistol.”

“That’s my guess, too. You run into any antique gun collectors in this case?”

“Can’t say I have.”

Cleaver returned the sack to his sergeant. “Process them both through ballistics,” he instructed.

Cleaver picked up Roger’s cigar box, opened it, and saw the carrots inside. His granite jaw cracked upward slightly at either end of his mouth. Poor guy. But that’s what happens when you hang around with ‘toons all day. You start to develop a sense of humor. Next thing you know, nobody takes you seriously anymore, and you wind up laughing yourself straight into the morgue. “The deceased have any enemies you know of?” asked Cleaver.

I shrugged. “Who could hate a rabbit?”

Just then another police car squealed up outside. The rear door opened, and out came Captain Rusty Hudson. He worked the human side and had a well-earned reputation as the most feared kind of law-and-order fanatic, one with a self-starter but no brake. He wrapped up his assignments so quickly and so neatly that he routinely had the lowest active case load of any human detective. I wondered why the department had sent its superstar to investigate a case involving a dead rabbit.

Hudson came inside, took a look around, and saw me. “Finally found your level down here with the rest of the crazies, huh, Valiant?”

“Nice to see you again, too, Captain,” I replied.

“What can I do for you, sir?” asked Cleaver. Even though they held the same rank, the department’s age-old unwritten law required a ‘toon officer to defer to a human, and everybody who knew Hudson knew he would make life extremely miserable for any ‘toon colleague deviating from tradition.

“When I heard the report about this Roger Rabbit character being killed,” said Hudson, “I figured I’d better shag it right over here before your bunch gets too far into their search. No offense, but I’ve had lots of problems with the ‘toon side losing evidence on me before.”

“What kind of evidence you after?”

“A thirty-eight-caliber revolver, maybe has one shot gone. You find anything like that when you tossed this place?”

Cleaver nodded. “Sure did. Upstairs in the nightstand. One bullet fired. I sent it to ballistics. Why? You got something on it?”

“I have reason to suspect it was the murder weapon in a human homicide last night.”

“A human homicide? Who?” I asked.

Hudson looked at me the way people look at escargot when they find out that means snails. “You got a reason to be here, gumshoe? You a witness, a suspect, or what?”

“He was employed by the rabbit,” explained Cleaver. “I was just taking his statement when you arrived.”

Hudson nodded to show he understood that police work often forced officers to associate against their wills with guys like me. He expanded his narrative, but for Cleaver’s benefit, not mine. “About one this morning we got a call from a hysterical woman who turned out to be this rabbit’s wife. Seems she lives with a guy named Rocco DeGreasy, a big wheel in the comic industry. She was out late. When she came home, she saw a light on in DeGreasy’s study. She went in to check and found DeGreasy slumped across his desk, dead.”

“You got an estimated time of death?” I asked, but Hudson ignored me.

“I did some quick checking around,” he continued, “and found out that this rabbit had previously threatened DeGreasy’s life, in front of witnesses during a photo session at his photographer’s studio. I also discovered that this rabbit bears a grudge because DeGreasy failed to honor a promise to give him his own strip. As if I needed more, DeGreasy has also grabbed the rabbit’s girl. Put that all together, it spells murder. I’ll give odds that the bullet we found in DeGreasy turns out to have come from the rabbit’s gun.”

“Were you able to pinpoint an exact time of death?” asked Cleaver, repeating my earlier question.

Since this time it had come through channels, Hudson answered. “We figure about midnight.”

“Judging from the hardness of the rabbit’s final balloon, he got it about an hour later. You check Jessica Rabbit’s alibi for then?” Cleaver asked.

“No, why should I? What’s she got to do with anything? The rabbit plugged DeGreasy. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

“Great. That takes care of your murder. What about mine?” Cleaver’s word balloon came out so frosty you almost needed a squeegee to read it. “These two deaths are too closely related to be a coincidence. Suppose Jessica Rabbit saw Roger kill Rocco, followed the rabbit back here, and executed him for his crime. A perfect motive. The rabbit shot her lover, so Jessica shot the rabbit.”

“I’ll let you solve that part of it,” said Hudson, buffing his fingernails on his lapel with such intense concentration that a casual onlooker might suspect it was the most important thing he had to do for the entire rest of the day. “When the report comes back from ballistics, I’ll stamp my case closed. What do I care about who blew away some bunny.” With that he left the house, got into his car, and roared off, siren on and lights flashing, a showboat to the end.

Cleaver took a peek through a telescope set up in the front window, but it was way too early to see any stars. “Did that rabbit have what it takes to kill a man?” Cleaver asked me.

“I don’t know. On the one hand, he really hated Rocco DeGreasy. But on the other hand, who can picture a killer rabbit?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Cleaver. He drifted off into the mental never-never land where ‘toons seem to spend three-quarters of their time.

“You finished with me, Captain?”

“What?” A series of tiny balloons, each containing an itsy-bitsy question mark, bubbled out of his head. The balloons popped, letting the question marks parachute to the floor. I was tempted to scoop them up and pocket them, since I knew a book publisher who bought them to cut type-setting costs in his line of whodunits.

“Sure,” Cleaver said, “you can go. Just don’t leave town without checking with me first. And one other thing. I don’t know how you felt about this rabbit, or if you took his case seriously, but from here on out this affair belongs to me. Official police investigation. You want to keep your license, you stay out. Understand?”

“One hundred percent,” I said. “I won’t interfere.” I jammed my hand into my pocket and crossed my fingers. “I promise.”

