Who P_p_p_plugged Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  He resumed his pacing. “Halfway through the program, the studio lights went dark.” My bedsprings groaned. I would too if I got tromped by tootsies the shape and circumference of snowshoes. “I heard a shot. Ka pow!” His onomatopoetic exclamation drifted out the open window. Another senseless expression of violence polluting the landscape.

  “I felt a stinging pain in my”—he blushed—“overalls. The lights came on, and I found myself holding this.”

  He showed me yet another Roger Rabbit doll. They sell in stores for a buck. This one would go for twenty percent less. It had no head.

  Roger handed me a balloon. “This was stuffed…” He pointed to the gaping hole where the neck bone connected to the breast bone.

  “You’ve got the box, and I want it,” read the balloon. It matched the ones left by the rascal who clobbered me and deposited the tailless rabbit at Roger’s front door. “Put it into a plain paper sack. Bring it tomorrow night to the Toontown graveyard. Leave it outside the Crypt of the Dipped on the stroke of midnight. Come alone. Don’t try anything cute. I will be watching.”

  He’d signed it with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones under which he’d added a P.S.: “Cross me, and forget about hats, fright wigs, baseball caps, propeller beanies, eyeglasses, nose cozies, wax lips, chin straps, or anything else worn above the shoulders.”

  I crammed the note back in the chest hole it came from. “You know the box he’s talking about?”

  Roger’s ears bent outward at right angles. They shrugged.

  You got no shoulders, you improvise. A light bulb oozed out of his head and plopped onto my pillowcase. It switched on, filling the room with the fire-sale odor of scorched percale. “My lunch box, my bread box, my shoe box, my tool box, my itty bitty ditty box?”

  “How about the one that belongs to Davey Selznick?”

  “A box seat!”

  “Not hardly. Remember the day you, Kirk Enigman, and Baby Herman went to Selznick’s office to palaver about Gone With the Wind?”

  “Of course. I dressed in my finest apparel. Red overalls with brass buttons. I cut quite the impressive figure, if I do say so myself.”

  “When you three skedaddled, a box belonging to Selznick snuck out with you.” I gave him the rundown.

  The accumulated weight of the mogul’s accusation pressed him low. By the end of it, he was under the carpet with yesterday’s dust. “Mr. Selznick thinks I swiped his dumb box? That’s ridiculous. I’m as honest as…as…”

  I braced myself for another round of parallels on parade. He didn’t disappoint.

  “…as the day is long. As the mountain is high. As the river is deep. As the cheese is binding. As the…”

  “Spare me the indignation.” I went into the living room. I propped Trudy Hammerschlemmer’s photo against my fish tank, figuring it might keep the scum at bay. I threw the mutilated rabbit doll under my coffee table, out of Roger’s sight. “I can square you on the rap. Enigman took the box. He as much as admitted it to me. Before person unknown booted his bucket.”

  Roger’s jaw took the elevator to the basement. “Kirk Enigman’s dead?”

  “Done in, unless I miss my guess, by the sharpshooter who slung lead at you. The box holds the key. I find it, unlock it, and I throw this case wide open.”

  “Do it, Eddie, and quick. Or I’ll be playing the lead in The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.” He bent his fruitcake backwards and tucked it under his arm, worming his neck into the shape of a bar pretzel.

  A fist hit my front door with the impact of a rutting goat. “Open up, scuzz hamper.” Pepper Potts. There went my hundred-yard head start.

  I shoved Roger into my hall closet.

  “Hold it,” he protested, his head snapping out from under his armpit with the whooshing velocity of Jack Kramer’s second serve. “I’m your buddy, your sidekick. I go where you go, do what you do, see who you”

  I slammed the door on his balloon, tore off the half circle caught on the outside, and flipped it under an easy chair.

  I threw the dead bolt and opened the front door.

  “Took you long enough,” snarled Potts.

  “Sorry, I was in the greenhouse pollinating my posies.”

  He shoved me aside and hobbled in. His phony leg clattered like a castanet on the linoleum.

  “You need a pedicure, chum. Hang on. I’ll fetch my rasp.”

  “Don’t crack wise, peeper.” He kicked my early American rocker so hard its maple slats wept pancake syrup.

