by Gary K. Wolf
Gable was right. Toons are slippery little cusses. Roger freed himself of his bindings in seconds. “Shows how much you know about women,” said Roger. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
Gable caressed his mouth into that sly, knowing grin that makes movie theaters keep smelling salts on hand to revive fainting women. “The version I heard has it that when the cat’s away, the mouse will play.”
“Oh, yeah, smarty britches?” Roger pulled himself up where his nose reached Gable’s boutonniere. “For as little as you know about the fair sex, you know even less about adages. What about ‘Absence reopens the springs of love’?”
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Love does not rust,” Roger said belligerently. “So there.”
“Old love, cold love.” Gable lit a smoke with a lighter fashioned from a gold molar yanked out of the Colossus of Rhodes.
“True love never ages,” shot back Roger.
“New love drives out old.”
Roger folded his arms across his chest. “Love conquers all.”
“Never rely on love or the weather.”
Roger assumed a soapbox posture, hand raised, finger extended even with his orange topknot. “Love blossoms at marriage.”
“Marriage is the tomb of love.” Never trade maxims with an actor. They eat axioms for breakfast and spit them out at the afternoon matinee.
Roger gave it one last, desperate shot. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.”
“Marry in haste…” Gable took a long, leisurely drag off his Chesterfield…“repent in Reno.”
Roger swelled his head to twice normal size to prevent the escape of his spontaneous giggle. “Gigolo,” he spat at Gable when he had himself back under control.
“Fool,” Gable countered.
Gable walked to the window, where he finished his smoke. Roger tested the workmanship on my filing cabinet.
I helped myself to a shot from Gable’s bottle, poured a thimble for the weenie and a double for Roger. I handed Gable the slim remains. “Go home,” I told him. “I’ll call when I turn up a lead.”
He shook his head. “You take my money, you take me along with it.”
“Wait a minute, Eddie,” said Roger. “You can’t take him. You promised you’d take me.”
“Why can’t he take us both?” asked Gable. “We’re grownups. We ought to be capable of setting aside our animosities to help solve a murder.”
Roger stuck out his tongue.
“See,” said Gable to me. “Best of buddies, already.”
“I got to make a call,” I told them. “Since Clark used my cord for a hog tie, I’ll use the pay box in the hall. If you two can kiss and make up by the time I get back, I’ll take you both.”
I left them to mend their fences while I called Ferd.
“Your time’s almost up, Eddie,” he warned me. “I’m not kidding. You produce one killer, signed, sealed, and delivered, or I rat you out to Bascomb.”
“Sure, Ferd, I got the case under control. A few loose ends, and I hand it over. That’s not why I called. I need to know about Heddy. How’s she been acting lately?”
I thought his balloon took a trifle long to squeeze out of the mouthpiece, but it could have been my imagination. “Same as usual. Brassy as Barnacle Bill’s buttons.”
“She hasn’t been doing anything…strange?”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. Like…different than she normally does.”
“You mean is she getting more headaches than usual? That kind of different? Or is she growing hair on her face during full moons and going out for a romp in the woods?” He laughed. I didn’t.
“I’d say the latter.”
“What are you insinuating, Eddie? You suggesting my wife’s a freak?”
“Ferd, she’s my sister.”
“You intimating that my wife, your sister’s a werewolf?”
“Worse Ferd, lots worse.”
This time there was no mistaking it. His balloon took forever to swell out of the mouthpiece. “What could be worse than that?”
“I think Heddy’s turned into a Toon.”
He produced a ha-ha bubble the size of a dinosaur egg. “She should be so lucky.”
“The waitress at Dingles identified Heddy as the Toon woman who left with Baby Herman.”
His hand came through the line and grabbed me by the throat. I had to bash him with my gun butt to make him let go. “You’ve tried slimy tricks before, Eddie, but this wins the cake. Setting up your own sister to take the fall for your crime. I ought to noogie your fattfarking nuggets.”
“Ferd, you don’t believe me, go to Dingles, ask the waitress yourself. Incidentally, you’ll find Lupe Chihuahua working there, too. You starting to see this tie together?”
