Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  “When I told the rabbit I wouldn’t play ball,” Gable said to me through six inches of polished Philippine mahogany, “he let fly with a word balloon so profane it blistered the paint.” Gable wasn’t exaggerating. I noticed a bare spot three by three on the ceiling slightly right of the porcelain chandelier.

  Gable came out. When I suit up every morning, I pick my apparel by pulling stuff out of my closet and drawers until I’ve got the proper number of items—which, by trial and error, I learned to be eleven. If I don’t have on eleven items, I’ve left something out. Which explains why I’ve gone to work wearing no belt and two pairs of shorts. Color? Who cares. It all goes pink in the wash. Style? I wear my undershirts inside out to give my Fruit of the Loom label equal time in a world of alligators and polo ponies.

  Gable, on the other hand, with his monogrammed gold buttons, double-breasted blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt, and V-necked white sweater, stepped right off the cover of Esquire. A straw boater added just the right touch of savoir faire, which, for you who don’t speak the sartorial, means proper breeding. “What happened after you booted the rabbit?”

  “He threatened me. Said he had contacts in high places. He promised me I’d never work in this town again. He took a poke at me. He missed. I didn’t.”

  “Leave any marks?”

  “I blacked his eye.”

  The butler had left Roger rolled up by the front door. I hoisted him up by his ear knot and checked his face. His nose was pushed clear to his tonsils, but there wasn’t any sucker’s halo around his lamps. “I think you got your rabbits confused.”

  Gable checked for himself. “If it wasn’t him, it was his identical twin bunny, right down to the stutter. ‘D-d-d-do what I tell you or you’re d-d-d-dog d-d-d-donuts.’ That’s what he said. Wish he’d been there to spray me with saliva when I was in the Mojave shooting Red Dust.”

  Together, we carried Roger out to my car. We walked side by side, the prince and the pauper. No question which part I played.

  Gable opened the door and we threw the comatose rabbit into the backseat. “Tell the little imp I’m sorry if I made a mistake. I’m normally better at keeping my temper under control. I’ve been under a great deal of stress lately.”

  “The rumors, the career.”

  “That I can handle. I’m being bothered by the age-old story.”

  Gable’s butler pulled around to the front of the house. His chauffeur’s cap was way too small for him. The Duesenberg he drove wasn’t. “I read the same book,” I said. “Cherchez the dame.”

  “I’ll give you this much, buster. You know the ropes. Seems the love of my life’s been cheating on me with another man. I’d kill the guy if I knew his name.”

  If Roger wasn’t already out cold, the shock of hearing this would put him there. “Jessica’s trysting with somebody else?”

  Gable’s laugh rattled out of him like an empty corn husk, brittle and dry. “Probably, but it’s not her who’s slicing my heartstring.”

  “Care to share a name?”

  He shrugged. “Why not. You’ll read about it in the Telltale sooner or later anyway. It’s Carole Lombard.”

  I recollected the photo I saw hanging on Roger’s wall, a lovey-dovey glossy of Lombard and that diminutive rake around town, Gable’s cycling buddy, Baby Herman. Imagine that. I had to hand it to the Baby. Stealing his best friend’s girl. The little man had a big, big cheek.

  12

  I tailgated a Gray Line Tour Bus along the twisting Malibu beach road. The double-decker slowing my parade had a PA system so loud hoe-downers could use it to call square dances during an air raid. Even with my windows up, I got a blaring earful of the guide welcoming his Als and Allisons to Wonderland.

  The bus slowed as it went past an isolated beach house. A red-tiled roof and smooth, buff-colored walls tossed the place into the Spanish stucco bin, though in size it came closer to King Ferdinand’s villa than to Father Sierra’s mission. The loudspeaker ahead of me identified the place as the getaway of that terrific twosome Jessica Rabbit. Remind me to laugh.

  I turned into the pea-graveled driveway.

  Roger was still dead to the world. Mute testimony to the force of Gable’s wallop. Or maybe my luck was turning.

