Who Censored Roger Rabbit?
by
Gary K. Wolf
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 1981 by Gary K. Wolf
To Bugs, Donald, Minnie, and the rest of the gang at the B Street Smoke Shop.
1
I found the bungalow and rang the bell.
My client answered the door.
He was almost my height, close to six feet, but only if you counted his eighteen-inch ears. He wore only a baggy pair of shorts, held up by brightly colored suspenders. His shoulders stooped so badly, he had to secure his suspender tops in place with crossed pieces of cellophane tape. For eyes, he had twin black dots, floating in the center of two oblong white saucers. His white stomach, nose, toes, and palms on a light brown body made him resemble someone who had just walked face first into a freshly painted wall.
"I'm Eddie Valiant, private eye. You the one who called?"
"Yes, I am," he said, extending a fuzzy white paw. "I'm Roger Rabbit." His words came out encased in a balloon that floated over his head.
The rabbit ushered me into his living room. The angular furniture reminded me of the upward-reaching spires in caves. That, combined with an extremely low ceiling and stale air, gave the room the closed-in nature of an underground burrow. Perfect interior design for a rabbit.
The bunny opened a. liquor cabinet and brought out an earthenware jug emblazoned with three X's. "Drink?" he asked.
Since Toons could not legally buy human-manufactured liquor, most drank the moonshine produced by their country cousins in Dogpatch and Hootin' Holler. Potent stuff. Few humans could handle it.
Although no stranger to strong drink, I knew my limitations well enough to pass.
"Mind if I do?" the rabbit asked. "Fine with me," I said.
The rabbit cradled the jug in his elbow and guzzled down a healthy swig. Almost instantly, twin puffs of smoke shot out of his ears, drifted lazily upward, and bounced gently against the ceiling.
Quite nonchalantly, the rabbit pulled a large butterfly net out from behind the sofa, snared the bobbling whiffets, and shook them free through an open window. They joined forces, floated merrily skyward, and expanded into a soft, billowy cloud.
"Cumulonimbus," the rabbit remarked, as he watched the evidence of his indulgence drift away.
The rabbit closed the window and drew the drapes to protect his frail parchment skin from the drying effects of the early morning sun. He hippity-hopped across the room to his desk, returned, and handed me a check. "A retainer. I hope it's large enough."
It certainly was! At my regular rates, the check would buy my services for nearly a week.
"Maybe I'd better outline my problem," said the rabbit. "I know all the cash in the world wouldn't persuade a private eye to take on an unjust cause."
I nodded. If the rabbit only knew. I had undertaken numerous unjust causes in the course of my career, and for a lot less than all the cash in the world. A lot less.
The rabbit picked a walnut-inlaid cigar box off a mushroom-shaped coffee table. "Carrot?" he asked.
I looked inside. Sure enough, carrots, carefully selected for uniformity of color, size, and shape, and alternated big end to little end so that the maximum number of them could be squeezed inside. Each bore a narrow, gold and red paper band proclaiming it a product of mid-state Illinois, generally acknowledged as the world's finest source of the orange nibblers.
I declined.
The rabbit selected a chunky specimen for himself and gnawed at it noisily, freckling his chin with tiny orange chips that flaked off in the gap between his front incisors. "About a year ago, the DeGreasy brothers, the cartoon syndicate, told me that if I signed with them they would give me my own strip." He laid his half-eaten carrot on an end table beside a display of framed and autographed photos, some human, some Toon. They included Snoopy, Joe Namath, Beetle Bailey, John F. Kennedy, and, in a group shot, Dick Tracy, Secret Agent X-9, and J. Edgar Hoover. "Instead they made me a second banana to a dopey, obese, thumb sucking sniveler named Baby Herman."
"So find yourself another syndicate."
"I can't." The rabbit's face collapsed. "My contract binds me to the DeGreasys for another twenty years. When I asked them to release me so I could look for work elsewhere, they refused."
"They give you any reason?"
"None. Being somewhat an amateur private eye myself, I did some legwork." He displayed a hind limb that would have looked exceptionally good dangling from the end of a key-chain. "I nosed around the industry and uncovered a rumor that someone wants to buy out my contract and give me a starring. role, but the DeGreasys refuse to sell. I want you to find out what's going on. If the DeGreasys won't star me, why won't they deal me away?"
Sounded horribly boring, but one more look at his check convinced me to at least go through the motions. I hauled out my notebook and pen.
Normally I would have asked some questions about his background and personal life but, since I only intended to give this case a lick and a promise anyway, why bother? I asked for the DeGreasys' address, and he rattled it off.
"I'll stay in touch," I promised on my way out. "See you in the funny papers," joked the rabbit. I didn't smile.
2
I stopped off at a newsstand and bought a candy bar for lunch and a paper to read while I ate it, making sure to get a receipt for my expense report. I turned to the comic section and found the Baby Herman strip.
The rabbit appeared in one panel out of the four, barely visible behind the smoke and flame of an exploding cigar given him by Baby Herman.
I folded the paper shut. Hardly an earthshaking caper, this one. A fast buck and not much more. But what did I expect? Hobnobbing with a rabbit only gets you to Wonderland in fairy tales.
I met the DeGreasy brothers, Rocco and Dominick, in their offices high atop one of L.A.'s most prestigious skyscrapers.
The two were human, although almost comical in their marked resemblance to one another. Their ridged foreheads formed a wobble of demarcation between bowl-shaped haircuts and frizzy eyebrows. Their noses would have looked perfect behind a chrome horn bolted to the handlebars of a bicycle. Smudgy moustaches curtained their circular porthole mouths. Their biceps looked to be barely half the size of their forearms. And they had feet large enough to cut fifteen seconds off any duck's time in the hundred-meter freestyle.
Had the DeGreasy boys been discovered frozen beneath some Arctic tundra, a good case would probably have been made for their being the long-sought missing link between humans and Toons.
