Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (27 page)

“You started by throwing clinkers into the wishes you granted. And you worked up to murder. That’s what happened to the diver who brought you up. He released you from your lantern, made a wish, and you strangled him.”

“Such a buffoon,” said the genie. “Thou knowest what he wished for? Gills so he could breath underwater. I fixed him so he could not breath over water.”

“From there you passed to a junk dealer, a movie prop man, and finally to Roger Rabbit, but none of these three knew what your lantern contained.” “I spent most of those years snoozing.” “Then, by accident, Roger stumbled across the magic words, which released you.”

“I would have killed the dratted mite, except each time he released me he was in his living room, and I was in his kitchen where he could not see me. I am not that mobile, you know.” He pointed to the lantern anchoring him to the floor. “Why didn’t you shout out to him?” Seeing the genie blush was like watching a boil redden and fester. “I never thought to. When thou art a shut-in such as I, thou tend to forget how to communicate. I granted the rabbit his wishes and went back inside my lantern to await a better opportunity to do him in.”

“Roger wished for Jessica’s hand in marriage. You arranged it so she would cease to love the rabbit in exactly one year.”

“One of my favorite ploys, though I also like what I did to Romeo when he wished for Juliet.”

“Next Roger wished for a contract to appear in the strips.”

“I truly outdid myself there. He got his contract, but as a perennial second lute.”

“Roger released you for the third time the night he died. This time he didn’t stay in the living room, though. He walked upstairs to his bedroom, and from the staircase he saw you in the kitchen.”

“He asked who might I be,” said the genie, “and I told him. I told him it was I who got his wife to marry him, and it was I who got him the contract.”

That explained the significance of Roger’s last words. “He still had a third wish coming.”

“So what? I was through being the universal lackey. From thence forward I was on my own. I pulled forth this pistol I cadged from Blackbeard years ago and shot the rabbit dead.” The genie treated me to a showing of my life story. It passed in front of my eyes when he aimed his pistol at my head and mimed pulling the trigger.

I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “After you shot Roger, how did you get outside the house?”

He lowered his pistol, and my heart rate dropped from rhumba rhythm to fast tango. “I disengaged the lock through an application of hocus-pocus.” The genie drew himself up nearly to the ceiling, and his lantern made a tiny hop. “Then I did that right out the door, a means of locomotion I discovered right then on the spur of the moment. Centuries I lay in that lantern, and never once thought to hop.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of. Some people are just slow learners.”

“Yeah, verily. When I hit the sidewalk, I realized I had no idea where to go next, so I crawled back inside my lantern to consolidate my thoughts.”

“And what did you come up with?”

He thumped himself on the chest hard enough to knock unconscious any creature this side of a Brahma bull. “I decided the next time I came out I would stay out forever. And that be precisely what I intend to do. If thou thinkest I wilt go back inside that lantern, thou art nutty.”

“In my apartment I had Roger Rabbit sing the song that released you. Why didn’t you come out then?”

“That rabbit friend of thine art a doppel. The magic words work only when uttered by a real, live ‘toon. Doppels count not.” The genie looked at me with eyes as shiny and malicious as the jagged underside of two bottle caps. “Enough of this folderol. I have work for thee to do. I command thee to pick me up,” he pointed to his lantern, “and carry me to the nearest aerial port. There we shall commandeer a flying carpet and whisk to Persia where I will rule as caliph.”

“I hate to ruin your grand plan, but flying carpets went the way of the dinosaur, and so did Persia for that matter.”

“Persia no longer existeth?”

“Afraid not.”

“Who makest thy carpets?”

“Conglomerates mostly.”

“Then I will take over and rule one of those.”

“You got an MBA?”

“I understand not thy foolish banter. Get thy cloak, and let us begone.”

“Sure.” I thought back to what Professor Cackleberry told me about destroying a genie. As I remembered it, the first requirement was to be pure of heart. I decided to take a crack at it anyway. Maybe I could catch the pureness-of-heart judge out on a coffee break.

I sauntered over to the genie and bent as if to pick up his lantern. I shut my eyes, said a silent prayer to anybody out there in the great beyond who might be listening, and straightened up.

The genie’s gun hit me on the shoulder.