  I stretched him out in the trunk. His head rested on my spare tire, his legs straddled my jack handle. He blipped out a stream of hazy, black-and-white balloons, visions of him wailing the tar out of Gable. Only in his dreams. I took off my belt and tied the trunk shut, leaving it open a smidgen so his apparitions wouldn’t fill the space to overflowing and suffocate him.

  Jessica opened the door in person, and that’s quite a person, indeed. “Why, Mr. Valiant. How nice to see you again.” Her delicately petaled balloons could easily pass for a bouquet of gardenias, especially since they exuded the same hint of secret passions and gave off a similar aroma of forbidden delight.

  Too bad I only knew two words that rhymed, “moon” and “June,” because this was the woman wordsmiths invented poetry for. “Always a pleasure being in your neighborhood.”

  Young girls across the country faddishly aped Jessica’s arched eyebrows, butterfly lashes, virgin-blush cheeks, passion-purple eye shadow, rosy-red smackers, and peek-a-boo hair. The girls of my youth leaned toward Tugboat Annie. How times change.

  In the flesh, no pun intended, Jessica wore a bright blue swimming suit that left little to my scanty imagination. I needed a window-shade roller to stuff my tongue back into my mouth. I shouldn’t have left my gat in the car. I could have gotten a free reload from the way she made me sweat bullets. Except for my one and only scruple, never mess with married women, I’d camp outside her window every night strumming romantic ditties on my lute.

  “Won’t you come in,” she said warmly enough to melt butterscotch.

  She held a brace of wooden dumbbells. Working on her pecs, she said. I volunteered to lend a hand. She winked, exhaled a pair of appropriately sized balloons, and blew them in my direction. I reached out with the sure-fingered poise of a Harlem Globetrotter demonstrating how to palm basketballs. The instant I touched them, they turned to jaggedy-jawed mousetraps and sprang shut with the vicious snap of an over-wound set of chattering teeth. Lucky I got quick reflexes. I barely escaped having no further use for gloves with fingers. I love a woman with a sense of humor.

  “I’m going to finish off my workout with a swim,” she said. “Perhaps you’d care to join me.”

  “I didn’t bring my suit.”

  “That’s not a problem.” She chucked me under the chin with a red fingernail the shape of an ironing board. “It’s a very private beach.”

  She took my hand and led me down a long wooden staircase to the water. She plunged into the surf and motioned for me to join her.

  I stripped to my unmentionables and followed her into the drink. Our idyllic cavort lasted only until I watched her do the breaststroke. My jaw hung so far open I swallowed a gallon of salt water. She dragged me out, laid me facedown on the sand, straddled my back, and pumped me dry.

  “I had a dream last night, Mr. Valiant.” She switched from artificial respiration to back massage. “Do you ever have dreams?”

  “I’m having one right now.”

  “You were in my dream.”

  “Makes us even. You’re in all of mine.”

  My explosive starts as a human cannonball had left me with a perpetual kink in my shoulders. She found it and rubbed it with her palm until it heated to near boiling. She had strong hands for a woman. “I dreamt Roger killed a man. Then somebody killed Roger.”

  I tried to roll over and face her, but she knew how to keep a man pinned to the ground. “If this story goes on much longer, I’ll need a week to come back to Earth.”

  “Stay put, it’s almost over. You straightened everything out. You discovered who censored Roger Rabbit, you even cleared him of
a murder you knew he committed. Because you’d grown fond of my little honey bunny.”

  “My soul drips with compassion.”

  “It was so real, Mr. Valiant.” She jammed her fist into my deltoid and twisted. My knot dissolved. “I awoke in a cold shiver, convinced my beloved was gone forever. Imagine my surprise when I went into the bathroom, opened the shower door, and there he was, cute as ever, lathered tip to toe.” She rolled off me, stretched out, leaned on one elbow and stared me in the eye. Drops of seawater, or maybe perspiration, trickled off the end of her dainty, upturned nose. “What do you make of my dream?”

  “About a quarter of a million dollars from any movie studio in town. Call it the story of a man, a woman, and a rabbit in a triangle of trouble. Ending needs work. Only a nincompoop would believe that shower scene.”

  We air-dried lying side by side on the sand, me on my stomach, her on her back. Her silhouette reminded me of a picture postcard I once got from a friend in the Alps. “Is this social, Mr. Valiant?” Her thick red hair pillowed her head. “Or business?”

