by Gary K. Wolf
“Confidentially,” he whispered from out of the snuggly depths of his blanket, “I hear she left Roger for Rocco DeGreasy.”
Rocco DeGreasy and a female ‘toon rabbit? Sounded ridiculous, but I’d heard of guys with stranger tastes in women. “Actually, I’m not really interested in Roger’s wife. I’m investigating Roger’s treatment by the DeGreasy syndicate. I understand you heard Rocco promise Roger his own strip.”
The blanket bobbed up and down. “Sure. Day before yesterday at a photo session, but only because the bunny was threatening to hit him over the head with his lunch box. It was the first time they’d met since Roger’s marital breakup. Roger accused Rocco of putting pressure on Jessica to leave him. Rocco denied it, and Roger went for him. Carol Masters, our photographer, jumped in between them and kept them apart. Rocco came up with that bit about giving Roger his own strip mainly to cool him off, but it didn’t work. I never saw Roger so riled. He kept threatening to kill Rocco. Can you imagine that coming from a pussycat like Roger Rabbit? After Carol finally got Roger calmed down, Rocco offered to drive him home. He suggested they could sit down there and discuss their differences rationally until they had them all worked out. A fair and classy guy, that Rocco. Anybody else would have canned Roger on the spot.”
“Did Roger and Rocco leave together?”
“No, Roger stormed out of the studio in a huff. Darned inconsiderate of him. We still had half a day’s shooting left that we had to cancel. Threw my feeding and nap-time schedule into a complete tizzy.”
“So Rocco wasn’t serious when he offered Roger his own strip.”
“Nope. Rocco was scared, plain and simple. When Roger threatened to kill him, I believe he meant it, and Rocco believed it, too.”
The butler entered and gave the lumpy blanket a courtly bow. “Don’t forget your two-o’clock photo session, sir.”
“Right.” Baby Herman unwrapped himself and stood. “I’m doing some baby-food spots.” He ground his cigar out on the rug. “I sold eight million jars of that junk last year. My wholesome image.” He extended his pudgy arms to Eddie. “Carry me to my limousine?”
Outside, I set him into an infant seat strapped in the right front bucket of a white Mercedes. “Hey, detective,” said Baby Herman as I shut the door. “I like you. You come back sometime, and we’ll have us a party. I’ll supply the funny hats, the cake, and the noisemakers. You supply the broads. Just make sure they go for younger men.”
Baby Herman waved bye-bye, and his Mercedes pulled away.
Chapter: •5•
I’ll say one thing for the rabbit, he certainly was a persistent little bugger. As soon as I got back to the city, I spotted him again, hanging maybe half a block back, matching me move for move. He wore a trench coat slightly open, exposing purple lederhosen and an orange shirt. His hat brim scaled up on both sides against fully unfurled ears. Inconspicuous? Maybe at a clown convention. Certainly not on Sunset Boulevard at two in the afternoon.
I debated whether or not to brace him again and give him another ultimatum. He’d probably just ignore it the same way he had the last. Obviously not one to give up easily, that Roger, a trait I admired in anybody, ‘toon rabbits included. What the heck, if he insisted on wasting his time hopping along in my footsteps, let him. So long as he kept his distance and didn’t interfere.
I entered a big downtown office building. The rabbit ducked behind a lamp post across the street, doing his best to appear unconcerned in the presence of a small poodle sniffing at his hydrant-red sneakers. On the building’s directory, I found the listing for Carol Masters, photographer.
I boarded a humans-only elevator and rode it up to Mas-ters’s floor.
I opened the door to her studio and ran smack into a pile of props big enough to challenge Sir Edmund Hillary.
Masters herself, a human, thank God, since I didn’t know if I could handle another ‘toon today, stood in the studio’s only uncluttered space, a rectangular whitewashed area about ten feet long by five feet wide, positioning her lights and camera.
