Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (20 page)

“Raise your paw and repeat after me.”

He raised his paw.

“I, state your name.”

“I, Roger Rabbit.”

“Promise to uphold law and order.”

“Promise to uphold law and order.”

“And to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.”

“And to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.”

I handed him the wallet.

He opened it and saw the badge inside. The last remnants of his blue funk flaked off his fur, and he stood before me as pure and white as one of those knights that fight bathroom scum on TV. “I don’t know what to say.” He jammed the wallet into his hip pocket. “This is one of the happiest moments of my life.”

“No more Gloomy Gus?”

“You’ve seen the last of him.”

“No more deep depressions when a witness takes a pot shot at you?”

“From now on I’m strictly hard-shell. Let them call me what they will.”

“Then let’s get to work. We’ll start by interviewing that messenger service clerk. What’s more, you ask the questions.”

“You mean it? Honest? I ask the questions?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Oh, boy. Stand back and make way for Roger Rabbit, special deputy, barreling through.” He took off out the door so fast he left behind a hefty shock of the
whizz
lines ‘toons produce when they blast off in a hurry. I kicked what I could under the sofa, stuffed the rest into a closet, and went out after him.

The messenger service clerk, Mrs. Ida Koontz, lived in a house that looked like it had been built by a bakery school dropout. It had gingerbread trim, ladyfinger shutters, a mint-frosting front lawn, and a vanilla-wafer walkway. The gutters were peppered with stunned woodpeckers who had taken a whack at the milk chocolate roof only to bash a beak against solid slate, instead. A brightly colored carpet of the kind Ara•

bians use when they fly economy class lay draped over the porch railing. Two others hung from a clothesline in the side yard. As I watched, a window opened, and a portly woman dumped the contents of a dustpan into the flower bed outside. The ‘toon flowers living there coughed and gagged horribly, but, as soon as the woman retreated into the house, the Ritz Brothers of the pansy set exchanged their hacking for a swell case of the giggles.

The front door was the strong, solid kind you like to put between you and the cold, cruel world. I gave it a hearty rap, knowing I wouldn’t have to worry about winding up with my hand buried to the wrist in splintered wood.

How Mrs. Koontz ever came to be associated with the Speedy Messenger Service I’ll never know, unless she was an old-line employee who had started with them when they used to ride horses and called themselves the Pony Express. She took forever to answer the door, another forever to examine my license, and yet a third forever to show us into her parlor. She offered us a beer, and I would have accepted but didn’t want to waste the rest of the day waiting for her to return from the kitchen. “Thanks anyway,” I said, “but we just have a few questions to ask, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Whatever I can do to help,” she said obligingly enough. She picked up her knitting and went to work putting her single daily stitch into a sweater that had gone out of style twenty years ago.

I nodded at Roger and waited for him to begin. He stared at old Mrs. Koontz, his feet did a fast tap shuffle straight out of “Flying Down to Rio,” and he sent up two balloons. One contained a hem, the other a haw. He grabbed them out of the air, stuffed them under his coat, and jerked his head in the direction of the hallway.

“Would you excuse us, please,” I asked Mrs. Koontz, “while I confer with my partner?”

She nodded absently, too intent upon getting her sweater done in time for the New Year’s party celebrating the start of the next century to pay us much mind.

“I have a problem,” said the rabbit once we were out of the woman’s eye- and earshot. “I’m supposed to ask the questions here.”

“Right. So, what’s the problem?”

His cheeks flushed red. “I don’t know what questions to ask.” He turned his paws palms upward at shoulder level and tilted his head.

I patted his arm. “My boy, you just relax and watch the master at work.”

We rejoined the old lady. “You work for the Speedy Messenger Service,” I asked, “right?”

She mulled my question over in her mind for a couple of minutes. “That’s correct.”

Since I hadn’t brought my overnight bag, I skipped any further background stuff and got right to the nitty-gritty. “A few days ago you accepted a parcel for delivery to the Hi Tone Gallery of Comic Art, a parcel about so big by so high.” I sized it for her with my hands.

She nodded, but I couldn’t tell if that was because she remembered it, or because she had fallen asleep.

