Who P_p_p_plugged Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  I went back to the Crypt of the Dipped. My sack was gone. Roger’s killer had plugged him for nothing more than a common brick.

  I put the Toontown Graveyard a couple of miles behind me. I wished I could do the same for this case.

  I uncorked my liquid hammer and beat a few brain cells to death, but they must have been in the wrong quadrant. The memories lingered on. What’s worse, they intensified. I swear I could smell that dumb bunny’s cologne. Eau de phew.

  As I returned the bottle to the glove compartment, a hand reached out from behind my seat and pincered my shoulder.

  I rammed the car into a light pole. The jarring impact slipped me out of his grip. I whipped out my cannon, thumbed the hammer, whirled in my seat, and stuck the barrel halfway up the dastard’s snout.

  “P-p-p-please don’t be mad at me, Eddie, for getting scared and running away.”

  “Roger?”

  He sneezed my gat out of his honker. “I’m so sorry. I’ll do anything you say to make it up. I’ll be your p-p-p-personal slave. Say the word. I’ll wash your board, I’ll scrub your bucket, I’ll whisk your broom, I’ll clean your clock.” He climbed into the front seat. “Don’t hate me just because I’m not as brave as you are.”

  “You miserable, good-for-nothing twerp,” I yelled at him. “Why aren’t you dead? I watched you die.”

  “Which movie?”

  “Real life! “

  His balloon took the shape of a ghost. “You must have been hallucinating. Graveyards have that effect.”

  Not on a hard-bitten dick like me. There was only one explanation that made sense. “This cousin of yours. Dodger Rabbit. He look like you?”

  Roger shook his head so forcefully the ends of his ears cracked like bullwhips. “Don’t be silly. I’m unique in all of rabbitdom. Nobody ever mixes up me and Dodger. We’re totally different. He parts his hair in the middle.”

  “You always stutter on P’s? No exceptions?”

  “P-p-p-pretty much.”

  The dead rabbit hadn’t. “That picture of you and Selznick. Could that have been Dodger and Selznick instead?”

  Roger shut his eyes. A mental vision of the photo floated in the air between us. He pulled out a magnifying glass the circumference of a moose’s monocle and went over the picture inch by inch. “By golly, you’re right. It is Dodger. That scurrilous scamp’s been impersonating me! That rabbidy rat. He nearly got me killed!” Roger wrapped his stubby hands around the floating image of his cousin’s neck. He strangled a half quart of air.

  “He’s always been the black sheep of the Rabbit family.” Roger closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see what he said next. “I never thought I’d wish this on any relation of mine, but that foul foolish fellow deserves to be incarcerated. Eddie, when you catch him, make sure he gets five years in Sing Sing, at least.”

  “I got good news for you, buddy. He’s serving a longer sentence, in a lot worse place.”

  16

  I met Ferd at the entrance to Toontown. His backup contingent wore baggy twill pants and knee-length blue uniform coats. They packed oversized soft rubber nightsticks and pistols that shot seltzer water. Two-quart helmets covered their one-quart heads clear to their googly eyes. To amuse themselves, they played Ping-Pong across the hood of their paddy wagon. For paddles, they used their flatfooted, splay-ended uniform shoes. Toontown’s finest. “Call roll,” I told Ferd.

  “I don’t see Larry, Moe, and Curly.”

  “Be famucking happy with what you frugitty got.” Ferd slid into the front seat beside me.

  “Watch your feet,” I told him. Roger sat in the backseat, bawling his oblong eyes out. He’d covered the floorboards with a quarter inch of tears.

  “What’s with blubber bunny?” asked Ferd. “Death in the family,” I said.

  “I adored that rotten, miserable, sneaky, scum-sucking louse,” wailed Roger.

  I offered Ferd a shot of courage. He cleansed the bottle of cooties by rubbing the open mouth with his palm. “The captain would rip out my fuzzucking guts and eat them for breakfast if he knew I was dragging out the troops to help the likes of you.” He gave me my turn at the spigot. “Hand me a fadduking hint. What’s going on here?”

  “I got a hunch there’s nasty business coming down the road.”