  “Pick on something your own size. The sofa, maybe, or the daybed.”

  “You’re a piece of work, Valiant. A regular Wisenheimer.” He wore baggy-knee britches and a matching back-belted jacket the color and texture of a mangy ferret. “We got a problem, you and me.”

  “Let’s solve it quick. I had a long, tiring day. I’m bushed. I need my beauty rest.”

  “Har har. That’s a pip. You could sleep through to the next stone age and still be plug-ugly.” He leaned on my bookshelf, his shoulder next to my fish tank. “I got a job to do, and you’re standing in my way.”

  “I’ll move aside and let you past if it gets you out of my life.”

  He picked up the picture of Charley’s niece. “Quite a looker.”

  His ligneous leg rubbed against the bookcase with sufficient friction to start his calf smoking.

  “I’ll introduce you.”

  “Skip it. I’d owe you, and I wouldn’t want that.” He took two steps toward me. His spindle sank to the ankle through my cast-iron heating grate.

  “Need a saw?”

  “What I need is a star for Gone With the Wind.” He lifted his pin and two square feet of metal grate came with it. He took another step. The extra weight didn’t slow him, but the noise, the sound of a tap-dancing telephone pole, stopped him dead. “What I got is a dead actor and two prime suspects. That ain’t gonna hack it with my financiers.” He stamped his gimp hard enough to dent the underside of China. The iron grate snapped in half. “Mr. Selznick is not a happy man. The cops been sniffing around. Davey don’t like it when cops ask him questions. It’s bad for his image. Not to mention it upsets him. He can’t work. And when Davey’s testy, I’m an absolute screaming banshee.”

  I uncorked my volcano and flowed molten lava into a matched set of jelly glasses. I handed one to him.

  “Never touch the stuff.” The smell of rum on his clothes said otherwise, but I wasn’t about to argue. More booze for me. “Mr. Selznick wants this matter wrapped up pronto. Before any further damage gets done.” Potts laced his digits together, turned them inside out, and crunched them, producing the pop a firebug makes when he snaps his kindling. “To that end, Davey authorized me to persuade you to hurry it up.”

  I got a flash of what literates call déjà view. Meaning I don’t have to get hit in the head to know I’m about to get hit in the head. I made what flyboys call a preemptive strike, meaning I cheap-kicked Porter low with sufficient force to pulverize any stone short of a diamond. Men hit that way will double over, fall down, choke, turn blue, puke, pass out, die, or worse. Porter reacted like I’d tickled him with a feather.

  He stepped forward and planted his wooden size one on my instep. While the force of his broom handle pinned me upright, he played xylophone on my ribs, and glockenspiel on my kisser.

  When he’d finished his recital, he lifted his pinion and let me sink to the floor. By the light of the constellation of stars whirling around me, I made a quick calculation. According to my unofficial tally, I’d taken more beatings than an old maid’s living-room carpet.

  Potts sunk his spindle into my gut. “Davey says you’ve gotten too notorious for him to deal with direct. He don’t want you calling him or coming around his office. From now on, you deal with yours truly and nobody else. This box Davey’s got you hunting for. You tell me who stole it. You give it to me and
only me when you get it back.” He peeled open my eyelid. “Clear?” He let loose of my head. It hit the floor. Potts mashed my puss for luck. “You get a break in this case, you call me on the horn.”

  “French or fluegel?”

  “Keep talking like that and it’ll be a bugle blowing taps over your casket.”

  As he walked out, he tromped on Roger’s beheaded doll. His leg went through its stomach. “Remember, Valiant. Davey don’t want to see you, hear you, smell you, or taste you. From here on, you deal with me.” The doll impaled on his pinewood muffled the sound of his leaving.

  I sterilized my wounds with Potts’s untouched drink, then opened my hall closet. Roger had fallen asleep draped over the hanger supporting my green checked slacks. I lifted his head, laid it on the shoulder of my raincoat, and let him snooze.

  I drove to Arnie Johnson’s. He complained when I woke him until he realized he’d just secured Guinness Book of Records immortality for most stitches laced into a single head.