But, as funny as they looked, when I checked them out, they had come up professional and efficient, the most astute guys in the comic strip business. I gave my card to Rocco, the eldest, who passed it across his handsome antique desk to his brother Dominick.
Not wanting to spend a minute longer than necessary on this case, I came straight to the point. I told them Roger Rabbit had hired me to find out why they refused to honor their contractual obligation to star him in a strip of his own.
Rocco chuckled, then scowled, the way a father might when he sees his youngster do something irritating but cute. "Let me explain our position with regard to Roger Rabbit," he said, without the slightest trace of rancor. His precise manner of speech and his six-bit vocabulary gave me quite a surprise. From his looks, I expected Goofy, but got Owen Cantrell, Wall Street lawyer, instead. "My brother Dominick and I signed Roger specifically because we felt he would play well as a foil for Baby Herman. We never made any mention of a solo strip then or since."
Rocco leaned toward me, displaying in the process an impressive array of his stars' merchandising tie-ins -- a Superman tie bar, Bullwinkle Moose cufflinks, and a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. "Roger frequently concocts absurd stories such as this one. We tolerate his delusions because of his great popularity with his audience. Roger makes a perfect fall guy, and his fans love him for it. However, he does not have the charisma to carry a strip of his own. We never even considered giving him one. Right, Dominick?"
Dominick's head bounced up and down with the vigor of a spring-necked plastic dog.
Rocco got up, opened a file drawer, and pulled out a sheaf of papers, which he handed to me. "Roger's contract. Read it through. You'll find no mention of a solo strip. And it stipulates a very generous salary, I might add." He closed the drawer and returned to his chair. "We have treated Roger fairly and ethically. He has no reason whatsoever to complain."
I flipped through the contract. It seemed to be in order. "What about the rumor going around that somebody wants to buy out Roger's contract and make him a star?"
Rocco and Dominick exchanged quizzical glances and shrugged more or less in unison. "News to us," said Rocco. "If someone did approach us with an offer for Roger, if it made financial sense, and if Roger wanted to go, we would gladly sell him off. We're not ones to stand in the way of our employees' advancement, and there's certainly no shortage of rabbits to replace him."
He stood and ushered me to the door. "Mister Valiant, I suggest you consider this case closed, and next time get yourself a more mentally stable client."
Sounded reasonable to me.
3
I took a few random jogs. The trench coat, broad-brimmed hat, and large sunglasses matched me move for move. A tail.
I picked up my pace, turned a corner, and ducked into a doorway.
Seconds later my tail came around the corner after me.
I let him get three paces past, then jumped him, grabbing his arm. I twisted it behind his back and slammed him against the nearest wall.
"Who are you, and what do you want?" I hissed, applying some persuasive pressure.
"I was only curious about how a real detective operates," read my tail's balloon. "I just thought I'd tag along. Kind of observe from a distance. I'm sorry if I fouled up your modus operandi."
I released my grip, and snatched away the broad-brimmed hat, exposing a set of carefully accordioned eighteen-inch ears.
"Look," I told the rabbit, honing the hat against his concave chest, "when I have something worthwhile to report, I get in touch. Otherwise you stay away from me. Clear?"
The rabbit smoothed out his ears. However, the left one sprang back into a tight clump giving his head the lopsided appearance of a half-straightened paper clip. "Yes, I understand." He fiddled with his ear, fiddled with his sunglasses, fiddled with the buttons on his trench coat, until finally he ran out of externals and began to fiddle with his soul. "My entire life I've wanted to be a detective."
Sure. Him and ten million others. Toon mystery strips suckered them into believing that knights-errant always won. Yeah, maybe Rip Kirby bats a thousand. But I consider it great if I go one for ten. "Forget it," I said. "Besides, I'm not so sure how much longer I'm going to stay on this case." I reported my conversation with the DeGreasys, adding that they'd suggested him as poster boy for the Failing Mental Health Society.
He took it in stride. "I never said they put in writing that bit about me getting my own strip," he countered. "They made the offer verbally, and Rocco repeated it several times since."
"Anybody besides you ever hear him?"
"Sure. He said it once at a photo session in front of Baby Herman and Carol Masters, my photographer. Just ask them. They'll remember. As for my being crazy, yes, I see a psychiatrist, but so do half the Toons in the business. That hardly qualifies me as a full-blown looney."
"I don't know," I said, figuring to cut it off here. "The whole mess sounds like a job for a lawyer."
"Please," the rabbit begged. "Stick with it. I'll double your fee."
Such persuasive words. "All right. You double my fee, and I stay on your case." I turned and walked away. The rabbit plopped his hat into the chasm between his ears and bounded after me, hopping so fast that his word balloons whipped across the top of his head, snapped loose with sharp pings at the base of his neck, and bounced off across the sidewalk. "Let me help you," he said when he caught up with me. "It would mean a great deal to me. Please."
"No way," I stated flatly. "I work alone. Always have, always will." Call me rude, but I say what I mean. If people want sympathy, let them see a priest.
At least he got the message. He did an abrupt about face and shambled away.
4
Apparently the strip business paid babies a whole lot better than it paid rabbits.
Baby Herman lived in an honest-to-God, balconied, marble-pillared, stone-lions-at-the-front-gate mansion tucked neatly away in the kind of neighborhood where middle-class rubbernecks ride bicycles on Sunday afternoons.
His place covered nearly enough land to qualify it for statehood. The house proper sat far back on the property, and a jumbo herd of bib-overalled Toon goat gardeners puttered about the grounds, nibbling back the grass and shrubs.
The ultimate Toon status symbol, a human servant, in this case a butler in full regalia, opened the door. He ushered me through to a den furnished in sophisticated playpen.
A Barcelona chair rested beside a rocking horse. Abstract metal sculptures straddled wobbly towers of alphabet blocks. A fine, post-impressionistic painting hung just above a wooden peg supporting a tatty security blanket, one end well chewed.
Baby Herman, two feet high, wearing only a diaper, and bald save for one dark hair sprouting from the precise center of his crown, sat in a highchair in front of the TV. A good portion of his lunch -- strained peas, pureed beef, and applesauce -- still clung to his chin and to the tray in front of him.