I rapped his elbow hard with my arm, and his gun clattered to the floor. I kicked it into a corner.

“What did thee that for?” asked the genie, his head cocked at an angle. “Dost thou not knowest that I can enchant thee to kingdom come? Total power have I over all living things, humans included. I can turn thee into a cockroach if I so desire. Or a toad. Or the smallest flea in the fur of an infidel dog. Thou hast not the chance of a Chinaman against me.”

“I think you’re full of beans,” I said. “Lots of talk and no action. You can work your mumbo jumbo all day and not hurt me. Come on, genie, give it your best shot.” And please hang in there, oh pure heart of mine.

The genie leered at me and shook his head. “Oh, mortal, what a great fool thou art.” He shut his eyes.

A wave of nausea hit me. For a brief instant I knew what it felt like to sport six legs and live on the backside of a Chihuahua, but the feeling passed and except for a slightly queasy stomach, I came out of it completely unchanged.

The genie blinked at me and looked at his hands the way a twenty-game winner does when his curve ball refuses to break. He pointed a crooked index finger at me and roared out some foreign gobbledygook. I got another blast of nausea, but I held my ground.

The genie tried again, and again, and again, until I finally got tired of fooling with him and called a halt to it.

“Enough, genie,” I said. “I beat you fair and square.”

“That be what thou thinkest,” said the genie. Since voodoo wasn’t working for him, he tried physical mayhem, instead. He pulled back one of his massive arms and let go a punch that added a zag to my already amply zigged nose. He packed a wallop, but I’d taken worse (once, from a guy wielding a sledgehammer). I gave the genie as good as I got, a roundhouse right to the schnozzola. He went backward but, like one of those bottom-weighted inflatable rubber clowns, he hit the floor and bounced right back up again. He grabbed me in a headlock, and the fight began.

I have no idea how long we wrestled. It was probably minutes, but seemed more like days. He had power; I had mobility. Unfortunately, he also had an extra psychological edge. He knew as well as I did that, no matter what the outcome of this tussle, he could never really lose in the end. The only way for me to destroy him permanently was to drop him into an ocean, and it was a long, long walk to the nearest one of those.

Then I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Dominick DeGreasy had a fishtank, a
saltwater
fishtank.

I kneed the genie as hard as I could in the spiggot. He moaned and doubled over. Before he could recover I picked him up, carried him to the fishtank, and held him over the top.

He took one look inside and immediately got the picture. “Holdest thou off,” he said. “Let us discuss our differences as civilized men.”

“There’s nothing to talk over, genie. You play ball with me, or you go for a permanent swim.”

“What wouldst thou have of me? There be nothing I can give thee.”

“I want three wishes.”

“Impossible,” stated the genie flatly. “I canst grant wishes only to ‘toons.”

“Make an exception.” I submersed the base of the lantern in the tank, and smoke billowed out where it touched.

“Oooow, oooow, oooow, agreed, agreed,” shouted the genie, sweat pouring off his forehead. “One wish I will grant thee. It be really the best I can do.”

“Deal,” I said. “My wish is to have conclusive proof that Dominick DeGreasy shot both Roger Rabbit and his brother Rocco.”

“And that be all?” asked the genie. “No money, no women, no power?”

“That’s it,” I said. “Simple as can be.”

“Thou shalt have it,” said the genie. “I grant it, and with no skullduggery.” He shut his eyes and,
poof,
a suicide note handwritten by Dominick DeGreasy appeared magically in Imy free hand. In the note Dominick explained that he shot his brother during an argument centered around who should have control over the business. Roger Rabbit saw him do it, so he went to Roger’s house and shot the rabbit, too. Dominick could not live with the guilt of his actions so he also shot himself.

A good note. It would take both Roger and Jessica off the hook. I put it into my pocket.

“Thanks, genie,” I said. “And adios.” I dropped the lantern, genie included, into the fishtank.

“But thou promised!” shouted the genie as he shriveled away in a cloud of steam. “Thou promised!”

“So I lied,” I said. And then I called the police.

Rusty Hudson suspected me of cheating him somehow but couldn’t prove it. Dominick DeGreasy’s note spoke for itself. Hudson had to let Roger go.

Just like Clever Cleaver had to cancel his arrest warrant for Jessica.

