by Gary K. Wolf
Roger’s balloon exploded out of his head with such force that his words shattered a furrow through the hanging crystals on Gypsy’s chandelier and nearly blew a hole through her ceiling. “Nubbins! You say I got no nubbins? Lady, I got plenty of nubbins. My nubbins have got nubbins.”
Roger put his hands behind him and grabbed on to his own skinny butt cheeks. Either he had no idea what she was talking about, or his nubbins where in a completely different location from everybody else’s.
Either scenario could be true.
“You wanna see ’em? Wanna see those big boys? I keep ’em with me all the time. Right here in my back pocket.”
Oh, boy. Him being a Toon, that could be the truth. If so, I didn’t want to see what he was going to pull out of his pants. “Roger, cool off.”
Roger ignored me. He raised his hands. Thankfully, his hands came out empty.
Roger hopped up on Gypsy’s table. “See what your crystal ball has to say about this.”
He pulled back his size twenty-two clodhopper and gave Gypsy’s crystal ball a good, swift kick.
I figured we were about to get hit with a thousand shards of flying glass. Plus a bill for destroying Gypsy’s prop.
Instead, the ball went sailing through the air. Then Gypsy snapped her fingers and…POOF. The crystal ball vanished in a cloud of smoke.
Gypsy was good. She was very good indeed.
Roger didn’t seem to notice or care that his violent gesture had been nullified by a slick bit of abracadabra.
“So there,” he said.”Let that be a lesson to you.”
Roger hopped off Gypsy’s table. “I’ve had about all of the fortune telling I can take,” he said. “I’ll wait for you guys in the car.”
He stormed out. In Toon rabbit-storming terms, his action had more the force of a gentle spring rain rather than a thunder-clapping, earth-shaking deluge.
“I changed my mind,” I said to Gypsy. “Do me.”
“I’m sorry, Mister Valiant. I won’t be telling any more fortunes today. I’ll pick up a new crystal ball tonight at my supply store, Hocus Focus. I’ll need a day or so to get the new ball up and running. Crystal balls don’t operate on electricity, you understand. Not like a toaster or a coffee pot. Crystal balls plug in to a much higher power source. The connection process involves securing thirteen spirits. Not an easy task.”
“Gin, bourbon, whiskey, rum, vodka, tequila, brandy, sake, schnapps, grappa, jenever, ouzo, and mescal. I can secure those thirteen spirits for you with a twenty minute visit to the nearest corner package store.”
“How very droll. I’m referring to spirit guides, the royalty of the world of the dead.”
“Some stiffs are better than others? I always figured dead men to be pretty much the same. Dust and bones. With maybe a few worms thrown in.”
“Hardly. A definite hierarchy exists in the underworld. At the apex are the spirit guides. Those who have lived an exemplary and guilt free life. At the bottom of the pile are, well…”
“Wastrels like me.”
Her antennae dipped. “I will contact my spirit guides and get them to charge my new crystal ball with spiritual ether. Then I’ll be back in business. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll reveal your fortune.”
“I’m not interested in the future. I want to know the past.”
“Ah, the past. An entirely different kettle of ectoplasm. Revealing the hidden nature of the past can be hard or easy, depending on the parties involved.”
“Clabber Clown and Willy Prosciutto.”
“I see,” she said. “That would be a tense bit of past. Quite hard to conjugate.”
“A hundred simoleons hard?” I said.
“Harder,” she said. “Two hundred simoleons.”
“Spill.”
“Cash up front.”
“I ain’t got that much on me. Trust me. I’ll find the money,” I said.
“Sorry, no credit,” said Gypsy.
“You just told Cooper’s fortune and the rabbit’s too for free.”
“A special circumstance,” she said. “A way to gain your confidence for the main event.”
“By that you mean the bigger score.”
“If you want to be crass about it. A girl has to pay for her magic potions somehow. You give me the money, I give you the dope.”
“I’m tapped out. I don’t have that much,” I said.
“I do,” said Cooper.
Cooper reached into his leather jacket. He pulled out a roll of simoleons. He counted out twenty tens and handed them to Gypsy.
Gypsy put them into the cleft of her thorax without counting them.
“I provided psychic counseling to Clabber Clown. Once, not too long ago, Clabber came to me with a question. He had acquired some hot information. He could release it to the press or use it to blackmail Willy Prosciutto. He asked for my counsel. Asked me to tell him what to do.”
She wrapped her wings around her, as though using them to ward off a cold chill. “Money’s money, I told him.”
She unfolded her wings.
“‘Money’s money?’ That’s the advice you gave him?”
“For that sage bit of wisdom, Clabber paid me a hundred simoleons.”
“Let me make sure I got this right. Basically, you told Clabber Clown to go ahead and blackmail Willy P.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“In any manner you wanna name, speaking or silent. Did Clabber tell you the nature of this information?”
Gypsy rubbed her antennae together. A word balloon popped out from between them. I could make out a picture inside the balloon, a picture so shrouded in haze that I couldn’t tell with certainty what the picture showed.
Gypsy swirled her wingtip through the balloon. Balloon and picture both vanished.
“My vision is cloudy today,” she said.