He was watching his own show, giggling happily every time one of his Toon foils took a clout to the chops. The butler announced me as Eddie Valiant, private investigator representing Roger Rabbit, then left me and Baby Herman alone.
I had no idea how to proceed. I didn't have much of a way with kids. They generally react to me as they would to the man who shot Bambi's mother.
On the TV screen, a tuxedoed raccoon struggled vainly to extricate himself from the inside of a trombone. Baby Herman laughed uproariously and pounded his tray with a silver spoon, splattering the front of my coat with a fine layer of goo. I steeled myself for a long, hard afternoon.
Just then the butler returned bearing a cigar box, full of robust Havanas. I helped myself. And so, to my surprise, did Baby Herman.
"Kind of young for that stuff, aren't you?" I asked.
"Hah, hah," appeared over Baby Herman's head in the lettering style found on a preschooler's handmade valentine. He lit up and exhaled a cloud that would have done credit to a locomotive. "That's rich. Just how old do you think I am?" When he turned his head so I could examine his profile, he also twisted his word balloon around one hundred and eighty degrees, thus flopping his words into mirror images of themselves.
"I never play guessing games."
"Come on. Just this once. Try." Sorry.
"OK, then I'll tell you anyway." Baby Herman unsnapped his tray and climbed to the floor where he stood, puffing his cigar, one chubby hand on each hip. "I'm thirty-six. Don't look it, do l?"
I admitted that he didn't.
"Most people guess me between two and four. Of course, most people don't know enough about Toons to realize that some age and some don't."
"And you're one of the lucky ones?"
Baby Herman plopped down on his hind end and zigzagged his fingers across the rug. "Depends on your point of view. Eternal youth isn't everything it's cracked up to be. Imagine going through life eating mush, wearing diapers, and sucking on plastic doodads." He displayed the teething ring hung on a gold chain around his neck. "And women. Need I even mention women? Here I sit with a thirty-six-year-old lust, and a three-year-old dinky." He climbed aboard his rocking horse and began a bouncy journey to nowhere. "Why does the funny bunny need a detective? He decided to file for divorce? That what you do? Bust into motel rooms and shoot quickie photos of cheating wives?" An obscene musing encased in a fluffy, cherubic balloon floated above the kid's head. It bobbled around playfully awhile before impaling itself on his single wiry hair, and bursting in a shower of dust that layered his shoulders with the fine powder unknowledgeable humans mistook for dandruff. He immediately conjured up a second image even worse.
"Roger Rabbit has a wife?"
"He did until she left him." Baby Herman dismounted his rocking horse and waddled out from under his pornographic fantasy. "Jessica Rabbit." His second vision turned to sand and dirtied the carpet behind him. "Gorgeous creature. Does a lot of commercials. Wouldn't mind taking her for a hop myself."
"How long they been split up?"
"I guess two, maybe three, weeks."
"What caused the breakup?"
"How should I know? What do I look like, Mary Worth? I mind my business, let other people mind theirs." He crawled to the wall and pulled his blanket off its peg. He bundled it around his legs, torso, and head, enveloping himself so completely that only the end of his cigar remained uncovered.
"Confidentially," he whispered from out of the snuggly depths of his blanket, "I hear she left Roger for Rocco DeGreasy."
Rocco DeGreasy and a female Toon rabbit? Sounded ridiculous, but I'd heard of guys with stranger tastes in women. "Actually, I'm not really interested in Roger's wife. I'm investigating Roger's treatment by the DeGreasy syndicate. I understand you heard Rocco promise Roger his own strip."
The blanket bobbed up and down. "Sure. Day before yesterday at a photo session, but only because the bunny was threatening to hit him over the head with his lunch box. It was the first time they'd met since Roger's marital breakup. Roger accused Rocco of putting pressure on Jessica to leave him. Rocco denied it, and Roger went for him. Carol Masters, our photographer, jumped in between them and kept them apart. Rocco came up with that bit about giving Roger his own strip mainly to cool him off, but it didn't work. I never saw Roger so riled. He kept threatening to kill Rocco. Can you imagine that coining from a pussycat like Roger Rabbit? After Carol finally got Roger calmed down, Rocco offered to drive him home. He suggested they could sit down there and discuss their differences rationally until they had them all worked out. A fair and classy guy, that Rocco. Anybody else would have canned Roger on the spot."
"Did Roger and Rocco leave together?"
"No, Roger stormed out of the studio in a huff. Darned inconsiderate of him. We still had half a day's shooting left that we had to cancel. Threw my feeding and naptime schedule into a complete tizzy."
"So Rocco wasn't serious when he offered Roger his own strip."
"Nope. Rocco was scared, plain and simple. When Roger threatened to kill him, I believe he meant it, and Rocco believed it, too."
The butler entered and gave the lumpy blanket a' courtly bow. "Don't forget your two-o'clock photo session, sir.”
”Right." Baby Herman unwrapped himself and stood. "I'm doing some baby food spots." He ground his cigar out on the rug. "I sold eight million jars of that junk last year. My wholesome image." He extended his pudgy arms to Eddie. "Carry me to my limousine?"
Outside, I set him into an infant seat strapped in the right front bucket of a white Mercedes. "Hey, detective," said Baby Herman as I shut the door. "I like you. You come back sometime, and we'll have us a party. I'll supply the funny hats, the cake, and the noisemakers. You supply the broads. Just make sure they go for younger men."
Baby Herman waved bye-bye, and his Mercedes pulled away.
5
I'll say one thing for the rabbit, he certainly was a persistent little bugger. As soon as I got back to the city, I spotted him again, hanging maybe half a block back, matching me move for move. He wore a trench coat slightly open, exposing purple lederhosen and an orange shirt. His hat brim scaled up on both sides against fully unfurled ears. Inconspicuous? Maybe at a clown convention. Certainly not on Sunset Boulevard at two in the afternoon.