The elevator in my office building worked so seldom that the ‘toon door-man, a strapping gorilla, made a nice chunk of change carrying people to the upper floors on his back. Today I lucked out. The elevator appeared and whisked me to the twelfth floor in less than a week, which probably set a building speed record.

My three hundred bucks a month bought me a waiting room where a secretary would sit, if I could ever afford to hire one, my office proper, and a small John. The place normally rented for two fifty, but I got charged an extra half-yard because of the view. Open the window, look up, and you see the sky. Look down, and you see the street. Look straight out, and you see the brickwork of the building next door. Great place. Shabby and overpriced, but it suited me better than one of those chrome-and-glass stakes that builders keep pounding into the heart of what used to be a picturesque city.

I noticed something wacky as soon as I took out my keys to open the outer door. The lock was badly scratched, sure sign of an amateur thief. The pros go in and out without leaving a trace, but amateurs always botch it. I slammed open the door and entered the waiting room the way I learned in the Corps, low and fast. I kicked the door shut on my way past, but there was nobody hiding behind it. It didn’t take me long to search the waiting room, since it contained only two folding chairs and a card table with some hardly thumbed magazines on it. Anybody small enough to hide behind any of that stuff didn’t really worry me.

I checked the door connecting this room with my office proper. It, too, bore signs of having been picked. I had a wall safe in my office, and in that I kept my gun. Just my luck to walk in on a burglar and get shot with my own piece.

I took a few deep breaths, opened the door, and went in Marine style again, except this time I added a forward somersault, which might not have been the greatest idea in the world. You have to practice those things a lot or they leave you dizzy, which is just how I wound up when I came out of it. I grabbed the edge of my desk for support and tried to look alert. Nobody shot me, so I figured the burglar had already skedaddled.

But I was wrong. When the room straightened out, I found him, sitting behind my desk, brazen as you please. One thing for sure. I’d have no trouble picking this clown out of a lineup. He wore a long purple coat, a fireman’s hat, and a T-shirt that said, “Kiss me, I’m fuzzy.” If I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn it was …

“I’m sorry I had to break in on you like this, Mister Valiant, I mean picking your lock and all, but I really didn’t know where else to go, or who else to turn to.”

“Roger? Roger Rabbit?” I
went around to his side of the desk, opened the bottom drawer, took out the office bottle, and swigged down a healthy glug. I stared at the rabbit until he got the message and shagged his tail out of my chair. I brushed a few stray pieces of hair off the seat and sat down. “Start explaining,” I said, “and it better be good.”

He went to the window and took in the fifty-dollar view. “I know what you think,” he said. “You think I’m really Roger. But I’m not. I’m his doppelganger, his mentally created duplicate.”

“Yeah, I know about that stuff,” I said, remembering Jessica Rabbit falling to pieces around me.

“Well, Roger conjured me up last night about eleven,” the rabbit went on. “He had a photo session this morning, and he needed a pair of red suspenders to wear at it. He gave me a fifty-dollar bill, and told me to go out and buy him some.”

“He sent you out in the middle of the night to find him a pair of red suspenders?”

“Yes. He … I mean, we … I mean, I can be very impulsive at times. Anyway, I left and started hitting those variety stores you see around, the ones that stay open late at night. I must have gone to twenty of them and couldn’t find a pair of red suspenders anywhere. I found green, blue, yellow, polka-dot, orange, striped …”

I did a few wheelies with my index finger. He caught my drift and kept his story rolling.

“When I finally found a store with the right color suspenders, they couldn’t change my bill. I hung around downtown until my bank opened, broke the bill, went back, and bought the suspenders.” He pointed to a wrapped package lying on top of my desk. “I returned home about ten this morning and found the place crawling with cops. I overheard two of them describing what had happened. That I, or rather the real me, had been killed. I didn’t know what to do. I’m not very decisive when it comes to emergencies. I suppose I should have identified myself to the police, but I was afraid to. I feared that whoever got to the real Roger might come after me, too. Then I thought of you.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Since I’m supposed to be dead, I didn’t want to wait for you out in the hall where somebody might recognize me, so I picked your lock. I didn’t think you would mind. You don’t, do you? It’s actually my first try at it. As I told you before, I’ve always had a hankering to be a detective. I believe every detective should know how to pick locks. I’m sure you do, don’t you? So I bought some lock-picking tools I saw advertised on the inside cover of a matchbook.” He showed me a set of picks only slightly smaller and less clumsy than the iron bar I use to pry the hubcaps off my car. “They came with a self-instruction manual. Pretty neat, huh?”

“Tell me,” I said, after giving the office bottle another howdy-doody. “How long before you start to, you know, fall apart?”

The bunny stared with deep foreboding at the far wall, as though the hand of God had just inscribed there the recipe for hasenpfeffer. “Hard to tell. Roger put a large jolt of mental energy into creating me. I could easily last forty-eight hours before I … until I …”

A dark, watery boo-hoo balloon plopped to the floor, but I give him this much, it didn’t spill any tears. “You have any idea who murdered me?” he asked.

“Yeah, I got an idea. You get a call from anyone last night?” I asked. “Or anybody come to see you?”

He shrugged, a ridiculous move for a guy with next to no shoulders. “I don’t know. The mental strain of creating a doppel tends to disrupt short-term memory. I remember up to early yesterday evening, but not much after.”

“You don’t remember getting a call from your wife? Saying that she wanted to come over for a talk?”