“I’m gonna check, Eddie. Don’t think I won’t. You better not be foofarfing me, that’s all I got to say.” He slammed the phone in my ear.
I returned to my office. Unfortunately, Gable and Roger were both still alive and eager to go. I had no choice. “Let’s move out.”
Roger, sitting next to the small fry on the edge of my desk, hopped to his feet. So did Gable in my armchair. Only one difference. Gable keeled over and fell flat on his face. His shoelaces were tied together.
Roger spread his hands open palms up at shoulder level. He smirked.
While Gable fumbled with his laces, I pulled Roger aside. “You ever been to Cuba?” I asked him.
“Never,” said Roger. “Doctor’s orders. I’m deathly allergic to bananas, mangos, papayas, guavas, and sugarcane. I sneeze when I walk past fruit stands. I blush to mention what happened to me the time I danced with Carmen Miranda.”
Gable offered Little Jo a ride in his trousers. She declined. Oddly, she chose my pocket over his. Imagine that.
On our way out, Gable read my door’s fading inscription, EDDIE VALIANT, PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS, INCORPORATED. “You’re a publicly held corporation?” he asked.
“More or less. I’m the only stockholder. Keeps the annual meetings short and friendly. My pencil pusher suggested it. Said it would save me money.”
Gable gave me a double take. “I wouldn’t have imagined excessive taxes to be a problem for you.”
I got into the elevator. “Brother, sometimes you can’t believe your eyes.” I punched the button marked “absolute bottom.”
We drove Gable’s Ford. I had him pull close to the front of LeTuit’s warehouse so passing cars couldn’t see me break and enter.
I wedged a tire iron into the doorjamb. The lock snapped like a fresh wad of Juicy Fruit. I nudged the door. It refused to budge. I put my shoulder to it. No luck. Gable and Roger joined in. The three of us got it open wide enough for me to squeak in with my gun drawn.
I tripped over the doorstop, a hundred and eighty pounds of decomposing dead man. I rolled him over. Tom Tom LeTuit, plug ugly as ever with his flatiron snout; double row of crocodile chompers; round, open, sightless eyes sliced off the bottoms of rusted tin cans; Oop Shoop forehead; and Gravel Gertie hair. He wore white linen slacks. His rickrack-embroidered cream-colored Guabaya shirt contained an extra buttonhole just about the size of the studs in my stolen gun.
I knelt beside him and frisked him.
Little Jo stuck her head out of my pocket. To her credit and my surprise, she didn’t faint. The game little trouper hopped onto the body and searched those places I couldn’t or wouldn’t reach.
Gable and Roger inched up behind me. “Is he dead?” asked Roger.
“No, chum,” said Gable. “He’s sleeping with the angels.”
“That’s not funny,” said Roger.
“Who says it’s supposed to be?” said Gable. “I’m not out to draw a laugh every time I open my yap.”
“And I am?” said Roger. “That’s what you’r
e implying?”
“If the shoe fits, buddy boy,” said Gable.
“Hah. There you go, showing your stupidity again. I don’t wear shoes.” He held up his foot. As advertised, no shoes. “Anybody with half a brain can see that.”
Little Jo crawled out of LeTuit’s nether regions. She handed me her findings, an engraved invitation to David Selznick’s house, the selfsame affair Vivien Leigh was dolling up for. My case was closing quicker than a Broadway play about alley cats.
LeTuit’s warehouse was a dipsomaniac’s daydream, stacked floor to ceiling with bottles, jugs, cases, barrels, casks, and flasks of rum. A glass-walled lab in the back boasted more copper tubing than Snuffy Smith’s outdoor cocktail maker.
We tossed LeTuit’s office. By mutual agreement, we divvied labor according to stature. Gable took six feet and over, Roger tackled three feet and under, Little Jo explored the mouse holes, I handled what fell in between, an ersatz leather sofa, war surplus desk, and a decrepit chair.
Roger held up a fist full of lint balls. “Are these clues?”
“To your IQ,” said Gable.
We didn’t find squat.
I left LeTuit where I found him.
