by Gary K. Wolf
Every stick of furniture in Sleaze’s office cried out big bucks. Lamps made out of Chinese vases. An Italian desk old enough to have come across the ocean with Columbus. And leather chairs with enough moxie to keep a solid guy like me from sinking through to the floor.
I introduced Roger as my research assistant and sat him on a chair against the wall far enough away so he didn’t cramp my style.
Sleaze served us coffee in translucent china cups with handle holes you’d be hard-pressed to stick a pencil through. I made two stabs at taking a drink without extending my pinkie, failed both times, and finally let my Java go cold.
“What can I do for you, Mister Valiant?” Sleaze asked congenially. “I’ve talked to many vice-squad officers in my days, but never to a private detective. I must say I’m rather intrigued. What would anyone want to privately detect about me? I have absolutely nothing to hide. Lord knows you only have to look at my comics to realize I have nothing to hide.” He laughed heartily and took a sip of coffee. Out went his pinkie.
“I’m working on a case involving the cartoon publishing industry, and a mutual friend suggested you might be able to help me. Carol Masters, remember her? She said it had been quite awhile.”
Sleaze set his wonderfully modulated voice to work, conveying us on a nostalgic journey backward through time. “Of course, I remember Carol. I provided her with her first break. A hard worker and a terribly talented lady. I’ve often wished she would come back to work for me now, and I’ve asked her to on numerous occasions, but she turned me down cold.” He plucked a few stray pieces of lint off a sleeve that already looked like he vacuumed it every hour. “Carol told me she won’t shoot for the skin trade anymore, and I can’t say I blame her. It’s a filthy, rotten business, and I grow more disenchanted with it every day. Lately I’ve toyed quite seriously with the idea of getting out of it, getting back into mainstream comics again.” He settled back in his chair and crossed his feet at the ankles. “What specific case is it you’re here to see me about, Mister Valiant?”
“The Rocco DeGreasy murder.” I watched his face for a reaction, but none came.
“And what exactly is it you want to know?”
I went straight for the jugular. “I understand you’re responsible for a crassity that Rocco’s live-in girlfriend Jessica Rabbit starred in several years ago. Lewd, Crude, and In the Mood. Remember it?”
He smiled the way a proud papa does when discussing his precocious child. “How could I forget? My masterpiece. When I still believed it possible to produce quality pornography. Before I realized the two terms are mutually exclusive.”
“Jessica says you Shanghaied her into making that comic, that you drugged her and shot it while she was under.”
A melancholy sadness crinkled his eyes. “I’ve heard that story before. It’s Jessica’s way of rationalizing a youthful indiscretion. In truth there was no need to coerce her with drugs or anything else. She did it quite willingly, for the money, I expect, since she was awfully poor in those days. We shot Lewd in my downtown studio in a couple of days. A few months after the comic appeared, she came back and asked to star in another. I would have loved to oblige her, but by then she had acquired a fine sense of her own worth and had escalated her salary demands accordingly. I simply couldn’t afford her, so I had to turn her down.”
I checked Roger’s reaction to these revelations concerning the base-metal core of his pedestal’s ivory statue, but he seemed more interested in getting his thumbs to twiddle. Maybe doppels degenerate from the inside out. Maybe the attention span goes first. So far, I loved it. I’d love it even more if his head fell off. “You later threatened to blackmail Jessica unless she gave you money for the negatives to that comic,” I said to Sleaze.
Sleaze spread his hands, so I could see where the spike would go when an inflamed public nailed him unjustly to a cross. “I wouldn’t call it blackmail exactly. I’d call it a quid pro quo. She came to me when she needed money. I went to her when I needed money. The only difference was that she wasn’t quite as willing to pay me as I had been to pay her. You may not believe this, but I had no intention of following through on my threat to print more copies of that comic. It was pure bluff on my part.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe it,” I said. “You went to see Rocco DeGreasy night before last. What for?”
He pushed his brows together over twinkling eyes. “Business, just business.”
“Yeah, monkey business. You sold Rocco a set of the same negatives you sold Jessica. Plus, you were the last person to see Rocco DeGreasy alive. Which means you might also have been the first person to see him dead.”
