by Gary K. Wolf
“I thought dying put the kibosh on conversation.”
“The first rule of detecting, class.” She combed her hair with the serrated edge of a quarter. “Never take anything for granted. Potts’s wife is a Toon. She foiled his murder attempt by refusing to expire after she died.”
I decided Jo, the rabbit, and I would interrogate the dead woman. I instructed Gable to find and tail Potts.
Gable and Roger floated a raft of better ideas, but my powers of persuasion and the rest of Selznick’s bourbon convinced them to do it my way.
Pepper Potts’s murdered wife lived in a castle which had the ersatz regality of a honeymoon hotel catering to newlyweds with more money than taste.
Naked, pudding-thighed Cupids substituted for legs on tables and chairs, for columns on archways, for spouts on fountains, and for spigots on faucets. The chandeliers contained more crystal hearts than the souvenir stand at a cardiologists’ convention. Everything that wouldn’t look right painted red had been anyway.
An alcove displayed a rose quartz bust depicting a stunner of a woman. Delicate ringlets of hair and a flowing wimple framed a face that could launch the Navy’s next thousand ships. “Meet Pepper Potts’s wife,” said Little Jo. “The Queen of Hearts.”
Her royal nibs in person sat on a high-backed gold throne worthy of a king’s leer.
Forget what I said about her puss luring dinghies off the dock, and cancel that hoary chestnut about death being the mother of beauty, too. The Queen of Hearts suffered from a bad case of cardiac arrest. Facially, she resembled a lump of suet discarded by a butcher. If her eyeballs sunk any lower, they’d roll out through her nostrils. As for her hair, Godzilla picked less scraggly from between his teeth. Her flat, rectangular, playing card body contained more rips, tears, creases, and bends than a noisemaker laced through the spokes of a boy’s bicycle. She’d shred to tatters halfway through a game of fifty-two pickup. Her patched, papery flesh looked like Hell and smelled to Heaven.
She wore an ankle-length red robe cut to fit a shape that existed only in her memory book. Red, open-toed buskins seemed an odd choice of footwear since eight of her little piggies had shriveled to sausage. A golden, heart-shaped crown sat atop the bright red turban encasing her magpie’s nest coiffure. Rouged red hearts adorned her cheeks. A lipstick heart framed her mouth.
A sign on the back wall displayed the number of shopping days left until Valentine’s Day.
“Identify ourself.” She spoke with the wavery whine of an unbalanced power saw.
I bowed from the waist. “Eddie Valiant, Your Highness.”
“Ahhhh,” cooed Queenie. “Sir Valiant. A fabled handsome stranger of story and song. Pray tell us, where have we been all of our life? Have we come to court our favors? Well, we have but to say the magical word, and we win ourself an Arabian night of a thousand and one delights.” She gave the regal hip a grind that powdered her seat cushion with pulverized pasteboard.
She hadn’t taken a look in a mirror lately. No man in his right mind would touch her without first donning a suit of armor.
“I’m not here to toot the flute, lady. I’m private heat dogging your hubba-hubba.”
She poured herself a flagon of port. In her decaying condition, I wouldn’t have thought she’d have the stomach for it. The mouth or throat, either. “We beg our pardon?” With nothing but empty light sockets showing, her blank stare was as blank as blank can be.
Little Jo climbed onto my shoulder and curtsied. “If you’ll permit me to translate, Your Highness. Sir Valiant regrettably declines your generous offer of a royal indulgence. In actuality, the good knight is embarked on a very important crusade. To the fulfillment of that quest, he would like to query you about your husband.”
Queenie sipped her libation. A wet circle grew on her robe as the liquid leeched out of her shredded border. “We would die, if we had not already, for dear Pepper Potts. How we loved us. And how did us repay we?” She opened her robe and showed me. A paring knife penetrated slightly above the spot where other women wear their boyfriends’ fraternity pins. “And we escaped scot-free by calling us a cooking accident. We insisted our hand unintentionally slipped while we sliced shallots with a dip-tipped dagger.”
“Your yoke mate’s whiffed two since you. Deliver me the straight skinny, and I’ll make him guest of honor at Sing Sing’s next Friday felon fry.”
