Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  Praise for Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?

  “Gary K. Wolf’s iconic world and characters have never been more vivid—readers will fall in love with Eddie Valiant, Jessica Rabbit, and her hunny bunny Roger Rabbit all over again. Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? delivers hilarious cover-to-cover surprises and a whole new cast of Toons that will make you spill your drink all over your e-reader. Even the Incredible Hulk calls Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? a ‘SMASH!’”

  —Stan Lee, Marvel Comics

  “Fans of Disney’s Roger Rabbit movie and shorts have a brand-new, rollicking adventure to enjoy! Private eye Eddie Valiant has a mystery to solve, complete with Roger Rabbit, his amorous & glamorous wife Jessica, Baby Herman and — surprise! — silver screen heartthrob Gary Cooper as well. In Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? Gary K. Wolf carries on his Toontown legacy… and even explains in his wacky way things like why most Toons choose to have only four fingers. It’s the best Roger Rabbit t̷a̷i̷l̷ tale yet!” –

  —Rich Koster, DisneyEcho

  After so many years, going back to Toontown with Eddie Valiant is like visiting the old neighborhood and catching up with old friends. Gary Wolf has done it again!”

  —Tom Sito, animator & historian. Author of Moving Innovation, a History of Computer Animation.

  “We keep reading a novel because we believe in what we are reading-if only for the time we are engaged with the novel. Novelists throughout the centuries have toiled to create such novels that have the ability to immerse their readers in the world that they have fashioned. Gary K. Wolf succeeds brilliantly with “Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?” with a novel that engages our imagination, our sense of humor and ultimately-our desire to be part of a world that we would love to be a permanent resident in good standing!”

  —Oscar Benjamin

  “Gary K. Wolf writes with ink siphoned directly from Toontown to paint a wondrous world of laughter, surprise, and imagination.”

  —Charles Fleischer, actor and voice of Roger Rabbit in Touchstone’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit

  “Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? is a quick-paced, light-hearted mystery…Wolf created these characters and feels free to play around with them, as noted by the lack of continuity between the three books, but he also knows these characters and everything they do feels natural for them, even taking Roger’s toonishness into consideration.”

  —Stephen H. Silver from SFSite.com

  “What makes this novel so intriguing is Wolf’s ability to create an entirely unique world: a world where animated characters and humans coexist…Bottom line: The eccentric creativity of this novel makes for a fun, fast-paced read. Fans of classic film will be delighted by the multiple references to Hollywood stars of the past.”

  —True Classics

  Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?

  by Gary K.Wolf

  Copyright © Gary K. Wolf, 2013

  All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While references may be made to actual places or events, the names, characters, incidents, and locations within are from the author’s imagination and are not a resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, or events. Any similarity is coincidental.

  Musa Publishing

  633 Edgewood Ave

  Lancaster, OH 43130

  www.MusaPublishing.com

  Issued by Musa Publishing, November 2013

  This e-book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. No part of this e-book can be reproduced or sold by any person or business without the express permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-61937-605-2

  Editor: Celina Summers

  Artist: Kelly Shorten

  Illustrator: Jacques Muller

  Line Editor: Helen Hardt

  Interior Book Design: Cera Smith

  To Bob Hoskins.

  The best P.I. a writer or a rabbit could ever want.

  Chapter One

  Nowadays, every hardboiled detective story involves the same elements. A man, a woman, and a rabbit in a triangle of trouble.

  My story was no different.

  My jalopy smoked almost as much as I did. If I ever got two simoleons to rub together, I was gonna treat it to a ring job and put myself back in good standing with all the holier-than-me purists who breathed clean air for a living.

  I was on my way to meet a new client. If I had known what was gonna happen as a result, I would have pulled over to the curb, sucked up to my own exhaust pipe, and let the fumes put me out of my future misery.

