by Gary K. Wolf
Roger braced his feet on the anteater’s forehead and yanked to no avail.
“What gave you that idea?”
The anteater sneezed louder than the chief inspector in a pepper mill, but couldn’t clear the ear out of his throat.
She extended her index fingers, raised her thumbs, and lined them into an imaginary machine gun. She sprayed a burst into my craw. “My daddy was a great fan of your American gangster films. He carted me to every one that played in London.”
“Sorry, toots. Life don’t imitate art in this burg. I haven’t seen a Thompson since Normandy Beach. I looked you up to buy you lunch.”
“Really?” She removed her cap, wrung it out, and mopped her brow with it. “Let me warn you. I haven’t eaten a decent meal for weeks. I might gorge myself and not be able to walk away from the table.”
“I’ll bring my wheelbarrow.”
Her warm laugh dried the car from the inside out. She knighted my shoulder with her headgear. “I have tomorrow off. Pick me up at my place.” She gave me the address.
The anteater hawked. Roger’s top third blew out of his honker along with six pounds of dust.
The lady and the anteater climbed out. They ran down the line to catch the next boat through the canal, a bright yellow Rolls.
“Hey,” I called after her. “What’s your name?”
She yelled it over a snake hiss of steam. “Vivien Leigh.”
Roger tumbled into the front seat, his left ear bent to the shape of the anteater’s innards. “We wasted half the morning, and I nearly lost a lobe just to get you a date?” He formed his thumb and first digit into a circle and ran it stem to stern along his kinked appendage. It straightened with the sound of pigs popping their knuckles. “How can you possibly justify that?”
“Love makes the world go ‘round, chum.”
He blinked like I’d speared him through the heart. “You’re right.” He unleashed a torrent of tears having the high arc of a one-handed jump shot. They splattered me with brine. “What’s life without romance? Without wooing and cooing? How I miss the bliss of her kiss.” I folded his bright red, lacy-edged balloon lengthwise and tucked it away. It would save me a dime, assuming I clicked with a skirt by Valentine’s Day.
“Forget about the assassin,” he said. “Forget about Mr. Selznick’s dumb box. Forget about Rhett Butler, Baby Herman, Kirk Enigman, Gone With the Wind. None of it matters a hill of beans, not compared to what’s really important. Eddie, I have to know.”
He stood on the seat and faced me, pleating himself across the middle so he wouldn’t have to stoop. “Is Jessica cheating on me or not?”
I kicked the gas. The acceleration sproinged open the accordion folds across his stomach, leaving him wedged firmly between seat cushion and roof. “Let’s find out.”
11
We pulled into an office park built entirely out of the jolly Green Giant’s old toy blocks. The developer had simply hollowed them out, added doors and windows, and stacked them in piles. Architectural critics took one gander at his hodge-podged square wooden buildings, embossed on the sides with brightly colored silhouettes of circus clowns, choo-choo trains, and barnyard livestock, and proclaimed the brilliant dawn of style naïveté. Space here leased for an arm and a leg per foot.
“Wow,” said Roger. “These streets are paved with gold!”
The rabbit needed spectacles. The road we traveled was common macadam, a bit less bumpy than most. It led to the medical offices of Dr. Wallace Ford.
A small brass door plaque displayed his name followed by enough letters to stir envy in an eye chart.
I unwrapped a large bar of Ivory and handed it to Roger. “Chew this up good before we go in.”
“What? Eat soap? Are you nuts? It could kill me.”
“Not a chance. It’s ninety-nine and forty-four one hundreths percent pure.” I shoved it into his craw. He munched it up and swallowed.
Ford’s starchy, lemon-pussed receptionist informed me nobody sees the doctor without an appointment. His first open slot? Two weeks into the next decade.
I pleaded emergency. Told her I had a rabid rabbit on my hands. Roger stood beside me, obligingly foaming at the mouth.
She ushered us into an examination room, posthaste.
Dr. Ford entered a few minutes later. He was as thin and sterile as a scalpel. I hoped he wasn’t as sharp. He added a final notation to his last patient’s file and dropped it into a wall-hung metal basket. He slipped a fresh form into his clipboard. His brisk, efficient manner epitomized the medical profession’s motto: Impellite Eos, Expellite Eos (“Move ‘em in, move ‘em out”). Another reason I saw a vet. “What seems to be the problem?”
