by Gary K. Wolf
I scooped my fruitless evening exercise into the wastebasket just as Old Mister Sun bade me good morning and started his trek across the sky. Must be boring for the big, yellow galoot, doing the same job day in, day out, but at least he always knows where he’s headed. That’s more than I could say for a certain private eye of my acquaintance.
Scrubbing off my face left such a dark ring around the office sink that I dared to hope I might have scoured off the circles under my eyes, but no such luck. I hauled out my razor and upped my record for most shaves on a single blade. At least this time I managed to stop the bleeding before it attracted vampire bats.
I swiped the morning paper from in front of the accountant’s office next door and was just sitting down to a leisurely glass of breakfast when my partner walked in.
I couldn’t understand it. Even with no rest the darn rabbit came in perky enough to out-chipper Mary Poppins. I could have gone into insulin shock or suffered permanent eye damage from being exposed to such a heavy dose of sweetness and light. “I didn’t expect to find you here this early,” said Roger cheerily.
“I wanted to get an early start,” I answered. The sun shining in my office window lit up the tips of Roger’s fur and made him look like a descended angel. Dare I hope that maybe Roger had disintegrated during the night, and what I saw before me was Roger’s ghost? On second thought, that didn’t seem like such a hot prospect. At least I could keep a live Roger at bay by barricading my door. I hated to imagine the pester potential of a Roger Rabbit able to walk through walls.
I poured myself a second glass of breakfast, and Roger just couldn’t leave well enough alone. “You shouldn’t drink this early in the morning,” he said. “It’s bad for your liver.” His balloon rained down a trail of brimstone halfway across my desk. Ever catch a whiff of brimstone? Pure essence of skunk-flower. I pulled out my lighter and ignited the larger of the puffets before they broke. They flared bright yellow and disappeared. “Who appointed you guardian of morals around here?” I said, knocking back my toddy in a single swallow. “How about you watch your liver, and I’ll watch mine.”
“However you want it,” he said peevishly. “I’m only concerned for your welfare.”
“You earn your keep last night?”
“Indeed I did.” The rabbit set down a Piggly Wiggly grocery sack, from which he extracted enough carrots to bring everybody in the building up to twenty-twenty vision. He ran them through his front teeth the way lumberjacks run redwoods through a sawmill. Zing, zing, zing. “I visited a few all-night bookstores, but none of them had any reference books detailed enough to help me identify the writing on the scroll. So I planned to check out the public library as soon as it opened this morning. That’s when I got an incredible stroke of luck. On my way to the library I passed a Persian falafel shop. They had a big sign out front listing all their sandwiches in English and a smaller sign with the same list in Persian. That smaller sign stopped me cold. Why? Because—are you ready for this—I noticed a distinct similarity between the Persian menu and the writing on the scroll.” The rabbit grinned so broadly that the next carrot he sent to oblivion fit into his craw sideways. “I waited until the shop opened, went inside, and showed the owner our scroll. I asked him if it was written in Persian. He said yes, although it was a rather quaint, old dialect, and he couldn’t read it. He said he had an elderly uncle who lived with him who might be able to translate it for us.”
I don’t think I ever met anybody who dragged out a story as much as this rabbit. I doubt I could have shoved his narrative along any faster with a bulldozer, but I gave it a shot. “So what did it say?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean the uncle couldn’t translate it?”
“No, I mean the uncle wasn’t awake yet. I left it there with the owner, and he promised to show it to his uncle as soon as the old man woke up.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “Roger, you idiot. I paid a hundred smackeroos for a scroll that you left at a Persian deli! Suppose that scroll turns out to be valuable, and the deli owner decides to keep it for himself? Suppose when you go back for it, the guy tells you he accidentally stuffed it full of sprouts and sold it as a sandwich? What do you do then, Mister Sam Spade reborn?”
That knocked the smart-alecky rabbit down a peg or two. He sucked in his mouth so far his nose almost disappeared. “Gee, Eddie, you want me to go back right now and get it?” I shook my head. “No, don’t bother, the damage is done. If the deli owner’s going to diddle us out of it, there’s not much we can do to stop him.”
“I really am awfully sorry, Eddie.” Everything the rabbit had that could slump, slumped: his shoulders, his ears, his nose, even his eyebrows.
I came around to his side of my desk and punched him a hearty tap on the arm. “Hey, brighten up. What kind of a detective would you be if you didn’t screw up every now and then?”
“You mean it?” A few parts of him unslumped.
“Sure. Even me, your supposedly infallible mentor, has been known to blow it a time or two.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true.”
“Tell me one time.”
“Maybe later.” In truth, I couldn’t remember a time, but I had the rabbit pretty well pumped up by then, and I didn’t want to go through the process again. “Right now I’ve got something more important to discuss with you. You ever hear of a guy named Sid Sleaze?”
The rabbit snapped back into the proper spirit. The way he talked, his mannerisms, his stance, I swear if I squinted I couldn’t have told him from a fuzzy, long-eared Humphrey Bogart. “Yes, I know him. A no-good, through and through. A human publisher of ‘toon pornography.”
“A human? With a name like that?”
