by Gary K. Wolf
“Let me guess. Clark Gable.”
Large stooped over and let Herman use his spine as a stair step onto the sofa. “You heard it?” Herman waddled to the sofa’s apex.
“Of course he heard it,” stated Large Mouth. He brushed the sandy outlines of baby feet off his sofa’s buttery leather. “The entire Hollywood community heard it. That rumor couldn’t have spread faster if I’d planted it myself.”
“Why’d you slice that particular hunk of phony baloney?” I asked.
“My way of discrediting the competition.” Herman spit on his balloon, slipped it under his bumpus, and rode it down the sofa’s spiral curved spine. “Wheeeeeeeee.” He hit the floor and skidded on his ample rump, cutting parallel ruts in the sand. He stood and pulled his chappie away from his legs to drain out the grit. “Five foot two, eyes of blue, anything I want she’ll do.”
“Carole Lombard.”
“The man wins twenty-four silver dollars.” Herman opened a pirate’s treasure chest containing a fully stocked bar. “I don’t know where you got your scoop about me and Carole, but every word was true. I went for Carole”—Herman ground his pudgy pelvis—“as bad as she went for me.”
“You’re a lucky stiff.”
“You got that right.” He flicked his solid-gold diaper pin. “Women go ga ga over my goo goo.” Herman poured two fingers of rye into a baby bottle.
“I’ll issue a press release at once,” Large Mouth enthused. “Herman and Lombard hear wedding bells.”
“Save your balloons,” said Herman. “I dumped her. Love ‘em and leave ‘em, that’s my motto. I sent her packing back to Gable.”
I saw his problem. “Now you’re afraid of what Gable will do when he finds out his best so-called buddy vamped his best so-called girl.”
“He’ll turn me over his knee and spank me black and blue. Or worse.” Difficult to tell which Herman enjoyed more, the taste of the liquor or the act of sucking it through the nipple. “Unless I find a bigger bullyboy willing and able to paddle him first. How’s about it, Valiant? Are you my man?”
“Probably. First, answer me a question. Where you been the last few days?”
He cocked his head. His blue-ribboned topknot flopped sideways like a reaped shock of wheat. “What’s that got to do with me and Gable?”
“Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Give me the gories, and let me decide.”
He hauled himself onto a knotty-pine chair carved in the shape of a mermaid. “I was crawling saloons night before last, hunting for company of the female persuasion.” He stowed his bottle in the cleft formed by the mermaid’s wooden brassiere. “This Toon doxie ambled up and gave me a how-do-you-do. I asked her the sixty-four-dollar question, and she won my jackpot. We were no sooner out the swinging door than she bopped me with her purse. Knocked me silly. Next thing I know, I’m tied up and blindfolded. Which I normally enjoy, except here the only action I got was this bimbo grilling me as to the whereabouts of Dave Selznick’s box.”
“You knew the box she was talking about?”
“Sure.” His wiggly pink fingers explored one of the mermaid’s knotholes. “I dropped it into Roger Rabbit’s pants cuff the day me and him and Kirk Enigman met in Selznick’s office.”
“Why’d you do that?”
He chinned himself on the mermaid’s bosom. “The three of us were up for the same role. I figured if Selznick thought Roger was light-fingered, it would cut the competition.”
Large Mouth’s secretary fishtailed into the office bearing a stack of unsigned balloons.
Herman winked at her lewdly. “I could get hooked on you in a big way, butterfish.” He jostled his diaper. “Want to feel my eel?” Sparks came out.
“I’d swim up her stream,” he said to me after she’d gone.
“Did you tell your kidnapper that Roger Rabbit had Selznick’s box?”
“You kidding? I’ll give a dame half the night but never the time of day.” His diaper ballooned out, lifting his rear end with it. “I told her to soak her head in a bucket of Dip.”
“How did you escape?”
