by Gary K. Wolf
“These are Willy’s accounting books. There’s enough meaty stuff in those to butcher him. Then watch the movie. You’ll find the content real informative.”
“You double crossed me once. Why should I believe you now? What are you gonna do to convince me you’re on the up and up? Cross your heart and hope to die? That won’t work, not unless you die for real.”
“Funny you should say that. I have died, Eddie. Not all of me. Only part. My hopes and dreams.”
Honey Graham stayed silent for a long time before she spoke again.
“Last night I went out alone. I wasn’t going to meet a man. I learned my lesson a long time ago. I know better than that. This was completely innocent. I went to a movie.” She nodded her veiled head at Cooper who stood waiting for me half a block away. “One of his.”
“When I came home, Willy asked me where I’d been. Willy doesn’t like me going to movies starring handsome men. Willy’s jealous that way. He only wants me seeing movies starring homely, goofy Toons.”
She hooked her gloved thumb at my other companion, the homely, goofy rabbit.
“I lied. I told Willy I’d gone out for ice cream. I didn’t know that Louie Louie had tailed me and reported back. Willy knew exactly where I’d been. We got into a big argument. Willy dredged up a bunch of old news about my affairs with other men. I’ll be honest with you. A few were true, but mostly not.”
She raised her hand to shoulder level. “I lost my temper. I slapped Willy’s face. He’s hit me plenty often, but that was the first time I ever hit him.” She lowered her hand to her side.
“He stormed out of the room. I thought maybe I’d won. Maybe I’d taught him a lesson. Showed him he couldn’t keep pushing me around without there being consequences.
“I was wrong.
“He came back toting a plastic squirt gun.
“He didn’t say a word. Not a single word. He pointed the squirt gun at me and pulled the trigger.
“His squirt gun was filled with DIP. Eddie, he squirted my face with DIP!”
She took off her hat and her veil, giving me a full on look at her motive for coming tonight.
In my long and frequently violent career, I thought I had seen the worst one person could do to another.
Nothing I’d ever witnessed came close to this.
Honey’s face had melted off her skull.
What little remained of her facial skin curled and dangled in lumpy blobs at the base of her neck.
Honey still had her eyes, but they dangled by their stalks, banging against her high cheekbones whenever she swiveled her head. Peering in through her empty eye sockets, I could glimpse her pinkish brain.
One side of her jaw had come unhinged. She’d secured the loose jawbone to her skull with a knot of manila twine. That kept the bone from twisting loose, but did nothing to restore her mouth’s functionality. Honey would never again be able to speak out loud.
Granted, last time we met she had gulled me good. I ought to be holding a first rate grudge. That was the problem with being a modern day knight errant. Chivalry always kicked in.
I pulled her to me, put my arms around her, hugged her tight. “I’ll get that pig for this. I’ll get him good.”
She drew away from me. Drippy specks of her facial skin clung to the front of my jacket. “He kicked me out on the street. He didn’t even let me pack a bag. I left with only the clothes on my back.” She reached into her cloak’s pocket and pulled out a key dangling from a small circular chain.
“Willy made one big mistake. He forgot to take my house key.” She spun the chain around on her finger. “I watched from across the street. I waited until Willy and Louie Louie went out. I let myself in. Whatever I wanted was there for the taking. I could have grabbed my jewelry or stolen his money. Willy keeps huge stacks of simoleons lying around everywhere. That wasn’t enough, not to pay for what Willy did to me. I wanted more.” Her twisted, turbulent balloon resembled a cyclone cloud. “I wanted to hurt Willy as bad as he hurt me. So I stole Willy’s books. Which I’m now giving to you. Because you’re the most stand-up guy I’ve ever met. I trust you to use these books to do the right thing.”
Honey sunk back into the shadows.
“Does that convince you I’m on the up and up?”
