by Gary K. Wolf
“Did you see anyone else in there?”
“No, no one. I beat it out of there as quickly as I could. And that’s it. Judging from what I saw, Roger shot Rocco, and Jessica shot Roger.”
“That seems to be the general consensus. This object that came sailing out the front door. What was it, did you see?”
“Nothing much. An ordinary teakettle.”
A marching band could have taken a quick-step cadence from my loudly thumping heart. “What became of it?”
“I picked it up on my way past and threw it into the trunk of my car, along with my camera stuff. As far as I know, it’s still in there.” Her mouth twisted sideways, the way it would if somebody grabbed her by forehead and chin and wrung her dry. “Are you going to report me to the police?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On a lot of things. On how the case breaks. On how well you cooperate from now on. On how much of what you’ve told me turns out to be the truth. On whether there’s a full moon tonight.”
She didn’t take kindly to my humor. “You’re going to leave this hanging over my head, aren’t you? You really are a louse, Valiant. A genuine, Grade-A weasel.”
“I’ve been called worse. I’ve been called better, too, though I think the ones who call me worse have a firmer fix on the real me. Now, how about you give me the keys to your car? I want to take a close-up look at that teakettle.”
She reached into her jeans, pulled out a key, and tossed it over. Although I don’t think she believed I meant it, I wished her a good day.
I walked down the hall, turned, and tiptoed back to her apartment. I put my ear to her door. I heard her pick up the phone and dial it. I didn’t bother to listen to her conversation. I knew well enough who she was calling. And I knew why.
I went downstairs, found her car parked out on the street, and opened the trunk. Sure enough, there, buried beneath a pile of photographic paraphernalia, sat my phantom teakettle.
In its pictures, it looked like an ordinary dime-store teakettle, but not in person. You hear people say they don’t make things like they used to. In the teakettle department, they hadn’t made one like this for a thousand years. It had intricate ornamental doodads and curlicues inscribed over every square inch of it. It had the solid heft of Krazy Kat’s brick. Its top fit tighter than the door to Scrooge McDuck’s vault. It was ancient and well constructed, but so were my grandmother’s false teeth. What made this so much more valuable?
I put Carol’s car key into her mailbox, tucked the teakettle under my arm, and headed for my office.
Chapter: •30•
I set the teakettle on my desk and examined it from every angle. No secret compartments that I could see.
I pulled out my pocket knife, flipped out the heavy blade, and scraped away a layer of metal. All I got for my trouble was more metal. No gold underneath here, not unless some medieval alchemist had found a way to turn it back to lead. I scraped a few bumps off the handle, but they were just that, bumps, not jewels. I leaned back in my chair and considered the possibilities. Maybe this wasn’t the actual teakettle. Maybe somebody had substituted this worthless piece for the real thing. Or maybe the teakettle had some other significance. Maybe it was the key to some illicit drug-smuggling ring. Maybe it had come into the country loaded with opium.
I picked it up and turned it over. On the bottom I discovered what appeared to be more Persian writing. I had a hunch it probably said “Made in Japan,” but I copied the inscription into my notebook anyway.
Just then the phone rang. It was Roger, so excited I had to hold the phone away from my ear to keep his word balloons from stinging my earlobes when they came zipping out. “It worked just the way you said it would,” he bellowed. “I positioned myself just outside Little Rock’s gallery. I could see Little Rock through the gallery window. You had been gone maybe an hour when he got a phone call. He talked a few moments and hung up, quite upset. He rushed out and got into his car. You’ll never guess who he went to see.”
I knew perfectly well, but I let Roger surprise me anyway. “I can’t imagine.”
“Sid Sleaze!” Roger exclaimed. “He stayed in there with Sleaze for the better part of an hour.”
“Did he have something with him when he came out?” I asked. “A small box, or maybe an envelope?”
I could tell from Roger’s silence I had just impressed the fuzzy socks off him. “As a matter of fact, he did,” Roger said reverentially. “It was a large envelope. He took it with him to his house. I’m calling from a phone booth nearby. What do you want me to do?”
