Who P_p_p_plugged Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  Praise For

  Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?

  Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit? is as bright and fresh and fascinating as the original. Fans of the first book and film are in for a Toonful treat.

  —Michael Eisner / Chairman of the Board and CEO / The Walt Disney Company

  Reprint of the entire first page of the novel under the heading Auspicious Beginnings.

  —People Magazine

  Unabashed P-P-P-Plug! If you like Roger Rabbit, you’ll adore

  Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf, the man who created Roger and the rest of the Toon crew.

  —The Toontown Tattler (Disney Comics)

  A good, fun read. Eddie Valiant out-Marlowes Marlow and out-Spades Spade. The humorous strength of Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit? lies in Wolf’s one-liners and quirky send-ups of 1940s hard-boiled detective patter. The bodies drop like names at a Hollywood party. Wolf’s prose is consistently witty, the plot is fast-paced and quirky, and he can craft a decent mystery with a sense of fun.

  —Boston Herald

  The Toonish imagery, the slapstick humor, the double entendre dialogue all contribute to turn this book into a Technicolor vision as you read. From the first “P-O-W” to the last “K-A-B-L-O-O-E-Y,” the fun is never ending.

  —Nashville Banner

  The welcome mat is out again at Toontown. Expect the usual surreal hi-jinks. In Wolf’s crazy universe, a never-never-land gag is always around the corner.

  —Columbus Dispatch

  Wolf freely mixes Toons and human characters in situations both real and surreal. It’s a fast and funny story made up of equal parts of cartoon pratfalls, tough-guy detective action and sly humor. It’s an endlessly entertaining tale with jokes and puns that leap at you like out-of-control cartoon speech balloons.

  —Austin American-Statesman

  Stay Tooned. If you enjoyed the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, you’ll have to run out to the bookstore and buy its sequel. It’s a good, hare-raising mystery.

  —Newport News Times-Herald and Daily Press

  Proclaimed Best Fantasy Novel of 1991

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  Eddie Valiant, the hard-boiled private eye who makes Sam Spade look like Little Lord Fauntleroy, takes the lumps and solves the mysteries while spouting the most incredible array of similes ever committed to paper. There haven’t been such characters since the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. The wildest adventure since Alice went through the looking glass. The highest form of comedy.

  —Louisville Courier-Journal

  When the folks at Disney make P-P-P-Plugged into a m-m-m-movie, I’ll be f-f-f-first in line for a ticket.

  —Indianapolis Star

  It’s a hoot. Wolf obviously gets as big a kick out of the convoluted plotting and the exaggerated private-eye lingo as he does the interactions between humans and Toons. The ingredients make a rich confection for anyone addicted to pop culture.

  —Wichita Eagle

  Fun reading.

  —Reno Gazette-Journal

  A marvelous adventure in Toontown, a hare-sute tour de farce. In this latest cotton-tale, Roger is back with the same madcap characterizations we loved in the film.

  —Ottawa Citizen

  Wolf has managed to take a potential one-joke premise and milk it for all it’s worth.

  —Wilmington Sunday News Journal

  Those thespian Toons are back. Readers are going to love it. And the film is going to be great.

  —Washington Times

  Murder and mayhem in Hollywood’s shady underworld. A humorous and intelligent mystery.

  —Staten Island Sunday Advance

  Wolf does it with panache. If you want high quality entertainment, grab this book, then follow Eddie Valiant’s advice in the introduction: Relax, hang on, and enjoy the ride.

  —United Press International

  Involving reading which will be enjoyed by fans.

  —The Bookwatch

  The long awaited sequel to Who Censored Roger Rabbit? Great fun throughout.

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  Imagine a comic book with no p-p-p-pictures. It sounds dull, but when Gary K. Wolf writes about Roger Rabbit and Eddie Valiant, it isn’t. Valiant discovers just about every crime taking p-p-p-place in Toontown. The book requires readers to exercise more imagination than most. Despite its silliness, the suspense and mystery of the book and the mischievous rabbit will hold readers of all ages.