“I didn’t. That’s L.M.’s concoction.” He tugged out his waistband, releasing a string of bright green bubbles. His posterior sunk to its normal level. “The ditz let me go. Dumped me in a ravine across town. I figured I’d better check with L.M. before I squealed to the cops. See how to get maximum mileage out of my plight.” He touched the glowing tip of his cigar to one of the floating bubbles. It burst into flames, leaving behind an airborne smudge of green soot and the smell of Limburger cheese. “Maybe parlay it into a sympathy bump or two.”
“Describe your kidnapper.”
Herman rolled his baby-browns. “Supremely ugly sucker. The kind I’d la-de-la only if she wore a bag over her head, and another over that in case the first one broke.” He tilted his head and gave me a onceover lightly. “She kind of resembled you. Oh, yeah. One other thing. Every third sentence she repeated the same stupid phrase. Over, and over, and over. Hi-de-ho-ho-ho. If she said it once, she said it a jillion times.”
Herman motioned to Large Mouth. The fish obligingly lifted the Baby so he could throw a fat, dimpled arm around my shoulder. “How’s about it, Valiant? You want to guard the body that’s going to win the Academy Award playing Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind?”
“I’d be foolish to refuse.”
On my way out, I handed Large Mouth the photo and bio of Charlie’s niece. “L.M., do an old, dear, sweet, longtime friend a favor. See what you can arrange for this young lovely.”
Large Mouth took a gander. His jaw dropped open. “What a face! I can make this woman a star! She has that…that…raw animal quality.”
To put it mildly.
29
The story, under Louise Wrightliter’s byline, made page-one headlines in the Toontown Telltale.
BABY HERMAN ALIVE AND WELL.
Herman had been kidnapped, so the story went, by a stunningly beautiful and exceedingly amorous female fan. “She forced me to perform unspeakable acts,” said Herman, who went on to speak about them in graphic detail. A satyr in season would have been hard-pressed to match his alleged performance level. Wishful thinking? Or good advertising? The police department’s composite sketch of his kidnapper bore a distinct resemblance to Marlene Dietrich.
A paragraph on an inner page caught my eye. Seems a redheaded, stuttering albino in a trench coat pasted acerbic film critic Nono Nuttingood in the kisser with a custard cream pie.
“I realized I’d never again have such a splendid opportunity. So I took it,” said Roger. “Nuttingood never utters a kind word about anything or anybody. I detest the man. He’s ruined countless careers. It gave me immense satisfaction to strike a blow on behalf of the entire acting fraternity. Best of all, there’s no way for him to retaliate. I invented the perfect crime. I’m no longer who I was when I did it.”
His balloon extended the full width of my office like a banner welcoming a traveler home. “Thank goodness Toon Tonic works both ways. Being a human was the worst experience of my life. I don’t know how you tolerate an existence so mundane and boring.”
“I take it one day at a time and manage to struggle through.”
“The world isn’t ready for Toon Tonic, Eddie.” Roger handed me the small flask containing the remnants of the batch he’d mixed up. “If I were you, I’d destroy this immediately, or at least squirrel it away until humans and Toons can accept its consequences.”
“You realize Toon Tonic could make us both rich beyond our wildest dreams.”
“What dreams? I wouldn’t be able to sleep nights knowing the horror I’d inflicted on civilization. Smash, bash, trash, mash, lash, hash, gash, and dash Toon Tonic, Eddie, and then do it again for good measure.”
“I’ve got one final use for it, then it’s gone.” I shoved the flask into my top desk drawer, rem
oving my office bottle to make room.
I poured myself a nip. “Here’s to another case wrapped up in ribbons.”
“Not quite.” Roger plopped his head on my desk top. His features flattened out and lost their definition, like a wax doll face gone spongy in the sun. “I still have to confront Jessica.”
“Yeah.” I cleared everything breakable off the walls and poured him a nip, too. “I suppose you do.”
“I want you there with me.” He spun his glass between his paws, creating a whirlpool that sucked in his words and swallowed them whole. “To keep me from falling apart at the seams.”
“If you want to be propped up, buy a two-by-four and hire a carpenter.”
“Eddie, I saved your life!”
“That was your choice, not mine.”
