Who P_p_p_plugged Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  The cop gave him a long, slow onceover. “And I’m Fearless Fosdick.”

  “Hi, Fearless.” Roger pumped the cop’s hand. “P-p-p-pleased to make your acquaintance. Jumpin’ jiminy. Your jaw’s rounder than I recall. You’re taller, heavier, fairer, lighter haired, and younger, too. Have you been sick?”

  “I’ll be dipped.” The cop reached under his hard brim and scratched his scalp. “That’s the best take on Roger Rabbit I ever heard. How long you been working on that?”

  “All my life.”

  “Keep it up, fellah.” Officer Meany strolled away. “You nearly got it perfect.”

  We dropped Gable at home.

  Roger and I went to my place to select the former rabbit a less conspicuous wardrobe.

  He browsed my closet and emerged decked out in a suit I’d worn once, a conservatively cut, dark blue, double-breasted banker’s special I bought for Heddy’s wedding. Heddy steered me towards it. She wanted me to fit in with Ferd’s family. Fat chance. I would have blended better wearing Dad’s old clown outfit. I was the only one in attendance whose carnation didn’t squirt water.

  I plucked that selfsame withered flower out of Roger’s buttonhole and tucked it into my wallet.

  When we left, Roger lugged along the leather briefcase I keep to disguise myself as a nine-to-fiver. “For carrying briefs,” he told me when I asked him why. He opened it and showed me. He’d filled it with my underwear. Another axiom validated. You can take the man out of the rabbit, but not the rabbit out of the man.

  We drove to Malibu Beach.

  I walked to the water alone.

  I bought Selznick’s second Dragoon a one-way, first-class accommodation on board the biggest rock I could lift and throw.

  The Mug Shot saloon offers no atmosphere, no food, no live entertainment, no dance floor, no Happy Hour, no mixed drinks, no draft beer, and no clean glasses. What keeps it in business? It’s a hop, skip, and a coffee break away from the Toontown Police Station.

  Even this early in the morning, the place was filled to standing room. Assuming the typical ratio, I figured two out of three for cops, though I recognized only one.

  I made introductions. “Ferd Flatfoot, Roger Rabs.”

  Roger propped his foot on the bar’s dented, tarnished brass rail and extended his hand. “Eddie tells me you’re a minion of the law. Here’s a riddle you might find amusing. What are old pennies made of?”

  Ferd turned his back on the rabbit and signaled the barkeep.

  “Dirty copper!”

  I’d guessed wrong when I estimated two thirds of the patrons enforced the law. A quick show of hands, those reaching for guns to blast Roger to kingdom come, indicated nearer ninety-five percent.

  “What a rib tickler,” said Roger. His proffered shake hung empty. Rather than waste a reach, he scooped his mitt full of peanuts and tossed them toward his mouth. He scored a perfect zero. The goobers ricocheted off his nose, his chin, and every piece of face in between. Undaunted by failure, he grabbed for more.

  Ferd slid the bowl down the unvarnished, splintery pine bar. “I can’t shuffle that fumpadumping woman from pillar to post much longer, Eddie. She’s screaming bloody murder. Sooner or later, Bascomb’s gonna hear her. Then my fat hits my friggetytooting fan.”

  A group of long-term residents cancelled their lease on a booth, and we moved in.

  “You got ‘til the end of my shift tonight. After that, all Hell and Louise Wrightliter both break loose.”

  Our plain-featured, stoop-shouldered, mussy-haired, flatfooted waitress worked as hard as Tillie the Toiler. You have to in a bar serving liquor to cops. We ordered two slugs apiece to spare Tillie a second trip.

  “I need another extension.”

  “No dice, Eddie. You’ve collected what you’re owed. Read my balloon.” It displayed a parcel of words the Brits never envisioned when they invented English.

  “You’re forgetting about Heddy.”

  “Who’s Heddy, Eddie?” asked Roger. “Your steady?”

  “I thought we agreed,” said Ferd. “You bring her into it, you sink in a wink.”

  “You whiff in a jif. Spin it in a minute. Sour in an hour. Crash in a flash. You’re lice in a trice.”

  I smacked Roger hard in the ribs. “Hush.”

  “In a rush!”

  I gave him a dime and a shove toward the jukebox.

