by Gary K. Wolf
“Hey, I was watching that,” I said.
He looked at me, and at where I was pointing. “You were watching the closet door?” he asked.
I didn’t have the strength to explain. “Tell me what you found,” I said.
“I hit every one of those gun dealers you sent me to and came up absolutely blank. No luck on the thirty-eight.”
He sat down across the desk from me, leaned back in his chair the same way I was, and crossed his feet on the desk top just like mine. It was almost like talking to my reflection in the mirror, except even on my worst morning I never looked as fuzzy as that. “Too bad. That means it probably came from some minor dealer. It would take us a week to hit those. Tell you what, drop the gun angle for the time being and concentrate on the teakettle instead.”
The rabbit overlapped his upper lip with his lower, achieving exactly the same facial posture he would have if I had bopped him in the jaw. “The teakettle? You can’t be serious. What can possibly be so important about that crummy old teakettle?” His next words came out in the close-set, legalistic lettering you see in the contract for a set of encyclopedias. “You promised me we would go partners in this. I assumed that meant we would share the work evenly, good and bad alike. So far you’ve taken the glamour jobs, and I’ve done the doggy stuff. How about giving me some real detective work for a change? Something that really matters.”
I opened the closet door just in time to miss an eighty-six-yard punt return, catching instead Plastic Man’s spiel for his brand of garbage sacks. Lucky me. “You got it wrong, bunny boy,” I told the rabbit. “This teakettle looks like it might be the most important angle of the case.”
“Pish, posh. I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true.” The TV showed a closeup of a Rams cheerleader wiggling her fanny, although I couldn’t get too excited by the sight of a possum in tight pink shorts.
“How can you be so sure? Just because Dominick De-Greasy’s after the teakettle, that doesn’t make it the Holy Grail.”
“It’s not just Dominick anymore. Your ex-wife has a yearning for that teakettle, too.”
“Jessica? You saw Jessica?”
“Less than an hour ago. She says that you and she bought that teakettle at an antique auction. She says she always had a particular fondness for it, that you told her to take it with her when she left, but she forgot it. She asked me to scout it up and give it to her. Any of that sound familiar to you?”
Roger wore the dumbfounded look you see on the face of somebody who walks into a darkened room, flips on the lights, and finds thirty people in there with him all yelling “Surprise!”
“She told you the two of us bought it at auction?”
“So she said.”
“That’s a flat-out lie.” His large black eyeballs took a big hop with every word. Almost made me want to sing along. “I got that teakettle where I said I got it.”
“So you see, the teakettle shapes up as being very significant.”
Roger bent his ears forward ninety degrees, like he was caught in a brisk wind pushing him forward into some place he had no desire to go. “Fine. No more static. Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.”
“Good. Check with the studio prop man who bought the teakettle. Find out where he got it from and work backward from there.”
“Right.”
“Also, something else.” I wrote out a name and telephone number and passed it to him. “This is a contact I have at the phone company. Give him a call, set up a meeting, and tell him I want the phone records for Rocco’s house on the night he died. All calls both in and out.”
“He just gives you that kind of data?”
“Not exactly.” I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. “In return I supplement his income slightly.”
“Wow!” Roger’s buoyant balloon sailed up so high, it wrapped itself around the single light bulb that illuminated my office. I had to stand on my desk to peel it off. “Bribery,” said Roger. “That’s what I call real detective work.”
I crushed Roger’s balloon, which the heat from the light bulb had baked into the crackly consistency of a fortune cookie, and dropped it into my ashtray. “How have you done with the double-S initialed characters?” I asked.
Roger pulled out his notebook and studied it, although I don’t know why. Anybody who could memorize a cartoon script shouldn’t have any trouble remembering a report as short as the one he gave me. “I checked Sam Spud and Sad Sack. Both of them had ironclad alibis for the time Rocco died.”