  “Nothing more concrete than that?” He took back the sauce. He didn’t wipe the bottle this time. He wanted plenty of germs present to infect the wound when he clubbed open my skull. “You dragged me and a frigadigging contingent out in the frugadugging middle of the frogadogging night based on a lousy hunch?”

  “Don’t knock it, Ferd. Those hunches of mine got me where I am.”

  “Which is living next door to nowhere.” From out of his coat pocket he produced a bag of potato chips and a government envelope. He ripped open both with a single pass between his teeth.

  He kept the chips and handed me a sheet of government stationery. “My buddy at State ran a check on Dodger Rabbit.”

  “Waaaaa,” wailed Roger. “I loved that rabbit like a half cousin once removed.”

  Dodger had been out of the country once in his life. On a packaged gambling junket to Cuba.

  Ferd tucked his bag of chips between his legs, the one place he knew I wouldn’t reach for a handful. He flipped through his official police-issue notebook. Dick Tracy was pictured on the outside of his too, but here Dick held a gun and he definitely wasn’t smiling. “Here’s the skinny on the Baby Herman caper. Burglar came in through an open window. Spent maybe an hour, hour and a half there. Tossed the place pretty good. Must have made a terrible racket what with the rattles, drums, and clacker toys lying around. Herman insists he didn’t hear squat. He was entertaining a very vocal lady friend in that den of iniquity he calls a playpen. I checked with her and she confirms the basics. We got one suspect. A suspicious clod-wallander a next-door neighbor saw prowling around.”

  “Toon or human?”

  “That’s the odd part. The neighbor couldn’t tell. The jaboney acted like a Toon, walked like a man. You figure it out.”

  We settled back to wait, parked at the base of the miniature mountain range Angelenos erected to keep Toons in their place. For size, it put San Francisco’s Great Wall of Chinatown to shame. Visionaries who dream up what you can see from places you’ve never been claim it’s one of the few manmade objects visible from the moon.

  The bungle brigade had polished off its hundredth game of clip-clop, Ferd and I had done the same to my quart of amber inspiration, when a convoy of Toon sedans came hightailing past, speeding into Toontown lickety-split. They rode low in back, filled to the gills with heavy cargo. A familiar black four-door sedan led the way. “Chalk up another win for Valiant’s famous hunches,” I announced. “Your rum-runners, Ferd.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Ferd.

  “If I’m lying, I’m dying.”

  “And I’m the one who’ll kill you.” Ferd drew his pistol, filled it from his canteen, and joined his men at the barricade they’d erected across the road.

  “Is there going to be shooting?” asked Roger.

  “Count on it, chum.”

  “If you don’t mind,” said Roger, “I’ll stay on the floor until it’s over. I’ve already lost one dearly beloved family member today. I don’t want to lose another.” A bright yellow stripe ran the length of his balloon.

  The convoy crashed headlong into the barricade. After a short, vicious gun battle in which I, in all modesty, acquitted myself handsomely, the sedans threw in the grease rag.

  The motor mouths immediately started honking for their lawyers. The cops slapped Denver boots on them to keep them from skedaddling.

  I walked to the lead sedan and yanked open the rear door. “Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”

  Louise Wrightliter stretched out the length of the rear seat. “It’s
not what you think, Valiant.” She’d thrown a car blanket over herself. Not much of a hiding place for a woman with more ups and downs than the Dow Jones average. “I was only along for the ride.”

  “You should have turned left before you hit the skids.” I scooted her aside and pried loose the phony seat cushion concealing the fifty-gallon tank suspended between the wheels. I unscrewed the cap, wetted my fingers with the liquid inside, and took a sniff. Straight rum, the brand she’d poured me before. Also what grannies use to lace fruitcakes. Score a point for Roger’s sniffer. He’d smelled right at the Burbank warehouse. “You’re in hot potatoes, lady.”

  She lit a smoke, despite the fact she was sitting on sufficient high-octane alcohol to turn us both into crepes suzette. “I’m no rum dummy. You know that. It’s the story I’m after.”

  Ferd loped up behind me riding piggyback on the blithe spirit of his biggest arrest ever. “What’ve we got here?”

  I winked at him. “None other than the notorious Bonnie Parker. Murderess, bank robber, car thief. Last time I checked, she was number eight on the FBI’s hit parade and rising fast.”