  “I guess you’d say a bit of both. You been too social. That makes it my business.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t follow.”

  “Let me spell it out for you as genteel as I can. I’m looking to find out what’s going on between you and Clark Gable.”

  She gripped a handful of sand and squeezed it tightly enough to fuse it into glass. “By whom? Who hired you? Roger?”

  “That’s confidential info. I can’t divulge the name of my client.”

  She moistened a fingertip with her tongue and ran it into my hair, at the sensitive spot where temple meets ear. “Not even to Jessie Wessie?”

  It would take stronger than me, Sampson or Goliath maybe, to resist. “Davey Selznick. He’s checking up on the stars for his Southern extravaganza. He doesn’t want any scandal blotting his bottom line.”

  She rolled over, front down. I never thought I would envy sand. “You can tell Mr. Selznick I resent his intrusion into my personal life.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Then how about this. Clark and I are good friends. Period. You know Hollywood. You keep bumping into the same people.”

  “The way I hear it, you’ve been bumping into Gable in some of our better hotels.”

  If looks could kill, I’d have spent the rest of eternity six feet under that patch of beach. “We have fun together, Clark and I. Gay parties, wading in fountains, racing the streets of Hollywood in his Stutz, mountains of caviar, oceans of imported champagne. You know the feeling.”

  “Sorry, sweetheart. In my version, folks sit around coldwater flats with a bucket of beer. Where’s your hubby while you’re out hobnobbing with the fast life?”

  She opened her fist. Sand ran out in a fast stream, like the last residue of time tumbling from an hourglass. “Roger is a stay-at-home rabbit. I’m not. I enjoy a good frolic out on the town. And so does Clark. But that’s as far as it goes.”

  A car door slammed on the road above, a Packard or Cadillac from the solid clunk. “I invited a few girl friends over for a swim,” Jessica said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Mind? Her three friends came laughing and sashaying down the wooden stairs. A voice from out of my wildest fantasy said, “Eddie Valiant, meet Rita Hayworth, Betty Gable, and Mae West.” The three women who kept my heart throbbing while I slogged through Europe making the world safe and free for democracy. In swimming suits that didn’t contain enough material among them to upholster a footstool.

  Betty requested that I lather her with suntan oil. Rita told me I reminded her of a bullfighter she’d once seduced. Mae asked me to hold her beach balls while she slipped out of her sandals. Purely my pleasure, believe me.

  The trio of lovelies invited me to join them for a splash. Jessica held me back. They went without me. Paradise lost. The sacrifices I make to earn a buck.

  “Don’t be fooled by appearances, Mr. Valiant.” Jessica pulled her knees to her chin and wrapped her arms around her stems. “I love my husband very much.” Her sentiment came forth in the puppy-love lettering a high-school girl uses to see how her name looks sandwiched between “Mrs.” and her biology teacher.

  “Is that what you tell the desk clerk at the Beverly Hills Hotel when you and Gable register as Mr. and Mrs. Jones?”

  “I’ve said everything I’m going to say concerning my relationship with Clark.”

  “Maybe I’ll have to browbeat the juicies out of your friends.” I indicated the three lovelies frolicking in the foam.

  “Save your breath. Even if they knew, which they don’t, they wouldn’t tattle. It’s the age-old law of womanhood. Girls stick together.”

  I pitched her the changeup. “I know why you went to see Dr. Wallace Ford.”

  What a great actress! When she told me, “I never heard of the man,” and stuck to the story, I almost believed her.

  It was an hour later when I pulled into Ferd’s slot in the Police Department parking lot.

  Roger, sprawled on the seat behind me, woke up swinging. He kayoed a cubic yard of air. “He sucker p-p-p-punched me. The big p-p-p-palooka hit me when I wasn’t looking.”

  “You always stutter when you talk?”

  Roger crawled into the front seat. “P-p-p-practically never. Only when I’m nervous or excited or especially adorable, and then just on words beginning with p-p-p-p-p-p-p…”

  “Never stutter on words starting with D?”