Queenie raised a deteriorated eyebrow containing more empty spaces than SOS in Morse code.
“Your husband has murdered two other people,” said Little Jo in the Queen’s English. “Tell Sir Valiant what he wants to know, and he will guarantee that your husband is brought to justice.”
Queenie fondled her orb the way Salome caressed John the Baptist before relieving him of his upper echelon. “We would truly adore witnessing brimstone and flames arising from the pantaloons of our nefarious consort.” The heart around her mouth cracked in half, giving me a peek into a black hole that would make an Indian homesick for Calcutta. “Ask what we will. We will reply forsoothfully.”
She handed Roger a sheaf of pink paper, a bottle of dark red ink, and a cardinal feather. “We appoint us official court posterian. Make careful note of what we utter.”
“Ay, ay, Your Royalship.” Roger dipped his quill.
I started with the obvious. “Why’d your helpmate whisk you?”
Little Jo lobbed my question into Queenie’s court. “Sir Valiant would like to know the reason your husband murdered you.”
The screech of bone on bone hackled my back as the end of Queenie’s thumb rolled around her fingertips “We committed our deed most foul for lucre.” A mosquito erected its derrick on her nose, sunk a shaft, but struck no juice. It departed for warmer blooded climes. “We requested funds from our royal treasury to finance a scheme to produce a magic potion. We refused us. We be old-fashioned. We subscribe not to the theorem of ‘Better living through alchemy.’ “
“Is alchemy spelled with one K or two?” asked the royal scribe. “And did you say ‘potion’ or ‘lotion’?”
“When you and Potts got hoppled…” I asked.
“Married,” said Little Jo.
“…what flavor was he?”
“Was your husband a human or a Toon?”
Queenie arose and paced her dais. Her footsteps clanged like a Chinese gong. No wonder it’s impossible to sleep in a haunted house. “We be Toon through and through.” Queenie ran her hand up and down the strand of pearls encircling her neck. It produced the sound of rattling chains. Another ghostly legend debunked. “ ‘Twas only quite recently we began to exhibit distressing symptoms of humanity.” The flickering candlelight gave her face the waviness of a badly patched two-lane blacktop. “Whence we pointed this out to us, we possessed the abject temerity to deny the obvious.” Her cold, hollow words explained why people listen to ghost stories with the lights on. “Mark this well.” Roger scribbled to beat the band. “We do not argue with a queen. We do not tell the royal personage what is right and what is not. We tell us!”
“You want a translation?” said Little Jo.
“Rest your tonsils. I caught the gist. Your Highness, where would your bunkie hidey-hole a rebus about yay big?” I spread my hands the length of Selznick’s Colt.
“What he wants to know,” said Little Jo, “is…”
“We begin to grasp the nuances of our odd bodkin speech. There be but a singular location. Whatever we possess of grave value we hide between merkin and cod.”
“Do you spell that with an E or a U?”
Little Jo stuck her head halfway up my semicircular canal. “That’s…”
“I know. I’m not a total ignoramus.”
“Tell me, tell me,” said Roger.
I pointed to his corresponding locale.
“Oh, my gawsh!” He blushed so deeply he disappeared against the crimson wallpaper.
/> That goes ditto for me, in spades. My case had been breaking quicker than a set of dime-store dishes, until this dead queen dumped her husband’s lap in mine.
22
Against my better judgment, we stopped at Roger’s place. I told him the cops would likely have it staked. He insisted. His overalls and his underwear had shrunk in the dryer and were putting a bad squeeze on his gentility. He needed looser.
Outside his front door, Roger produced a key ring rivaling the one worn by the innkeeper at the Bastille. He went around the perimeter, flipping through the unlockers, jingle-jangling louder than Kris Kringle’s sleigh on Christmas Eve.
On his third revolution, I took over the search. “I’ll find it. What’s it look like?”
“This.” He held up a single Yale connected by a long spring to the inside of his back pocket. He grinned devilishly.
