by Gary K. Wolf
“They intended to kill the rabbit? For his teakettle?”
“So they said.”
“What happened when you got to Roger’s house?”
“I found the door open. I went inside and saw Roger dead. I looked around, but the teakettle was nowhere to be found. I figured that Dominick had probably beaten me to it. So I left. That’s how it happened.” She crossed her heart and hoped to die. “The truth.”
“Why didn’t you report it that way?”
She displayed another side of herself, the confused innocent. “I was afraid. I didn’t want to get involved with murder. Leave it to that stupid bunny to die with my name on his lips and rope me in anyway.”
“When you entered the house, and when you left it again, did you notice some music coming from out of the piano?”
“Yes, I did. That’s what held the door open. The music had gotten wrapped around the knob. I don’t remember what the song was, if that’s what you’re after.”
“That’s what I’m after.”
“Well, I don’t remember.” She leaned forward far enough across the desk to put her hand on my arm. In an earlier, more direct era, that kind of touch would have been all I needed to grab her by the hair, drag her into my cave, and ravage her until morning. Nowadays we have to be satisfied with a silly grin. I gave her a silly grin. “I did not kill Roger,” she said. “You must believe that. I swear it on my honor.”
“That’s a pretty shaky oath in my book.” I pitched her my beanball. “Ever hear of a man named Sid Sleaze?”
Her hand tightened around my arm, but she didn’t seem to have enough strength in it to squash a cockroach. “Yes, I know him. He asked me to appear in a porno comic book once. He hounds most of the top ‘toons. He’s a filthy, perverted beast, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“You never gave in and appeared in one of his goodies?”
“Of course not. What kind of woman do you take me for? I have my standards.”
There was only one reply to that. I pulled out Lewd, Crude, and In the Mood, and threw it on the desk.
She stared down at it the way an innocent bystander stares at a body which has just fallen ten stories to the sidewalk. “Where did you get this?”
“From a book dealer I know. It cost me a bundle. But I must say it’s worth every penny. You naughty girl, you.”
She reached for it, but I quickly hauled it back and stuffed it into my top desk drawer.
She uncorked a stream of tears that would have made a crocodile proud. “I was trying to break into modeling when I first met Sid Sleaze,” she said. “He passed himself off as a big-time movie producer. He told me he would make me a star. Some star. He invited me to his apartment and slipped me a spiked drink that left me able to function physically, but made me totally uninhibited. When the effects wore off, Sleaze showed me prints of the porno material he had shot of me while I was under. The same stuff he later used to prepare that horrid book. He gave me five thousand dollars and told me there would be a lot more in it for me if I did it again, of my own free will this time. I threw the money at him, and ran out.”
“Did you go to the cops?”
“I was afraid to, and embarrassed. I was only eighteen at the time. Besides, while I was drugged, Sleaze had me sign a formal release. Luckily, Sleaze printed up only a small quantity of those comics. This was when he was first getting started in the business, and he couldn’t afford a large press run. After I became famous, and he realized what a potential gold mine he had, he approached me again, shortly after I married Roger. He said if I didn’t give him money, he would print up another hundred thousand copies for general release.” She brought her cigarette up between us and watched it burn.
“What did you do?”
She killed her smoke by grinding it viciously into my cup, and she kept grinding it long after it had gone out, until nothing remained except loose strands of tobacco and thoroughly shredded paper. “I paid him, naturally. What else could I do? I had my career to consider. Luckily for me, Sleaze proved to be a lot more honorable as a crook than he was as a porno producer. Once he had his money, he gave me the negatives, exactly as promised.”
“He gave you the negatives?”
“That’s right.”
“What did you do with them?”
“I cut them into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.”
“Did Rocco ever see them, or see the comic?”
“No, never. It’s hardly a subject I’d discuss with a man who worshipped me as the embodiment of sophistication.” As she talked, Jessica came around to my side of the desk, took up a position behind my chair, and ran her fingers through my hair and along the side of my face. “You have beautiful features,” she said. “So strong and well-defined.”
