by Gary K. Wolf
Roger’s tongue unraveled. “What about night before last at Jungle Rhythms?” He jumped out of his chair, put his fists on his hips, and spread his legs wide.
Jessica’s green eyes narrowed and the slightest trace of a line appeared on her brow. “What about it?”
Roger thumped a yellow thumb on his scrawny chest. “You agreed to go out with me!”
“What are you talking about?”
“That was yours truly there with Eddie. Me, myself, and I.” He folded his arms and tapped his foot. “What do you say to that?”
She glanced back and forth between us. “I consented to date my own husband.” She reached forward and caressed Roger’s cheek with the back of her hand. “Hardly a federal offense.”
“But I was a human!” He ripped the word out of his balloon and stretched it out beneath his chin. “You didn’t recognize me.”
“Of course I did.” She took him gently by the paw, relieved him of his “human” label, sat him down, and plunked herself on his lap. She wound him around her little finger, starting with his ear. “What kind of wifey poo would I be not to recognize my own precious hubbie wubbie in whatever form I happen to find him?” She kissed him full on the mouth with such force she sucked his nose into his head.
“Makes p-p-p-perfectly good sense to me,” said Roger nasally when she let him up for air. He smacked himself on the back of the noggin. His beak popped back into place. “How about you, Eddie?”
“If you’re happy, I’m happy.”
“Oh boy, am I happy,” sighed Roger, leaning forward for another lip lock.
Jessica left his pucker dangling. She jumped up. “Stay right here. I have a present for you.”
She disappeared into the house, returning with a large picture draped in red velvet. “For you, honey bumpkins.” She pulled the velvet away to reveal her portrait, the one we saw hanging over Gable’s mantle. “It’s your birthday present. Clark’s been storing it for me. But I can’t wait. I want you to have it now.”
Roger couldn’t decide whether to hug the painting or the model. He made the right choice in my book. “Oh, Eddie, isn’t she wonderful?”
“A regular peach.”
“I’ve got another, even bigger surprise for you.” Jessica’s eyes flicked for the briefest instant from his to mine. “I’m expecting a baby.”
Roger’s orbs irised to the size of the winning ticket in the Irish sweepstakes. “You mean I’m… I’m…going to be a p-p-p-poppa! A p-p-p-pater! A p-p-p-parent!”
“Yes, Roger, you’re the father of my child.” She hung her head and clasped her hands girlishly behind her back. “I’ve known for almost a month. I put off telling you because I feared you might be upset. We’ve never talked about a family. I have no idea how you feel about children.”
“Are you kidding? This is the happiest moment of my life!”
Mine, too. According to the notarized promise in my pocket, I was now officially through with Roger Rabbit forever.
Gable and Lombard. Roger and Jessica. All those lovebirds billing and cooing only made my next task that much harder.
Little Jo sat cross-legged on the white linen tablecloth of our restaurant table. She kicked away the gold-rimmed plate bearing the meal I ordered special for her, shoestring potatoes, baby Brussels sprouts, petite filet. “What do you mean, you’re breaking it off?” Her words sloshed around on a jigger of tears. The hovering headwaiter snagged her tiny balloon with a pair of sterling silver ice tongs and handed it to a busboy for disposal. He didn’t want it floating away, snagging on a salad fork, breaking open, and irrigating one of the other patrons. The mark of a fancy place. Nothing but the best when I give a dame the air. “I repeat what I’ve been saying ever since we met, Eddie. Size doesn’t matter to people who truly love one another.”
“We’re not only two different sizes. We’re two different worlds.”
“And never the twain shall meet.” She rejected my handkerchief—it was the size of her bedspread and smelled of laundry starch—for one of her own, a swatch of lace as delicate as a leprechaun’s antimacassar. She dabbed it under her eyes. “I won’t buy that, Eddie. It’s too trite.”
“I’m sorry, pidge. I don’t know how to do this gracefully. I haven’t much practice at it. I’m usually on the receiving end.”
“Here’s a suggestion. Come straight out with it. Try, ‘So long, Shorty. It was fun while it lasted.’ “
I took her advice. It only made matters worse.
Junior Selznick sat hunkered over Abe Lincoln’s desk. He was playing with a flea circus.
“Your juggler’s passable, but your clowns stink, and I’ve seen squirrels perform better high-wire acts on a telephone line.”
“I have no desire to replace Barnum and Bailey.” With the tip of a pencil, he edged a few of the tiny critters around into different positions. “I use insects to block out my big crowd scenes. Here, for instance, they’re set up for Scarlet’s visit to the railroad yard, where she hunts for Dr. Mead to deliver Melanie’s baby.”
“Imagine that. I’ve seen thousands of those little tykers cavorting on the backs of junkyard dogs, and never once recognized the dramatic possibilities.”