  —Pensacola News-Journal

  Fast, funny, and sus-p-p-p-pensful.

  —Nassau Herald

  Another offbeat mystery story as good as the first book and the movie.

  —Erie Times-News

  Wolf is a master of word plays and has great fun with the English language.

  —Syracuse Daily Orange

  Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?

  by Gary K. Wolf

  Copyright © Gary K. Wolf, 1991

  Smashwords Edition

  All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While references may be made to actual places or events, the names, characters, incidents, and locations within are from the author’s imagination and are not a resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, or events. Any similarity is coincidental.

  Book Design: Cera Smith

  Jacket design and illustration: Dayna Stedry © The Walt Disney Company and Amblin Entertainment, Inc.

  The detective on the cover

  is portrayed by Mr. Wolf.

  www.garywolf.com

  A memo to my clients.

  Roger Rabbit and his screwball buddies play fast and loose with historical accuracy.

  That’s the way things happen in Toontown.

  Take a tip from a guy who’s been there. Relax, hang on, and enjoy the ride.

  Eddie Valiant

  Private Eye

  Los Angeles, California

  1947, more or less.

  1

  I knocked on the rabbit’s door.

  A curtain shivered in a second floor window, and I caught a flash of ears. The window flew open.

  A word balloon sailed out.

  It turned edge-on, slicing the air like the business end of a guillotine, and shattered on the stoop. Six inches farther left, and I’d own one less private eye.

  I jig-sawed the pieces together with my toe. “Eddie Valiant,” it said, followed by a single exclamation point the size of a major leaguer’s bat and ball.

  I looked up. There he stood in the open doorway. Six feet tall and change, counting his eighteen-inch ears. His carroty cowlick flopped forward to the tops of his blue-lagoon eyes. Cotton candy ear canals, marshmallow fur, and lemon-drop mittens put him next in line to replace Shirley Temple as First Mate on the Good Ship Lollipop. His red corduroy overalls fit him the way spider webs drape the Headless Horseman’s hat rack.

  “P-p-p-please come in,” he said out loud, spraying me with enough saliva to irrigate the San Fernando Valley.

  I entered the low-ceilinged warren he called a living room.

  He’d decorated it on the cheap, with props from his movies. I spotted a sofa from Tummy Trouble, a beach chair from Roller Coaster Rabbit, and dishes from Waiter, There’s a Hare in My Stew.<
br />
  I recognized his Oriental rug from the flying scene in Baby Baba and the Forty Thieves. It still bore the stain where Baby Herman had wet his pantaloons during one of Roger’s hare-pin turns.

  One whole wall displayed autographed photos of famous celebs. Studio prexy Walt Disney and his adopted nephew Mickey. Roger and Baby Herman flanking publicity agent Large Mouth Bassinger. Benny the Cab out for an evening of engine revving with Fangio, the Spanish race car driver. Baby Herman making goo-goo eyes at Carole Lombard and her making them back. Roger even had one of me and Doris. Together and happy. A collector’s item if ever there was one.

  A faded chunk of wall space contained a hook but no likeness. In a nearby wastebasket, I spied a silver picture frame. I eyeballed its eight by ten. Jessica Rabbit, Roger’s hotcha wife. She looked terrific, even scraped and torn by broken glass.

  Roger opened the breastplate in the suit of armor he’d worn in Sleepless Knights. With its straight-up-and-pointy iron ears, it would have made a perfect cocktail fork for the giant who lived at the top of Jack’s bean stalk. Roger had a better use for it. He’d converted its hollow innards into a bar. “Drink?”

  “Every chance I get.”

  He set out glasses—decaled with his likeness—and poured from a bottle of bourbon with more years on it than a perpetual calendar. I’ll say one thing in the rabbit’s favor. He didn’t know when to stop.

  We both drank up.