  I motioned Ferd closer. I didn’t want my sorry story noised around a crowd with a sworn duty to eradicate crime. “Heddy’s in bona fide Dutch involving a dastardly brew called Toon Tonic. It changes humans into Toons and vice versa. I know for certain Freddy swigged a dose. I got reason to believe Heddy did the same. To snare the formula, and the big money that comes with it, she bagged and dusted Baby Herman.”

  Ferd’s response ascended out of him slowly, like once-burned bread rising from a twice-shy toaster. “Peeeeeeeeee-you. I ain’t biting, Eddie. Not again. That’s the biggest fooping fairy tale I heard since Cinderella.”

  “I admit I’m lacking proof. But the facts line up like a row of dominoes with Heddy the first to topple. I want to keep her clean, but that’s gonna be easier said than done. She’s messed in a big, ugly way.”

  Roger and my ten-cent piece returned together. “What kind of establishment stocks twenty-five different versions of the Marine Corps Hymn?” He slid into the booth.

  “Heddy never leaves home.” Ferd tossed back his first and second shooters and mine for good measure. Tillie would earn her tips today. “The woman cooks, cleans, tends to the kids. When’s she have time for mischief?”

  “Lois Lane thought the same about Clark Kent.”

  Ferd’s cogitations resembled a basic arithmetic primer. No matter how he rearranged the numbers, two plus two kept adding up to four. “I’ll stall Bascomb,” said Ferd, “provided you reciprocate.”

  “How so?”

  He pulled out a Wanted poster advertising Roger Rabbit’s particulars. “Turn in the rabbit. For as much as Bulldog wants you, he wants Roger Rabbit more.”

  “Let me make sure I understand you right. If I hand the bunny to Bascomb, I save my beloved sister and get myself off the hook in one fell swoop?” I looked at Roger. “What do you think, compadre? Would you snap at a deal like that?”

  Roger clutched his shot glass so hard I feared for exploding shards. “I’d have to give the matter a great deal of thought. Speculate, cogitate, meditate, ruminate, contemplate. Weigh the respective pros, the disrespective cons, the whys, the wherefores…”

  “I’d do it in a whisker.” I addressed Ferd. “You want Roger Rabbit, he’s yours.” I slid out of the booth. “As soon as I find the slippery cuspidor.” I grabbed Roger by the arm and hustled him out.

  Roger slouched in the front seat twiddling the car radio. He bypassed the chuckleheads—Baby Snooks, Groucho Marx, Lum and Abner, The Great Gildersleeve—in favor of hillbilly music about busted wranglers, jilted lovers, out-of-gas truck drivers, and similar washouts knotted together by a common thread of off-key misery.

  “Relax, bunkie. I won’t roll you out of the frying pan to save my own bacon.”

  “I know, Eddie. You’re my friend, my chum, my pal, my crony, my sidekick.” Roger hung the upper half of his body out of the moving car and pressed his face against the window of the bus chugging along parallel to us in the next lane. The strap hanger on the receiving end of Roger’s attention responded by smacking the glass with a rolled-up newspaper. Roger hauled himself back inside. “See there? That’s my problem.”

  “You’re a world-renowned movie star, but everybody takes you for an ordinary Joe?”

  “Merciful Mergatroyd, no! That’s not it. Next to rhubarb, humble’s my favorite pie. I can live with obscurity.” We stopped at an intersection. He made a face at a kid entering the crosswalk. The kid started to bawl. The kid’s mother shook her fis
t at us. “I’ve lost the ability to make people laugh.”

  I punched the accelerator and sped away before the angry mother took down our license number. “You’re fighting a losing battle, amigo. Humans regard buffoonery as a social disease. If it shows up in your blood, you’re not funny. You’re sick.”

  24

  The Oriental ruddy who functioned as Delancey Duck’s butler cum bodyguard was big as the pressed sumo entrees you wrestle with during the main event in a Chinese restaurant. Except when you melted down this quacker, you wouldn’t wind up with much fat on your skillet. He was as solid as the cement goose anchoring a middleclass front lawn.

  He admitted us into a living room containing enough potted foliage to reforest the Bikini Islands. I unhinged the machete in my Swiss Army knife and hacked through to the backyard.

  I found the duck in his pool. It wasn’t as big as Gable’s, but then neither was the Indian Ocean.