  “What are you trying to pull, Valiant?” She snuffed her butt on the rum tank. “Officer, my name’s Louise Wrightliter. I’m a nationally renowned journalist. I work for the Toontown Telltale.”

  “You got ID to that effect?” asked Ferd.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’d be a fool to carry my press credentials during an illegal activity.”

  “She left them home,” I said.

  “Clyde’s babysitting them and her spare burp gun.”

  Ferd studied her face close up, a not-unpleasant assignment. “Quit juking me, lady. I know who you are. I recognized you right off. I seen your picture in the papers.” For a refreshing change, Ferd played my game. “And your mug on the post-office wall. You’re Bonnie Parker, no question about it. I’ll win a medal for hauling you in.” He snapped steel bracelets over Louise’s delicate wrists.

  “Hold it,” she shouted.

  He dragged her unceremoniously out of the car and shoved her towards his prowler.

  “Stop!” She dug in her heels but only succeeded in snapping both her three-inch spikes. “Call my boss. Delancey Duck. He’ll vouch for me.”

  “Sorry, tootsie,” said Ferd. “I’m fresh out of nickels, and payday ain’t until a week from Friday. I’ll check you out when I got spare change and an extra minute. Until then, I’m gonna dump you in the hoosegow with the geeks and stumps and drools and drizzles and sad apples. Don’t worry. If you’re really who you say you are, sooner or later I’ll find out, and set you free.”

  “How long is that likely to take?” she asked sarcastically.

  “By the time I do the paperwork, put it through channels, get an answer from the powers upstairs, I don’t know. The rate the gears turn in Toontown, you might be out come next Armistice Day. Plus or minus a month either way.”

  “I hope you brought a change of underwear,” I said.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “You bet. ‘Course there’s only one in Toontown,” said Ferd. “Owen Cantrell. Just left on a month’s vacation. I’ll tack a note on his screen door. Tell him you want to see him first thing when he comes back.”

  “You can’t do that to me. You can’t hold me incommunicado without charge. I’ve got my rights.”

  “Not in Toontown, you don’t,” said Ferd.

  She fooled me. I figured she’d last at least a few days in the squalid Toontown slammer before she offered a deal. “Let’s negotiate, shall we, Officer? Perhaps we can strike a bargain.”

  “What do you think, Eddie? Is this a transaction I care to negotiate?”

  “I don’t know. She’s a vicious, amoral, homicidal gun moll. Yet I sense that deep down she’s a good person. I vote you hear her out.”

  Ferd bobbed his coconut. “What you got?”

  She directed her words to Ferd. Her smoldering eyes locked on me. “Release me, and I’ll hand you Kirk Enigman’s killer.”

  Not at all the deal I wanted! “Whoa,” I said. “You’re swimming in the wrong kettle of fish. The officer’s after the name and current location of the Toontown jackboot who’s running rum.”

  “Is that what you’re after, Officer?” she cooed. “Really? Too bad, since I can give you so much more.”

  Ferd weighed me against her. I fell two tons short. “Can it, Valiant. I’ll decide what I’m looking for and what I’m not.”

  Thus encouraged, Wrightliter reached into her brassiere and pulled out a small spool of film. Some secret hiding spot. Though I must admit, it was the first place I thought to look. “Take a peek at this.” She handed the spool to Ferd. “Decide for yourself whether or not it buys me my freedom.” She indicated me with her thumb. “And loses him his.”

  “What the famafooming frigadoozies is she talking about, Eddie?”

  I pulled Ferd aside and spilled my guts into his droopy earlobe. “Buddy boy, brother-in-law of mine, there’s a few words on that film which I wouldn’t want Bulldog Bascomb to see.”

  He held the spool out at arm’s length, upside down between his first and second fingers, the same way you’d carry a dead skunk. “You’re telling me I’m going to play the score of Enigman’s murder and watch you singing lead.”

  “I didn’t croak Enigman.”

  “Like I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

  He wasn’t and never would be. Ferd was an only chimp. “Give me a chance to prove it. Lose the skirt in the system. Grill her about the rumrunners. You drag out of her where I can find their head cheese, and I’ll deliver Enigman’s killer split on a spit. “

  He buried the spool in his pocket along with his oath to place law above family. “Twenty-four hours, Eddie. After that, me, the broad, the film, the whole sorry forfumpalumping story goes to Bascomb.”

