Who P_p_p_plugged Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  “Try the school of hard knocks. It’s chiseled in stone over the door: ‘Whatever works.’ “ She lit a cigarette, the strong, stubby variety much in fashion with burly stevedores who muscle crates around the docks. “I was poking through his belongings, seeing what I could see, and that wasn’t much. Dark as an aardvark’s ark hole in there. I don’t know exactly where I ended up, but wherever it was, Enigman himself came in. And guess what. You were with him. I realized I was in his screening room. I ducked under the front row of seats and waited for the show to start.”

  “You saw the movie?”

  She nodded. “I saw Enigman tell you about Selznick’s box. Needless to say, the Telltale would pay a major bonus for a peek at anything that important to so many high-powered big wigs.”

  “Then you also saw whoever else was in the room.”

  “Sorry. All I saw, or didn’t see, was you.”

  She pulled her coat more tightly around her, though I was the one catching the chill. “I heard you threaten Enigman. I heard the gun go off, your gun. What’s more, I got Enigman’s last three balloons on film. I’d show them to you except the film’s hidden away. I will tell you one thing. His dying words make you look guilty as sin.”

  Of that I had no doubt. “How do I know you didn’t kill him?”

  “Maybe I did. Why don’t you try and prove it?” She flipped the remnant of her glowing cigarette out the window into the scrub grass lining the road. Obviously a woman unconcerned about starting fires. “Either I get the box, or the film goes to Bulldog Bascomb. After the Telltale runs a series of stills on page one.” She opened her purse. “That’s a better deal than you’ll get from David Selznick.”

  She replaced the lipstick her ciggie had kissed away. “Here’s an exclusive scoop for you. Selznick’s backers are one step away from pulling their money out of his Civil War musical, lock, stock, and cannon barrel. Selznick’s near bankruptcy. He doesn’t have the money to pay your fee let alone produce Gone With the Wind.”

  Life was so much simpler when my only worry was matching the day of the week with the word embroidered on my underwear. “The box is yours.”

  “You better not forget.” She got out of the car. She pointed a finger at me gun fashion through the window and pulled the trigger. “Or you can tell it to Saint Peter, bub.”

  Exactly my next-to-next-to-last words to Enigman before somebody iced him.

  Roger came back. “That car’s got a bad drinking problem,” he said. “He positively reeks of rum. What’d you find out?”

  “You can’t trust a woman.” Of course I already suspected that.

  I had a hunch about the devious Miss Wrightliter, and it smelled of lots worse than rum. I gave Roger the wheel plus everything that went with it and told him to follow her car.

  14

  I grabbed a hack to the Toontown Ritzy. I found Carbuncle Chameleon rolled out three feet wide, eight feet long, a quarter-inch thick, masquerading as the hotel’s front doormat.

  I squatted beside his flattened body. “How you doing, Carbuncle.”

  “Eddie,” he said in a balloon as thin as a pauper’s pocketbook. “What brings you around?”

  “Tom Tom LeTuit.”

  Carbuncle reached up with his snaky arm and held the door open for an elderly swell and her pet poodle. “My but we’re looking lovely today,” he told her. His balloon assumed the shape of a tin cup. The lady tossed him a nickel. He flipped out his tongue and caught the coin on the fly. He dropped it into his pocket. He was spread so thin I could count his change. A dollar twenty-three. “Never heard of him.”

  “Let me refresh your memory. LeTuit amscrayed my brother. Five years ago. About the same time that murdering burglar Farnsworth Fenestration found out his egress of choice was really a cop, and I saved your casement. Remember?”

  Carbuncle’s throat coiled tight enough to hogtie a dogie. “It’s coming back, yup.” Three of his letters blinked. The I, the 0, and the U. “Follow me.” Chameleon got off the sidewalk, curled himself into a sphere, and bounced along ahead of me, making me feel like a guy blind-dating a basketball.

  We entered the employees’ lounge. There, Carbuncle assumed his normal shape, tall and thin, with the deadly tension of a cocked bowstring. His jet-black hair, greased shiny and plastered flat, gave his head the sheen of a highly polished bowling ball.