She had her lean, athletic body nicely displayed in tight jeans and a blue T-shirt sporting an autographed photo of Casper the Friendly Ghost. Baby-soft brown hair played tag with her shoulders. Her tongue underscored her concentration with a thin layer of moisture traced across her creamy red lips. For the sake of male sanity, I hoped she changed perfumes after sundown, since the one she had on could send every male within sniffing range out into the streets to bay at the moon. The lenses in her big, round glasses were the kind that reacted to skin temperature, changing color according to the wearer’s mood, going from dark amber to a rosy pink. Right now they fluttered somewhere in between, not happy, not sad, just doing a good day’s work. “Something I can help you with?” she said.
I laid a card on her and waited for her to read it. She held it up between us, as though comparing the written description with the real thing. Apparently I measured up to my printed notice, since she motioned for me to sit.
Rummaging through the prop pile, I hauled a chair out from between a plastic palm tree and a bus-stop sign. I reversed and straddled it so I faced her across its back. “I represent Roger Rabbit,” I told her. “I’d like to ask you a few questions concerning his relationship to the syndicate.”
“Ask away.” She opened a corner cupboard and, from behind half a dozen jugs of ‘toonshine, produced a bottle of Burgundy, which she held up with an empty glass.
I nodded.
She splashed out a healthy slug.
I tilted it back, tossed it down in one fast swallow, and extended my empty glass for a refill. “You photograph the Baby Herman strip, right?”
Carol joined me this round, sipping her wine slowly. “I photograph Baby Herman, yes, as well as a number of other DeGreasy strips.”
“And you were present a few days back when Roger went after Rocco DeGreasy with a lunch box?”
She nodded. “Roger accused Rocco of pressuring his wife to leave him. I’ve never seen a rabbit so angry. If I hadn’t stepped between them, I think he might have done Rocco some serious harm.”
“Any truth to Roger’s allegation?”
She studied a hanging photo of Roger Rabbit. It bore the cutesy-pie inscription you’d expect from a professional buffoon. “A sweet bunny, that one,” she said fondly. “My absolute favorite subject. No big-star hangups. Never moody or temperamental. A joy to work with. I absolutely adore him.” She flicked on several spotlights to see how many dark corners she could illuminate without lengthening her own shado’w. She pulled over two easy chairs, one for Dagwood, one for Blondie, and set a floor lamp between them. “I believe Jessica left Roger of her own free will without the slightest bit of coercion from anybody.”
“Why do you think that?”
I had seen men break other men’s fingers with less force than Carol used to snap in her wide-angle lens. “Who knows?” She squinted into her camera, but jerked her face instantly away, as though repulsed by the nastiness she saw on the other side. “A real bitch, that Jessica. You ever meet her?”
“No. Kind of hard for me to picture so much allure and such a devious nature in a female rabbit.”
“Rabbit? No, don’t be misled by her name. She isn’t a rabbit. She’s humanoid. Does mainly high-fashion, cosmetic, and car ads.” She went to her file cabinet, removed a portfolio, and passed it to me. “Jessica Rabbit.”
A knockout. Every line perfection. Creamy skin, a hundred and twenty pounds well distributed on a statuesque frame, stunning red hair. Easily able to pass for human. “What did someone like this ever see in a ‘toon rabbit?”
Carol retrieved the photos and studied them for a moment, as though trying to decide whether to return them to her files or pepper them with voodoo pins. “Nobody knows. Before Roger, she dated humans and other humanoid ‘toons exclusively. Their marriage came as a total shock to everybody who knew them.” She slipped Jessica’s photos back into the darkness where she seemed to feel they belonged. “Fo
r about a year it appeared to work. Jessica totally changed. She quit her carousing, quit bad-mouthing her rivals, knocked off her on-the-set temper tantrums. She even went to several of Blondie Bumstead’s Tupperware parties.” She made a bowl out of her hands and extended it toward the right-hand chair. Then she decreased the cup of her hands to about the size of a rancid tart. “Suddenly, almost overnight, the old Jessica came roaring back. Shrieking at her photographers. Back-stabbing everybody who disagreed with her in the slightest. She and Roger broke up shortly thereafter, and she went back to living with Rocco DeGreasy.”
“She went back to living with him? You mean she had lived with him before?”