I debated whether or not to brace him again and give him another ultimatum. He'd probably just ignore it the same way he had the last. Obviously not one to give up easily, that Roger, a trait I admired in anybody, Toon rabbits included. What the heck, if he insisted on wasting his time hopping along in my footsteps, let him. So long as he kept his distance and didn't interfere.
I entered a big downtown office building. The rabbit ducked behind a lamp post across the street, doing his best to appear unconcerned in the presence of a small poodle sniffing at his hydrant-red sneakers. On the building's directory, I found the listing for Carol Masters, photographer.
I boarded a humans-only elevator and rode it up to Masters's floor.
I opened the door to her studio and ran smack into a pile of props big enough to challenge Sir Edmund Hillary.
Masters herself, a human, thank God, since I didn't know if I could handle another Toon today, stood in the studio's only uncluttered space, a rectangular whitewashed area about ten feet long by five feet wide, positioning her lights and camera. She had her lean, athletic body nicely displayed in tight jeans and a blue T-shirt sporting an autographed photo of Casper the Friendly Ghost. Baby-soft brown hair played tag with her shoulders. Her tongue underscored her concentration with a thin layer of moisture traced across her creamy red lips. For the sake of male sanity, I hoped she changed perfumes after sundown, since the one she had on could send every male within sniffing range out into the streets to bay at the moon. The lenses in her big, round glasses were the kind that reacted to skin temperature, changing color according to the wearer's mood, going from dark amber to a rosy pink. Right now they fluttered somewhere in between, not happy, not sad, just doing a good day's work. "Something I can help you with?" she said.
I laid a card on her and waited for her to read it. She held it up between us, as though comparing the written description with the real thing. Apparently I measured up to my printed notice, since she motioned for me to sit.
Rummaging through the prop pile, I hauled a chair out from between a plastic palm tree and a bus-stop sign. I reversed and straddled it so I faced her across its back. "I represent Roger Rabbit," I told her. "I'd like to ask you a few questions concerning his relationship to the syndicate."
"Ask away." She opened a corner cupboard and, from behind half a dozen jugs of Toonshine, produced a bottle of Burgundy, which she held up with an empty glass.
I nodded.
She splashed out a healthy slug.
I tilted it back, tossed it down in one fast swallow, and extended my empty glass for a refill. "You photograph the Baby Herman strip, right?"
Carol joined me this round, sipping her wine slowly. "I photograph Baby Herman, yes, as well as a number of other DeGreasy strips."
"And you were present a few days back when Roger went after Rocco DeGreasy with a lunch box?"
She nodded. "Roger accused Rocco of pressuring his wife to leave him. I've never seen a rabbit so angry. If I hadn't stepped between them, I think he might have done Rocco some serious harm."
"Any truth to Roger's allegation?"
She studied a hanging photo of Roger Rabbit. It bore the cutesy-pie inscription you'd expect from a professional buffoon. "A sweet bunny, that one," she said fondly. "My absolute favorite subject. No big-star hang-ups. Never moody or temperamental. A joy to work with. I absolutely adore him." She flicked on several spotlights to see how many dark corners she could illuminate without lengthening her own shadow. She pulled over two easy chairs, one for Dagwood, one for Blondie, and set a floor lamp between them. "I believe Jessica left Roger of her own free will without the slightest bit of coercion from anybody."
"Why do you think that?"
I had seen men break other men's fingers with less force than Carol used to snap in her wide-angle lens. "Who knows?" She squinted into her camera, but jerked her face instantly away, as though repulsed by the nastiness she saw on the other side. "A real bitch, that Jessica. You ever meet her?"
"No. Kind of hard for me to picture so much allure and such a devious nature in a female rabbit."
"Rabbit? No, don't be misled by her name. She isn't a rabbit. She's humanoid. Does mainly high-fashion, cosmetic, and car ads." She went to her file cabinet, removed a portfolio, and passed it to me. "Jessica Rabbit."
A knockout. Every line perfection. Creamy skin, a hundred and twenty pounds well distributed on a statuesque frame, stunning red hair. Easily able to pass for human. "What did someone like this ever see in a Toon rabbit?"
Carol retrieved the photos and studied them for a moment, as though trying to decide whether to return them to her files or pepper them with voodoo pins. "Nobody knows. Before Roger, she dated humans and other humanoid Toons exclusively. Their marriage came as a total shock to everybody who knew them." She slipped Jessica's photos back into the darkness where she seemed to feel they belonged. "For about a year it appeared to work. Jessica totally changed. She quit her carousing, quit bad-mouthing her rivals, knocked off her on-the-set temper tantrums. She even went to several of Blondie Bumstead's Tupperware parties." She made a bowl out of her hands and extended it toward the right-hand chair. Then she decreased the cup of her hands to about the size of a rancid tart. "Suddenly, almost overnight, the old Jessica came roaring back. Shrieking at her photographers. Backstabbing every-body who disagreed with her in the slightest. She and Roger broke up shortly thereafter, and she went back to living with Rocco DeGreasy."
"She went back to living with him? You mean she had lived with him before?"
"Sure. She left him to marry Roger. Considering that Roger had just stolen Rocco's girl, nobody in the industry could understand why, a few weeks after the marriage, the DeGreasys signed Roger to a long-term contract. Everybody figured that Jessica must have gone to them on Roger's behalf. Rocco would have done anything, even given Jessica's new husband a contract, if he thought it would get her back." Carol picked up my card and reread the inscription, apparently concerned about my competence to practice my stated profession. "I'm surprised your client neglected to tell you any of this."
"He apparently didn't consider it relevant." I walked to the window, where I could see the rabbit still trying to protect his sneakers from the poodle in the street below. "Guess I'd better ask him why."
"Will you talk to Jessica, too?"
"Probably."
"Then let me give you some advice. Be careful. She has a nasty way of sinking hooks into photogenic men." Carol smiled, pointed her camera at me, and clicked the shutter.
My luck held. The lens didn't break.