I got the address. “Wait for me there,” I said. “I’ll be right over. And, Roger, one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“It’s all downhill, now.”
On the way to Little Rock’s, I stopped first at the Persian deli. I bought a falafel sandwich and gave Abou Ben a copy of the writing on the bottom of the teakettle. He promised to have his uncle translate it for me that evening.
Next I stopped by to see a scientist friend of mine. I gave him the teakettle and asked him to analyze the composition of its metal and any residue it might contain. The scientist informed me a thorough examination would take a couple of days. I told him I didn’t have a couple of days. Or rather, Roger’s doppel didn’t have a couple of days. I wanted to have this case wrapped up air-tight before that little guy expired. I owed him that.
The scientist told me he’d do what he could.
Chapter: •31•
Roger’s hop, hop, hop up the walk to Little Rock’s front door turned his stream of questions into a verbose roller coaster. “How did you know Little Rock would get a phone call?” read his words on his upspring. “How did you know who it would be?” they read on his descent. “How did you know Little Rock picked up a package?” Uuuuuup. “Do you know what’s inside it?” Downnnnnn. “What do we tell Little Rock once we’re inside?” Uuuuuup. “Who does the talking?” Downnnnnn. I got motion sick just reading him.
I slapped my hand over his mouth to shut him up and scrambled his wavy words so Little Rock wouldn’t see them and get wise to our play. I shoved the rabbit behind me where he wouldn’t get in rny way, and rang the bell.
Little Rock opened the door and stood there staring at me, with his mouth open about as wide as first hole on a championship putting green. “Yes? Oh, Valiant, wasn’t it? What are you doing here?” He fluttered a hand. “I’m so sorry, but I’m just in the middle of something. Could you possibly come back later? Say tomorrow. Tomorrow would be just perfect. See you then.”
He started to shut the door on me, but I pushed past him into the house. Roger bounced along after me, and Little Rock brought up the rear. “Here now, exactly what do you think you’re doing?” Little Rock babbled. “You can’t come in here.”
“Too late,” I countered. “I already am in. And you’re in, too. In deep, serious trouble.”
Little Rock’s Adam’s apple gulped through a series of moves good enough for first place in a yo-yo tournament.
“I know what you’ve got going with Carol Masters and Sid Sleaze,” I stated.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” he retorted lamely. “Sid Sleaze? Who’s Sid Sleaze?”
“He’s the guy whose office you visited not half an hour ago.” I pointed at Roger. “Want me to have my assistant here play back a videotape of that event?”
Roger showed some of that quick wit that made him such a hot property in the comic biz, and picked up on my bluff. “I can have the machine set up and rolling in five minutes, chief,” he said.
Little Rock looked from one of us to the other for the slightest sign of a schuck, but both of us held fast. “Oh, that Sid Sleaze,” he said finally. “Of course. Now I know who you mean. I had some minor business dealings with the man. Nothing significant. He wanted to buy some things from the gallery.”
I put out my hand. “Let’s have it.”
“Have what?” asked Little Rock.
“The envelope you got from Sleaze.”
“What envelope?” he said with an air of innocence unbelievable in anybody this side of Dondi.
“Come on, don’t play cutesy with me. I know what’s in that envelope. You either give it to me, or I phone the cops, and you give it to them, and believe me, you got a lot better chance with me. I’m not really interested in your scam. I’m out to nab your old man’s murderer. You help me do that, and I don’t care if you bilk the entire Western world. But I have a hunch the cops aren’t quite so open-minded. Now give.”
He caved in easy, but wimps like him always do. He scuttled into his den, came back, and gave me a standard eight-by-ten manila envelope. I opened it and unceremoniously dumped the contents onto a coffee table.
As I suspected, it contained at least three dozen negatives. I picked a few at random and held them up to the light. Sure enough they were the negatives of Rocco DeGreasy’s missing artwork. As nearly as I could tell, there were at least six sets of negatives for each piece. “Take a look,” I said to Roger. “You once told me you could tell reproduction negatives from originals. Which are these?”