  If you work plainclothes detail in the tonier sections of Toontown, you dress to the nines. In Carbuncle’s case, that meant a wide-shouldered brown worsted suit, a monogrammed silk shirt, and buffed leather wing tips that would go sixty bucks easy in a Beverly Hills footery. Tough to handle on a cop’s pay. So Carbuncle patronized the trunk of Filo Fence’s car and called it a victimless crime.

  “What I’m telling you stays between us.” Lucky I took a speed-reading class. Carbuncle’s balloon stuck around for barely an instant before turning to smoke.

  “You know me.”

  He nodded. “LeTuit’s staying in the penthouse, but he hasn’t been around for a couple of days.” He poured himself a cup of coffee and another for me.

  I sweetened my java with the nectar of the gods. “Any idea where he’s gone?”

  “None.” He sat down the easy way. He turned himself into a chair, a plush, heavy, claw-footed winger upholstered in crewel. The undisputed King of Camouflage. A mummer with a magnifying glass couldn’t tell him from any other chair in the room. “LeTuit shook his tail and disappeared. I’m waiting for him to show so we can place him under surveillance again.”

  “What’s his play?”

  Carbuncle crossed his leg apron over his seat cushion. “He’s smack in the middle of a major drug deal.”

  “Powder, pellets, tablets, crystal, weed?”

  “None of the above. Liquid. Formulated by a Cuban compadre of LeTuit’s. Dr. Jackal. The title’s bogus. He swiped it along with a white coat and stethoscope when he escaped from the nuthouse.”

  “What’s his potion do?”

  “Don’t know, but I understand it’s worth a wad of bucks.”

  “Heard any names?”

  He wigwagged his wings.

  “How about LeTuit’s girlfriend? A bowser named Lupe Chihuahua.”

  He returned to normal in time to avoid being plopped on by a three-hundred-pound maintenance man. He formed himself into a circle and rolled back to his post, letting inertia do his work. “A couple of months back Lupe breezed LeTuit for another mug. She dropped out of sight shortly thereafter. I would too. Can’t imagine LeTuit taking kindly to a Dear Tom Tom letter.”

  I couldn’t either.

  Carbuncle no sooner stretched back out on the sidewalk than a happy camper in waffle-soled hiking boots strolled the length of his back, leaving him resembling what goes under a helping of pancake syrup. “Be careful, Eddie,” Carbuncle warned me in a balloon as squarely peaked and valleyed as he was. “LeTuit’s a mean, lean, ugly machine.”

  The news wasn’t all bad. At least I matched my quarry in the first and last categories.

  I strolled the Boulevard.

  Millions of Toon bulb heads illuminated the advertising signs and theater marquees on either side. I’ve seen buses rolling in from Podunk that glowed in the dark, full of incandescent pilgrims eager to put their luminescent craniums up in the limelight. A few, the very brightest, would rise to the klieg level. Most would spend a few years spelling out “Coca-Cola” for scale before they gave up and went back home to their annual star turn as the bright spot on top of the hometown Christmas tree.

  I walked into Playhouse of the August Moon Mullins, a theater so far off Broadway it might as well be on Mars.

  A rusty tin sign screwed to the cornerstone informed me that forty years ago this playhouse premiered the original version of Gasoline Alley. The theater must have run out of ethyl soon thereafter. Reluctant to destroy a candidate in the contest
for lousiest lyceum in L.A., the owners hadn’t so much as freshened the paint since Michelangelo’s untalented cousin slapped it on.

  Ring Wordhollow moonlighted nights here as dialogue coach for a Toon Revue.

  The performers consisted of barnyards, house pets, humanoids, small appliances, and, for comic relief, a few connect-the-dots, the Toons with numbers for elbows and knees.

  I joined Wordhollow in the last row. “All the world’s a stage,” I said, “and all the talking toasters and flatulent furniture merely players.”

  He lowered his head, not in shame, only to peer at me over the top of his spectacles. “Facetiousness does not become you, Eddie. Even in the literary genre of detective fiction, where traditions tend to linger, witty repartee has largely passed out of vogue.”

  “I’m an old-fashioned guy. I’ve been hardboiled too long to go back to sunny-side up.”