“How much to make the fog go away?”
“The weather should improve greatly for another two hundred simoleons.”
Gypsy looked at Cooper. So did I.
Cooper shrugged. “Got fifty.”
Gypsy held out her hand.
Cooper forked over the cash.
“Clabber’s information concerned Prosciutto’s plan to buy up all the oceanfront land in Toontown.”
“What’s he gonna do? Build a beach resort? Name it after himself? Call it ProsciuttoLand? Charge a hefty fee for a daily visit. Gouge the beach goers on food and drinks. Sell cheap souvenirs at exorbitant prices. Nobody, not even a Toon, would be daft enough to go for that.”
“Nothing that good. Willy P doesn’t plan to build anything there. Willy P made a deal with Dowdy Chemical.”
Dowdy Chemical made noxious stuff, napalm, DDT, nitroglycerin, and DIP. The company defended their unwholesome product line with the corporate tag line “Somebody’s Got to Make This Crap. Might As Well Be Us.”
“Willy P’’s going to use that strip of land as a dumping ground for Dowdy’s chemical waste. Once Willy P does that, the whole area will become uninhabitable for Toons. They’ll never be able to go to the beach again. If they do, the dumped DIP will melt them to sludge.”
I had mixed emotions concerning that revelation. A few less Toons in the world wouldn’t be a bad thing. On the other hand, I’d witnessed death by DIP. A slow and painful passing. Even a goofy Toon didn’t deserve to go out that way.
“The story gets worse,” Gypsy continued. “Willy’s actions will harm more than Toons. Willy P’s not going to bother burying the waste. He’s going to dump that noxious stuff right on the sand. The ocean waves will pick up the sand and the waste together and carry both out to sea. You know what that chemical waste stuff does to fish?”
“I’m figuring nothing good.”
; “High doses make fish flesh poisonous. Humans who eat that fish will die.”
Me being a longtime lover of tuna salad on rye, her revelation made this affair personal.
We went to the Toontown Registry of Deeds, where I studied the board listing the Registry’s Departments.
Good Deeds, Bad Deeds, Deeds of Trust, Misdeeds, Yesindeeds, Deedydos.
We went to the Land Deeds department. The clerk in charge, a Toon land crab, crab-walked us to the files section. Me, Roger, Sands and Cooper spent the next couple of hours poring through reams of dusty papers.
I thumbtacked the map in Roger’s Gossipy Guidebook to a wall. I used the map to track and annotate our findings.
The ocean in Toontown was bordered along its entire length by Pelagic Pike. A hundred yards of pure white, sandy beach separated the ocean from the Pike.
Toonie Island was situated smack in the middle of this peachy beachy strip.
According to the registry’s deeds, hundreds of small companies owned all the rest of the land between Pelagic Pike and the ocean.
We discovered the curious fact that the presidents of all of these companies listed the same birthplace, an address on Plaster Overpass.
I used Roger’s Gossipy Guidebook to locate this birthplace.
The address was a factory called The Manikin Works.
I checked the deed on The Manikin Works. None other than Willy Prosciutto owned the place.
Under the Business Type section of the deed, The Manikin Works listed Manufacturing. Under Type of Product the company put, logically enough, Dummies.
We pulled off Rusty Beltway onto Plaster Overpass, and parked in the Manikin Works’ employee lot across the street from the factory. I gave the factory one of my patented, private eyeball, once-overs.
I saw nothing out of the ordinary.
A building two stories high, all brick, simple sign over a utilitarian front door, a loading dock on the side. The windows were barred which seemed a little strange. Who’d want to steal a dummy? The thought never occurred to me that the bars might not be there to keep thieves out but rather to keep the dummies in.”You two stay in the car,” I told Roger and Cooper. “I want to keep the snoop squad small and inconspicuous. Just me and Sands. Bring your camera,” I told Sands. “I want this on film.”
The factory had a security fence, but not much of one. I cut open an entry hole using my nail clippers.
The windows were too high up for us to see inside. I hauled over a couple of old wooden crates. I stood on one crate, Sands climbed up on the other.
We took a look inside.
The Manikin Works manufactured dummies all right. Not the rigid, jointed, poseable kind department stores use in their windows to display their spring wares. The dummies made here were more like the kind Doctor Frankenstein stitched together in his science lab.
These were anatomically correct humanoid dummies. No women, only men. They were all visually different, but of a type. Mid-forties in age, patrician features, well-styled salt and pepper hair. They mimicked guys who joined country clubs and attended high-end charity fundraisers. Banker types you would trust with your grandmother’s life savings.
They came off the assembly line at the rate of one every couple of minutes. From there they walked naked to a haberdashery section. Here they got fitted with conservative three-piece suits, shiny shoes, and homburgs.
Lastly, each dummy received an expensive patent leather briefcase.
They marched off toward the loading dock in groups of thirty. As they marched along, they sang gaily, “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.”
They waited on the dock for a few minutes. Eventually, a bus pulled up. The dummies got on. The bus pulled away.
“You get that on film?” I asked Sands.
“I did. I’m not sure what I’ve got. What are those creatures?”
“They’re the dummy executives Willy Prosciutto uses to run his dummy corporations.