Each time Roger held one up and examined it, he gave out with a low whistle of admiration, until there were so many notes floating around, the room looked like the site of yesterday’s canary convention. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said when he finished. “These are absolutely perfect. No graininess, no fuzzy images, no degradation of color. They all look exactly like originals to me.”
“Want to tell us about it?” I asked Little Rock.
Little Rock went to the bar and mixed himself a drink from out of a rainbow assortment of bottles that duplicated the ones he kept in his gallery office. I don’t know what color he was shooting for, but he built and threw away three drinks, all of which turned out jet black, before he finally gave up and tossed down a straight shot of plain, garden-variety, see-through vodka. “Carol Masters and I vowed to avenge ourselves on my father for the unjust way he treated us. So we decided to sell a number of pieces we removed from the gallery.”
“That’s a rather genteel way of phrasing it,” I said. “You didn’t just remove them. You stole them, plain and simple.”
There was no way he was going to convince me otherwise, but by golly if he didn’t try. “We did not view ourselves as criminals, Mister Valiant. We took Carol’s works and hers only. We both felt she was entitled to profit from their increased value. We saw nothing morally wrong in her doing so, and in my getting a cut for helping her.”
“I know a rabbi, six ministers, and a Pope who might give you an argument on that. Especially when you take into account what you eventually did with them.”
Still no mea culpa. “That was Carol’s idea, not mine. Carol’s. Rather than sell them once, she reasoned, why not duplicate them and sell them multiple times?
“I told her it was an admirable idea, but would never work. We had the original negative, so we could easily produce more prints, but each framed work had to include both a print and the negative it came from. Since we had only the one negative, that was impossible. We couldn’t use a normal dupe neg. Any knowledgeable collector would spot it in an instant. That’s when Carol suggested Sid Sleaze.
“Carol had worked for Sleaze years earlier, when he still went by the name of Baumgartner. He kept in contact with her through the years, trying to get her to go back to work for him. One day, over lunch, he told her about a new process he’d developed to reproduce negatives so perfectly that not even an expert could tell duplicates from originals. If it worked as well as he led Carol to believe it would, it presented the perfect solution to our problem.
“Carol approached him with our proposal. In return for a flat fee per piece, he was to take our original negatives and turn out duplicates in limited quantity. I framed the duplicate prints and negatives together, and Carol signed them. We then sold them as originals through shady dealers like Hiram Toner.”
“The word must have gotten around that these pieces had been stolen from your gallery.”
“To be sure. The police circulated photos and complete descriptions throughout the world.”
“Your fences have any problem finding buyers under those conditions?”
“None whatsoever. There are any number of collectors who care not a whit about a work’s provenance. If they want to possess it, they will, stolen or not.”
“How many of these duplicates did you sell?”
“We limited ourselves to fifteen copies of each work. Any more than that, and we ran the risk of exposing our ploy. Our buyers weren’t about to display stolen works openly, but they might show them to a close friend or two. Sooner or later someone was bound to see the same supposed original in two collections. At that point values would plummet, suspicions would rise, and angry buyers would begin tracing their way back through their dealers to Carol and me. An altogether ugly situation. We fully intended to be out of it before that happened.”
“You planned to use the money from this deal to bankroll the startup of your own cartoon syndicate?”
“Yes. In fact I had already approached my father through an intermediary, with an offer to buy up the contract of a ‘toon I could use as the cornerstone of my new enterprise.”
“And that intermediary,” I said, “was Sid Sleaze, going by his real name, Sid Baumgartner.”
“Correct,” said Little Rock.
“And the character you were going after,” I continued, “was Roger Rabbit.”
“Correct again, but Father refused to sell. I consider myself a very astute judge of ‘toon talent,” bragged Little Rock. “I told Father many times that Roger Rabbit was one of the most talented ‘toons in the DeGreasy stable. I told Father over and over that Roger should get a strip of his own. But Father refused to listen. He wouldn’t star the rabbit, nor would he turn him loose. I always suspected it had something to do with Jessica.”