  Wordhollow reached into the embroidered carpetbag that served him as home away from home and pulled out the balloon I’d given him. There wasn’t much left. What he hadn’t snipped to ribbons or dunked into chemicals had shredded to dust on its own. “I’ll be honest with you, Eddie. I’ve seen a great quantity of these in my day, but never one even remotely resembling this. It’s unique, although I can’t quite lay my finger on the reason why. It’s a Toon balloon, but yet it’s not. Of course that’s flatly impossible. It must be one or the other.”

  The Toons resumed their play. One of them muffed a line. Wordhollow searched through his bag until he found a balloon showing how the line should have been spoken. He marched up on stage and displayed it to the actor, comparing the flubbed line letter by letter with the good.

  I considered the remnants of my balloon. As airy as unenriched white bread, yet it had the potential of knocking my whole world topsy-turvy.

  My office was within sight of the perennial rainbow that stretched from one end of T-town to the other. Travel writers describe it as a fitting metaphor, symbolic of the carefree lifestyle in Happy Valley. I call it a tourist gimmick, a way to attract the rubes from Kansas. Beneath those furry, fuzzy, feathery Toon exteriors runs a vicious streak that’s totally unhuman. Pop a close gander at the daily strips or Maroon’s cartoons. Squish, pop, bang, pow. You call that entertainment? So did the Marquis de Sade.

  Either somebody left a pair of pink surfboards on my desk top, or Roger was sitting in my swiveler with his tootsies propped. I uncorked the office tool kit and poured myself a gut wrench. “Where’d Wrightliter go?” I asked the rabbit. “What’d she do?”

  “I know exactly. I wrote it down.” He pulled out a pocket notebook with Dick Tracy’s smiling likeness on the cover. “She drove to a seedy warehouse in Burbank. She met up with a dozen more cars like the one she was driving. You know. With that queer black paint on their windows and headlights, and those big wide tires, and that funny slant. The bunch of them stood in line at the warehouse loading dock and took on gas.”

  “They got fueled at a warehouse?”

  “Abso-rootey-toot-tootley. An attendant pumped them from a long rubber hose.” He closed his notebook. “Made me hungry to watch.”

  “How so?”

  “The whole place smelled like a big fruitcake.”

  Proof positive that it takes one to know one. I shooed Roger out from behind my desk and called Ferd. I asked him what he’d turned up on Roger’s prodigal cousin Dodger.

  Seems Dodger escaped from the hoosegow six months ago. The hare hadn’t been heard from nor seen hide of since.

  I asked Ferd to find out if Dodger had ever left the country. He groused and groaned but eventually promised to run a request past a buddy of his at the State Department.

  Lastly, I hit Ferd up for details on Baby Herman’s burglary. He agreed to check, mostly to get me off his back.

  I rewarded him with a Lucky Strike extra. I told him to meet me at the entrance to Toontown at half past midnight. I suggested he bring along a squad of his biggest, meanest friends.

  15

  Even in my worst scrambled egg and pepperoni nightmare, I never saw anything as horrifying as the stiff stone whatnots guarding the drawbridge leading into the Toontown Graveyard. Ugh. Squat, reptilian bodies supported snaky necks with sulphurous eyes and heads the shape of upended spittoons. Their sculptor modeled their ears after the parts of a chicken that people throw away. Pitch-forked tongues flicked through lips ripe as rotten tomatoes. Cold sores substituted for noses. Clustered stingers tipped their serpentine tails. Talons extended from each of their four stumpy fingers and three bootless toes.

  They reminded me of the plastic horror toys which a few sharp twists transformed into innocuous household devices. Their finely honed, double-edged eyeteeth or perhaps their bread bowl bellies suggested that these two might metamorphose into Mixmasters.

  Roger and I parked next to a large wooden rack full of broomsticks, the docking lot for the bone-yard’s resident witches. We walked through an archway shaped like the mouth of a mummified Sultan.

  I toted a paper bag concealing a brick the size of Selznick’s box.

  “Gee, Eddie, I’m glad you’re here,” said Roger, his teeth clattering with a sharp staccato rhythm a flamenco dancer would envy. “I’m not scared with you along to p-p-p-protect me.”

  We found the Crypt of the Dipped. The graveyard’s boogey women straddled the roof. They wore the union uniform, peaked hats and billowy black robes. They were ugly as sin, and in this town, that’s as ugly as ugly gets. Their skin reflected every shade of green from seasick to serpent. Line up their noses end to end and you’d walk an extremely crooked mile. Huck Finn could have worked his way through Mississippi State selling them wart remover.