  He struck an oratorical pose, one hand gripping the front of his overalls, the other with index finger extended pointed into the air. “Dorothy dug doohickeys down by the dump.”

  “Wait here.” I got out. “While I see a man about a dog.” I walked into the station. The rabbit’s balloon caught me as I opened the door.

  “My no-good. half cousin Dodger. He stutters on D’s.”

  “Where is he now?” I yelled back.

  “Last I heard, he was in p-p-p-p-p-p-p…jail!”

  So much grousing overhung Ferd’s desk it resembled a balloon concession at the park. Seems the powers that be had yanked him off the Enigman case and put him back chasing the Toontown hooch haulers. What’s one dead actor, more or less? Rumrunners, on the other hand, cheat the state out of tax revenue. Besides, word had it that Bulldog Bascomb had the Enigman case one nail away from shut. I had a good hunch who was about to get hammered.

  I asked Ferd what he’d dug up on Tom Tom LeTuit.

  “Swell company you’re keeping, shoo fly,” he said. He slipped an official file folder out of his desk. “Guy’s a famuzzing scuzz ball. As soon kill you as call you a cab.” He opened the folder and went for a cup of coffee.

  He didn’t make it totally easy for me. I did have to lean over to read it. I learned LeTuit was suspected of being drug smuggling’s Kingpin of the Caribbean. He was living high on the hog at the penthouse suite of the Toontown Ritzy. Carbuncle Chameleon, undercover cop extraordinaire, had him under twenty-four-hour surveillance. No word on the whereabouts of Lupe Chihuahua.

  When Ferd returned, I asked him to run a check on Dodger Rabbit. Find out if he was still vacationing at a government resort.

  I used Ferd’s city line to call my answering service. Skipper told me I had a number of messages from Louise Wrightliter. Charley Ferris commandeered the horn and asked if I’d gotten his niece a starring role. I told him it was only a matter of time. So was the end of the world.

  We drove past Grauman’s Chinese. The marquee announced a special memorial tribute to the late, great Kirk Enigman. A round-the-clock nonstop showing of all his movies. Ain’t Hollywood grand? Your wake consists of insomniacs sitting in the dark eating popcorn.

  A poster for Shadow of Evil caught my eye. I braked to a halt.

  Could it be…?

  I headed for the curb. “Let’s take in a movie,” I told Rog
er.

  “Right now?” said Roger. “In the middle of our case? I strongly protest. We should be hopping and bopping, shaking and quaking, moving and grooving.”

  I handed him his ticket.

  We sat in the balcony. The lights went down. Shadow of Evil came on the screen. The opening credits rolled.

  I got up and left.

  “Eddie,” said Roger, hopping after me. “Where you going? You haven’t seen anything yet. The movie’s just starting.”

  The rabbit had it dead wrong. I’d seen plenty.

  13

  Baby Herman shot his daily newspaper strip in a swanky photography studio in Pasadena.

  We found him sitting in his personalized canvas director’s chair surrounded by the dialogue he’d been rehearsing, a milky, slightly rancid heap of gee-gee and ga-ga balloons.

  He was taking a break while his prop man restocked the day’s supply of seltzer bottles.

  A line of tourists snaked through the studio. One at a time they stepped up and stood next to the Baby. In return for five bucks, a photographer snapped a quickie of them with the star. For an extra fin, the Baby tweaked their noses. For a double saw, he goosed them in the knickers. Plush-bottomed women got the ten-dollar extra free.

  A makeup lady powdered Herman’s face and realigned the red ribbon tying his spit curl. As she worked over him, his head lolled sideways. An infantile inability to hold it upright? Nope. A better angle for peeking down the front of her dress.

  “Valiant,” bellowed Herman when he saw me, “you old sack of shingles. How they hugging?”

  The photographer asked Herman to open his mouth into a wide circle. He took a light level on Herman’s tonsil for the Baby’s big bawling scene. Herman obliged, producing a cavern to rival Carlsbad.

  “And Roger,” said Herman. “Still got the rabbit habit?” Roger and Baby Herman exchanged the elbow-slapping, nose-tweaking, eyeball-gouging foolishness that constitutes a handshake in Toon circles.