“P-p-p-please, Eddie. Do this for me, and I’ll never, ever, in my whole life ask you for anything again. I p-p-p-promise. Scout’s honor, cross my heart, and hope to die.”
“Put it in writing, and we’ve got a deal.”
I hit Gable hard—with a handful of rice.
Lombard giggled. Then she excused herself and went to powder her nose. She was a vision in white, from her platinum hair to her low-cut ivory dress, to the bouquet of colorless roses she clutched to her milky chest.
“Thanks, old sport, for coming down on such short notice,” said Gable. He brushed my rice off the shoulders of his simple, expensive, double-breasted, dark blue suit. He lit a smoke. The flame sparkled off the plain gold band he wore on his third finger, left hand. “You made a superlative best man.” He slipped me a century note. I swapped it to the Justice of the Peace for Gable and Lombard’s marriage license, signed, sealed, and delivered. The JP threw in free a souvenir copy of their marriage vows printed on imitation parchment.
I gave the two pieces of paper to Gable along with my best wishes. “Since I won’t be seeing you for a while, I’ll use this auspicious occasion to deliver my final report.”
He folded the license and the vows lengthwise, being careful not to crease any of the important words, like “love,” “honor,” and “obey.” He tucked both into his jacket pocket, where nothing in the world could touch them. “Save your breath. I got what I wanted. I married the woman I love. What she did prior to today, before she said the words ‘I do,’ well, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I suspect it will.”
A thumbnail of ash fell off his ciggie and hit his shoe, marring a perfect shine. “You’re going to tell me even though I don’t want to hear it.”
I nodded.
He bopped one of the chapel’s large, silver, cardboard bells. Instead of pealing, it split up the middle. “Speak your piece and be done with it.”
I borrowed his smoke and lit one of my own off the end. “There was nothing going on between your new missus and Baby Herman. She only pretended to be cuckoo about him to get you to pop the question. I think you ought to know that, because it’s not often a guy finds a woman who adores him that much.”
Gable stared at me a minute, then grabbed me by the ears and kissed me flush on the forehead. “Thanks Eddie.” He stuffed my breast pocket with a fistful of crisp, new one-hundred-dollar bills. “For a job well done.”
“All in a day’s work.” The first lesson you learn when driving in my neighborhood is how to toot your own horn.
Lombard came back from the hooter. The three of us walked out onto the JP’s front porch.
A hundred reporters milled around on the front lawn.
Large Mouth Bassinger stepped forward and inserted himself between Gable and Lombard, two of his most prominent clients. He hooked his fins through their elbows.
“You promised. No press,” carped Gable to the fish.
“I did, I know, and I kept that promise. I have no idea how word of your nuptials leaked out.” The glare of flashbulbs gave a preview of what it would be like to stand on this porch a billion years from now on the day the sun exploded. “As long as they’re here,” said Large Mouth, “you might as well give them an interview.”
The reporters formed a tight circle around the newlyweds. Gable mouthed the words “Eddie, the car.”
I headed toward it, shouldering a path through the minions of the fifth estate. Gable and Lombard followed me.
Large Mouth, abandoned to his own devices, composed a half page of razzmatazz set in newsprint, justified on either end, ready to be pasted into the afternoon edition. The news hawks pushed forward the long-handled butterfly nets they use to scoop quotes. The few extraneous comments they left behind wouldn’t make up a three-line filler.
I shoved Gable and Lombard into their car. “Happy honeymoon.”
I leaned inside and whispered to Gable. “A word of advice. Man to man. Shave the caterpillar. Women hate smooching a gent with a furry lip.” He promised to think it over.
Her eyes glued to mine, Lombard extended her slim, shapely, nyloned leg and propped it on the dashboard. She reached beneath her skintight, calf-length white skirt.
As their car pulled away, Lombard leaned out the window, winked, and threw me her black-lace garter.
It was my day for glamour girls.
Jessica Rabbit opened her front door wearing a glimmer of perspiration and a thin cotton red-and-white-checked sundress. She carried a tall, chilly glass of iced tea to ward off the oppressive midday heat. “Hunny bunny,” she sighed when she spied Roger on her threshold, “you’re back!” She picked up her spouse and hugged him to her chest.