  I recognized one as the crone in Snow White. With her death rattling cackle and her poisoned apple, she’d scared the popcorn out of half the kids in America. Rumor said she came by her talent naturally, and I don’t mean acting. Word was if you crossed her she’d vex you, hex you, pox you, and box you. I didn’t believe it. I’m your basic Doubting Eddie. Still, when she flashed me her evil eye, it made me wish I’d worn my garlic necktie.

  “Maybe he won’t show,” said Roger. From the lightness of his lettering, he expected that theory to disintegrate in the slightest passing breeze, and it did. He puckered his lips to whistle a happy tune. Discordant static came out. Every body part south of his nose chattered. He was scared half out of his wits, dangerous since he didn’t have a full compliment to start with.

  In the distance, a steeple clock struck midnight. The Hell’s Hobgoblins mounted their broomsticks and rode away into the moonset.

  I bent over and left the sack, as instructed, outside the crypt. When I turned around, Roger was gone! “Hey, fur ball.” I figured he’d discovered a secret passage. I tapped the crypt’s polished marble wall. Solid as Gibraltar. “Knock off the foolishness. I got no time for hide-and-seek. Ollie-ollie-oxen-free.”

  A motion caught my eye. I saw Roger, two rows over, standing in front of the Crypt of the Slipped, a repository for Toons who broke their necks on banana peels. He had his arms upraised. His torso shook with the uncontrolled abandon of a bee-bitten belly dancer. Then I saw why. Somebody standing in the shadows had him covered with a gun. My gun! I’d found the spit bucket who clipped me and stole my rod. I couldn’t rush him without getting my client exterminated, and that’s generally rotten for business.

  The stark terror radiating out of Roger’s balloon lit up an area three rows by three, turning the graveyard into a tic-tac-toe game with headstones for X’s and O’s. “Refrain from pulling the trigger,” pleaded Roger. “Please, please, please!”

  Roger’s supplication bought him a single blast at pointblank range.

  I would have been hard-pressed to miss at that distance, and I’m the world’s worst pistol shot. It runs in the family. Me, Teddy, Freddy; we inherited it from Dad, who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn wit
h his cannon. Yet that’s exactly what happened. Red flag. Betty’s bloomers. Goose egg. Zilch. Out of the onion. The bullet went wild, cracking the Almond joys off a marble cherub. The little angel wouldn’t miss them.

  Roger examined his hands, surprised they weren’t holding a harp. He checked himself for extraneous holes. When he found none, he hitched his britches like the Lone Ranger confronting a bloodthirsty renegade. “Miss me, miss me, now you have to kiss me.” Ah, the new West.

  Roger’s assailant wasn’t about to smooch a rabbit or make the same mistake twice. He pressed his pistol barrel directly against the rabbit’s chest and emptied his load. Five dip-tipped slugs ripped through the rabbit like hot pokers through lard. The impact carried him ten yards backwards. He landed like a swatted bug, on his back with his legs and arms poking straight up in the air.

  By the time I drew my hog leg and reached the action, the shooter had taken a powder along with my gun.

  I checked the rabbit. His pulse, normally a sprightly marimba beat, thudded at the rate of a funeral dirge. Empty balloons gurgled out of him the way muddy water burbles from a dried-up well pump. I dismissed artificial respiration. I’d need a pneumatic tire pump to respirate him in his leaky condition. I’d need corks the circumference of poker chips to plug the holes in his chest. “Who did it?” I asked him. “Who shot you? Tell me a name.”

  Roger motioned me closer. I leaned forward and put my head next to his mouth. He stuck his wet sticky tongue in my ear and went “BLAAAAAT!”

  He died laughing.

  Apparently, Roger hadn’t been the goody-goody he pretended. A transparent likeness emerged out of his chest. It sported horns, carried a pitchfork, and took the escalator, express, to the basement.

  Hard to predict how fast a dead Toon will decompose. Enigman hung around. The one at my feet melted faster than an ice-cube omelette. In seconds, Roger went from star of stage, screen, and comic strip to puddle on the ground. I gave him the best funeral possible under the circumstances. I kicked a clod of dirt over him. I skipped the eulogy. What can you say about a dead rabbit?