“Sure. She left him to marry Roger. Considering that Roger had just stolen Rocco’s girl, nobody in the industry could understand why, a few weeks after the marriage, the De-Greasys signed Roger to a long-term contract. Everybody figured that Jessica must have gone to them on Roger’s behalf. Rocco would have done anything, even given Jessica’s new husband a contract, if he thought it would get her back.” Carol picked up my card and reread the inscription, apparently concerned about my competence to practice my stated profession. “I’m surprised your client neglected to tell you any of this.”
“He apparently didn’t consider it relevant.” I walked to the window, where I could see the rabbit still trying to protect his sneakers from the poodle in the street below. “Guess I’d better ask him why.”
“Will you talk to Jessica, too?”
“Probably.”
“Then let me give you some advice. Be careful. She has a nasty way of sinking hooks into photogenic men.” Carol smiled, pointed her camera at me, and clicked the shutter. My luck held. The lens didn’t break.
“Thanks for the warning. When I see her, I’ll be sure and wear my armored undies. One last question. Have you heard the rumor that someone wants to buy out Roger’s contract and give him a starring role in a strip of his own?”
“Yes, I’ve heard it. Rumors like that spring up with alarming regularity in this business. Most often they prove totally false. For Roger’s sake, I hope this one’s true, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Before I left, I got her home address and phone number, just in case I decided later to ask her a few of the more personal questions that kept jumping to mind every time I saw her move.
Chapter: •6•
I slipped out of the building through a side door, crossed the street, and came up on the rabbit from behind.
“Surprise,” I growled. I grabbed the rabbit’s arm and hustled him unceremoniously down the street.
I whizzed my reluctant companion past several human-only and several ‘toon-only bars before we came to a grubby hole-in-the-wall saloon, maybe twenty feet wide and thirty feet long, willing to serve both species. The bar, tended by a puffy-eared, flat-nosed human, ran the length of the right-hand wall. A bunch of derelict ‘toons held down one end. A bunch of derelict humans pegged down the other. The saloon’s only interior decoration consisted of several framed newspapers welcoming Lindbergh back from Paris, a subtle play on the common belief that certain humans—Babe Ruth, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and, of course, Lindbergh—were really hu-manoid ‘toons who had crossed the line.
I marched Roger to a booth, sat him down, and slid in beside him, trapping him against the wall.
A ‘toon waitress came over. In her younger days, she probably got mistaken for Dixie Dugan. Nowadays she carried forty pounds too much flab, three pounds too much makeup, and the resemblance leaned more toward Petunia Pig. “ What’ll it be?”
“Boilermaker for me,” I said, “and a ‘shine for the fur ball.”
She waddled to the bar to fill our order.
The rabbit wiggled himself some breathing room. “I’m sorry,” he said, misinterpreting the reason for my anger. “I know you told me to keep my distance, but I couldn’t resist. My entire life I’ve been a clown, acting out jokes for a living. Here I saw the chance to get involved in something serious for a change, and I took it.” His right-hand fingers started a frisky jig on the booth top, which his left-hand fingers couldn’t resist joining in. “You can’t imagine how exciting it’s been for me just to follow you around and watch you work. Granted, I disobeyed your order. For that I apologize. But, to be honest, I’m delighted I did. I haven’t had this much fun in ages.”
“I’m glad I brightened your humdrum life,” I said sarcastically. “Maybe you’ll do something for me in return.”
The rabbit doubled up his ears so they wouldn’t collide with the booth top when he nodded his head. “Name it.”
“Tell me about your wife,” I said with enough frost in my voice to turn the rabbit’s nose blue.
“My wife?” The rabbit’s word balloon miserably failed its maiden flight, collapsing half-deflated across my shoulder.
I grabbed it, squashed it into an hourglass shape, and tossed it in front of him. “Jessica Rabbit.” I pointed to the mangled balloon. “Your wife. Remember her?”
“Oh, of course. Jessica!” Roger plucked the name from out of the air above him and extended it to me pillowed in the cup of his palm. “Jessica. She’s my wife.”