  Me and my smog machine rattled our way down Sunset Boulevard to Columbia Studios, the toniest movie lot in Hollywood, where the bungalows are painted with the pixie dust that coats silver screens and the streets are paved with pure movie gold. A schmoe like me rarely gets an invite to a top shop like this. My gumshoes stick to the seamier sidewalks of Tinsel Town.

  The mug guarding the gate to Dreamland could have been my second cousin once removed. We were both middle-aged, with builds that had started as beefcake but had digressed over the years to bovine, thinning hairlines, noses made pug-ugly by forceful encounters with other men’s fists, and—the big clincher—dead-eyed looks you get from storming ashore on a foreign beach. That last one’s an exclusive fraternity. The initiation ritual’s murder. Every Veterans Day, us surviving members hoist a few in honor of those pledges who didn’t survive the initiation.

  The guard recognized me as a kindred spirit. He leaned down until his head was at my window level, and tossed me a half-assed salute. “How you doin’, Sarge?”

  He was off by a couple of stripes. I never got past Private First Class. Although I did get there four or five times before being busted back down to No Class for insulting officers.

  Respecting authority. A big problem for me. One of the reasons I always work alone.

  “Name’s Eddie Valiant,” I told him. “I got a meeting with a producer name of Barney Sands.”

  He stepped into his guard shack and lifted a clipboard off a hook. The clipboard held several sheets of paper containing a long typewritten list. He flipped through page after page after page. I read the names as he ran his finger down a list that included half the movie stars in town. He found my name almost at the bottom of the very last page, just above the final entry—a guy who delivered take out from a cheap-Charlie Chinese joint around the corner.

  How about that? I was moving up in the Hollywood hierarchy

  “Go on in.” He handed me a Toon parrot. “Polly will give you directions.”

  “Let’s begin our journey,” said Polly putting up one of the big-lettered word balloons you get in the mail when you ask AAA to plan your vacation. “Turn right, and go half a mile.”

  I drove the route Polly laid out for me.

  On the way I passed the usual rigmarole you see on a Hollywood lot.

  José Ferrer costumed as a Frenchie fop rehearsing a sword fight for what I figured was a film about Cyrano de Bergerac since Ferrer wore a phony nose almost as long as his rapier.

  Roy Rogers leading his palomino horse Trigger to a reproduction of the Trevi Fountain. The old adage proved true. Despite Roy’s best efforts, the horse refused to drink.

  Errol Flynn, dressed as
General Custer, still making passing starlets swoon despite the quivering quiver’s worth of arrows sticking out of his back.

  Frankenstein’s monster out-sprinting the townspeople in the race to be first in line for lunch at the studio canteen.

  “You have reached your destination,” said Polly. I was expected to tip the birdie. I was low on cash and fresh out of crackers. I gave the bird one of my peppermint breath mints. Polly flew away saying things about me you can’t print in a family travel guide.

  I docked my rolling abomination next to a dented 1951 Kaiser Henry J— the cheap, fastback, two door Sears Roebuck Allstate model. In Hollywood, where you are what you drive, the Allstate says you’re a has-been director, second rate actor, or down-on-your-luck producer. The sign in front of the Allstate reserved that parking spot for Barney Sands, the producer I came to meet.

  The car on the other side of me, a classic 1935 Duesenberg SSJ, sold new for more than I’m gonna make in a lifetime. The Duese, parked like me in a visitor’s slot, had the word Coop written in gold script on the driver’s door.

  Most high level execs in this town fronted their offices with aspiring starlets sporting conical breasts, narrow waists, shapely legs, tight sweaters and skirts, low morals, and throaty voices you prayed would go from “Can I help you?” straight to “Come up and see me some time.” Most of these so-called secretaries couldn’t type a word, thought taking dictation required sitting on a lumpy lap, and filed their nails instead of their boss’s paperwork.

  Sands bucked the trend. He put no pretty front on his operation. He opted for efficiency over adornment. One Miss Ethyl Gravitz, according to her forged-out-of-cold-steel nameplate. She seemed to have a thing for cold steel. She gave me a cold, steely glare, a cold, steely uplift of her eyebrow, a cold, steely scowl. No doubt if you stuck her in an X-ray machine, you’d see she was powered by a cold, steely heart.