"Thanks for the warning. When I see her, I'll be sure and wear my armored undies. One last question. Have you heard the rumor that someone wants to buy out Roger's contract
and give him a starring role in a strip of his own?"
"Yes, I've heard it. Rumors like that spring up with alarming regularity in this business. Most often they prove totally false. For Roger's sake, I hope this one's true, but I wouldn't bet on it."
Before I left, I got her home address and phone number, just in case I decided later to ask her a few of the more personal questions that kept jumping to mind every time I saw her move.
6
I slipped out of the building through a side door, crossed the street, and came up on the rabbit from behind. "Surprise," I growled. I grabbed the rabbit's arm and hustled him unceremoniously down the street.
I whizzed my reluctant companion past several human-only and several Toon-only bars before we came to a grubby hole-in-the-wall saloon, maybe twenty feet wide and thirty feet long, willing to serve both species. The bar, tended by a puffy-eared, flat-nosed human, ran the length of the right hand wall. A bunch of derelict Toons held down one end. A bunch of derelict humans pegged down the other. The saloon's only interior decoration consisted of several framed newspapers welcoming Lindbergh back from Paris, a subtle play on the common belief that certain humans -- Babe Ruth, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and, of course, Lindbergh -- were really humanoid Toons who had crossed the line.
I marched Roger to a booth, sat him down, and slid in beside him, trapping him against the wall.
A Toon waitress came over. In her younger days, she probably got mistaken for Dixie Dugan. Nowadays she carried forty pounds too much flab, three pounds too much makeup, and the resemblance leaned more toward Petunia Pig. "What'll it be?"
"Boilermaker for me," I said, "and a 'shine for the fur ball." She waddled to the bar to fill our order.
The rabbit wiggled himself some breathing room. "I'm sorry," he said, misinterpreting the reason for my anger. "I know you told me to keep my distance, but I couldn't resist. My entire life I've been a clown, acting out jokes for a living. Here I saw the chance to get involved in something serious for a change, and I took it." His right-hand fingers started a frisky jig on the booth top, which his left-hand fingers couldn't resist joining in. "You can't imagine how exciting it's been for me just to follow you around and watch you work. Granted, I disobeyed your order. For that I apologize. But, to be honest, I'm delighted I did. I haven't had this much fun in ages."
"I'm glad I brightened your humdrum life," I said sarcastically. "Maybe you'll do something for me in return." The rabbit doubled up his ears so they wouldn't collide with the booth top when he nodded his head. "Name it."
"Tell me about your wife," I said with enough frost in my voice to turn the rabbit's nose blue.
"My wife?" The rabbit's word balloon miserably failed its maiden flight, collapsing half-deflated across my shoulder. I grabbed it, squashed it into an hourglass shape, and tossed it in front of him. "Jessica Rabbit." I pointed to the mangled balloon. "Your wife. Remember her?"
"Oh, of course. Jessica!" Roger plucked the name from out of the air above him and extended it to me pillowed in the cup of his palm. "Jessica. She's my wife."
I rolled the name into a tiny ball and flicked it into orbit off the end of my thumb. "And also Rocco DeGreasy's current romantic interlude. How come you didn't tell me about her?"
The rabbit twiddled the stubby ends of his ears. "I didn't think it was important."
I tilted my head back and rolled my eyes. Melodramatic, I know, but dealing with Toons seemed to have that effect on me. "Your wife plays patty cake with one of the guys you work for, one of the guys who you say reneged on your contract, and you don't think it's important? My friend, you got a lot to learn about what makes the world go round."
"Well, how come you didn't pry it out of me?" said the rabbit, turning untypically militant in his own defense. "I mean you've got some responsibilities in this case, too."
The waitress brought our drinks. While I fished out my wallet, she snabbed a few stray ear puffs floating across the low ceiling.
"So maybe we both made a mistake," I said, figuring there to be zip percentage in arguing with a bubble-brain like Roger. "What say we chalk it off to experience, and start over?"
"Fine with me."
"Great. Let's begin with how you and Jessica first met."
The rabbit crossed his oblong pupils as though reading the high points of his life off a crib sheet taped to the rear of his nose. "We met one day at a photo session."
"At Carol Masters's place?"
"Yes. Jessica had just finished shooting a liquor ad, and I was there to do a supporting role in a jungle Jim strip. This was, of course, when I was still doing bit parts, before I signed with the DeGreasys. We chatted for a while. Nothing of any great import. Mainly trade gossip, who got his contract dropped, who got a new strip, who got married, who had kids, who got divorced. Normal small talk. We seemed to get along pretty well, so I asked her to dinner. I didn't really expect her to accept, not with her being a humanoid and me a barnyard. But she did. We went to this cozy Italian place and had a delightful time. We talked and laughed and played kneesies under the table. She came back to my place for a drink. I made some popcorn, lit a fire, and played her a song on my piano. Then, more as a gag than anything else, I proposed to her. Got down on bended knee, the whole works. To my great surprise, Jessica accepted. We flew to Reno and tied the knot." He commemorated the happy event by looping his ears into a bow and bugging his eyes out into two perfectly matched hearts.
"You mean Jessica married you on your first date?”
”Yes. I could hardly believe it."
Same here. "How long after your marriage before the DeGreasys gave you a contract?"
"Almost immediately.”
”How did it happen?"
"One night, right after Jessica and I got married, we were sitting in our living room listening to our stereo. I told her how much I envied her. How it had always been my fondest wish to be a well-known star. The next day, out of the blue, Rocco DeGreasy called up, said he had seen me in some of my supporting roles, said he thought I had enough talent to carry my own strip, and offered me a contract."
"Did you know about Jessica's previous relationship with Rocco? That she had left him to marry you?" The rabbit nodded slowly. "But I don't think she ever really loved him. I think he had something on her, something dreadful he used to hold her to him. A girl as wonderful as Jessica would never voluntarily stay with anyone as awful as Rocco."
"Any chance Jessica might have been influential in getting you your contract?"