Roger belched a quantity of soapsuds sufficient to swab the decks of a battleship.
Ford grabbed a handful, rubbed them between his fingers, and sniffed the residue. “Definitely not rabies. Any family history of saponaceousness?”
“Only the sap part,” I said.
“Let’s have a look.” Ford shined a flashlight into Roger’s ear. A shadow picture of squirrels storing nuts for the winter appeared on the wall beyond.
“You come highly recommended by a friend of mine,” I said. “Clark Gable.”
“Ah, yes. Clark, the dear boy. I haven’t seen him for ages.” Ford tapped the back of Roger’s head with a silver hammer. It rang like a lumberjack axing a hollow oak.
“When he heard I was coming here, he asked me to do him a favor. You sent him a bill.” I showed him the copy I’d cadged from Louise Wrightliter’s Gable file. “He can’t remember what it’s for. Maybe you could refresh his memory.”
Ford glanced at it and nodded. “That was incurred by a friend of his. A lady friend.” He flat-handed Roger between the shoulder blades. Roger coughed out a balloon filled with froth.
“Clark requested I send the bill to him personally rather than to her or the studio.” Ford snapped Roger’s balloon onto a back-lighted viewing box. He studied it through a magnifying glass. “I obliged.”
“Clark figured it for that.”
“I’m surprised the matter slipped his memory.” Ford wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around Roger’s neck, stuck a bicycle pump in his mouth, and inflated him to three times normal size. “Considering the circumstances.”
He put his stethoscope on Roger’s nose and pulled out the air tube. “It’s not every day a man requests me to examine Jessica Rabbit. Especially for what he gave her.”
Roger deflated to the thickness of an ironing board.
Ford slipped Roger under a fluoroscope and turned on the juice. The screen showed a cranium full of bubbles. Ford noted it on Roger’s chart. “Remarkably clean-minded chap.”
Hardly. I saw murder in Roger’s pancaked eyes, and that’s as dirty as thinking gets.
“I prescribe a vacuum purge,” said Ford. He stuffed Roger into his stainless-steel sterilizer, slammed the door, spun the spoked metal lock, and set the timer for thirty minutes.
With Roger out of earshot, I asked Ford the sixty-four-dollar doozy. “What exactly did Jessica Rabbit catch from Gable?”
He chuckled. “A case of morning sickness. The lady is pregnant. “
I paid a street-corner urchin six bits for a map of the stars. It told me Gable resided in what real-estate hawkers call an ethnically undifferentiated, upscale neighborhood. That means everybody’s invited, Toons and humans alike, but show a fat wallet at the door.
The names on Gable’s street read like Who’s Who. Movie stars, athletes, politicians, industrialists, more movers and shakers than you’d find at a bulldozer’s reunion.
His driveway snaked so far back from the road I earned a few extra bucks in mileage money, and so far up it practically gave me a nosebleed. Gable lived in a suction cup that clung to the leveled-off top of the hillside the way flies stick to a wall. One good swat f
rom Mother Earthquake and he’d ride the world’s only twenty-six-bedroom toboggan.
The actor wasn’t as egalitarian as Knuckles presumed. He had a Ford all right, but I have a hunch he only drove it when sweaty. His personal parking lot also boasted a Stutz Bearcat, a LaSalle, and a Duesenberg.
I parked next to an Indian Chief motorcycle. A leather helmet and goggles hung from the handlebar. Comforting to know even he-men worry about bug-spotted foreheads.
The soap suds had melted away, but raw fury and gall had kept Roger lathered. When I dowsed the engine, he exploded with the roar of a match down a gas pipe. “Gable! That p-p-p-parsimonious p-p-p-popinjay. That p-p-p-prodigious p-p-p-pederast. I’ll p-p-p-parboil his p-p-p-porridge. I’ll p-p-p-pulverize his p-p-p-petunias. I’ll p-p-p-punch his p-p-p-parasol to p-p-p-pieces.”