The twinkle in his eyes became a worried flicker. “I left Rocco alive. I didn’t kill him.”
“Ever see a cop spin a web of circumstantial evidence into a hangman’s noose? No? Well I have, and unless you come clean with me, I’ll hoof it straight over to the local station house, and the next sound you’ll hear will be the pitter-patter of young flatfeet eager to make their reputations by arresting the infamous Sid Sleaze.”
Sleaze fingered the pieces of a magnificent carved wooden chess set on the corner of his desk. He tipped over the king and watched to make sure I caught the significance. “What is it you want to know?”
“For how much did you nick Rocco?” No more glib evasions. “Twenty thousand dollars.”
“Why did he write you out two separate checks for ten grand each?”
“I told him he could buy me off in two installments, one then, one in six months. He would get half the negatives each time. When he saw the first batch, he went for the full price up front.”
“You always let your mark make time payments?”
“Depends on the circumstances. Naturally, if that’s what it takes for maximum return. I’m quite the progressive blackmailer.”
I assumed this was his idea of a joke, but I wasn’t laughing. “I should say so, considering this was the second time you’d sold what were supposed to be one-of-a-kind negatives, once to Rocco, once earlier to Jessica.”
He displayed the guilty look you see on a four-year-old kid caught standing beside a broken vase. “In actuality, I shot two sets of those negatives. The ones I sold Jessica were the ones I used to make the comic. Rocco got the second set. The poses were slightly different from the first, but I counted on Rocco’s being too disgusted to examine them closely. And I was right. The instant he got his hands on them, he gave them a quick once-over, and tossed them straight into the fireplace. Caveat ernptor, Mister Valiant, in blackmail as everywhere else.”
“Did Rocco make any phone calls while you were there?”
“No.”
“What time did you leave his place?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t pay much attention. I’d guess about eleven thirty or so.”
“Did you see anybody else in the house, or outside it?”
He thought for a while. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. As I was driving away, I saw Baby Herman’s stooge, you know the one, the rabbit, Roger Rabbit, walking up the drive.”
That dragged Roger back into the ballgame. He hopped bolt upright. I braced myself for trouble, but Roger only puffed forth an innocuous balloon containing a vague reference to important matters elsewhere and fled out the door.
“Queer fellow, your assistant,” said Sleaze. “You know when I first met him he reminded me of someone. Now I know who. Roger Rabbit. Do you see the resemblance?”
“Yeah, now that you mention it,” I said casually. “I do. The both of them could be twins.” I bid Sleaze a quick farewell and went out to collar Roger before he did something dumb. About as easy as changing the course of the Mississippi River.
I searched for several blocks in every direction, but couldn’t find hide nor hair of the skedaddled bunny.
On the off chance he might surprise me and do something reasonable, I hot-footed it over to the Persian delicatessen where he’d left the scroll.
I don’t know which smell
ed worse, the deli’s cuisine or a dead camel. Not that it mattered, since they were probably one and the same.
The deli’s owner, a middle-aged greaseball named Abou Ben Something spoke English about as well as I spoke ‘toone-sian. He tried semaphore, but I couldn’t read his waving arms, either. We finally hit on charades. I got through by pretending to read a napkin wound around a fat weiner. He ran into the back room and returned with the scroll, plus some old codger who should have been hanging in the front window with the rest of the skinny, brown, wrinkled sausages. The old galoot handed me a sheet of paper with marks on it that looked like they had been scratched there by what eventually wound up as the main ingredient in the chicken salad. I finally got the key to deciphering it when I realized that half the o’s were grease spots. If you ignored them, the message came clear. “Beware,” it said. “Great tragedy will result should this fiendish device ever fall into the hands of a ‘toon.”
Imagine that, a cursed teakettle. Though oddly enough the scroll’s dire prediction had come true. The teakettle had fallen into the hands of a ‘toon, and great tragedy had resulted. Maybe the teakettle really did carry a curse. And maybe Santa Claus also swept out my chimney for me every Christmas.