A hard knot of stringy words squeezed through the eyehole of Roger’s needle-thin mouth. “Sleaze is his professional name. His real name is Sid Baumgartner. He once published a line of comics illustrating the classics and was a pretty good Joe to work for. He gave a lot of people their first big break. In fact I believe Carol Masters got her start working for Baumgartner. Then a few years back, when people lost interest in the classics, Baumgartner went bankrupt. He resurfaced as Sid Sleaze and made a fortune. Why the interest in him?”
“Isn’t there something about his name that strikes you as being rather important? His initials, maybe?”
A marquee’s worth of light bulbs went on over Roger’s head. “Double S! Sure, double S! You mean Rocco wrote those checks of his to Sid Sleaze?”
“Looks that way.”
“What on earth for?” The perfect copycat, Roger took a chair, spun it around, and straddled it the way I do. He might not have the substance of detecting, but he was sure getting a good handle on the form.
“That’s what we have to find out. Did you ever have any dealings with Sleaze? He ever approach you or anybody you know to star in any of his hotsy-totsy stuff?”
The rabbit gave me a no-nonsense nod, the energy-efficient variety, down and up one time, quick. “He talked to me once. He said he could do a lot in his line with a rabbit. He told me he would dude me up in a tux, promote me as a randy playboy, and turn me into a millionaire. I told him no soap. I told him to find some other bunny willing to debase himself. I didn’t want any part of it.”
“How about Jessica? Sleaze ever approach her?” The rabbit’s cast-iron front cracked open, and I caught a glimpse of the old, familiar mushbag underneath. “Probably,” said Roger. “At one time or another Sleaze has propositioned just about everybody in the business. But Jessica would never do such a thing. She’s too much of a lady.”
I could feel Lewd, Crude, and In the Mood smoldering inside my jacket pocket. I should have shown it to him, shown him what a tramp he had married, but I couldn’t. Deduct it from my income tax as this month’s charitable contribution. I heard somebody enter my adjoining waiting room. I opened the connecting door a crack and peeked in to see none other than Jessica Rabbit. Speak of the devil.
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br /> Roger pleaded with me to let him stick around when I talked to her, but I told him nothing doing. She’d see through his flimsy disguise in a minute. I told him to go out the window and down the fire escape, go to my apartment, and wait for me there.
He wasn’t tickled at the prospect, but he did it anyway. I opened the outer door, and invited Jessica in.
Chapter: •25•
She swept into my office the way a touring British queen would enter a bushman’s hut, head high, stiff upper lip, determined to maintain proper imperial bearing, but very, very, careful not to breathe too deeply of the foul air or stray too near the mud-caked walls. She wore a casual outfit—blue jeans, T-shirt, and tennis shoes. If she was dressing down to my level, I hope she brought her pick and shovel because she still had three miles deeper to go.
I offered her a chair. The regal way she carried herself made me want to dust off the seat cushion first, but my only handkerchief is the one my dry cleaner stuffs in my breast pocket whenever I get my suit pressed, and it’s no more than a half-inch of material stapled to a piece of cardboard.
She accepted my offer of an eye-opener, but when I poured her three good fingers, she barely sucked the thumb.
“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” I asked.
She turned heavy sighing into an athletic event worthy of feature coverage in Sports Illustrated. “I want to hire you,” she said, “as a private detective.” She lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray, but there are none, since I routinely use the floor. I dug out an old coffee cup, one with “I’m proud to be a ‘toon” written on it with ‘toon misspelled about six times, and shoved it across the desk at her. She read the inscription, smiled, and dropped her burnt match onto the rug.
“Mind telling me what exactly it is you want me to do?”
She crossed one exquisite leg over the other and tapped her foot against the thick, invisible wall between us. “Since Roger was killed, I’ve been visited several times by a certain police captain named Cleaver. Are you familiar with him?”
I nodded. I poured myself her second drink since it looked like she’d never get around to it, and I hate to see booze spoil.
“I don’t think it’s any great secret that Cleaver considers me the prime suspect in Roger’s murder. I came to you because I want you to get me off.”
I wished I had a month to really think this one out. I wished I had contacts in high places who could supply me with inside info. I wished I had a mind Machiavellian enough to give Jessica Rabbit a run for her money. But most of all I wished I had some ice because this warm bourbon was starting to do me more harm than good. “Rather an odd choice of words you picked there, missy. You mean you want me to prove you didn’t do it, don’t you? Asking me to get you off makes it sound like you’re guilty as charged, like you did kill Roger exactly as Cleaver says you did.”
She backpedaled faster than a bicycle rider careening toward a washed-out bridge. “Yes, of course, you’re right. That’s what I meant. I want you to prove me innocent. I just got my words twisted around. What I meant was that I want you to find out who really killed Roger.”
“And if I do that, if I take your case, you’ll assist me however you can? You’ll tell me the absolute truth about your involvement with .this affair?”
Her head bobbed up and down like a line float with a firm hook on an angelfish.
“OK. Let’s start with your alibi. Is it true that you spent the entire evening alone, at a movie and out for a walk?”