  Delancey floated on a plastic inflatable created in the likeness of Esther Williams. When he saw me and Roger, he slid off her stomach and paddled towards us. I’d rank his swimming ability at the underside of a stone.

  He waddled out of the water and onto the Mexican tiled apron. He wrapped himself in a Turkish towel the thickness of lawn sod.

  “You need help with your backstroke,” I said.

  Ever see a duck sheepish? “I’m ashamed to admit,” he said, “I can barely tread water.”

  “I thought it came natural.”

  “To Donald and Daffy perhaps. Not to me.” Delancey slipped into a formfitting bathrobe that doubled as the cover for his outdoor gas grill. He stuck his tootsies into boat shoes that could flagship a flotilla. “Introduce me to your companion.”

  “Delancey Duck, Roger Rabs.”

  They shook.

  “Ahahahah-chooooo!” said Roger. “Ah-ah-ah-ah-chooooo! Excuse me. I seem to be catching cold.”

  “Perhaps you’re allergic to Toons,” suggested Delancey. “The Telltale recently chronicled a score of humans suffering from the malady. Have you ever sneezed in the presence of a Toon before?”

  “Always,” said Roger. “Whenever I sneeze there’s a Toon in the room.”

  “Mystery solved,” said Delancey. “Stay away from Toons.” Delancey offered us breakfast. Bowls of seed corn. Packed with the six essential vitamins and minerals required for strong webs and shiny feathers. I didn’t need either. On the other hand, what was Kellogg’s Corn Flakes but this once removed? I dug in.

  “I’m pleased you stopped by, Mr. Valiant.” Delancey’s morning exercises entailed filling his cereal bowl with seconds. “My ace reporter has disappeared. I wondered if you might know her whereabouts.”

  “If you’re referring to the lovely Miss Wrightliter, we might be talking turkey, Duck.”

  “ Ah-ah-ah-ah-chooooo!” Roger resorted to a Toon’s standard cure for the sneezies. He submerged his head in the pool.

  “An extreme remedy for a human to undertake,” marveled Delancey.

  “When in Toontown…”

  Delancey poured a brace of eye-openers. He kept the bigger glass. I didn’t argue. He had more eye to open. “What’s become of my Louise?”

  I gave it to him straight, hard, fast, and bitter. Rum running, Wrightliter’s arrest, Toon Tonic, Freddy, Enigman’s murder, LeTuit’s murder, Dodger’s murder, Herman’s murder, Potts, Selznick, the whole ugly shebang except for Jessica and Gable, Roger’s disguise, and Heddy.

  He crossed his spindly legs and oscillated his foot, provoking a breeze that rustled my tie. “Can you prove any of this?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “What, then, do you expect me to do with the information?”

  “Print it anyway.” I noticed Roger had stopped bubbling. I grabbed him by the belt, hauled him out of the water, and laid him face up. His skin had a bluish cast, and his breath wheezed out in fits and starts. At least he wasn’t sneezing. I slapped his eyes open and bequeathed him what remained of my drink.

  “You can’t be serious, Mr. Valiant.” Delancey patted his long expanse of bill dry with his linen napkin. By the time he went up the left side, across the front, and down the right, I was ready for lunch. “You actually want me to run an unverified story implicating several of Hollywood’s most powerful men in a quadruple murder? You’re asking me to bring a rainstorm down on my head.”

  “I heard that was lovely weather for ducks.”

  Roger and Delancey both got a cackle out of that, or rather the buck got a yuck and the duck got a cluck. Me, I wished the ASPCA had a branch to protect us from them.

  “I’ll consider it.” Delancey leaned over in his chair and brought his head to mine, giving me the sensation of putting on an Indian headdress backwards. “I find you extremely interesting, Mr. Valiant. We must meet socially some time.”

  “You bet. How about Christmas? I always have a duck for dinner.”

  “I’ll come hungry,” he said with a smile.

  “You’ll leave stuffed.”

  Judging from the moon-sized craters of dirt, a neighborhood mongrel had paid a visit to Heddy’s front lawn. If a fraction of his buried bones took root, Heddy would raise sufficient beef to throw her own stampede.

  “Hi-de-ho-ho-ho. Twice in one week,” she said in answer to my knock. “You must be miles up the proverbial creek.”

  “Without the mythical paddle.”