A Toon woman with a heaving chest yanked open the door. “I was clear in the back of the house.” The screen door’s mesh turned her winded balloon to confetti. “Do me a favor, Mr. Rabbit. Hide a key under the mat like normal folks.”
“It’s funnier this way,” Roger explained.
“Not if you travel on my aching bunions.” Her breathing imitated the desperate gasps of a blocked vacuum cleaner. She stepped aside and let us in.
Whoever built this woman drew his basic inspiration from an upended cement mixer. He topped that with a honeydew melon, pounded in a carpet-tack nose, glued on a serrated bar coaster for a mouth, and made eyes out of the thin pencil lead that drew the plans. He crowned her with a thicket of hair Daniel Boone shot on a beaver hunt. She wore a shapeless black dress with starched white collar and cuffs, a frilly white maid’s cap, and a matching apron. She cased her dogs in black, sensible shoes.
“Eddie, Joellyn, meet Harriet,” said Roger. “My cleaning lady.”
Instead of shaking hands, she dusted my shoulder, removing the leftover husks of the popcorn Little Jo and I shared for lunch. “Use a dandruff shampoo,” she advised.
“Any visitors since I’ve been gone?” asked Roger.
“Not if you don’t count half a dozen policemen,” she wheezed.
“I don’t,” he said.
“Not a soul.” She collapsed into an easy chair, her legs spread-eagled, building strength for her return voyage.
“I brought you a present,” said Roger. He folded his arms across his chest. “Presto!” He pulled an exquisite bouquet of silk flowers out of thin air.
“Oooooh,” gasped Harriet. “Thank you.” She clasped the flowers to her ample breast.
Harriet levered herself out of the chair. To make room in her apron pocket for Roger’s flowers, she removed the object of my desires. “By the way, Mr. Rabbit, I found this in the trouser cuff of your formal overalls, the ones with the brass buttons. Looks like a prime hunk of junk to me, but I didn’t want to chuck it without asking first.” She handed Roger a small box made of pitted gray pot metal, its rusty hasp secured by a heart-shaped iron padlock.
Roger gave it a cursory onceover. “You’re absolutely correct. A worthless piece of trash. Toss it in the garbage pail.” He flipped it back to her.
Stan Musial couldn’t have snagged Roger’s popup better than I did. I shoved the box directly under the rabbit’s nose. “You’ve never seen this before? This gray metal box?”
His eyeballs marched front and center for a better look. “Abso-righto-rootie-toot-tootly. I’m like an elephant. I never forget. I don’t know what this is.”
“Rummage deeper in your trunk, mammoth mind.”
It still took a revolution or two for his sprockets to haul in the slack. “That’s Mr. Selznick’s box!”
“Bingo.”
“I had it all the time and didn’t know it. Those overalls, the ones with the brass buttons. I wore them the day me, Baby Herman, and Kirk Enigman went to Mr. Selznick’s office. The box must have accidentally fallen off his desk top and landed in my cuff. Doesn’t that beat all? Thank you, Harriet, thank you, thank you, thank you.” He gave his maid a juicy smooch.
Harriet returned to work wearing the befuddled look of a safari guide crossing the dark continent without a flashlight.
“Let’s see what’s in here.” I set the box on the floor.
Roger pulled out his key ring. “One of these ought to work. If not, I have two hundred more in the garage.”
“Spare yourself the trouble,” said Little Jo. “I can reach my fingers through the lock’s keyhole and work the tumblers into place. It won’t take longer than half an hour.”
I pulled my pistola and blasted the lock to pieces.
“Ooooh,” said Roger, “Mr. Selznick’s not going to like you destroying his property.”
“I’ll buy him a new one, engraved, for his birthday.” I sprung the hasp and opened the lid. Selznick’s precious box contained a single piece of plain, blank, empty, vacant, bare, unmarked, white bond paper. I studied it front and back, right side up, upside down, edge-on. I held it to the light. Nothing.
“That’s what I call a secret formula,” muttered Little Jo.
“May I?” asked Roger. He took the paper, contoured it into his underarm, clasped his arm against it, and rubbed the sheet vigorously in tight circles.
“Sanding your pits?” I asked him. “You need a courser grit.”