I rolled the name into a tiny ball and flicked it into orbit off the end of my thumb. “And also Rocco DeGreasy’s current romantic interlude. How come you didn’t tell me about her?”
The rabbit twiddled the stubby ends of his ears. “I didn’t think it was important.”
I tilted my head back and rolled my eyes. Melodramatic, I know, but dealing with ‘toons seemed to have that effect on me. “Your wife plays patty cake with one of the guys you work for, one of the guys who you say reneged on your contract, and you don’t think it’s important? My friend, you got a lot to learn about what makes the world go round.”
“Well, how come you didn’t pry it out of me?” said the rabbit, turning untypically militant in his own defense. “I mean you’ve got some responsibilities in this case, too.”
The waitress brought our drinks. While I fished out my wallet, she snabbed a few stray ear puffs floating across the low ceiling.
“So maybe we both made a mistake,” I said, figuring there to be zip percentage in arguing with a bubble-brain like Roger. “What say we chalk it off to experience, and start over?”
“Fine with me.”
“Great. Let’s begin with how you and Jessica first met.”
The rabbit crossed his oblong pupils as though reading the high points of his life off a crib sheet taped to the rear of his nose. “We met one day at a photo session.”
“At Carol Masters’s place?”
“Yes. Jessica had just finished shooting a liquor ad, and I was there to do a supporting role in a Jungle Jim strip. This was, of course, when I was still doing bit parts, before I signed with the DeGreasys. We chatted for a while. Nothing of any great import. Mainly trade gossip, who got his contract (dropped, who got a new strip, who got married, who had kids, who got divorced. Normal small talk. We seemed to get along pretty well, so I asked her to dinner. I didn’t really expect her to accept, not with her being a humanoid and me a barnyard. But she did. We went to this cozy Italian place and had a delightful time. We talked and laughed and played kneesies under the table. She came back to my place for a drink. I made some popcorn, lit a fire, and played her a song on my piano. Then, more as a gag than anything else, I proposed to her. Got down on bended knee, the whole works. To my great surprise, Jessica accepted. We flew to Reno and tied the knot.” He commemorated the happy event by looping his ears into a bow and bugging his eyes out into two perfectly matched hearts.
“You mean Jessica married you on your first date?”
“Yes. I could hardly believe it.”
Same here. “How long after your marriage before the DeGreasys gave you a contract?”
“Almost immediately.”
“How did it happen?”
“One night, right after Jessica and I got married, we were sitting in our living room listening to our stereo.
I told her how much I envied her. How it had always been my fondest wish to be a well-known star. The next day, out of the blue, Rocco DeGreasy called up, said he had seen me in some of my supporting roles, said he thought I had enough talent to carry my own strip, and offered me a contract.”
“Did you know about Jessica’s previous relationship with Rocco? That she had left him to marry you?”
The rabbit nodded slowly. “But I don’t think she ever really loved him. I think he had something on her, something dreadful he used to hold her to him. A girl as wonderful as Jessica would never voluntarily stay with anyone as awful as Rocco.”
“Any chance Jessica might have been influential in getting you your contract?”
“I don’t know.” Roger’s ears turned as limp as stalks of old celery. “I always secretly suspected she probably had gone to Rocco about it, but I never asked her outright. I was afraid to. I desperately wanted to believe I had gotten it based on my own merits, not because Rocco thought it might win Jessica back. Anyway, for a while I was the happiest bunny alive. I had Jessica, and I had a contract with the biggest syndicate in the business, and I had their promise to make me a star.”
So much for that part of Roger’s life where everybody had sung in tune. Now for the later sessions, where the notes had turned sour, and the strolling violinist had left in disgust. “What caused your marriage to break up?”
The rabbit’s ears flopped over double and wobbled side to side, like a television aerial trying unsuccessfully to align itself with a very faint signal. “It was a real mystery. We had been married about a year when, about two weeks ago, almost overnight, Jessica changed from a kind, wonderful, caring person into a shrewish, raving witch.” Roger’s body sagged. “You don’t have any idea what caused the change?”