"I don't know." Roger's ears turned as limp as stalks of old celery. "I always secretly suspected she probably had gone to Rocco about it, but I never asked her outright. I was afraid to. I desperately wanted to believe I had gotten it based on my own merits, not because Rocco thought it might win Jessica back Anyway, for a while I was the happiest bunny alive. I had Jessica, and I had a contract with the biggest syndicate in the business, and I had their promise to make me a star."
So much for that part of Roger's life where everybody had sung in tune. Now for the later sessions, where the notes had turned sour, and the strolling violinist had left in disgust. "What caused your marriage to break up?"
The rabbit's ears flopped over double and wobbled side to side, like a television aerial trying unsuccessfully to align itself with a very faint signal. "It was a real mystery. We had been married about a year when, about two weeks ago, almost overnight, Jessica changed from a kind, wonderful, caring person into a shrewish, raving witch." Roger's body sagged.
"You don't have any idea what caused the change?"
"None. She refused to discuss it or even to admit that she was any different. I suggested a marriage counselor, but she said no. She moved out on me and moved back in with Rocco DeGreasy."
"You seen her since?"
"No. I've tried to talk to her a couple of times, but she avoids me. I understand she's contacted a lawyer and put a divorce in the works." His eyelids dipped to half mast in memory of his dear departed, and he saluted her with a long drink of 'shine. His ear puffs, when they appeared, came out in a curving column of spheres resembling the smoke from an underpowered locomotive chugging up a long, impossibly difficult hill.
"OK. Now that we've covered your marital squabbles, let's do your assault on Rocco DeGreasy."
The rabbit's pupils bounced back and forth across his eyes like the electronic blips in an arcade tennis game. "I knew I should have told you about that. I knew I could never hide it from you. Not from a pro." His thought-balloon formed an image of a wooden hammer that whopped a few licks of sense into his head. "It happened the first time we met after Jessica left me. I accused Rocco of somehow blackmailing her into it. Know what he did? He laughed at me. He didn't even answer. He just laughed at me. Tell me, Mister Valiant, do you know how miserable it is to have a person laugh at you?"
It seemed an odd statement from someone whose main function in life was to make people laugh at him, but I didn't feel up to tackling the philosophic implications of it. "Look," I said, "I'm not so sure this is really my kind of job. It seems to me that maybe what you ought to do is to take this up with your Toon union labor board. You need an arbitrator, not a private eye."
"I already threatened to do that, I did, but Rocco warned me that it might have unfortunate consequences.”
”Any idea what he meant?"
"Sure. He meant his brother Dominick." Roger shuddered the way you do when an icy draft slips down the back of your neck. "I'm not a brave rabbit, Mister Valiant. I'm not about to buck Rocco and Dominick by myself. That's why I came to you.
I cradled my head in my hands. What had I ever done to deserve this? Other detectives get the Maltese Falcon. I get a paranoid rabbit. "You should have told me about your marital problems before," I said self-righteously, half-hoping I'd provoke the rabbit to fire me.
But the rabbit accepted my scolding with remarkably good grace. "Well, I would have, except you didn't ask. When we first met, you were so taciturn and in such a hurry. Who am I to second guess a private detective? I assumed a close-mouthed, speedy approach must be your style. I assumed you were a pro, and you knew what you were doing. And I guess I was right. I mean you did find out about everything anyway.”
”Yeah, I sure did," I said with glum resignation. The rabbit dropped his voice so low his word-balloon barely cleared the booth top. "Where do you go next, Mister Valiant?" The words inside the balloon flickered on and off like a decrepit neon sign. "Are you going to see Jessica?”
”Yes, I am. First thing tomorrow morning."
The rabbit bowed his head and sent up a scrolly, illuminated balloon that could have been ripped straight out of a prayer book. "Well, when you do, would you give her a message for me? Would you tell her I still love her? Tell her I miss her very much, and I'd like to give her another try. Tell her that I'm sorry for whatever it was I did to offend her, and I promise to change. I promise to do anything she wants, if only she'll take me back. Will you tell her that? Please?"
I didn't stick around much longer. It depressed me to see a grown rabbit cry.
7
A TV-commercial director hand-signaled the ten cameramen evenly spaced along a roped-off length of Rodeo Drive.
His production assistant, perched on a tower halfway down the street, flipped on a specially rigged wireless relay box and set a driverless, open Mercedes convertible rolling along the street at forty miles an hour.
A stubby helicopter overtook the Mercedes from behind and assumed a position just above the driver's seat. A trim, flight-suited female, wearing a leather flying helmet and aviator goggles, with a rope coiled around her left shoulder, appeared in the helicopter's cargo door. She secured one end of the rope to a pin ring on the helicopter's interior bulkhead, threw the remainder of the rope out the door, and shinnied down it toward the moving car. She lowered herself into the front seat, took the wheel, and applied the brakes just in time to prevent the car from crashing into a stationary truck positioned crossways in the street ahead.
The helicopter saluted her with a side-to-side dip, and sped away.
A most impressive operation, easily the equal of anything I'd seen in the Marines. Almost a shame that strategic responsibility for conquering other nations couldn't be switched from Washington to Madison Avenue. The United States might today be bottling Coke, packaging cornflakes, assembling Pontiacs, battling crabgrass, and eradicating underarm odor in suburban Moscow, Peking, and Hanoi.
The director, decked out in polo pants with side flaps large enough to put him into contention for head bull in a herd of elephants, conferred with a man wearing enough gold chains around his neck to shackle half the prisoners in a Southern road gang. The chain man framed the final scene between his thumbs and forefingers and gave the director an exaggerated nod.
"That's a keeper," yelled the director. "Let's break for breakfast while we check the rushes."
The car backed, turned, and squealed to a stop alongside the curb in front of where I stood. The girl driver pulled herself free of the cockpit and swung athletically across the door and out. She unsnapped her goggles, peeled away her helmet, and gave me my first, real-life look at Jessica Rabbit.