  I returned home, went to bed, and tried logging Z’s but didn’t have much success. I’ve slept through earthquakes, but none rattled me as much as Pepper Potts.

  10

  A suicide squadron of chirps and trills kamikazed my upwind ear canal. I tilted my head and palm-smacked the opposite temple. The tiny eighth and quarter notes popped loose, but the bigger halfs and fulls burrowed in deeper, warbling to beat the band.

  I named that tune in nine notes.

  “Wake up, wake up, wake up, you sleepy head, get up, get up, get up, get out of bed…”

  I burrowed out from under my top sheet.

  Roger stood facing my open bedroom window. The morning sunlight reflecting off his polar-white fur ice-picked my pupils, inflicting the worst case of snow blindness south of Nanook of the North.

  A boisterous choir of bluebirds perched on the edge of the sill. Clothespins shielded their beaks from the aroma of the stinkweed overgrowing my window box. Roger led them in rosy song. For a baton, he had rolled up the rent-over-due-pay-up-or-get-out notice which the super shoved daily under my door. “Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up, the sun is red. Live, love, laugh and be…”

  I threw my pillow at the merry songsters. In a scene out of Mr. Disney’s sticky sweetest fairy tale, they encircled it in the air and caught it on the fly. Holding it in their tiny beaks, they flew it back to me and tucked it under my head.

  There’s never a scattergun handy when you need one. “Shoo those squawk boxes out of here,” I yelled at my morning maestro, “before they give me diabetes.”

  Roger sent his tweeters flying. “I thought you’d like a wakeup song. “

  For six months in boot camp I rousted to bugle music. I’d toss Peggy Lee out of my sack if she tickled her tonsils before noon. “You thought wrong.”

  I did my morning exercises. Twenty pushups, ten squats, five leg lifters, two shots. Roger shadowed me one for one including the deuce of snifters, then he followed me into the bathroom. “What’s our modus operandi, chief?”

  I gave him the boot and slammed the door.

  I scrubbed my snags with Ipana, tamed my cowlick with Wildroot, frosted my chops with Burma Shave, mowed them with a double-edged Gillette, and anointed my armpits with Old Spice. I stepped back and rated the results. My mirror told me the wicked queen could quit worrying. Her position as fairest in the land was safe for another day.

  When I went back into my bedroom, I discovered how Dorothy felt when she went from Kansas to color.

  Roger had tidied up, and how! My wallow hadn’t been this neat and mud-free since Doris handed in her latchkey. A geometry teacher could use my bed sheet corners to illustrate isosceles triangles. My plumped pillows resembled the rear view of a Dandie Dinmont. Gymnasts trampoline on fabric looser than my bedspread.

  The rabbit had washed and ironed my argyles and underwear. A spotless shirt hung on the closet door. He’d pressed my brown plaid suit. He’d even mended the old bullet hole. With a green square cross-stitched on with yellow thread to match my tie!

  In my circles, neat relates to whiskey not clothes. If I wore this regalia, my friends would think I’d gone Ritzy, or crackers. Or both. I ripped off the patch, rumpled my suit and shirt, and dowsed a pair of skiffs with bay rum to loosen the starch.

  I accessorized my outfit with my snap-draw shoulder holster and my spare .38.

  Roger was in the kitchenette, hunched over my Formica table. He’d dumped out the contents of an entire cereal box and was picking through the flakes. He wasn’t being a finicky eater. He was hunting for buried treasure.

  He whooped, held up a clear cellophane packet, and ripped it open. It contained a Captain Midnight Secret Decoder, round and solid brass, the size of a lady’s compact, embossed with the year and Midnight’s emblem. A revolving metal dial set the code of the day.

  “Yippee! I can’t believe it!” I’ve wrapped Christmas presents in paper less colorful than his balloon. “I’ve searched through a hundred boxes for this!”

  “And you found it in my Wheaties.”

  His gasbag crumpled. Glumly, he handed me the decoder. “Keep it,” I told him. “I use the Jack Armstrong model.”

  “He’s got one too?”

  I scowled.

  Roger split a grin the size and shape of a melon slice. “Gee, thanks, Eddie. You’re swell.” He dropped the premium in his pocket.