“You mean Rocco used Roger to hold onto Jessica?” interrupted Roger. Why did that rabbit refuse to give up his dogged belief that Jessica loved him when anybody with even half a brain could tell otherwise? “So long as Rocco kept the rabbit, he kept Jessica, too?”
“So it appeared,” said Little Rock, sending Roger’s spirits soaring to the moon. “Jessica would never have stayed with him of her own free will. Jessica did not love my father. How could she? She was so cultured and refined, and he was such a boor. No, she loved someone else. That was quite obvious to even the casual observer.”
Roger beamed, but not for long.
“Jessica loved me,” said Little Rock, and Roger’s self-proclaimed hard-shell exterior flattened out quicker than a turtle out for a Sunday stroll on the Golden State Freeway. “That’s the other reason I got involved in this nefarious scheme,” said Little Rock. “For Jessica. She never said this in so many words, but she certainly led me to believe that, if I ever became independently wealthy, she would leave Father in a flash, no matter what he did to stop her, and would run away with me.”
“To a grass hut on some tropical island where you would both eat coconuts, never wear clothes, and live happily ever after,” I said. “It never occurred to you that a guy with your old man’s clout could track you to Timbuktoo and haul you back?”
Judging from the look on his face, it never had. I’m constantly amazed how people kid themselves into believing love can conquer all.
I didn’t want Roger to hear my next line of questions, so I trumped up a dangerous assignment for him. “Who was that?” I asked pointing toward the window. “Out there. Somebody’s out there. We’re being watched.”
“We are?” said Roger and Little Rock almost in unison. I pulled Roger to me. “You wanted action, here’s your chance. Go outside and collar that snoop. Just remember, this isn’t make-believe. Whoever’s out there is playing hardball, and he’s playing it for keeps.”
The rabbit nodded bravely. If you didn’t count the garbage can he tipped over on the way, you
could say he slipped silently out the backdoor.
“Rocco called you the night he died,” I stated to Little Rock after the rabbit was out of earshot. “Why?”
“To tell me he knew about my forgery scheme. He ordered me to come to the house immediately to discuss it with him.”
“And did you go?”
“No, I didn’t. I’m not a courageous man by nature, Mister Valient,” he said, stating the obvious. “The thought of facing my father in full fury was more than I could handle. Instead, I came home, got thoroughly swacked, and passed out on the living room floor.”
That I could believe. He was so chicken he probably got homesick walking by a Colonel Sanders. Now came the part I didn’t want Roger to hear. “How did Rocco use the rabbit to hang onto Jessica?”
“It’s a mystery to me. There appeared to be a connection there, but I could never figure it out, and I didn’t want to risk offending Jessica by asking her outright.”
“Holding onto Roger would have worked if Jessica had loved the rabbit. You say you’re pretty close to her. Did she? Did she ever love the rabbit?”
Little Rock tittered. “Heavens, no. Who in their right mind could love a rabbit?”
Roger crept by the window. He had gotten hold of a knife somewhere and had it clenched firmly between his teeth. If he bumped into a tree, he would slit his own throat. Never a stand of timber around when you need one.
“Jessica despised Roger,” said Little Rock. “She told me so many times. She dated him once, as a lark. She had no intention of getting serious with him. Then, totally out of the blue, she experienced an overwhelming urge to marry the furry fellow. She was never able to really explain it. It just came over her, too strongly to resist. Like an uncontrollable itch. She said later that it was as though she had been bewitched. She struggled every day for a year to break the mysterious hold the bunny seemed to have over her. Finally, one day, just as quickly as it came, her obsession vanished, and she managed to break free of Roger’s spell. She packed her bags immediately and walked out on the rabbit, without so much as a backward glance. She came back here to be near me, she said. While she played up to Father, it was really me she loved. It was a glorious period in my life. We went to dinner together, and to plays, and dancing. We even shared her new hobby.”