Her photos, as stunning as they were, hadn't begun to capture the full scope of her beauty. Curly hair the color of a lingering sunset. Porcelain skin. Incendiary gray-blue eyes. Lips the softness of pink rose petals. And a body straight out of one of the magazines adolescent boys pore over in locked bathrooms. The kind of woman usually portrayed floating down the Nile on a barge, nibbling at stuffed pheasant and peeled grapes, enticing some beguiled Roman into conquering half the civilized world on her behalf.
All of which only served to deepen the mystery. What had a woman like this ever seen in a dippy Toon rabbit? I approached her. "Mrs. Rabbit? My name's Eddie Valiant. I'm a private investigator. I'd like to have a word with you about your husband."
"My husband?" She inclined her head, squinted her eyes, and up-tilted the corners of her mouth into the amused yet perplexed expression of someone confronted by an especially ridiculous riddle. "I'm afraid you have the wrong person. I've never been married. I have no husband."
Surely I couldn't have made a mistake. There couldn't be two women this gorgeous. "You are Jessica Rabbit?"
"Correct."
"Then what, if I may ask, is your relationship to Roger Rabbit?"
"Who?" In the best Orphan Annie tradition, Jessica demonstrated her innocent bewilderment by revolving her eyes upward and tucking them out of sight underneath her open eyelids. "Roger Rabbit? Sorry, I never heard of him." A blatant lie, no question about it, and, as though to illustrate what happens to people who lie, her brilliant smile dribbled off her chin and fluttered to the ground like a bicuspid butterfly. I reacted the way I would have had she dropped her hankie. I reached down, scooped up her smile, and handed it back, only to find that, while I had been bent over, other assorted portions of her anatomy, including both ears and her nose, had also fallen off. I gallantly scrambled to retrieve these bits and pieces for her too, but they disintegrated before I could reach them. I stood upright just in time to witness the rest of her disappear the same way.
My hand still shaped to the bow of her smile, I circled the spot where she had stood, kicking my toe against the concrete. Not a smidgeon of her remained.
Suddenly I heard bemused, husky, feminine laughter behind me. "I take it you've never seen a doppelganger erode before?"
I turned around and found myself facing -- Jessica Rabbit!
Of course. What I saw wasn't really her. It was a mentally projected duplicate of her, or doppelganger as Toons call them. Identical to her in every regard, physically and mentally, but existing only by the energy of her mind. Toons can create doppelgangers more or less at will. They merely relax, channel their thoughts in that direction, and magically one of them appears. Toons use them as doubles in risky shots. When you see a Toon stuffed into a trombone or run over by a steamroller or crushed by a falling safe, it's really a doppelganger. And she was right. I never had seen one erode before.
"Isn't it kind of traumatic to see a part of you just wither away like that?"
"Not particularly. No more so than I imagine it might be for you to throw one of your fingernail clippings into a trash can. Oh, I'm sure there are primitive tribes in Africa or somewhere who treat their doppelgangers as mystic offshoots of their soul, but we modern, civilized Toons regard our doppelgangers as animated mannequins, nothing more."
She leaned gracefully against the Mercedes's rear fender, instinctively adjusting her posture to display herself to best advantage. She needn't have bothered. A woman as beautiful as this could have stood on one leg, flapped her arms, stuck out her tongue, and still held my interest. Like most humanoid Toons, Jessica suppressed her word balloons and spoke vocally only, thus enhancing even further her human image. "I heard you tell my doppel that you wanted to see me about Roger. What's his problem now?"
"What was his problem before?"
She replied quickly, as though she had been asked the same question so many times that she had committed the answer to memory. "He couldn't cope with being a celebrity. He turned moody, conceited, belligerent. So I left him."
A bit of a discrepancy there between Jessica and her husband. Had it been Jessica Rabbit or Roger who had undergone the Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation that had scuttled the marriage? By rights, I should believe my client. That was by rights. From experience, I knew that the one caught with the stolen macaroons often wound up being the same one who had hired me to stake out the cookie jar. "You might be interested to know that Roger says he wants a reconciliation. He says he's willing to do whatever it takes to get you back."
She crossed one perfect arm over the other. "If that's why he hired you, to come here and tell me that, I'm afraid he's wasted your time. I left Roger for someone else."
"I guess that translates to Rocco DeGreasy."
She dipped her chin and held it there, the way a fighter would to protect himself from an uppercut. "That's right, though I don't see where it's any concern of yours."
Good looks could distract me only so long. "Roger hired me to investigate irregularities in his contract. Rather an odd coincidence that his estranged wife would have such a close relationship with one of the people who gave it to him. You have anything to do with the DeGreasys signing Roger?"
She shook her head, pushed herself away from the car, and assumed a square stance that, even in its belligerence, gave a certain graceful beauty to her tiny clenched fists and firmly set jaw. "Absolutely not. I never understood why they did it. Roger has no talent whatsoever. I suspect Rocco thought it would please me and perhaps win me back. Or possibly Rocco feared Roger might move to another part of the country and take me with him. A contract tying Roger down might have seemed the easiest way to prevent that."
"Did the DeGreasys ever promise Roger his own strip?"
Too bad she suppressed her balloons. Her tinkling laugh could have re-outfitted a Swiss bell ringer. "No, never. That's nothing more than a story Roger concocted. You should not take Roger too seriously. He does see a psychiatrist, you know."
"You ever hear of anyone wanting to buy out Roger's contract and give him his own strip?"
"Yes, I heard a rumor to that effect, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to star Roger in anything. Believe me, the rabbit has absolutely no talent. None."
The director interrupted us before I could follow up. "Jessica, sweetheart," the director said, "the agency man wants to shoot a slightly different angle. Could you give us another doppel?"
"Of course. Would you excuse me?" she said to me. She stepped into a nearby dressing trailer and several minutes later emerged as twins.
"Ready to shoot," she told the director.
The two indistinguishable Jessicas climbed into the helicopter and flew off into the morning sky.