“Hold on, champ, before you lay on the blame. Last I heard, it takes two to tango.”
The lump in his throat blocked off his balloon. When it swelled to the size of a terminal goiter, I thumped him hard and shook it loose. I should have let him rupture. “I’m coming in with you,” he said.
“Over my dead body.” I got out of the car and headed for the door.
He hopped around and kneeled in front of me. “P-p-p-pretty p-p-p-please?” I left my heel marks on his chest. He grabbed me around the knees. “I’ll be good, honest I will.”
I’ll say this. He was tenacious. I like that in a rabbit. “You’ll keep your yap shut?”
He zipped his lip.
“You so much as raise your pinkie, and you spend the rest of this case locked in the trunk.”
He gave me a look of innocence that would have sailed him past the screening committee to the hereafter.
As we walked to the front door, I noticed him slip a nickel out of his pocket. He ran it the full length of Gable’s Stutz. It left a gouge almost as wide but not quite as deep as the one in his ticker.
A bronze plaque on the door frame designated Gable’s cliffhanger as a National Historical Wowser. Seems Daddy Warbucks built it in the twenties as a one-upper to his arch rival, William Randolph Hearst. He scoured the globe for French and Dutch doors, Grecian formula columns, Venetian blinds, and Roman candle holders. He crowned it with a Chinese-checkered paint job. The end result resembled the outhouse at the United Nations. Though admittedly my taste in castles runs to white ones that sell cheap hamburgers.
Gable’s butler was an English bulldog from the wrong side of the Thames. He was tall and lanky with not an ounce of puppy fat. He had his breed’s typical pushed-in face, but his went back farther than most, like he’d run full-tilt down one too many dead-end streets. He’d never take Best of Show at Westchester, but he’d go good rounds with any dogcatcher in town.
His words came out pure Cockney, dry as a day-old basket of fish and chips. The master was in the backyard enjoying a swim in the pool. Roger and I could cut through the house so long as we promised not to let our feet touch the floor.
We entered Gable’s inner sanctum. Roger pulled up short when he saw what hung over the mantel. An oil portrait of Jessica. Her eyes twinkled brighter than the star I wished on every night. She had hair the color of a strawberry sundae, always my favorite dessert. A plastic surgeon could have made a career out of giving other women her nose. Her smile out-candle-powered Rudolph the Reindeer. The portrait ended just below her bare shoulders and left me wishing for twelve inches more canvas.
Roger’s ears drooped like the side flaps on a moose hunter’s hat. I grabbed him by his limp auricles and dragged him onto the veranda.
If not for the Great Salt Lake, Gable’s freestanding, cantilevered pool would have been the biggest body of water west of the Mississippi. A strong wind could raise waves high enough to swamp his garage.
I picked binoculars off a small patio table and scanned the horizon. I spotted him paddling around on the far side of the island. He swam to shore with the effortless grace of a water sprite.
He pulled himself out of the pool and toweled off, starting with his long black hair and working his way down. I’ve met my share of movie actors. Most make as much of an impression as a gnat’s foot on wet sand. Not Gable. An advertising huckster seeking a ruggedly handsome face to drift the high plains in praise of a cigarette need look no further. His nose, perfect. His mouth, perfect. His chin, his teeth, his eyebrows, his mustache, even his nose hairs were perfect. When he smiled, his face became a sheet of slightly crinkled bronze foil recently unwrapped from a very expensive piece of Anglo-American toffee. In those movie posters showing him with his shirt off, his muscles came from pressing iron, not from the end of an airbrush. Ladies nowadays called him a dreamboat. I’d classify him heavier and more dangerous, a light cruiser or a PT. Crowds would part to let this man through, and so, probably, would the Red Sea.
There was only one slight flaw in his otherwise perfect demeanor. With his ears, he’d be well advised to stay out of high winds and elephant herds.
I handed him my card. “A private eye, huh?” He sized me up, not caring for what he saw. “What can I do for you gents?” He turned to Roger.