I took his party invitation and twelve bottles of his rum.
I paid my respects and three bucks to the desk clerk at Dyke’s Auto Camp. He passed over the key to Cabin Six.
The room was tackier than the business side of Scotch tape. It reeked of a disinfectant that kills germs by plugging their noses.
Scorch marks pocked every surface capable of supporting a cigarette butt. The twin beds swayed worse than a pair of elderly plow horses. The drinking glasses exhibited a thick, waxy buildup, a malady they caught from the linoleum floors.
Gable carried in the overnighter he kept in his trunk. I expected a Cock Robin like him to crow bloody murder once he took a gander at our hideout’s rustic accommodations, but years of living on location had prepared him for Dyke’s and worse. In two shakes of a lamb’s tail he changed into lounging apparel, stretched out on one of the beds, and made himself comfy.
Roger, who I expected to treat the place as a joke, turned out to be the priss. Keeping his fingers clothes-pinned over his beezer, he pointed out the room’s major shortcomings. The clothes hangers had more kinks than a Saturday night party at Fatty Arbuckle’s. The dresser drawers were lined with newspapers Gutenberg printed to carpet his canary cage. Roger vowed he’d let his kidneys explode before using the bathroom. He flopped onto the unoccupied bed. The mattress sunk through the frame, sandwiching him between twin walls of plunging bedsprings. He emitted a string of tiny blue gurgles filled with despair.
Little Jo was dead to the world. Dyke’s lacked a peewee-sized bed. Gable volunteered his padded Italian leather house slippers. I put one on the dresser top, laid her inside, and covered her with six plies of toilet paper.
I removed my coat and tie, opened a jug of LeTuit’s rum, and splashed out a round for me and my two colleagues. “Mud in your eye,” I toasted.
“Chin chin,” said Gable.
“Wrinkle my nose, cross my eyes, make my next one twice this size,” said Guess Who.
I stood back and waited for Roger’s explosion but none came. Seems rum affects rabbits the same way it does normal people.
I poured again. And again. And again.
My cohorts’ mutual antagonism dropped away as quickly as the bottle’s level.
“Bugs Bunny performs nude,” said Gable with a noticeable slur. “Why do you wear pants?”
“Simple,” said Roger, his lettering as fuzzy as a tippler’s logic. “To hold my suspenders down.” He indicated Gable’s velvet smoking jacket and silk pajamas. “Who’s your tailor? Dr. Denton?”
I cracked open bottle two.
“Roger, I can’t figure you out,” said Gable. “Sometimes you act like a mature, responsible adult, sometimes like an infant. How old are you, anyway?”
Roger tilted his head and made a whoozy, shame-shame motion with his ears. “That’s one of the two questions you never ask a Toon.”
“What’s the other one?” asked Gable.
“What’s the other one,” answered Roger.
“Right. What’s the other one?”
“What’s the other one. That’s the other one.”
Gable laughed so hard he fell off the bed. Roger hopped over to give him a hand up. Gable grabbed his outstretched paw, pulled him to the floor, and tickled him senseless.
I uncorked bottle three.
As happens when you heat men with rum, they eventually stewed over women. “In the evening,” said Gable to Roger as they sat side by side on the floor, their backs braced against the wall, “when you’re alone with Jessica in the bedroom, what do you have that a human doesn’t?”
A five-watt bulb appeared over the rabbit’s head. “My own nightlight! “
“Seriously,” said Gable. “What’s it like being married to the world’s most beautiful woman?”
“It’s awful.” To support his sagging noggin, Roger undid his bow tie, looped it under his chin, tied the ends together, and hooked them over a nail in the wall. “I spend every waking minute worried that she’ll leave me for somebody taller, handsomer, wittier, less rabbity.” The nail pulled loose. Roger’s head flopped sideways onto Gable’s shoulder.
Gable patted the rabbit’s ears. “You should have stayed single, like me,” he said.
“I like being married. Marriage is wonderful,” said Roger. “It’s a swell institution.”
“If you like living in an institution,” said Gable.
Bottle four.