  Ethyl was built solid and low to the ground. If you made an unauthorized dash for her boss’s door, I bet good old Miss Ethyl would stop you by dropping to all fours and grabbing your pants leg in her teeth. She wore no makeup and eyeglasses with heavy, black, unstylish frames. She had on the shapeless gray dress sold off-the-rack in the kind of store that catered to sadistic prison matrons. A gold-framed diploma hanging on the wall behind her declared that she had graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial College.

  “Yes?” She looked me up and down with contempt, weighing whether to call a security guard or the janitor who disposed of her trash.

  “My name’s Eddie Valiant. Here to see Mister Sands.”

  Miss Efficiency didn’t consult an appointment calendar. Most likely she knew every appointment by heart. Or maybe Sands got so few visitors he welcomed one and all. “Go right in.”

  I don’t follow what’s happening in the movie business. I leave that to gossip columnists like Walter Windchill, Louella Parslips and their peep-tomming cronies. I didn’t know anything about Sands. Never heard of the man.

  I knew what I expected.

  I’ve only been in the offices of a couple of filmmaking bigwigs. Davie Selznick back when I handled a theft thing for him when he was shooting Gone With the Wind. R.K. Maroon, although he hardly counts since he doesn’t make real movies, only cartoons. I’ve seen pictures of plenty of those places in the back issues of Photoplay I leaf through in my doctor’s reception room while I’m waiting to get my latest bullet hole patched. There were always high-profile props—a pair of sparkly ruby slippers maybe, or a plaster of Paris black falcon—and framed, signed glossies of smiling film stars; movie posters with the office occupant’s name emblazoned in type the same size as the film’s title, and a long chorus line of golden statuettes.

  Maybe Sands hadn’t been around long enough to accumulate the accessories. If he had, maybe he kept them in a closet. Maybe Sands was that one in a million movie guy who didn’t need to constantly remind himself of what he’d done to become who he was. Or maybe he hadn’t done anything. Maybe he was a nobody. Maybe that’s why he wanted to see me. To keep him company as his career slid south.

  Two birds of a feather, flocking together.

  His office décor consisted of a scarred wooden desk and a couple of cheap bentwood chairs usually found in rummy bars and ice cream parlors. Typewritten pages outlining movie scenes covered every wall.

  His desktop held several empty boxes of the thumbtacks he used to stick up his script pages, three overflowing ashtrays, and a Zippo lighter bearing a helmeted and bespectacled woodchuck holding a movie camera—the insignia of the Army film unit that documented what me and my fellow dogfaces had done for a living.

  He did have one decoration I had to admire. My favorite movie star. Gary Cooper. Not a dime-a-dozen glossy hanging on the wall. Sands had the real McCoy. The man himself, in the flesh. Being a licensed P.I., I used my well-honed skills of deduction, put two and two together, got four, and concluded this must be the Coop who owned the vintage Duese parked outside.

  Cooper was leaning against a wall, head down, eyes shut, not moving a muscle. I couldn’t tell if he was contemplating the strange and beguiling nature of the universe, or if the horse he rode in some recent Western had taught him to sleep standing up.

  Sands was behind his desk, bouncing around, up and down, like his chair had a broken spring that kept poking him in the rear and making him jump. Then I realized he wasn’t sitting down. He was standing up. A real shorty, this one, about the size of Napoleon’s kid brother.

  He came out from behind the desk, hopping foot to foot like a nervous palooka warming up for a ten rounder against a hard puncher way above his class.

  This guy didn’t have the look of a big deal movie producer. He wore a wrinkled shirt and trousers so threadbare he’d have to stay out of the rain or the falling water would wash his pants off. He had on those white canvas shoes that rich people wear to play tennis but which were now popping up on the clodhoppers of young lowlifes more involved with rackets of the criminal variety. His toupee wasn’t the world’s worst but was easily in the bottom ten. His toup looked like a gnarl combed out of a mountain goat. To further crown this mane insult to his cranium he had his rug on sideways. The part in it ran from ear to ear.