  I discovered how rabbits mourn their dearly departed. By pumping nickels into a roadhouse jukebox and dancing sprightly jigs atop the linoleum lunch counter. I spent the wake in a back booth wailing over a cup of java and a long stack of buckwheats.

  A newsboy came in and peddled me a paper, the Telltale’s early-bird edition. The banner headline sent a shiver down my spine that rattled Mr. Richter’s scales. Roger wouldn’t be the only one grieving today. Half the town’s women would be wearing black. Baby Herman had been killed!

  Details were sketchy. Herman had finished shooting a magazine ad for Sweet Herman’s Pabulum, the brand he endorsed. He had been relaxing his usual way, making the rounds of late-night jazz joints.

  He was last seen in a dive called Dingles. His diaper was drooping and so were his standards. He was hustling anything with a skirt, including the table-clothed barrels surrounding the dance floor. He left about midnight, cocked to the gills, his baby buggy pushed by a Toonette the other patrons described as a cross between a battle-ax and a burro.

  Early this morning, a downtown construction crew spotted Herman’s carriage ditched in their excavation hole. The Homicide cops, under the command of Bulldog Bascomb, searched the vehicle. Inside, they found an ice bucket and a magnum of nose tickler; a box of Cuban stogies; a trick lighter in the shape of a brass monkey; four quarts of beer: a cast-iron bottle opener with a randy lady for a popper; a twelve-inch bundle of monogrammed didees; a windup Victrola and a dozen pressings of Bolero; an emergency road repair kit consisting of talcum powder, safety pins, burping cloths, and spare bibs; a family-sized jar of Vaseline; a gallon of milk; a gross of slicks in assorted colors; an assortment of fireworks to celebrate occasions when the Earth moved; a solid gold, diamond-studded rattle; a pacifier autographed by Hedy Lamarr; a steamy love letter signed C.L.; and a whalebone shoehorn, which, I suppose, the Baby needed for squeezing himself in with all that junk.

  Bascomb’s prime suspect was currently doing a soft-shoe routine on a clear glass donut cover. Right. According to t
he Telltale, Bascomb believed Roger Rabbit had cacked Herman, and Kirk Enigman too. The motive was ambition, a common cause of felonies in Hollywood. Bascomb reasoned Roger did it to eliminate competition for the Rhett Butler role in Gone With the Wind. Roger’s self-proclaimed biggest fan had issued a warrant for the rabbit’s arrest. Ah, the fleeting nature of fame.

  I grabbed Roger’s ears in the middle of a passable buck-and-wing. “Eddie, p-p-p-please! Have some respect for the dead.”

  I stuck the tabloid under his fuzzy pink nose. His eyes crossed as he read.

  “That nice Bulldog Bascomb’s after me? For murdering Baby Herman? That’s absurd. It’s worse than absurd. It’s doubly absurd.” A Midwestern plowboy could plant an acre of corn in the furrows creased into Roger’s forehead. “He wouldn’t railroad an innocent rabbit. Would he?”

  “Bascomb would swap his kidney for a conviction.”

  “I can’t go to jail,” said Roger in a balloon the texture of sackcloth and ashes. “Horrible things happen to rabbits in jail. I’ve heard of rabbits being used for…earmuffs!” He sucked in his mouth until his nose was halfway down his throat. “I’ll go underground.”

  “You ever done it before?”

  “No, but I’m sure it’s in my genes.”

  “Trust me on this one. I’ve tucked away a fugitive or two in my day. I know the perfect place. Safe and sound as Fort Knox.”

  “Lead me to it.”

  “A locker at the bus station? I’m not hiding out in a locker at the bus station.” Roger stiffened his arms and legs against the opening.

  I huffed and I puffed, but I couldn’t jam him in. “You got a better suggestion, let’s hear it.”

  His answer bubbled out in one of the clear, beaker-shaped balloons that usually proclaim “Eureka!”

  “I could hole up with Jessica’s twin sister. We get along swell. She’d hide me. I know she would. “

  “Jessica’s got a twin sister?”