  I lit a smoke and tried to ignore Roger whooping, turning colors, smoking at the ears, pin-wheeling his eyes, and careening around the room with the wobbly abandon of a lopsided skyrocket.

  I counted seven points in his imperfect landing. He skidded to a stop with his head stuck in a large vase. He twisted it side to side and levered it with his feet, but it refused to come off.

  Wearing his Ming turban, he groped his way blindly around the coffee table until he came to several recent copies of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. He held them up. “Do you read the trades?” His words popped out of the vase individually, strung together like links in a chain.

  “Sure.”

  “Then you know about the plans to film Gone With the Wind. “

  “Yeah.” Frankly, I didn’t give a damn. The only movies that copped my six bits showed John Wayne whaling the living tar out of galoots wearing black ten-gallon hats.

  Roger puffed his scrawny chest. “I’m a leading candidate to play Rhett.”

  Hop hop hooray for Hollywood. With the whole Civil War for chaos, why did Gone With the Wind need Roger Rabbit?

  “The producer, David O. Selznick, loved me in Song of the South.” His word balloon formed a circle the size of a buttermilk biscuit. The writing inside had the broad, swooping mushiness of a pen dipped in grits. When the word bubble popped, it was with a fragrant whiff of honeysuckle.

  “It’s a long way, chum, from Br’er Rabbit to Br’er Butler.”

  “And getting longer every day. That’s why I wanted to see you.” By touch and feel, he located a wad of newspaper clippings. He handed them in my general direction.

  They’d been ripped out of the Toontown Telltale. I gave them a onceover. According to “unnamed but in-the-know sources” Jessica Rabbit was baking her carrot cakes for Clark Gable. The clippings gave the whats, whens, and wherefores in embarrassing detail.

  I tossed the articles on an end table. They hit with a juicy smack. “Rabbits will be rabbits.”

  Roger muttered a string of the gobbledygook you get dragging your finger along the top row of a typewriter. “You can’t believe that garbage.”

  “They can’t print what isn’t true. First Amendment. Look it up “

  The steam coming out of his ears blew the vase off his noodle. It shattered against the wall. Too bad his head wasn’t still inside. The impact might have jolted some sense into him. “I want you to make them stop.”

  “I’m the wrong man for the job. You need a shyster.”

  The rabbit helped himself to a Big Red One, a brand of cigar artificially colored to resemble a stick of dynamite. Sometimes the goofballs who roll and paint them slip a few of the real thing into the box. That’s why so many Toons have only four fingers. Roger lit the fuse. I held my ears. Nothing came out but smell and pollution. “I already contacted one. He told me a lawsuit could drag on for years. By then the damage will have been done.”

  “What damage?”

  “I can’t afford a scandal at this point in my career. Mr. Selznick is risking millions on Gone With the Wind. He can’t have his major star tainted by even a hint of impropriety. Even though the story’s a total fabrication, if the Telltale keeps running this…this bilge about Jessica, I’ll lose my chance to be Rhett.”

  “Sorry, Roger. I promised Doris. No more muscle work.”

  “I’ll pay any price you want.”

  “My principles can’t be bought.”

  He quoted me a figure that would rent them for a while.

  “OK. I’ll lean on the Telltale. But I warn you, they’re liable to lean back.”

  “I have faith in you, Eddie. You’ll make everything right. You always do.”

  2

  I opened my office door and held my hat in front of it. My fedora came back with no holes. Which meant Doris had either forgiven me or run out of bullets.

  I turned out to be only half wrong.

  Doris wasn’t around, at least not any place I could see. Maybe she was hiding in my bottom desk drawer. I checked. Nope. Nothing in there but that nasty old bottle of firewater. I put it to my lips and tilted it back.

  Not a drop dripped out.

  I spotted her note. She’d stuffed it down the bottle’s neck. The one place she knew I’d find it.

  I read her writing through a liquid haze.