He removed the paper and held it up. It now contained fifty five lines of chemical gobbledygook. He handed it to me with a self-satisfied smirk. “It was composed with disappearing ink. Heat and friction restore the writing. I thought every detective knew that. “
“Every one does now.” My knowledge of chemistry stops at mixing alcohol with water. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what that paper contained.
“You go to college?” I asked Little Jo.
“I’ve taken a few short courses at UCLA,” she said without a trace of irony.
“Can you decipher this?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, I studied creative writing and fine arts. Check with me if you want to parse a sentence or make orange out of yellow and red.”
“May I see it again?” asked Roger.
What the heck. The rabbit was on a roll. I handed it over. In less time than it took him to say “Please pass me a purple pointed pencil,” Roger hauled out his Captain Midnight Decoder, spun the dial to inorganic whoozits, ran it across the formula, and read off the results. “Add two parts of ethyl methyl Ubethyl to one part of oxie moxie Biloxi, toss in a splash of chlorofloro boroboro, and before you know it, you’ve got…” He studied the dial. “The decoder’s baffled. It’s only seen one concoction remotely resembling this.”
“Is that one dangerous?” asked Little Jo.
“For adolescents with complexion problems. It’s the formula for Coca-Cola.” He gave the paper back.
There I stood, holding in my hand the most horrendous scientific discovery since the A-bomb. If I had the slightest trace of social consciousness, I’d rip it to shreds and flush it down the commode.
Instead, I tucked it into my wallet.
The doorbell chimed. It wasn’t the cops. They never bother to ring. They smash in with hatchets. Even on social calls. That’s why cops have no friends. Invite a badge to your Saturday night poker game, you can’t win back what it costs to replace your portal. Taking no chances, I hid Roger behind the sofa before I opened the door.
I found Gable slumped against the jamb. “You lost Potts,” I said.
“No, he didn’t.” Pepper Potts stepped out from behind a bramble bush. He held an Army-issue .45 automatic. A massive weapon. I knew big, strong galoots who needed two mitts to fire it. Potts carried it as lightly as a water pistol. His knockwurst finger barely fit through the trigger guard.
“Sorry, Eddie,” said Gable. He moved his hand away from his forehead, showing me a lump the size of a darning egg. “I wasn’t the detec
tive I thought I was.”
Potts motioned Gable and me inside and followed after us. The bulge in Potts’s trousers told me Selznick’s Colt was stowed exactly where Potts’s ex indicated it would be.
Potts spotted Selznick’s open box. “My, my, my, what have we here?” He picked it up. “Congratulations, Valiant. You pulled it off. To tell you the truth, I didn’t give you a snowball’s chance in the Sahara.” He turned the box upside down and shook it. Nothing fell out. He threw the empty box at my chest. It hit with the force of a Howie Morenz slap shot. Potts leveled the gun directly between my eyes and waggled the fingers of his free hand. “Give with the formula.”
I shook my head.
He shifted the gun a fraction of an inch, maybe figuring to shoot me a piece at a time beginning with my earlobe.
A tiny round gasp swam down my tympanic canal. I remembered Little Jo perched on my shoulder. Potts had pointed his big bore at her midsection.
“The bullet’s twice her size, gumshoe. There won’t be enough of her left over to spread on your morning muffin.”
“Don’t cave in, Eddie,” she said gamely. “Let him shoot me.”
Carefully, so Potts could monitor every move, I extracted the formula from my wallet and handed it over.
Potts tucked it into his safety-deposit box, right next to Selznick’s Dragoon.
“You have what you came for,” said Gable. “Now beat it.”
“Don’t be naive, Clark,” I told him. “He’s got us slated for a recital of the Hallelujah Chorus performed by the original cast.”
“He’s going to kill us?” asked Gable incredulously.
I nodded. Potts did, too.
Gable’s knees buckled. He collapsed into a chair. When he faced death in the movies, he always knew he’d survive and win the girl in the end. He’d never been written out completely before. He didn’t know how to play the role. I hoped he was a quick study. He didn’t have much time to rehearse. And he only got one take.