“You got my vote,” I said.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Eddie. I can’t go out in public anymore. Not with my face looking the way it does. I’ve rented a cheap flop in the Mesa. There’s no lights here and plenty of shadows. A perfect place for an ugly girl to hide out.”
I wanted to tell her she wasn’t ugly, but even my well-honed ability to tell whoppers didn’t extend that far.
The best I could manage was, “Send me a Tweet if there’s anything I can do.”
I said goodbye to my three shadows and went back to the hotel alone.
In my room, I took a gander at Willy Prosciutto’s books.
I couldn’t make heads or tails out of them. Accounting was never my strong suit.
A thump on my door announced the late edition delivery of The Toontown Telltale.
Baby Herman had done as I had asked him, taking his first baby step into the world of private dicking. The Telltale’s headline proclaimed:
Baby Herman Gives Up The Bottle.
Checks Into Doc Trinaire’s Sanatorium To Wean Himself From Demon Rum.
I used my finely honed lock picking skills to enter Sands’s room. I put Honey’s reel of film on his projector.
The film rolled.
The film was too short to be a complete movie. All I got was opening credits and about five minutes of action.
That was plenty.
This was the documentary Sands and Cooper had shot in Gary, Indiana. The subject of that documentary was none other than Dowdy Chemical.
I utilized my breaking and entering skills once again to enter Miss Ethyl’s room.
I gave the room a good tossing.
I found what I was looking for in a dresser drawer, underneath a neat and tidy stack of her industrial strength underwear.
A snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver. The kind of gun humans were forbidden from bringing in to Toontown.
The kind of gun somebody had used to take a shot at Cooper.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Toontown currency was based on the hexadecimal system. You’d have an easier time converting dollars to donuts than dollars to simoleons. Simoleon calculations required a degree in advanced calculus.
My math skills declined sharply after two plus two.
To understand the simoleon-based accounting in Willy Prosciutto’s books, or, for that matter, to make change for a quarter, I needed a math expert.
The best numbers whizz I knew ran the Toontown Mint, the place where Toontown printed simoleons.
Every building in Toontown had a gender, formed at conception, when construction crews poured the building’s bedrock foundation, positioned main entryways and installed the plumbing. Firehouses, banks, barber shops, hardware stores, bars, liquor stores and police stations were usually male. Bakeries, candy shops, clothing stores, laundromats, bookshops, movie theaters, soda fountains, restaurants, hotels, five and dimes, newsstands, houses, and grocery stores were mostly female, as was the Toontown Mint.
The Mint building was a four-sided stone pyramid that sat halfway down a steep slope called Economic Decline. A lipsticked, Cupid’s bow mouth doubled as the Mint’s front door. A perky upturned nose provided interior ventilation. Protruding side windows functioned as ears. Golden light fixtures, the building’s equivalent of earrings, dangled from the bottom of each window. A single eye located at the building’s pointy apex kept watch over the going’s-on in the courtyard below.
Toontown conspiracy theorists believed that the Mint’s eye wa
s City Hall’s way of spying on Toontown’s citizenry.
I couldn’t see that view.
The eye in question had thinly plucked brows, wore mascara, purple eye shadow, and long false lashes. Granted, so did spying femme fatale Mata Hari, but the resemblance ended there.
Mata Hari used her sensual peepers and feminine wiles in cleverly beguiling and deceptive ways.
The Mint forsook subtlety, artfulness, and imaginative subversion for overt flirtatiousness and straightforward bitchiness.
The big eye winked coquettishly at passing men. The front door mouth spoke verbally in a voice borrowed from the Jessica Rabbit Guide To Seduction. “Hi, stranger. New in Toontown?” “My front door revolves around you!” and “Come inside and fondle my vestibule.”
The Mint’s eye squinted disapprovingly with raised brow at female passersby while the mouth snapped insults like “Girlie, I thought I had a wide rear loading dock until I saw you,” “Sweetie, you’re so fat I could use your dress for a front awning,” and “Dearie, I wouldn’t use your makeup to caulk my bricks.”