“OK. Keep trying. Make that your number-two priority after the teakettle.” I debated whether or not to let Roger in on the piece of negative I’d found in Rocco’s fireplace, but decided not to. It would only encourage him to stick around longer. This way, he put on his hat and coat and got back to business.
I spent the next few hours lowering the alcohol content in my bottle of bourbon.
Oh, yeah. The Rams won fourteen to twelve, they awarded the game ball to Priscilla Gorilla, and a million guys on a million bar stools mourned another fallen tradition.
Chapter: •20•
The outside of the DeGreasy Gallery was done up in what they call understated elegance. The gallery had no name on its window and only a scrolly golden street number and the single initial D on its heavy, carved walnut door.
Inside, a gaggle of sallow-faced, artsy-craftsy types scurried around arranging punch bowls and cocktail napkins just so for a reception to be held that night in honor of Hagar the Horrible and his photographer, Dik Browne. I saw Hagar and Browne off to one side chatting with a pair of early-bird country bumpkins. At the rubes’ request, Hagar donned his Viking helmet, and he and Browne posed with the two crackers for a photo they could show the folks back home in Podunk, Iowa. As their way of saying thanks, the hayseeds pasted sold labels on Browne’s three most expensive framed original strips. Must have been a good year for sweet com.
One of the artsy-craftsy types pointed out Little Rock DeGreasy to me.
The guy bore no resemblance whatsoever to his father. Where Rocco had been baked out of bread dough, his son had been carved in spun sugar. His delicate face gave him a boyish vulnerability. I could easily picture him napping at his school desk while his classmates tied his shoelaces together. He sported this season’s high-fashion outfit, what I call the flophouse bedsheet look: drab, loose, and wrinkled. I could almost see Rocco DeGreasy rolling over in his grave. “You yttle Rock?”
“One and the same,” he said, without looking at me. He told a pair of pretty young girls to raise up a particular strip and tilt it left, then right, then left again. I swear he put as much sweat into hanging the thing as Dik Browne had put into photographing it.
I stuck my license under his nose. “I’m Eddie Valiant, private detective. I’m investigating your father’s death.”
He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, and his two protégées locked their strip to the wall, a bit crookedly I thought, but I never did have much of an eye for art. “What’s to investigate?” Little Rock asked. “Roger Rabbit did it.”
“So say the police. I say otherwise.”
He made a sound halfway between a sigh and a gulp, the sound you’d hear from somebody who’d just discovered that the light at the end of their tunnel comes from an onrushing train. “As you can see, I’m awfully busy right now.” To illustrate, he took a bunch of strips stacked against the wall and stacked them against another wall. “I’ve still got scads of work to do before tonight’s reception, but I suppose I can spare you a moment. Let me just attend to some details, and I’ll be right with you.”
While he got in some last-minute whizzing around, I strolled through the gallery. A sign at the front door listed the photographers the gallery represented. The list included Carol Masters, although as I walked along I didn’t see a single one of her photos.
Little Rock rejoined me. “Shall we step into my office?” He indicated a door in the rear.
Some offi
ce. Storage shed would be more like it. He had framed and unframed strips, cardboard boxes, photos, and assorted papers piled everywhere. It made even my office look neat by comparison. Little Rock unburied a chair for me, and I sat down. “Sorry for the mess,” he said, “but we’re terribly cramped for space. I pestered my father for months to enlarge the gallery, but he never saw fit to do so.”
“You couldn’t go ahead without his OK?”
“Hardly. My father made all major decisions concerning gallery operation. I did exactly as he told me, no more, no less.” He squeezed between two filing cabinets and popped back out seconds later holding a tray of bottles. “Care for a drink?” he asked. He had liquor in about any color you could ask for, except the one I liked best, standard whiskey brown. I told him no thanks. He poured himself three fingers of emerald green and added equal portions of lemon yellow, sky blue, and sunset orange. I half expected him to stir it with a Crayola.