“Can you tell me anything about the person who dropped it off?”

She looked at me, then tended to her knitting for a while. “It was a woman,” she said finally.

“Human or ‘toon?”

“I’m sorry, but I really couldn’t tell. She didn’t say anything, and she wore a veil.”

“What else was she wearing?”

“Nothing unusual. A long, dark, baggy dress.”

“How tall was she?”

“I really don’t know. I was sitting down at the time, and she was standing up. It’s hard for me to judge heights in that situation.”

Now it was my turn to head-signal Roger out into the hall. “I’m out of questions myself,” I confessed. “Can you think of anything else I can ask her?”

He scratched his head. “Try asking her how the woman smelled.”

“How she smelled?”

“Sure. Women often notice other women’s perfumes. If she was wearing something distinctive, it could be a clue.”

“How she smelled?”

“Try it, you never know,” he said.

So I tried it. “You notice how this woman smelled?”

Ida put down her knitting and looked at me like I had just made an elephant appear in the middle of her parlor. “Why, come to think of it, I do remember something unusual about that.”

Roger’s grin tickled the bases of both his ears. “You do?” I said. “You remember something about how she smelled?”

“Yes. She had a very pungent odor about her. Like she hadn’t taken a bath for a while. The way some of these younger girls smell nowadays. Positively disgusting. When I was young I had to cart water in from a well and heat it over a stove, but at least I took a bath.”

I almost walked right over and gave Roger a hug. Too bad he wasn’t going to be around much longer. Another few months of working with me, and he might, just might, turn into a fairly competent gumshoe. Nothing to compare to a human, of course, but better than most any ‘toon. Thanks to him and his perfect question, I now knew enough to crack this lousy case open like a rotten walnut.

I pulled up outside the DeGreasy Gallery. “You know what Little Rock DeGreasy looks like?” I asked Roger.

“Yes,” said the rabbit. “I’ve seen him around.”

“Good. You wait out here on the street. When you see Little Rock come out of the gallery, you tail him. Don’t let him out of your sight. Clear?”

The rabbit’s nod started out fairly enthusiastic but rapidly wound down to nothing more than a slight bob in the tip of his ear.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, ignoring whatever I have in the way of better judgment.

The rabbit burped out a confused jumble of words which he rearranged by hand into a cogent statement. “I’m your official assistant, right?”

“You’ve got the badge to prove it.”

“Correct. Therefore, as official assistant, I should get meaningful assignments, stuff with gristle to it, and the aroma of danger.”

“You and me both, buster. But the private-eye business just doesn’t work that way. This is about as action-packed as it gets. I’d hate to tell you how many hours I’ve spent waiting for somebody to come out of somewhere so I could follow him to somewhere else and wait some more. You want wham, bam, slam detective work, stick with the comics. You want to be bored out of your skull, hang around real life with me.”

My message must have gotten through, since the rabbit smoothed the leftover nod out of his ear, climbed out of the car, and slouched into a doorway just across from the gallery. He tugged his hat down to within a finger’s width of his eyes, turned up his collar, and dangled a smoke from his lower lip.

I stuck my fist out the window at him thumb up.

From there I drove to Carol Masters’s studio.

I knocked but nobody answered. Never one to stand on convention, I opened the door and walked in.

Carol was bent over a light table, examining negatives. I picked up one of her props, a rubber mask that looked like the results of breeding Broomhilda the Witch to a wart hog, put it in front of my face, tapped her shoulder, and said, “Boo,” when she turned around.

She had a semicircular contraption over her head that magnified her eyes enough to startle me more than I startled her. “Valiant?” she said. “I might have known. It’s just your level of humor.”

“Then you should have laughed.” I lobbed the mask onto
a
nearby table. “It might be the last chuckle you get for a while.”

“No more Mister Nice Guy, I see.” She removed her wraparound magnifier and turned off the light table. “From your crusty demeanor, I assume we’ve reached the point in our relationship where you get tough.” She collected her negatives and slid them gently into an envelope. “Where you punch me around until I spill my guts.”