We slipped out through the hole I’d cut in the fence.
“Willy P’s dummy corporations, headed up by actual dummies, own every piece of oceanfront property in Toontown except for one,” I explained to Roger and Cooper. “Day after tomorrow he’ll have that too.”
I pointed to an auction notice posted on a nearby lamppost.
To settle Clabber Clown’s estate, Toonie Island was going under the gavel. Toonie Island, the one slice of beach Willy P didn’t own, would be sold to the highest bidder.
“Big problem,” said Cooper, summing things up in his usual economical style.
“You got that right,” I agreed.
Chapter Nineteen
We went around The Bend and down The Straight-away to Toontown Downs Racetrack.
“Hold your horses,” said Roger. “We’re off to the races.”
Indeed we were, but not to watch nags chase each other around a circle.
Buzz Bomb had told me Willy Prosciutto was at the track. Me and Willy P were gonna have words.
“This is Toontown’s favorite place for horsing around,” said Roger. His balloon came out in the shape of the little hammer a doctor uses to test reflexes.
Translation—Roger considered his comment to be a knee-slapper.
“How’s about you keep your balloons to yourself?” I told him. “For as long as we’re here, nothing comes out of you.”
Roger nodded. He put up an empty balloon the shape of an old-fashioned jailhouse padlock. He slapped the imaginary padlock on his lips and swallowed the key.
Roger’s vow of silence lasted longer than I thought.
“Look, look there,” Roger said less than two minutes later. “That’s the track’s trout. His name is R.R. Nothing. He’s known as Double R to his friends.”
Double R Nothing sat at a small table in a private box. Double R was a Toon trout. Like every fish out of water, he did what he had to do in order to survive.
In Double R’s case that involved keeping spare oxygen-filled word balloons at the ready. When he started gasping for breath, he grabbed a balloon and sucked out the air.
Double R’s well-muscled assistant, a pumped up Toon bellows, gathered up Double R’s empties, re-inflated them by huffing and puffing them full, then stacked them in the pile of gasbags next to Double R’s front fin.
“Hey, Double R. Staying out of hot water?” asked Roger.
Double R touched his fin to the wide brim of his fedora. “Doing swimmingly, Roger.”
“Moving with the current?”
“Keeping afloat.”
Double R wore a green and yellow checked suit louder than the track’s bugle.
His gold finwatch told the time. By that I mean the watch actually told the time. Double R would ask the watch how long before the next race at Hialeah, and the watch would tell him.
Not having feet, Double R wore only a single shoe on his rear fin, but that shoe was a doozy. The shoe had been custom cobbled out of alligator skin. The alligator’s head remained in place on the toe. Every now and then, the trout tout would toss his shoe toe a morsel of raw meat from out of a Waterford crystal bowl on his table. The alligator deftly caught the succulent snacks in mid-air.
“Got a good tip for me?” asked Roger.
“Don’t smoke in bed,” said Double R.
“No, I mean a real, sure thing. Don’t go giving me nothing fishy. I want a can’t-lose winner. In the main event.”
That main event was Toontown’s annual world famous race, the Brown Derby.
Double R’s tabletop contained betting slips, racing forms, and huge stacks of simoleons.
Double R perused several of his racing forms. He compared and computed odds by punching numbers into the keys of his calculator. The keys sprung forward and goosed a chipmunk who wrote the numbers out
in longhand on a roll of paper. At the end of each computation, the chipmunk tallied up, wrote down the result, chewed off the calculation, and handed the strip of paper to Double R.
“You bet. I got a bet you can bet will pay off big. I bet you won’t find a better bet anyplace from anybody. You better betcha. Take a seat, and we’ll dive in.”
“You guys go ahead without me,” said Roger. He pulled up a chair and joined Double R in his private box.
I debated warning Roger that Double R’s alligator shoe was eyeing the rabbit’s foot and licking his gatory lips. I didn’t. Roger was a big boy. Or at least a big rabbit. Let him watch out for his own feet.
I spotted Ring Wordhollow perusing his racing form.
“How you doing, Professor? I didn’t know you played the ponies.”
He grinned at me. He reached into his pants pockets and turned them inside out. “You have that backwards. The ponies play me.”
I found Willy Prosciutto in his private box.
Louie Louie Louse barred my entry. “You ain’t welcome here, dick. Get lost.”
“Let him in,” said Willy P.
I entered the box.
Cooper and Sands followed me.
“Only the dick,” Willy P told his louse of a gatekeeper. Tell the pretty boy and the movie guy to get lost.”
Mutt followed on my heals.
“No dogs allowed.”
I ignored him.
“I said, ‘no dogs’. I don’t like that dog.”
“That makes you even because he don’t like you either.”
I took a seat next to Prosciutto. Mutt hopped up into my lap.
“I thought you looked better dressed as a monkey,” said Prosciutto.
“I’m gonna like you just fine dressed in prison stripes.”
“That ain’t likely to happen, dick. I’m a law abiding pig.”
“I think we got different outlooks on the laws you’re abiding.”
“Laws of nature, laws of averages, laws of diminishing returns. Whatever you got.”