“Tongues are wagging because I’m here at the gallery today instead of home mourning,” he said. “But I considered my father a dreadful tyrant. I’m not the least bit sorry he’s dead.” He paused to give me a chance to fall off my chair, but, even if I’d been so inclined, in that crowded office there just wasn’t room.
“My father continually berated me for being lazy. Actually, I’m not the slightest bit adverse to good, hard work, so long as it takes me where I want to go.”
“And where might that be?”
He gave me a smile chock full of grand plans for better days to come. “I long to start my own cartoon syndicate. Nothing as unwieldy as Father’s. A quality line of high-class strips. Built perhaps around a single talented star. But in the meantime I run this gallery, and I run it well. I turned a profit every month. Yet Father refused to let me operate as I saw fit. He meddled in gallery affairs to the very end.” Little Rock finished his drink and made himself another, this round switching to blood red, straight up. “I still can’t believe it. After suffering through so many years of his domination, I’m finally free.” True, he no longer wore the shackles, yet I had a hunch his body would continue to sag for years from the accustomed weight of the chains. “Why do you suspect Father was killed by someone other than Roger Rabbit?”
“Because of some things that don’t figure.” I consulted my notebook. “For starters, the day he died, your father wrote a check to a gallery downtown. The Hi Tone Gallery of Comic Art. Ever hear of it?”
Little Rock laughed dryly. “I should say so. It’s run by a fellow named Hiram Toner. He has a reputation as a somewhat less than ethical dealer.”
“Exactly what do you mean by that?”
“I mean the provenance of his art warrants extremely close scrutiny.”
“Could you translate that into plain English for me?”
I finally saw a resemblance to his father in the haughty way he peered at me down his nose. “He’s a fence for stolen art.”
I hauled out the photos I had found in Rocco’s office. “Recognize these?”
He fanned them out card fashion in front of himself and kept glancing at me over their tops like a riverboat gambler figuring out how to stick me with the Old Maid. “Where did you get them?”
“They were in your father’s office. You know what they are?”
He laid them face up on the desk, arranging them into a pleasing pattern the same way he would have had they been hanging outside on his gallery wall. “They were stolen from here about a month ago.”
“Any clue as to who did it?”
“None. I opened up one day, came in, turned off the burglar alarm, took a look around, and saw they were gone. They had been taken right off the wall during the night. The police investigated, but could find no evidence of forced entry. We never did discover how the thieves got in.”
“Who had keys?”
“Only me. And, of course, my father.”
I turned the photos over. “What about the prices on the back?”
He perched a pair of tiny half glasses on the end of his nose. “These prices are considerably lower than the works are worth.”
“As if the guy selling them might know they’re hot?”
“Yes, that’s likely the case,” said Little Rock, “especially at the Hi Tone Gallery.”
I returned the photos to my pocket. “What about Jessica Rabbit? Your Uncle Dominick thinks she was taking your old man for a ride.”
I couldn’t remember right off where I had seen his expression before. Then I placed it. I once had a puppy in love. “Shows you how little Uncle Dom knows about women. Jessica is one of the most charming and beautiful ladies I’ve ever met. She was far better than my father deserved.”
Chalk up another conquest for Jessica the Juggernaut. “You have any idea who will inherit your father’s estate?”
“No, although I suppose it will probably be me. I guess I’ll find out for sure tomorrow, when they read the will.” He didn’t seem particularly interested. Maybe he knew about the DeGreasy syndicate’s rotten financial shape, that he’d be lucky to inherit carfare home from the lawyer’s office.
I asked him point-blank the syndicate’s net worth, but he insisted he had no idea. He contended that his father had always excluded him from the fiscal end of the business.
“You know if your father had any recent dealings with someone with the initials SS?”
“SS? No, not that I know of.”
I played a long shot. “I notice from your sign out front that you represent Carol Masters, yet I don’t see any of her works out on display. How come?”
Little Rock slumped down into his chair as if somebody had yanked a cork out of his toe and deflated his body by ten pounds. “Father told me to pull them.”