I took her tea. The outline of her hand remained on the glass. The frost had turned to steam beneath her fingers. I helped myself to a swig. She drank a gunpowder blend but it was the peppermint taste of her lipstick on the straw that fired my cannon.
She let her husband go. She had clung to him so tightly his head displayed her bosom in full relief, hatcheted outward from forehead to chin, dished on either cheek.
She planted me with a smacker so scorchy it singed my socks. One more, and my shorts would come crashing down in flames. “Thank you, Mr. Valiant, for bringing my punkin puss home to me safe and sound.” She indicated the open door. “I hate to appear rude, but I would like to be alone with my sweetums. We have a bit of catching up to do.”
I gave her gunpowder brew a touch more bang by adding half an ounce of the liquid explosive I tote in my arsenal. “Roger needs to ask you a few questions. He wants me to stick around awhile to check his punctuation, grammar, and spelling.”
“Of course,” said Jessica. “Whatever my lord and rabbit desires.” She lead us onto the veranda. We took seats around a glass table containing an ice bucket, a large pitcher of her tea, a stack of fashion magazines, and the screenplay for Gone With the Wind. “Ask away, darling. As you are wont to say, I’m all ears.”
Roger moved his mouth silently, like a ventriloquist’s dummy trying out a solo act.
His better half glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged. “Go ahead, Roger.” I gaffed him in the side. “Shoot.”
The rabbit shut his eyes and scrunched his face. His head swelled to the size of a watermelon, but not a word came out.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked him.
He opened his mouth and showed me his tongue tied into knots.
His wife leaned in close to me so the fall of her flaming red hair blocked her words from her husband’s sight. “What’s causing my snookie ookums such grave consternation?”
I boiled it to the essence. “You and Clark Gable.”
She straightened her head and aimed her word-filled bubbles directly at her husband. “Clark Gable and I are extremely good friends. We’ve known each other for years, ever since we were both struggling to break into the movies, long before you and I ever met. Ours is a strictly platonic relationship. We have never had the slightest romantic involvement.” She pointed her left index finger at Roger and rubbed it
with her right. “Shame, shame, silly, silly rabbit, if you suspect otherwise.”
Roger pantomimed his response. I quit playing after guessing that the correct answer contained thirty-seven words, first word sounds like “herbaceous.” “You can’t blame Roger for jumping to the obvious conclusion. You and Gable have been spotted together a lot lately, in most of the wrong places.”
“Of course we have. It’s the essence of our plan.” She fished an ice cube out of the pitcher and rubbed it across her breastbone. The melting water soaked through the front of her dress and plastered it to her skin, revealing plenty of hidden assets, but you had to look quick. Her body heat dried the fabric almost instantly. “When Carole Lombard, the love of Clark’s life, left him for another man, Clark and I concocted a phony romance to make Carole jealous.”
Do tell. The flip side of the fib I gave Gable.
Jessica drummed her fingertips on the arm of her chair, daring one or the other of us to contradict her.
Roger stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled to signal another session of Pantomime Party. I declined to play, choosing to press ahead on my own. “You personally leaked the story of your big romance to the Toontown Telltale.”
“Naturally.” A fly landed on her bare ankle. She ended his brief moment of bliss with a quick swat of the latest Harper’s Bazaar. Noisier than a spider’s web, but every bit as deadly. “For our charade to succeed, Carole had to hear about it.”
“Why not let your husband in on the gag?”
She stroked Roger’s knee. His whistling sunk lower and fizzled out. “I didn’t tell you, sweetie pie, because you know you can’t keep a secret. You would have blabbed every detail of our ploy to the first ten people you met.”
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, exposing a generous expanse of thigh. Roger gave one last whistle, of the wolf variety. Jessica rewarded him with a wink and a purse of her lips. “I never imagined you would suspect there was anything actually going on between Clark and me. Not the Roger I married. He doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body. Our relationship has always been built on mutual trust.”