I slipped the deli owner a fin for his trouble and shagged it on out to the sidewalk before the deli’s zingy smell did permanent damage to my nose.
I debated whether to pursue clues or keep after Roger. Clues won.
I made a few phone calls, and in no time located the messenger service that had delivered the stolen artwork to Hiram Toner’s gallery.
The place, called what else but Speedy Messenger Service, told me somebody had dropped the artwork at their office and had paid cash in advance for delivery to Toner. Their records didn’t show the sender’s name.
I sweet-talked a secretary into giving me the name and home address of the clerk on duty when the sender came in, in the hope that maybe he could provide me a description.
When I came out of the messenger service, it was a cool, sunny day, and there wasn’t a ‘toon anywhere in sight. It made me want to chuck what I was doing, drive back by the Persian deli, pick up a roast goat sandwich and a bottle of camel whiz wine, and head out to the nearest stand of timber for a solitary picnic and drunk.
I flipped a coin. It came up Dominick DeGreasy. I resisted an urge to make it best two out of three, and headed off to do my duty.
Chapter: •28•
I found Dominick DeGreasy stalking through the syndicate’s production studio, glaring his work force to higher levels of productivity. The few people crazy enough to ask him a question got, instead of an answer, a public dressing down for not knowing their jobs. Quite a manager, DeGreasy.
“Got a minute, Mister DeGreasy?” I said to him.
“Don’t bring your problems to me,” he said, mistaking me for one of his employees. “That’s why I pay you good money. To know how to deal with problems.”
“No problem, Mister DeGreasy. Just a few questions. I’m Eddie Valiant, remember me? The guy looking into your brother’s murder? The guy who’s going to return your teakettle?”
“Oh, sure, Valiant.” He looped an arm the size of an oak tree around my shoulders. “You got a line on my teakettle yet?”
I nodded. “Maybe, just maybe. Can we go someplace private and discuss it?”
“Sure, sure. In here.” He led me into the employees’
lounge. When he entered, every employee inside walked out. “Respect,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the retreating multitude. “That’s what it takes to run a big company. Respect. You either got it, or you ain’t.”
“And you got it?”
“In spades. There’s not a worker in this company who doesn’t respect Dominick DeGreasy.” The coffee machine showed its respect by serving him up a freebie when he rapped it with his fist. “Tell me what you found out about the teakettle.”
“In a minute. First, I’ve got some other stuff to go over with you, stuff that bears directly on the case.”
“Stuff? What kind of stuff? I want that teakettle. Period.”
“And your brother’s murderer. You want him too, don’t you?”
“Oh, sure. Sure, I want him too. It’s just that I sometimes forget what I want more. Rocco was a great one for always taking care of me. It’s hard for me to keep my priorities straight now that I have to take care of myself.” He walloped the candy dispenser, but it refused to knuckle under to management pressure. Must have had a stronger union than the coffee machine.
“On the day he died, your brother wrote a check to Hiram Toner at the Hi Tone Gallery. The check went to pay for return of that stolen artwork I found photos of in Rocco’s office. Rocco mention anything about that to you?”
“No. Rocco took care of the money. I took care of discipline.” Dominick stuck his gargantuan hand into the candy machine’s delivery slot. The rankest amateur soothsayer could have predicted what would happen next. He was going to get that massive paw of his stuck up there, and, sure enough, he did. In a lot of ways, I hated dealing with Dominick DeGreasy worse than dealing with a ‘toon. At least with a ‘toon you knew enough to expect the ridiculous. With Dominick, you expected the normal, but got the ridiculous anyway.
I put a shoulder to the machine. Two healthy grunts, and I set him free. Although, for as much gratitude as he showed, I’m sorry I bothered. I should have left it on him and let him explain to his respectful employees how he came to be wearing their candy machine for an ID bracelet. “Did Rocco have many dealings with Hiram Toner?” I asked him.
“Enough. He had arrangements with most of the art dealers around. If anything interesting turned up on the market, legit or otherwise, the dealers gave him first crack. If he liked it, he bought it, no questions asked.” After getting caught once, you’d think even the numbest numbskull would get the message, but some numbskulls never learn. It took Dominick less than two seconds to get in up to his elbow, again. I got him loose, dug some change out of my pockets, and pumped it into the coin slot.