  She swung the door open wide. “Come in and tell Sis all about it.” If your nighttime reveries involve grocery store delivery vans, Heddy stepped out of your dream. She’d fabricated her housedress from a hundred-pound flour sack. She wore a duplicate of the red head scarf that adorned Aunt Jemima. Her white cotton apron came to her for ten cents and the box top from a package of Betty Crocker cake mix. “You’re just in time for midmorning tea.” She’d invited my two oldest and dearest friends, Jack Daniels and Jim Beam.

  “Let’s go for a walk, instead.”

  “I’d love to, Eddie.” My three nephews galloped through the room in a two-against-one game of cowboys and Indians. To improve his odds, Cochise had pried the rubber suction cups off his arrows. He let fly a badly aimed darter that penetrated six inches into the ceiling. “I can’t leave the boys alone.”

  “Meet my buddy Roger Rabs.” I pushed Roger front and center. “He’ll babysit the little darlings.”

  “I don’t know. Does he have experience?”

  “Four years of combat infantry.”

  The boys ran through in the other direction. The game had switched to aerial dogfight. The Lafayette Escadrille chased the Red Baron with a whirling electric fan.

  “He’s hired,” said Heddy.

  She corralled her sprouts. “Boys, this is your new babysitter, Roger. You behave for him, or it’s off to the science lab with the lot of you.”

  We left the three-member Sioux Nation attempting to scalp General George Armstrong Custer with the Red Baron’s propeller.

  Heddy set our pace, a quickstep at mazurka tempo. Since we weren’t hurrying to reach anyplace, I assumed she was anxious to leave where she’d been.

  Once we lost sight of her house, she slowed to waltz speed, laced her arm through mine, and patted my wrist. “Tell me what’s wrong, big brother.”

  “I brought you a present.” I went into my wallet and sprung my dried carnation. “It’s from your wedding.”

  “I’m touched.” She pressed it to her breast, right over the red Pillsbury trademark. “Thoughtfulness is so unlike you. Why the sudden attack of solicitude?”

  I heaved a rock at a rectilinear Toon Crossing sign. I missed by a mile. The sign showed its contempt for my pitching by crossing its O’s and sticking out its double S. “I’ve got to ask you a few questions, Heddy. I don’t want to, but it’s required.”

  “You think I won’t answer unless you’re extra specially
nice to me?” She removed her scarf and wrapped the carnation inside for safekeeping. “Hi-de-ho-ho-ho.” She tucked the flower into her apron pocket.

  “No, I think you’ll tell me the truth. I’m afraid of what might happen between us when I hear what you’re likely to say.”

  “In that case, fire away. I can’t wait to hear my answers myself.”

  We sidestepped a Toon beer wagon whoozy from sampling its own wares. “How are you and Ferd doing in the financial department?”

  “First cousins to a baker. We have all the dough we knead.”

  “I’m dead serious, Heddy.”

  She opened her tattered straw handbag, held it upside down, and shook it. A used Kleenex fell out. “My husband earns one third less than a human doing the same job. At best, we scrape by.”

  Clarence Centipede, a Toon of my passing acquaintance, undulated down the opposite sidewalk. To avoid him, I skidded down an embankment into a dry creek. He’s a one-man receiving line. Say hello and spend the rest of the day shaking hands.

  Heddy kicked off her shoes and joined me. She shut her eyes and wiggled her toes. “Isn’t this pleasant?” she said. “Shut your eyes. You can almost feel the cool, clear water that ran through here in prehistoric times.”

  Mine caressed the rusty edges of a skeleton left over from the days when Model A’s roamed the Earth. “Heddy, I know about you and Baby Herman.”

  She picked up a discarded coffeepot, sniffed the inside, turned the pot over, and checked the bottom for holes. “From what I read in the Tattletale, he’s danced the baby buggy boogie with every woman in town.” She threw the pot on the bank. “My bad luck. I was out shopping the day he worked his way through our neighborhood. I found his `Sorry I missed you’ note in the mail slot.” She took a practice swing with a broken baseball bat. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I know you hustled Baby Herman in a bar. I know you kidnapped him. What’s worse, I know you’ve been moonlighting as a Toon.”

  “Hi-de-ho-ho-ho. Pull my other leg, Eddie. It plays Jingle Bells.”