Hudson did get some pleasure out of clapping Little Rock into the tank for theft and art forgery. He put out an all-points for Carol Masters, too, same charges, but she gave him the slip. Too bad. Ruined his perfect record.

As for me, I considered the case a great success. I’d taken care of Roger, and his ex-wife, too. Exactly what the rabbit had wanted.

I picked Roger up at the city jail. His stay there hadn’t helped him any. His joints dangled as loosely as a marionette’s. He hadn’t lost any more parts that I could see, but it had to be only a matter of time.

I explained the case to him on the way home.

“I needed the note,” I said in conclusion, “because I knew nobody would believe you’d been shot by a genie.”

“Good thinking,” said Roger without much enthusiasm. He went into my apartment. Two of his fingers stuck to the doorknob. His tail fell off on the threshold. “So the genie shot me, and Dominick shot his brother.”

“Not quite,” I said. I rummaged under the sink for a bottle of hootch, but this had been a long, hard case, and I’d completely depleted my stock. Just when I needed it most. “The genie shot you, all right, but Dominick didn’t kill Rocco.”

Roger flopped around on the sofa to face me in a loosey-goosey motion that led me to believe he might be missing a few important bones. “If Dominick didn’t, who did?”

“Let’s examine the suspect list,” I said. “Jessica wanted Rocco dead, but she planned to let Carol Masters or Little Rock do the job for her, so that lets her out. Carol Masters came to the house that night but never went inside. Little Rock never even came. Sid Sleaze had no motive. That leaves only one other person with both reason and opportunity.”

“Who?” asked Roger in a balloon so faint I could see right through it to the wall.

“That leaves you, old buddy. There’s a sign up over the door to detective school. What walks like a duck and talks like a duck is probably a duck.” I lit a smoke. It went down harsh and rasped at my throat. “‘There’s just too much evidence against you. You publicly threatened to kill Rocco. Three eyewitnesses place you at the murder scene, gun in hand. Nickels the pawnbroker fingers you as the one who bought the gun. It has your fingerprints on it. But the kicker is something Jessica brought up. Doppels usually disintegrate within a few hours of their creation. Yet you’ve lasted nearly two days. Because the real Roger put an extra amount of effort into making you a bang-on duplicate of himself so anybody who saw you would have no doubt you were real. Then he sent you out in the middle of the night to buy a pair of red suspenders with a fifty-dollar bill. So the situation would be unusual enough for the shopkeeper who wrote up the sale to remember you. Roger created you as an
alibi.

“That’s who killed Rocco. You did. You hired me to give you somebody to hang the murder on. Tough detective gets carried away with his work. Kills wealthy syndicate owner. All you had to do to cement it was to take the gun you’d stashed in your nightstand and plant it where it would incriminate me. I take the fall, and you get off scot free. You never cared about your contract. And that phony pie assassination was just a ploy to keep me hooked until you did the deed.”

Roger’s face came apart, but he used his paws to force it back together. He started to say something, but I turned my back on him so I couldn’t see what. “You’re a smart cookie, Roger. You covered all the bases. Except for the forgery scheme and the magic lantern, you’d be home safe. But how were you to know that half the population of L.A. would be hanging around Rocco’s the night you killed him? And how were you to know that you had a deadly killer sitting on the front burner of your stove?”

I turned around to face him and nearly gagged on a dark cloud of malice with a stench to it worse than fried onions.

“I had it planned for days,” said Roger. His balloons came out paper thin and crumpled. They fluttered to the floor like the betting slips of a gambler with nothing left to lose. “Just the way you spelled it out. The night of the murder I waited in a phone booth. The real Roger called me just before he went to see Rocco. The next store I entered, I commented about the lateness of the hour so the storekeeper would remember the exact time. Then I went back to the phone booth. Roger called afterward and told me he’d done it. I gave him the name of the store so he had his alibi pat in case the police came by before I got back. The only thing left was to give him the red suspenders, pick up the gun, and plant it in your apartment. That’s why I bought the lock picks. So I could open your door. But when I got back to the bungalow the next morning, the real me was dead, the place was crawling with police, and I couldn’t get in. So the gun stayed put. I didn’t know where to turn, so I came to you.”