Whenever I had financial transaction questions, I consulted Ollie Owl, the bookish number cruncher who ran the Mint. Ollie was a true rarity, a smart Toon, a genius in the field of accounting, particularly shady accounting.
I went to see Ollie alone.
Ollie met me in the Mint’s lobby.
“Eddie,” said Ollie in a balloon with beautifully formed letters reminiscent of those found in manuscripts copied out by thirteenth century monks. Definitely a classy owl. “Good to see you again.”
Ollie extended a wingtip. I never knew how to respond when a bird did that. Ollie had no hand to shake. Did he expect me to plump his plumage? Give his feathers a flouncing? I settled for ticking the back of my middle finger to the rear tip of Ollie’s longest primary wing feather, a currently popular greeting referred to in avian vernacular as flipping the bird.
Ollie wore a stylishly conservative business suit cut extra big in the shoulders to give him freer movement around the drumsticks, and double breasted to accommodate his sizable chest. The dark brown suit perfectly complimented Ollie’s natural light brown color.
Ollie’s maroon and white old school tie wasn’t a put-on. Ollie had legitimate ties to an authentic old school. Ollie made history when he became Harvard’s first bird-brained graduate. By that, I mean Ollie was the first Harvard graduate who was a real bird and not a bird-brained human whose daddy had made a hefty donation to the University’s endowment fund.
Ollie was a barn owl by species, a society owl by birth.
Ollie grew up in a lofty perch in Boston’s Back Bay. According to history books, the first time Paul Revere shouted “the British are coming,” Revere mumbled so badly that one of Ollie’s owlish ancestors asked, “Whooo?” thus forcing Revere to improve his diction and possibly changing the course of American history.
Ollie ushered me inside the Mint. “Be careful,” he said, “don’t touch the front door or you’ll be all day scrubbing off the lipstick. I keep telling the building to go lighter, but she ignores me like she always does.”
Good to know that a PhD in economics wasn’t any better than my eighth grade education when trying to figure out women.
The Toontown Mint ran a high security operation.
In Toontown, high security meant only real business; no show business, no funny business, no monkey business, no giving anybody the business, no none of your business. The inscription carved into the lintel above the front door put the Mint’s cardinal rule into words even a Toon could understand. Abandon All Yucks Ye Who Enter Here.
Small, train-station style lockers in the lobby provided a place for entering Toons to check their sense of humors. Not possessing one, I had no need. The guard, a burly, barrel-chested, big-armed humanoid from the superhero school of character design, signed me in.
He produced a sticky-backed word balloon with my name on it. Underneath my name, a long paragraph scribed in one point type set forth the rules governing my visit.
I wasn’t much for rules of any kind, especially excessively restrictive rules like these which regulated every activity I was likely to engage in while here including how often I could go to the bathroom and the specific procedures I had to follow when washing my hands afterward.
The regs also set out the dire penalty I would suffer were I to illicitly pilfer the Mint’s merchandise. Five years in jail. Not a happy-go-lucky Toon jail where the goofball warden treated you like a long lost friend and a jailbird chorus sang show tunes every night after dinner. No, a real jail with hard case guards who slapped you upside the head with a nightstick if you stepped out of line. Stiff punishment indeed for palming a freshly minted simoleon or two.
On our way to Ollie’s office, Ollie gave me a short tour of the printing plant.
“We use a special paper,” Ollie told me as we stood next to several huge rolls of the stuff. “Made of twenty percent cotton, seventy percent linen, and ten percent ragweed.”
“Ragweed?”
Ollie gave me a foul owl scowl. “I can’t completely escape the fact that I’m printing money for Toontown. The good citizens want ragweed included so they can say their currency is nothing to sneeze at.”
“Wouldn’t putting ragweed in bills make you sneeze?”
Ollie shrugged. “Try getting a Toon to take reality over a lame joke.”