“Chipped out of granite, that’s me.”
She brushed a kiss across my ear. “You will take my case, won’t you?” she said in a throaty whisper that spoke of pleasures rarely experienced by the common man.
“Not a chance,” I whispered back, a lot less heartily than I had intended to. Her voice shot up like a rocket. “What do you mean, not a chance?”
“Just what I said. I won’t take your case.” I held her lovely hand in mine, and ticked off my reasons on her slender fingers. “First, I think you’re lying about seeing Roger coming out of Rocco’s study after the shooting. Why, I don’t know. Maybe to protect somebody else, maybe to cover yourself. Secondly, for once in my life, I agree one hundred percent with the police. I think you shot Roger. I’d stake my life on it. You had the teakettle for a motive, and you had the opportunity. Thirdly, I won’t take your case because I already have a client, Roger Rabbit, dead though he may be.” I ran out of reasons before I ran out of fingers, so I took the two of hers I had remaining, and squeezed them together. “And these two little piggies went to the gas chamber,” I said.
She jerked her hand away and hid it behind her where I couldn’t intimidate it anymore. “You’re wrong, you’re terribly wrong. I’ve told you the truth. I beg you to reconsider.”
Again I told her no dice.
She cried me another half a river as I shooed her into the hall.
No sooner had she gone than I heard a noise outside my window, like somebody stumbling over their own feet as they descended the fire escape.
I jerked the window open but found nobody there. Down at the bottom of the iron escape ladder, on the street, I did see Roger Rabbit though. Strange. He should have been halfway to my apartment by now. Could it be he stayed behind and eavesdropped on my conversation with Jessica? If so, he knew my true feelings toward her. Even worse, he knew her true feelings toward him, and right now I didn’t think the little guy could handle it. For his sake I hoped he had been far, far away when Jessica told her tale. But knowing snoopy Roger, fat chance of that.
I prescribed myself one final bracer and set resolutely off to face the morose scene I knew I’d find at home.
Chapter: •26•
When I got home, I found the rabbit crawling around the living room on all fours. For a delicious moment I thought he might have regressed to his wild state, but it turned out he had only dropped his contact lens, a plate-glass oval large enough to double as serving platter for roast squab. He buffed it on his sleeve and popped it into his eye, but I don’t think it improved his perspective any, since his face remained as sour as a dill pickle and nearly as green. “Want to talk about it?” I asked.
He shook his head so vigorously that his ears wound around each other. I had to step on his foot to keep him from helicoptering off the floor.
“It might help,” I said.
He shambled into the living room and collapsed on the sofa. He curled his fingers into a fist and rapped one of the cushions his best lick. Some puncher. With a right cross that weak, I wouldn’t back him in a match against Joe Palooka’s thumb. “What does she mean I’m a turkey?” he blurted out in a balloon the size and consistency of a squishy honeydew.
<
br /> So he had been eavesdropping after all. “Maybe she called you a turkey because you gobble your food.” A pretty good joke I thought, but it left old yuk-a-minute stone cold. Toons! You figure out what tickles their fancy, because I sure can’t.
“Somebody put those words in her mouth,” he said. “She would never talk about me that way of her own accord.”
“Right. The fly on the wall was a ventriloquist.”
“Don’t joke about it.” He snorted. Ever hear a rabbit snort? Imagine an effeminate donkey with bad adenoids. “I’m very upset by what I heard.”
“You shouldn’t have eavesdropped.”
“I’m a private detective now. It’s part of my job.”
“Then you’ll just have to learn to roll with it. Remember, people who peek through keyholes have to expect an occasional poke in the eye.”
The rabbit got up, stood in front of the window, and absorbed enough mellow morning sunlight to cast a shadow of his former self. “Was that one of those gems of folk wisdom we detectives throw out with such proficiency?”
“Call me the old philosopher.”
“The only old philosopher I remember wound up with a gut full of hemlock.”