“Why?”
Little Rock turned his beautifully manicured hands palms up. “I’m not exactly sure. About six months ago Father took a vehement dislike to the woman. I can only guess it’s because lately Carol has become a forceful crusader for ‘toons’ rights, and Father resented her for it. She led a contingent of ‘toons right into Father’s office on a quest for higher pay scales and , improved working conditions. Lord, I wish I could have been there to see it. I suspect that may have been the final straw. Shortly thereafter Father began a concerted effort to strangle Carol’s career. He spread the word that she had become unreliable, that a high percentage of her work required extensive retouching. He even rejected one of her strips outright, and that’s almost unheard of in the industry.”
“Did he have a case?”
“Not that I could see. Carol takes some of the best photos around. I had originally intended to feature her next month in a one-woman show—her first. I had invitations set, flyers printed. When Father found out about it, he was furious. He instructed me to cancel it, and what’s more to remove everything of Carol’s from the gallery.”
“How did Carol react when she found out you were scrubbing her show and yanking her stuff?”
“How would you expect? She stormed out of here in a royal tizzy. That was yesterday. When I heard Father had been killed last night, my initial reaction was that Carol Masters had done it. I was actually quite surprised to find out it had been Roger Rabbit instead.”
“You consider Carol Masters capable of murder?”
“Most assuredly. Especially if someone pushed her as hard and as far as my father did.”
At first I guffawed, then, when I remembered her eyes, her savage, tiger’s eyes, I realized that maybe, just maybe, Little Rock had a point.
I played clue with him for another half hour or so, but, when I tallied up my score sheet, I found I was no closer to discovering who had killed Rocco DeGreasy with the gun in the study than I had been when I first walked in.
Chapter: •21•
In a contest for most signs in least space, I would have been hard-pressed to pick between Smoky Stover’s firehouse and the front window of the Hi Tone Gallery of Comic Art. Half off on this, closeout sale on that, invest in art for the future, with
every S converted to a dollar sign. Toss in the loudspeaker blaring over the entry door, a half mile of flashing neon out front, and a used car lot seemed practically staid by comparison.
I barely got inside when two super-slick salesmen pounced on me, one from either side. For laughs I almost passed myself off as a big spender just to watch them arm-wrestle each other over who saw me first, but instead I flashed my license. That brought them to a screeching halt. I never heard so many hems and haws. Talk about guilty looks. Sylvester the Cat with his mouth full of Tweetie Bird could do a better innocent act than these two clowns. I asked for Hiram Toner, and they pointed me toward the back. As I headed in that direction, I caught one of the salesmen tapping a wall-mounted button, probably connected to an alarm in Toner’s office. Woe to the poor bunco cop snooping around here.
Maybe Toner was compulsively neat. Maybe, more likely, he was Jack Flash with a shovel and pail. Whichever, by the time I got to his office, there wasn’t a scrap of paper to be seen anywhere.
His decor could have been designed by Goldilocks and the baby bear—furniture not too hard, not too soft; lighting not too bright, not too dim; temperature not too hot, not too cold; but everything just right.
Toner greeted me warmly with an outstretched hand. “Hiram Toner,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” Give Toner a swig of Little Rock’s red liquor, and you could have used him for a thermometer. I’d seen cadavers with more padding on them. His suit looked to be expensive, but still fit him like a grocery sack fits a buck’s worth of canned soup and bananas. “How may I be of assistance?” he said, with a voice oily enough to fry a chicken. “Wait, let me guess. You’re here to see about buying an original strip. But which one? Ah, I know. Prince Valiant. Definitely Prince Valiant. It so suits you. Stately, with an aura of chivalry.”
“Sorry. If you’re going into the swami business, you need a new crystal ball.”
“Tarzan, then. I can see it in your rippling muscles.”
“Wrong again.”
“Jungle Jim? Blackhawk? Superman? The Incredible Hulk?”