  He eyed my outfit. “I must have missed those. Take them off, and I’ll iron them.”

  “Skip it.” I scraped a bowl of cereal off the table and ate it standing up. “I got to get to work.”

  “I’ll get ready.” Roger ducked into my closet. He came out wearing my belted trencher, collar up, and a wide-brimmed hat. “How do I look?”

  “Like Humphrey Bogart on Halloween.” If he wanted stroking, let him move to a petting zoo. I dialed the phone.

  “Oh, boy, here we go,” said Roger. “Official detective business.” He pulled out a leather notebook. He wetted his pencil point on his tongue. “Who you calling?”

  “The casting director at MGM.”

  Using his ear for a straightedge, Roger divided his page neatly into four equal columns. He wrote “CD/MGM” in the first, noted the time in the second, the date in the third, and poised his pencil above the fourth. “What’s he got to do with the price of peanuts in Paraguay?”

  “None of your beeswax.”

  Roger winked. “That’s a test, right? To see if I’ve got the moxie to overcome resistance when interrogating a suspect. Fine. I accept the challenge.” He bent over and aerialed his ears around my head. “I’ll switch to aural surveillance.”

  I smacked his bean with the telephone, raising a lump the size of my kitchen table. He didn’t need Captain Midnight to decode that message.

  The casting director came on the wire. In exchange for the promise of a double sawbuck, he gave me a daytime phone number, a car wash on the Strip. No surprise. If not that, it would have been a hash house, a juke joint, a bookshop, a department store, or a soda fountain, the traditional meal tickets of daydreamers.

  The maitre d’ at the auto laundry ordered me and Roger to vacate while our buggy took a bath. I flashed him a peek at my heater. He wished us bon voyage and hooked us to the treadmill. We rolled headlong into a humid hellhole of soap bubbles and water.

  “I’m baffled,” said Roger from the backseat. “What nefarious skullduggery goes on in here?”

  The automatic scrub brushes shoo-shoo-boogied the length of the car and backed off. The passenger door opened. A female attendant piled inside. She wore loose-fitting white coveralls and a long-billed blue twill cap of the sort sported by elderly fishermen and Donald Duck. A cinnamon-backed, black-bellied, plug-ugly male anteater with toenails as long and prickly as scimitars hopped in after her.

  The dame came armed with a spritzer of Windex and a handful of rags. The
rodent packed a snout the length, breadth, and color of Paul Bunyon’s Coney Island red-hot. Both were sopped to the skin, which displayed the contours hidden beneath white denim and fur, respectively. Underneath his bristly exterior, the anteater resembled a shriveled desert carcass. Road crews shovel up and bury better. The woman was another story. Unless she wore a Mae West and a tool belt stuffed with extra sponges, she curved front to back, side to side in exactly the right places.

  The rodent and I bookended the frail.

  She moved me over with an elbow shot to the ribs. “Another cheap thrill seeker,” she said to her partner in grime. “Hoping to pinch my wuzzle while I scrub his glass.”

  The anteater ignored her, me, everything but the ashtray into which he stuck his snifter and snorted.

  “One touch, mate,” she warned as she squirted my windshield, “and I yell for the bobbies.”

  “Save your lungs.” I showed her my photostat. “I’m legit.”

  She held my license an inch from her nose and squinted at the likeness. “I know you,” she said in her lilting, lightly Limey accent. “Last time we met, you were talking to a prop.”

  “Second to last. We met once after.”

  “So we did. I forgot.”

  “Beautiful women usually do.”

  Her nose dimpled on the end when she smiled. “I admire a man with the linguistic ability to pay a lady a compliment and disparage himself in a single four-word sentence.”

  “Smart girl, dumb luck.” I grinned. She clapped her wet hands. I took as much of a bow as you can while wedged behind the steering wheel of a Hupmobile.

  The anteater finished vacuuming the front floor mats and started on the back. He should have looked before he lipped. He inhaled Roger’s left ear.

  “Don’t tell me what happens next,” she said to me. “I know.” She sprayed the seats with the same solution she’d used on the windows. “You beat me with a rubber hose until I squeal. Isn’t that the way detectives operate?”