“Maybe he should have stuck to a bland diet.”
The rabbit threw up his paws in surrender. Match, set, and championship to yours truly. Roger dropped a small, rnilky-white balloon to the floor and bonked it across the carpet with his big toe. “What was the comic you and Jessica were talking about?” he asked, rather idly considering the grave implications of my answer, “and how does Sid Sleaze fit into it?”
If he wanted sugar-coating, the rabbit picked the wrong candy apple. I laid it out for him complete in every detail. “The comic is a racy number called Lewd, Crude, and In the Mood. It’s eight pages long and shows Jessica making whoopee. You heard Jessica’s version of how it came to be. The part of it that interests me isn’t the book itself, but rather the book’s negatives. Jessica says she bought the negatives from Sleaze shortly after you were married and destroyed them. Yet I found a piece of those same negatives in Rocco’s fireplace. Which means that Sleaze sold either Jessica or Rocco a copy.”
“Impossible.” The rabbit shook his head emphatically enough to put a spin on his next balloon. I had to slow it to a stop by dragging my finger across it before I could read it. “I don’t see how he could have sold either of them a copy,” it said. “A copy negative always comes out slightly fuzzy and easy to spot. I can recognize one easily, so I’m sure both Jessica and Rocco could, too.”
The rabbit spoke his next words staring straight up at the ceiling so that balloon shot out parallel to the floor. It hit the wall and fell down behind the sofa. Since he had his eyes closed, he was totally oblivious to his balloon’s final resting place. I had to snag it with a bent coat hanger and pull it out to see what he had said. “This comic of Jessica’s,” it turned out to be. “Show it to me.”
“I don’t think so. It’s as raw as any I’ve ever seen.”
I was certainly having my troubles conversing with the rabbit today. His next balloon came out so faintly written that I had to drag it to within six inches of my nose before I could decipher it. “Show it to me!”
I pulled the comic out of my jacket pocket and handed it over. “You’re the boss.”
Roger held it the way people handle a dead mouse, at arm’s length, between his first two fingers. Without even glancing at it, he dumped it into my wastecan and flipped a lighted match in after it.
I broke the record for the five yard dash getting across the living room, but still arrived too late. By the time I reached the wastebasket, the comic was nothing but a smouldering ash. It crumbled to dust at my touch. Not so much as a picture or a word remained visible. “That was a terrifically bone-headed play,” I yelled at the sullen bunny. “That comic set me back two hundred bucks. What did you have to go and torch it for?”
The rabbit stood up on his tiptoes, which brought his eyes just about level with mine. “You and I have to get something straight,” he said. I prayed for him to poke me in the chest with his finger so I could snap it off and hand it to him wrapped in a hot dog bun, but no such luck. He kept his arms hanging limply at his side. “There’s a fundamental difference in the way we want to conduct this case. I think we’d better resolve it right here and now.” His toes got wobbly so he put his heels back on the floor and we continued our discussion eye to chest. “You’re getting paid to prove I didn’t kill Rocco,” he said, “and to find out who killed me. I didn’t hire you to harass my wife. So leave her alone. She’s totally innocent.”
“She wasn’t so innocent when she made that pornographic comic,” I reminded him.
That got the rabbit back up on his tiptoes. “You heard what she said. Sleaze gulled her into making that piece of trash. She is not the kind of woman who would do that of her own free will. If she says she was tricked into it, I believe her. I believe everything she says.”
“She says she saw you kill Rocco. You believe that, too?”
Roger waffled so quickly I could almost taste butter and syrup. “No, that I don’t believe. I suspect she’s being pres-sured to implicate me. Possibly by Dominick DeGreasy. He’s that kind of rapscallion.”
“OK, let’s suppose for a minute we play it your way. What does that mean I do?”
“Jessica asked you to prove that she didn’t kill me. I want you to do just that. I want you to prove whatever she wants proved.”