I expected the printing presses to be Toonian in nature. Maybe rows of Toons sitting shoulder to shoulder on platforms above rolling rolls of blank paper, Toons wearing smocks and berets. Holding paintbrushes and palette. Painting simoleons on the blank paper as the paper passed beneath them.
Or the presses might themselves be Toons, putting out simoleons instead of word balloons.
Instead, the printing presses were real machines, not Toons, machines of the style used to print newspapers, and I suppose money, in my world.
The printed simoleons came off the presses in large sheets.
A cutting machine trimmed the bills to standard size.
A sorting machine stacked the bills in packets of one hundred and fifty nine. (Remember, Toons use the hexadecimal system. Go figure!)
We went into Ollie’s office. Proving the old adage that you could take the owl out of the forest but not the forest out of the owl, Ollie sat behind a wooden desk custom-crafted to resemble a tree branch. Ollie didn’t have a desk chair. He sat on his desk, his claws curled around an intercom done up to resemble a burl.
“You hungry, Eddie? Want a snack?” Ollie reached into a crystal bowl and pulled out a desiccated mouse. He tossed the rodent into his mouth.
“No. I’m good.”
“Rather have a grub? Just got in a fresh juicy new batch.”
I shook my head. “I’ve been spending too much time with Roger Rabbit,” I said, not wanting to disparage the owl’s culinary choices. “I’m going vegetarian.”
“Not for me. Anything green gives me gas. Lettuce, zucchini, frogs, lizards. How about a Cuban? Or has the rabbit convinced you to stop smoking, too?”
“That would take more than a rabbit. That would take an act of God.”
Ollie opened a wooden humidor. A gold plaque affixed to the top indicated that the humidor had been a present to Ollie from President Roosevelt as a reward for the owl’s great contribution to the formulation of The New Deal.
Ollie removed two Cuban cigars. “My cousin, Jose Carrioca, wings in a couple of boxes for me every month. Better smoke them while you can. My government sources tell me Congress is debating a trade embargo.”
“That would be criminal!”
“So would smoking one of these babies if the embargo passes.”
More senseless rules. I hated senseless rules. We both lit up while we could still do so without going to prison.
&n
bsp; I inhaled the memory of cold rum, hot nights, hotter women, and warm kisses.
“What can I do for you?” Ollie asked, disrupting my reverie.
“I got some ledgers. I want you to tell me what they say.”
“Let me take a peep,” said the owl.
I handed them over.
Ollie opened the first ledger. “Hummmm. These are Willy Prosciutto’s books.”
“That’s right. Anything incriminating in there?”
“Not just anything. Everything.” The owl paced end to end across his desktop, hopping over the desk’s faux twigs and phony branches as he leafed though the number-filled balloons. “I haven’t seen an operation this shady since I audited the city park’s grove of chestnut trees. These ledgers prove that Prosciutto has been taking protection money from every business in town.”
Ollie thumped a wingtip one of the number-filled balloons. “Boss T and Chief Hanker are both on Prosciutto’s payroll.”
He opened another ledger, thumped another balloon. “Prosciutto controls every criminal activity in Toontown.”
Ollie opened and studied the third, fourth and fifth ledgers.
When he finished, he shook his head. “This is bad stuff. Really bad. Prosciutto’s made a deal with Dowdy Chemical to dump toxic waste on the Toontown shoreline. That deal will come to fruition as soon as Willy P owns one final piece of property. Toonie Island.”
Honey Graham had really delivered the goods.
I had Willy P cold.
Ollie flipped back and forth, from balloon to balloon to balloon and back again. “There’s a money trail in here linking Willy P to you,”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “I’ve never taken a nickel from him.”
“Not directly, no. Your money came through a fellow named Barney Sands.”
Sands was on Willy P’s payroll. That explained why Sands stopped shooting his movie whenever we encountered anything that might make Willy look bad.