She must have halfway believed her smart-alecky crack. She visibly cringed when I reached into my breast pocket, expecting me to pull out my rubber hose, I suppose. Instead, I hauled out something that would hurt her a lot worse, one of the photos I’d gotten from Rocco’s office. I snapped it to attention in front of her perky nose. “Recognize it?”

She gave it barely a glance. “Sure. It’s a strip I shot a few years back. So what?”

“It’s also one of the pieces of artwork stolen from De•

Greasy’s gallery.”

“I repeat. So what?”

“When I first saw it, when I found it in Rocco’s office, it looked very familiar to me. It took me a while to remember where I had seen it before, then it came to me. I saw it in your apartment. It was one of the prints you were developing in your closet. She said nothing, so I turned up the heat a notch, to see if that would make her boil. “This morning I talked to a Speedy Messenger Service clerk who accepted the artwork for delivery to Hiram Toner. She remembered that the woman who dropped it off smelled bad. She assumed it was because the woman didn’t take baths. She didn’t know the real reason was because the woman keeps her wardrobe hanging right outside her photo lab, and her clothes pick up the smell of photographic chemicals. It all sifts down to one tidy conclusion. You stole your own stuff. You duplicated the negatives and the prints and used Hiram Toner as a middleman to peddle the copies as originals.”

She looked at me without blinking. “Sure I did it. That was the only way I could get what was rightly mine. As I told you, my contract with Rocco specified that he owned the prints and negatives of everything I shot for him. He took the better stuff, framed it, and sold it through his art gallery but refused to cut me in on the profits.”

She walked across the studio, winding up in front of a backdrop that pictured a sylvan glade with green trees and clean water and pure air. I took it to be some never-never fantasy-land, the world of the future, until I realized it was a decade-old backdrop and was really the world of the past. “One day I offered to watch the gallery for Little Rock while he wined and dined a prospective client. While he was gone, I photographed his key and later had a duplicate made.

“I went back several days after and helped myself to a number of my early works. I reproduced the prints, duplicated the negatives, and set out to sell the copies as real. I got into trouble my very first try.

“I gave my first set to Hiram Toner. He has a reputation as someone willing to deal in that kind of merchandise. I told him outright the stuff was stolen. I told him to peddle it to out-of-towners. So what does he do? He offers it for sale to Rocco himself. Naturally Rocco recognized it immediately for what it was. And, with his resources, it didn’t take him long to find out where it came from. That’s the real reason he called me the night he died. To tell me he knew I had stolen his stuff, and that he was going to have me jailed for it.” “Lucky for you he didn’t last through until morning.” “If you’re insinuating I made my own luck, you’re wrong. I didn’t kill him.”

“You did go to see him that night, though, didn’t you?” She leaned up against a phony palm tree. A phony coconut jostled loose and put a phony lump on a phony sheik sitting in a pile of phony sand. “No, I didn’t.”

I stared her straight in the eye. “I say you did. I say you went to Rocco’s after he called, and shot him to keep him from turning you in to the cops. I say you then went to Roger’s place and shot him, too, leaving the DeGreasy murder weapon behind, so Roger would take the fall for Rocco’s murder.” “It’s not true,” she said with a thickly clogged voice. “I didn’t leave my place all night.”

“Then how do you explain this?” I pulled out the rubber squeeze frog. “I found this outside Roger’s house the night he died. Photographers use these to make their subjects smile, don’t they?” I squeezed it and smiled nastily. “Tell me who else in this case is likely to have a rubber squeeze frog on them, and I’ll let you off the hook.”

She took the frog and squeezed it. It stuck out its tongue at her. She sat in a director’s chair and set the frog on the arm beside her, so I had two sets of eyes staring at me, one set real, one set rubber, and not the slightest trace of life in either one. “All right, I did go to Rocco’s place that night, and to Roger’s place, too. But it wasn’t the way you said. I didn’t kill anybody. Not Rocco, and certainly not Roger. I went to Rocco’s to beg him to go easy on me. I knew he had me, and I was scared. I was just about to ring the bell when I heard a shot from inside. I stepped back into the bushes just as Roger Rabbit came charging out, a gun in his paw. Roger ran past me, down to his car, and drove away.