If I’m ever tempted to take a ‘toon case again, I hope somebody puts a bullet through me first. “I can’t oblige. I already have you for a client, and it would be unethical for me to take on somebody else.”
He half-shut his eyelids, the way people do when they pass a cripple on the sidewalk. “From what I heard, ethics never bothered you before. Why the sudden change of heart? Sure it’s two clients, but it’s also two fees.”
That illustrates the first rule of detecting. Always wear your shorts snugged up tight so you don’t feel the pain when your client kicks you below the belt. “You really hurt me with that kind of rotten talk,” I protested. “I’m not in this one for the money. I’m in it because I think you’re almost an all-right guy, for a ‘toon that is, and I want to see you go out happy.”
Here I practically proposed marriage to him, and still he refused to back off. “Then do what I ask. Take Jessica’s case.”
I tried to grab him by the shoulders, but my hands slipped down and I wound up shaking sense into him at about the elbow level. “Damn it, Roger, don’t you understand. Your beloved sweetie Jessica, who you so badly want me to help, is the one who shot you.”
At this point any rational being would have given in to logic. That’s what makes ‘toons so frustrating. There’s not a one of them with the rationality of a dead frog. “I don’t care how incriminating the evidence is against Jessica. I don’t care what she said in your office. I don’t care what you think about her guilt or innocence. I only know that Jessica loved me and would not have harmed me. If you won’t take on two clients, drop me and accept her. In fact, I’ll go even further than that. Consider yourself fired. As of right this instant. You’re off my case. So there’s no more conflict for your precious ethics.”
“I’m sorry Roger. No go. I’m going to clear your name and bring in your murderer, whether you want me to or not.”
Roger huffed and he puffed, but he couldn’t blow me down, not once I had my mind bricked up. Best he could do was to try for a compromise. “Play it your way then, but if it turns out to be Jessica who killed me, I don’t want her punished for it. I want you to get her off the hook. Will you at least humor me that far?”
“That’s about the dopiest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“What did you expect from a rabbit?” said Roger. “Will you do it my way? If she’s guilty, will you get her off?”
“I’ll think about it,” I promised. And I did. For maybe half a second. Just long enough to picture Jessica Rabbi
t dangling by her gorgeous neck from the top of the nearest tree.
Chapter: •27•
I figured Roger needed a perk-up, so I told him to tag along and watch me grill Sid Sleaze. For the amount of enthusiasm he showed for it, I might just as well have asked him to watch me fold my laundry. I don’t know. You bend over backward to accommodate these creatures, and you get zippo appreciation for it. No wonder nobody goes out of their way to be nice to them. Where’s the percentage in it?
The Sleazy Press occupied a steel and glass high-rise surrounded by small one-story family-owned businesses. Roger and I hadn’t gotten three feet from the curb before a grandmotherly woman who should have been home in a rocking chair crocheting afghans stuck a petition under my nose, the gist of which was that Sid Sleaze should be tarred, feathered, and run out of the neighborhood lashed to a rail. She also carried a shopping bag of rotten cabbages to throw at Sleaze when he came through the door. When Roger blurted out that we were on our way in to see Sleaze up close and personal, she locked my arm in a vice grip and refused to release me until I promised to spit in his eye.
I expected Sid Sleaze to be a short, dumpy guy with Vas-olined hair, no neck, and an armful of tattooed naked ladies that would do obscene dances when he flexed his muscles. Sporting a dayglow-orange suit, a tie that lit up and said, “Kiss me in the dark,” a diamond stickpin, and a gold front tooth. Oh, yeah, and with plenty of drool dripping down his chin.
At least I got one right. He was short but as solid and well-proportioned as a bantamweight contender. His dark suit wouldn’t have drawn a second glance at a morticians’ convention. He walked more gracefully than I danced and had a melodious baritone that could have charmed the bloomers off the Virgin Queen. Certainly not the slime-ball type you walk up to on the street and bop with a rotten cabbage.
Needless to say, I didn’t spit in his eye.