  “I’m leaving you, Eddie,” she wrote in her tiny, precise hand. The booze, or maybe a tear, had smeared the ink that formed my name. “I’m a simple girl. I’d be real happy living in a tiny cottage, raising a couple of kids, married to a common working stiff with a better-than-average chance of living to a ripe old age. Maybe, in time, I could learn to abide your crazy schedule, your financial peaks and valleys, and your lowlife friends. But I’m afraid I’ll never shake the dreadful feeling that one day I’ll find a policeman on my doorstep come to tell me the worst news a woman can hear.” I twisted the bottle around, and the next line swam into view. “Don’t bother calling, and don’t try to see me. You can’t change my mind.” She signed it simply, “Doris.”

  I emptied the bottle by pouring it down my throat. I hooked her note out with a pencil. It didn’t read any better blotted dry.

  I heaved the empty out my office window. We both hit bottom in a dead heat.

  A stiff Santa Ana would send the Toontown Telltale Building sailing out into the Pacific. Considering its fishy journalism, maybe that’s where it belonged.

  The building’s four massive corner columns duplicated in painted stucco the muckraking mutton heads who changed the Toontown Telltale from a paper that wrapped garbage to one that printed it. The one called Sleazy had the pained, elongated snout of a constipated alligator. Slimey, with his triangular face, grayish pink pallor, sharply right-angled ears, and prominent, bony nose, resembled a fresh pork chop. An X-shaped scar crisscrossed Dreck’s cheek like the carved-on signature of an illiterate buccaneer. Profane had the profile of a wrecked four-hole Buick.

  I tried a nearby parking lot, but the attendant had a medical problem. He refused to touch eyesores, so I docked my heap on the street.

  I entered the publisher’s office.

  His plain Jane receptionist with her shiny nose, dull lipstick, bun-coiled hair, pince-nez, and ruffled, high-collared frock had “Agnes Smoot” engraved on her nameplate, and permanent spinster stamped across her forehead.

  I flashed dear, sweet Agnes my badge. After reading the front, she checked the
back for a dime store price tag. She take me for a fool? I washed it off last month, same time I laundered my underwear and socks. Agnes relayed my essentials to her boss. He told her to show me in.

  I entered an office twice the size of my biggest aspiration.

  The Telltale’s publisher, Delancey Duck, waddled out from behind his desk atop a webbed pair of orange size-fourteens. In a Mr. Universe contest, he’d lose to the fat soprano who sang the national anthem. His skinny white arms were just the right size for fishing quarters out of sidewalk grates. A basketball could roll between his legs and not touch either knee. An orange bill the wobbly shape of a sledge-hammered pumpkin underlined a bulging pair of hardboiled-egg-and-black-olive eyes. He measured three feet even but that included the good four inches of ruffled head fuzz you’d call a ducklick.

  He sported a tan cutaway with expanding shoulders for freer wing movement, a matching vest also tailored loose in the flappers, a buttoned-down duck cloth shirt in goosey gander white, canvas-back pants with extra give in the drumsticks, and a set of spats borrowed from his tropical cousin, the blue-footed booby. His feathery handshake removed the lint from my shirt cuff.

  He motioned me to a seat in an antique side chair. The duck shinnied up the leg of a ditto and plunked himself atop a plush eiderdown cushion.

  He coaxed a great impersonation of the Chattanooga Choo Choo out of an expensive Havana Corona-Corona. My mouth watered, but the implication rolled right off his back. He tipped the end of his butt into a gold-crested ashtray, a souvenir from the Stork Club.

  “You’re wasting your time, Mr. Valiant. Our reputation for spurious journalistic ethics far belies situational reality.” His balloon was as crisp as an English muffin. Printer’s devils could sort his letters and use them to set type for his morning edition.

  “Translate that for me.”

  A string of musical notes floated from a concealed speaker and tinkled into broken circles and stems against the wall. Swan Lake. “We print the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  I hauled out today’s edition and read him the cover headline. ‘Husband reborn as parrot. Says he never loved her.’” I flipped it in his face.