Had she not suppressed her thought balloons, the air above her head would have been filled with visions of churning gears. I could picture the pasteboard card flopping out the tiny slot at the far end. You weigh one hundred and fifteen pounds, you’re tall and gorgeous, everybody lusts after you, and, if you want to stay out of the slammer, you have no choice but to tell this nasty man what really happened on that fatal night. “I went to a movie. That much is true. But I didn’t go for a walk afterward. I went straight home. I got there at least an hour before Rocco died.”
“You mean you were actually in the house when it happened?”
She lit a new cigarette off the butt of an old one, just like you’d see any ordinary B-girl do in any ordinary juke joint on any ordinary night of the week, except, when Jessica did it, she made it seem extraordinary, as exotic and exciting as watching a jeweler cutting diamonds or a gunsmith engraving steel. She wrapped her lips seductively around the filter tip and sucked rhythmically, making her cigarette darken and glow, darken and glow in a pattern that spelled out temptation in her seductive private code. “Yes, not only was I in the house at the time, I saw the murderer.”
I suddenly felt like one of those milk bottles people whack with softballs at a local county fair. Just when you get settled into a good, solid, upright stance, somebody plunks down two bits and knocks you flat on your keister. “And who might that murderer be?”
The graceful way she tilted her head would have been an excellent subject for a charm-school student’s doctoral dissertation. “I thought you already knew.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“Why, it was Roger, of course.”
Of course. Had it been anybody else, this case would have been duck soup, and heaven forbid that Eddie Valiant should ever have a case handed to him on a silver platter. “Tell me what you saw.”
She detailed her story in the flat, unworldly voice that floats around the edges of a seance. “I was in my bedroom, giving my hair two hundred strokes, when I heard a shot. I went running into the hallway to the top of the staircase. From there I had a clear view of Rocco’s study below. I saw the door open, and I saw Roger come charging out, a smoking gun in his paw.”
“He didn’t see you?”
“No. He was in too big a hurry to get away. He went straight out the front door and down the sidewalk.”
“Still holding the gun?”
“Still holding the gun.”
“You didn’t see anybody else come out after him?”
“No.” She walked to the window and inhaled some of the loose-weave gray flannel that substitutes for fresh air in this burg. “I went into the study and saw what had happened. That Roger had shot Rocco dead. I immediately went back to my room, dressed, got into my car, and drove to Roger’s bungalow.”
“Why do that? Why not just call the cops?”
She gave me a look hard enough to hammer nails into my forehead. “I planned to use what I knew to blackmail Roger.”
“For what? What could the rabbit have that you could want?”
She sat down on the edge of my desk, leaned toward me, and whispered the week’s worst-kept secret. “Why, his teakettle, naturally. I wanted his teakettle.”
“Why didn’t you get it from him when you were still living together? He would have given you anything, especially an old teakettle.”
She returned to her chair. I didn’t feel such a compulsion to dust it for her this time, not after the ton of dirt she had dished around my office. “I didn’t find out how valuable it was until after I’d left him. I couldn’t ask him for it then, because I feared he might promise to give it to me only if I returned to him.”
“And you wouldn’t have done that?”
“Not even for the teakettle. I already told you. That rabbit’s a turkey.”
To my eternal credit, I let that one slide. “What is it about this teakettle that makes it such a hot item in your book? Exactly how valuable is it?”
She closed her eyes and launched into a tale fantastic enough to provide a six-month scenario for Terry and the Pirates. “In the early tenth century, a dying gourmet potentate wanted to provide for his royal chef. So he had the palace artisan construct for him a solid-gold teakettle, inlaid with a single, huge blue-white diamond and a multitude of other slightly smaller but equally precious stones. Several hundred years later this priceless teakettle fell into the hands of the Templar Knights. You’ve heard of the Templar Knights?”
“Sur
e. They came right after the Templar Days.”
She dismissed my sarcasm with a crinkle of her nose. “The Templar Knights fought for Richard the Lionhearted. They claimed the teakettle for themselves during one of their grand crusades to the Holy Land. To protect it from thieves on the journey home, the Templar Knights disguised it by having it lacquered gray. As fate would have it, thieves stole it anyhow, although as nearly as historians can tell, they had no inkling as to its true worth. To them, it was nothing but a common teakettle. That’s the last record we have of it until it turned up on Roger’s stove.”
“And how did you find out about it? Was it Rocco who told you? I understand he’d been studying up on mythology lately. Was this why? Because he was hot on the trail of the caliph’s teakettle?”
She lit a third cigarette and shooed the smoke away from her face with a hand as delicate as any Japanese fan. “Yes, precisely. He first saw it in a still photo taken from the Alice in Wonderland movie. He remembered it from a sketch he had seen years ago while researching a strip on the Arabian Nights. He went out and bought a ton of mythology books and searched through them for every reference to the caliph’s teakettle. He found enough to become convinced that it really existed, and that what Roger had matched its description perfectly. I learned about it one night when I heard Rocco and his brother Dominick discussing how to get their hands on it. Roger hated and distrusted them, so they couldn’t offer to buy it outright. Roger had that complicated burglar-alarm system, so they couldn’t break in and steal it. When I overheard them, they were just coming around to the prospect of murder.”