While I waited for her to return, I located the nearest pay phone and called my client, hoping to maybe clarify a few of the inconsistencies Jessica had lobbed into the ballgame.
Roger answered in a state of near panic. "My God, am I glad it's you! You have to get over here. This isn't just a matter of a broken promise anymore. It's escalated drastically."
"How so?"
Roger gulped audibly. "Somebody just tried to kill me."
8
I sat in Roger's living room doing my best to swallow a chuckle. "Somebody attacked you with what?”
”A custard cream pie," Roger repeated, nervously fidgeting with the pie tin balanced on his lap. "I was on my way home from an early photo session at Carol Masters's when somebody jumped out from behind a tree and smacked me in the face with a custard cream pie."
“It must have been a practical joke. Nobody could kill you with a pie."
"Oh, you're wrong. Indeed, they could. In the classic comic
pie toss, somebody plops you in the kisser, coming straight in to get maximum splatter, and then pulls up short so as not to mash in your nose. The pie tin slithers off, and that's it. But not this fellow." Roger fanned out his fingers and scrunched them into his face to demonstrate the angle of attack. "He came in from about shoulder level so the custard blocked off my mouth and nose, then he gave it kind of a half twist so the whipped cream flew up and covered my eyes. And he didn't let go. He held that pie so tightly against my face that I couldn't breathe. I kicked him a hearty one in the shins, and I guess I connected, because he grunted, dropped his pie, and ran away."
"You get a look at him?"
"No. He had turned a corner before I got my eyes scooped off."
"Human or Toon? Could you tell that?"
"No. I'm sorry. I checked around for witnesses but drew a blank." He held up a standard nine-inch aluminum pie tin covered with half an inch of dried custard. The custard had solidified into a perfect outline of his mouth and nose. "I did retrieve the weapon, though." He handed me the tin.
I examined it front and back. No prints evident, but it did bear the stamped-in name and address of a nearby neighborhood pie shop. I wrapped the tin as best I could into my handkerchief. "I'll check it out," I said, "even though I suspect this was most likely nothing more than a juvenile prank."
"Prank?" Angry whipcords of steam puffed out of the rabbit's nostrils and heated his nose to the color of an apple. "How can you say prank? It was those DeGreasy brothers. They tried to smother me. If we don't stop them, they'll try again. And next time they might not miss."
"Believe what you want, just be aware that in my opinion
this pie guy has no connection with your other predicament,
and chasing after him will most likely be a big waste of effort." Pie tin in hand, I got up and headed for the door, where I stopped, turned, and almost as an afterthought said, "By the way, I talked to your wife today."
Roger couldn't have brightened up any quicker had he plugged his tail into an electrical outlet. "Jessica? You saw Jessica? Did you give her my message?"
"Yes."
"And what did she say?"
I hit him with it the only way I knew how -- hard, fast, and straight to the chops. Leave tact to the slick talkers wearing pressed three-piece suits. If you had a terminal illness, I'd tell you pointblank not to start any all-day suckers. "She's not coming back to you. And she says the reason she's not is because it was you, not her, that changed. She said you used to be a fun guy, but that, after you got your contract, you turned into an ogre. She said she couldn't take it, so she left you."
"She said that? Jessica said that?" The tiny dots that gave color to Roger's skin coalesced into splotches so large that, given an ear bob and a transplanted tail, he could have passed for a calico cat. "Well, that's the silliest thing I ever heard. Me? An ogre?" He launched a partial balloon, but the feigned hah-hah inside fizzled out through the balloon's stem and, with a resounding blat, splattered across the rug.
"She also said a few other things."
"Such as?"
"I'm not so sure you want to hear them.”
”I'm a big bunny. I can take it."
"Suit yourself. She said you were nuts. She also said you had no talent."
"She doesn't mean that, not any of it. Rocco is pressuring her to say those things."
"She also insisted that you made up the part about the DeGreasys promising you your own strip."
"Widdle on that Rocco DeGreasy! Roger's word balloon had originally contained something far stronger, but, always conscious of his family-rated image, he had hastily X'd it out and replaced it with a statement less profane. "He has some evil hold over Jessica. For the year Jessica and I were together, we were as in love as two people can be. There was no faking how she felt about me. She couldn't possibly have reversed herself so quickly. Rocco forced her to leave me, and he's forcing her to say things about me that she doesn't mean. I want you to find out how he's doing it, and I want you to make him stop." Roger crossed his hands over his head but couldn't cork the flood of tear-shaped balloons blubbering out of him.
I nodded as though I really took seriously this whole monumental bit of goofiness. "Exactly what I planned to do next."
9
Carol Masters wasn't at her studio, so I tried her at home. She lived in a partially Toon, partially human neighborhood that real estate agents called ethnically enriched, and urban renewers called blighted. Depending on which way you happened to be facing -- toward the gossiping, front-stoop Toon and human housewives or toward the babbling, back-alley Toon and human drunks -- either term could apply.
Carol's apartment occupied half a floor in what had been, in the late forties, a fashionable row house. Now it and the houses linked together on either side of it resembled a rickety roller coaster already well over its summit and plunging pell-mell on its long run downhill.
Carol's doorbell wires drooped stiffly out of their housing like twin copper fangs, so I rapped on the door. Carol answered it, dressed as she had been at her studio, and invited me in.
I took an immediate liking to her home decoration. No wall to wall furniture to trip you up every time you went to the kitchen for a late-night beer. No chintz to gather dust. A few comfortable chairs placed for easy face-to-face conversation, some scattered end tables, and a colorful rainbow painted across two walls, culminating on each end in framed displays of Carol's photographs. Her record collection filled most of a six-foot-long shelf, bluegrass to the center with a few rock records tacking down either end.
She told me to pour myself a drink while she finished processing some photos in a darkroom she had rigged up in her bedroom closet.
I checked my watch. I never drink until after six. It was then four fifteen. Close enough. I buried the bottom of a glass under three fingers of bourbon, walked into the bedroom after her, and sat down on her bed.