“You know Sid Sleaze?” I asked.
“Never heard of him.” Dominick stabbed at the buttons with his broad, lumpy finger. He hit two buttons at once, but only one bar came out. He tore off the wrapper, jammed the bar into his mouth, and swallowed it whole.
“How about Sid Baumgartner?” I asked, trying Sleaze’s real name.
“Yeah, I know Baumgartner.” Dominick straightened out the only two pictures in the room, one of him, one of his brother Rocco, with a metal plaque that said “Our Founder” bolted under each. “This Baumgartner approached the syndicate a bunch of times with an offer to buy out one of our contract players.”
“Which one?”
His sandpaper voice gained another layer of grittiness. “Always the same. Roger Rabbit. I wanted to go for it, but Rocco told me he would never sell that rabbit in a million years. I told him he was nuts. Baumgartner offered a lot more than I thought the rabbit was worth. But Rocco refused to even consider the idea. He never told me why, but I always suspected Jessica was behind it.”
“Strange. When I asked Rocco if anybody had ever wanted to buy out Roger’s contract, he said no. Any idea why he lied?”
A few employees drifted into the coffee room, saw Dominick, and promptly drifted right out again. “Beats me. Rocco had a peculiar obsession with that rabbit.”
“Rocco ever mention anything about Jessica’s starring in a pornographic comic book?”
His lips curled back across his teeth in a leer. “She do that? No kidding? I told Rocco that woman was a doxie. I told him, but he never listened. No, he never mentioned nothing about any comic book like that, not that he would. He was nuts over that broad.” He leaned close to me. His breath smelled like he’d been gnawing on garlic cloves. “I hear she’s the leading candidate to take the fall for Roger Rabbit’s murder. I hear the cops think they can make it stick. That the angle you’re playing? You out to pin it on her too? Because, if you are, I’ll back you one
hundred percent. She caused Rocco a lot of heartache, and I want her to pay.”
“I’ll do my best. By the way,” I said casually, “did you know Jessica’s also interested in your teakettle?”
If you’ve ever seen a matador wave a red flag in front of a bull, you have some idea how Dominick DeGreasy responded to that one. He did everything but slobber and paw the carpet. “It’s not hers,” he yelled. “It belongs to me and Rocco. What the hell does she want with it?”
“According to her it’s solid gold.”
Dominick’s face lightened from bright crimson to pastel pink to its normal pasty white, and he gave out with a chuckle that sounded like the croak of a dying frog. “Solid gold! She says it’s solid gold? Boy, oh, boy, is she in for a surprise. It’s nothing but an ordinary teakettle. That’s it. Nothing but plain old metal.” He whipped out his fat leather wallet and waved it in my direction. “Whatever she offered you, I’ll double it.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was no way on earth he could double the kind of reward Jessica had promised me. Instead I assured him that, as soon as I got my grubby hands on it, the teakettle would be his.
I found Roger the last place I would have thought to look-back in my apartment, his feet hanging over one arm of my sofa, his ears drooped limply over the other. The residue from his deep funk had turned his white fur the same shade of blue as a careless grannie’s home rinse. Quite the pleasant sight to walk in on. Home sweet home, assuming you lived in a funeral parlor.
“You sure lit out of Sleaze’s place in a hurry,” I said. “I got kind of worried. I thought you might be starting to disintegrate on me. You’re not, are you?”
The last time I saw eyes with that much pleading and despair in them, they were staring out at me from inside a cage at the city pound. “I didn’t kill Rocco,” he said. “I just don’t have it in me.”
“Sure, you know that, and I know that, but prove it to the rest of the world. Maybe Sleaze is lying about seeing you there the night Rocco died. I don’t know why he would, but it’s possible. Maybe Jessica’s lying, too. I don’t know. That’s what we have to find out. Who’s telling the truth, and who’s not. That’s why we call this a mystery. Otherwise, if everything was cut and dried, we’d call it an unvarnished truth.”