Technically, Roger kept his promise. His dander was way up, flaking off him in a white blizzard that could serve as the before picture in an ad for hare conditioner. But he didn’t mouth off. He didn’t have a chance. Gable took one gander at him, said “Not you again,” and decked him with a right cross. I’ve heard directors complain that Roger can’t produce stars when he’s bonked on the bean. You couldn’t prove it by Gable’s punch. Roger created enough five-pointers to overpopulate the Milky Way. He collapsed into a heap.
“What’d you do that for?” I asked.
Gable slipped on a robe, heavy terry cloth with the nap of a good throw rug. He stepped over the unconscious rabbit, walked to the table, and poured a glass of orange juice. “The hairy little weasel’s trying to bribe me.”
“You got him confused with another hairy weasel.”
Gable rolled him over with the tip of his toe. “Roger Rabbit. I’d know those flying-saucer eyes, those Popsicle ears, that bellbottom body…”
“What’d he do to rattle your snake?”
Gable extricated his foot from the rabbit’s belly and let him fall back to the concrete. “The crumb bum came here yesterday. He offered me a sizable amount of money. All I had to do in return was interrogate my best pal.”
“And who might that be?”
“Baby Herman. He’s a good stiff. Me and the Babe have done more than our fair share of bar crawling. Not to mention racing our cycles together up in the hills. He’s a game little mud-lark, a suicide rider, flat out and won’t stop for anything. Though that might have something to do with the fact his legs don’t reach the brakes.”
“What was the rabbit after?”
“He wanted me to pump the Babes about a stupid box.”
Gable’s butler spread Roger flat and rolled him up from feet to head.
“I told the rabbit to take a hop.” Gable lit a smoke, a fancy brand that sells for a dime a pack. “I kicked him. Hard. Check under that bandage he’s wearing. I’ll bet you’ll find an imprint of my shoelaces.”
The butler tied Roger into a bundle knotted with his own ears.
“The rabbit grind any personal axes during his visit?”
Gable vitamin-enriched his juice with four ounces of fermented potato. “Give me a clue.”
“The subject of you and his wife.”
Gable’s thumb traced a pattern on his frosty glass, either a bull’s-eye or a zero. “Rumors. I pay a press agent big money to spread them. They bolster my reputation.”
“According to Old Doc Ford, one of those rumors took seed. He says Jessica’s in a family way, and you’re the culprit.”
Gable sipped his drink. “That’s a private matter a gentleman doesn’t discuss. You want to know, I suggest you ask the lady in question.”
“So far I’m aught for two here in the rumors-confirmed department. Let’s try for strike three. There’s a story going around that you’re not the man you’re cracked up to be, if you get my drift.”
That one drew a response. He smacked his fist so hard on the patio table he dented the metal.
“They’re saying you’re not a red-blooded male. They’re saying your bloodlines might be closer to shocking pink.”
He pointed a finger between my eyes. “That’s plenty, buster. Give it a rest. You’ve drawn the lines, you don’t have to color in the picture.”
“In other words, I don’t need to ask you the truth of that morsel.”
“Not if you value your head.”
“Any idea where it came from?”
“Who knows. I’m not a well-liked man in Hollywood. This is a company town, and I keep the wrong company. That’s why my career’s stagnating.”
I followed him into the house. “You’re getting your share of parts.
“For the wrong reasons.” Fifty sets of glass animal eyes stared down at me from the walls. Frank Buck brought ‘em back alive. Gable brought ‘em back stuffed and mounted on boards. “I’m always cast as a pretty boy. Nobody acknowledges my acting. I don’t want to leave this world with a tombstone that reads ‘He was only a pretty face.’ I want to accomplish something significant.”
“Choose another profession. Switch your major to physics. Sit under a tree and get beaned with an apple, or drop a pizza off a leaning tower. You’ll get credit for changing the world.”
He wasn’t about to take my advice, but rewarded the sentiment by going to the bar and pouring us both a short message from my favorite sponsor. “Excuse the vodka,” he said. “I much prefer rum at this time of day, but I’m having trouble getting it lately.”
I ought to put Gable in touch with Pepper Potts. They could break the law of supply and demand. One has no rum, the other bathes in it.
I tracked him up the stairs to his bedroom. While he dressed, I stood outside the door and fiddled with the loose threads dangling off my buttonholes.