  You’d figure him more for a working class stumblebum who came in once a day to empty the wastebasket, dust off the furniture, and swab the floors.

  Sands extended his hand. His fingers were yellowed by nicotine. We shook. He had a surprisingly firm grip for a guy outweighed by Rin Tin Tin. “Pleased to meet you, Mister Valiant, I’m Barney Sands.” Although Cooper needed no introduction, he got one anyway, albeit of the bare minimum variety. “That’s Gary Cooper.”

  Cooper opened his eyes. Since he didn’t whinny or neigh, I figured he’d been contemplating, not sleeping. Like a folding wooden ruler rousing itself to action, he came to life slowly, part by part, limb by limb. When he reached full length, he stood tall, head and shoulders above me. He moved in real life the same way he did on screen, languidly but with purpose, giving the impression of a hard man with a soft heart. The fan magazines called him the strong, silent type. Those rags usually shot their cows way over the moon to make Hollywood’s stars shine brighter. This time they got the description right. Cooper spoke like he paid for his words by the syllable and didn’t want to waste a nickel. “Pleasure.”

  “Me too,” I said honestly. “I’m a big fan.”

  Publicity photos always showed Cooper dressed like a high-tone swell. Dandified clothes that wouldn’t soil the seats or the aura of his dashing Duese. Custom tailored suits and shirts, gold cuff links crafted out of coins minted to pay foot soldiers in ancient Roman legions, tied with knots so meticulous they would be the envy of a finicky hangman.

  Either those shots were Hollywood hokum, or Coop was in costume today.

  His full-of-holes T-shirt could have been a used
target at a machine gun range. He partnered that with faded and ripped blue denim jeans anchored by a wide black leather and metal-studded belt of the style that collared vicious dogs, the steel-toed black brogans favored by low-life knee cappers, and a black motorcycle jacket with so many metal zippers he’d be taking his life in his hands if he walked through a store that sold magnets.

  Coop was dressed like a hooligan, but his grooming told a different story. His picture perfect hair had been shaped with a straight razor, one single sandy brown strand at a time. That level of styling went for five bucks, easy. His buffed and impeccably trimmed fingernails said he patronized a tonsorial parlor that employed a manicure girl. His cheeks had that healthy, hothouse glow that only comes from a cucumber facial. He was definitely a class act masquerading as the town clown.

  Coop sat down in one of Sands’s wooden drugstore chairs. I grabbed the other chair.

  “I need your help, Mister Valiant,” said Sands, coming straight to the point. He smoked Camels, the stogie-Joe of the plain working stiff. He stoked a new one to life off the embers of his old. I fired up a Lucky, my coffin nail of choice. Not wanting to be left out of our march to an early grave, Coop lit up too, a French bogey called a Gauloise Caporal that came in a pansy-blue cigarette pack and gave off the smell of burning hydrangeas. We sat there, sharing a moment, silently puffing away, three smokestacks on a tramp steamer to places unknown.

  The efficient Miss Ethyl came in, hefting cups and an urn of coffee. She seemed rather annoyed—or maybe repulsed would be a better word—when I passed on her sugar and sweetened my brew with a dollop of joy juice out of my hip flask.

  As she walked behind her boss, she put her hand gently on his head and straightened his toupee.

  She looked at Cooper’s hair. Nothing to be done with that. Cooper’s hair was perfect. She was clearly unhappy with his clothes, but stripping Gary Cooper to his skivvies and re-dressing him right was most likely not part of her job. Making me adhere to the social niceties apparently was. To maintain my devil-may-care, tough guy aura, I keep my fedora on indoors and out. Miss Gravitz was not one to tolerate impropriety for the sake of image. She grabbed my broad brim off my noggin and squashed my chapeau against my chest.