“Let’s take a poll,” said Roger. He and Gable stood between the beds, bent over at the waist, breathing hard. Roger had just taught Gable the bunny hop. “What’s the best present to get a woman? I vote for candy in a heart-shaped box.”
“Flowers,” said Gable. “Expensive, exotic hothouse varieties. Accompanied by a card dripping with mush. Women go nuts over that.”
Roger and Gable turned to me. Except for the drinking part of it, I hadn’t participated much in the evening’s revelries. I owed them this. “Best present I ever gave a woman was a gift box of grooming aids. Pearl-white tooth drops, ear squeegee, hair trimmer with special nose attachment, mustache plucker, and a compound for removing corns. I’ve got the same selection myself. Had them for years. I use one or the other every day. Know what? She tossed the lot out her window and me after. Accused me of being an unromantic boob. She’d rather have yellow teeth? Corns? Or a mustache?”
“Go figure women,” said Gable.
“Who can? I can’t,” agreed Roger.
By the end of bottle five the two were decently loaded and ready for bed. To preserve Roger’s modesty, I strung a clothesline across the room and hung it with a bedspread.
Before long both of them were soundly sawing timber.
I went into the bathroom. I sobered up by splashing my face with water and my tonsils with a stiff shot of rum.
I put on my coat and tie.
Dyke’s only nod to decor consisted of a carnival glass vase filled with plastic flowers. I plucked one and stuck it in my lapel. From farther than five feet away, I defied anybody to tell it from a real chrysanthemum. Glue, tape, a crayon for touchup. It would last forever. The Garden of Eden should have had it so good.
I took Little Jo out of her leather slipper and stuck her back in my pocket. She didn’t wake up.
I left my two sleeping beauties to their dreams and drove Gable’s Ford to Selznick’s house.
20
Selznick’s place sat in the center of a two-acre banyan grove bounded by ten-foot privet. As I neared the front door, Selznick’s night watchman, Horrible Hawk, a Hollywood legend, buzzed me by. A plug-ugly flying canker, he packed steel-tipped talons, the speed of a supercharged P-51, and a taste for crimi
nal canapés.
Unfortunately, his radar set lacked a tube. His first night on the job, he mistook an elderly bovine for a cat burglar. He dive-bombed that old bossy smack in the middle of her nightly jump. She kicked him over the moon.
I flashed the bird LeTuit’s invitation and entered Selznick’s inner sanctum.
Selznick’s home furnishings came secondhand from Napoleon Bonaparte’s going-out-of-business sale. His matching sofas stretched the length of a prone giraffe. A senior citizen with good health and a modest standard of living could retire to Miami Beach with the gold leaf melted off one of his chairs. His Persian rugs had more knots to the inch than a string salesman’s sample case. Resewn into trousers, his gray striped silk draperies would outfit Foggy Bottom. His wallpaper had more flocking than an autumn’s worth of migrating geese.
A French maid with plenty of oo-la-la treated me to a glass of champagne. I spilled it into a potted plant, used my awesome powers of detection to uncover Selznick’s private stock, and refilled my tulip glass with Four Roses.
The crowd contained roughly the number of stars I spotted on my high school field trip to the Griffith Park Planetarium. The Dorsey brothers, Benny Goodman, and Harry James sat in with the band. Jimmy Cagney cut an impressive rug with Myrna Loy. When Ricardo Cortez cut in, the Yankee Doodle Dandy grabbed Helen Twelvetrees and continued his two-step without missing a beat. Dolores Del Rio sat on John Barrymore’s lap. Charlie Chaplin sat on hers. Barrymore had no problem supporting the weight.
In a dark corner Zasu Pitts and Ramon Novarro created headlines for Louella Parsons. Sheldon Leonard and Edward G. Robinson cleared an end of the dining-room table for arm wrestling. Their only matchup ended in a draw.
Jessica Rabbit sat on a chaise lounge, huddled in whispered conversation with Carole Lombard. Gable would love to eavesdrop on those two comparing notes, and so would the population of every burg larger than Tiny Town. Out of respect for her lover baby’s murder, Lombard wore the front of her dress at half mast.