“Paint on the brush of a master becomes the Mona Lisa. Applied by a journeyman, it merely covers the side of a barn.” Selznick put a miniature megaphone to his mouth. “Take five,” he announced. The flea playing Scarlet crawled into a matchbox with a gold star pasted on the sandpaper striker. Even in flea circles, rank has its privileges.
“How are you managing without Potts?”
“Not well.” Selznick emptied his over-heaped ashtray into his wastebasket to make room for the butt in his hand. He had started smoking again. Pressure will do that. I took the one he offered me.
“Pepper was a man uniquely suited to expediting film projects.”
“He was a crude, oafish, unprincipled, murdering lout.”
“I won’t deny he had his faults.” A moving van screeched to a halt outside. Selznick watched morosely through his window as a sweaty team of knuckleheads loaded the truck with period furniture. He winced when a muscleman banged a highboy into a commode. “My creditors have called in my notes. I’m being forced to sell off my props to meet my payroll.” He closed his blinds so he wouldn’t have to watch any more of his castle crumble to dust. “I need my box, Mr. Valiant.” Selznick laced his hands together. His fingers were long and artistic, the kind that connect tuxedos to keyboards.
“No movie’s worth the consequences of unleashing Toon Tonic on an unsuspecting world. That’s why I heaved it into my neighborhood smelter.”
“You what?”
“I melted your box to slag.”
He slammed his hand on his desk, severely rattling his cast of thousands. “You’ve done the public a great disservice. The money I derived from selling Toon Tonic would have financed one of the greatest moving pictures of all time.” He uncapped a pill bottle, shook out a rainbow assortment, and popped them dry.
“You could always make the flick on the cheap.” I pointed to the fleas. “Shoot it with these peewees and a telephoto lens.”
“You’re displaying your ignorance, Mr. Valiant.” He mobilized his circus and sent it back to work. The ones playing the dead and wounded had it easy compared to poor six-legged Scarlet. She scampered frantically across the desk top, searching, searching, searching. “If I wanted to scale back the budget, I’d simply substitute humans for Toons.”
“How would that save moola?”
Selznick punched a string of calculations into a huge adding machine. He pulled the handle and handed me the strip of paper that popped out. It displayed an awfully large number. “For starters, that’s the amount I’d save by staging the battle scenes with blank ammunition instead of whipped-cream pies. But it’s an academic question. Audiences would never accept it.”
&
nbsp; “Don’t be too sure. I’m no movie critic, but I know what I like, and I’m tired of seeing every topic played for a laugh.”
He cupped his chin and stroked it. “Hmmm. Take a serious approach to Gone With the Wind. Is that what you’re saying?”
“It might play in Peoria.”
He rearranged his miniature performers into a tableau depicting the burning of Atlanta. “It would be a gamble.” An ember from the end of his smoke landed on the corner of his blotter, adding an unplanned touch of realism to his miniature scene.
“I hear risk’s never bothered you before.”
He reached into his desk drawer and removed a file. Vivien Leigh’s. “You were curious concerning my interest in young Vivien. It’s strictly professional. She’s a woman of remarkable acting ability. I don’t want word of her talent leaking out to other producers. I’ve been seasoning her with bit parts before launching her as a full-blown star. Perhaps the time has come. What do you think? Vivien Leigh as Scarlet O’Hara.” He studied Vivien’s glossy.
“She’s no Jessica Rabbit.”
“Who is?”
He pointed at a flea piloting a Tootsie-toy carriage across the smoldering desk. “And for Rhett Butler, I’d cast Ronald Colman. Or better yet, Errol Flynn.”
I suggested Gable. My way of saying thanks for the C-notes. Selznick didn’t see it. He considered Gable nothing but a pretty face. I told Selznick to picture Gable without the fuzzy lip.
I stuffed in a quarter, but the Automat refused to fork over my breakfast. I banged the glass window with the flat of my hand. The door stayed closed.
“You need another dime. Chocolate cake went up last week to thirty-five.” Louise Wrightliter stood behind me. She dropped two nickels into my slot. The cubbyhole popped open. I carried my cake, her cornflakes, and a brace of coffees to a table near the wall.
“Sorry I had to have you locked away,” I said. “You happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Don’t apologize.” She laced our javas with half an ounce of brandy from her filigreed flask. “I appreciate a man of action. And I’m none the worse for my stay in the pokey.” True. No jailhouse pallor, no knife scars, no self-inflicted tattoos, at least none visible. “I’m very impressed with your style, Eddie. It’s not every day I meet a man as lacking in principles as, I am.”
“Let’s form a club.”
“I have a better idea.” She scooped a bit of my cake onto her finger and licked it off with her tongue. “I’d like to become your Boswell. I want to write a book about you, about your cases. Eddie Valiant, private eye to the stars. I’m positive it will make a mint. Imagine the publicity. It would supercharge your career.”
“The duck’ll squawk up a storm if he finds out you’re writing my life story on company time.”
“That shan’t be a problem. You say yes, and I’ll take a sabbatical from the Telltale. I’ll work on you exclusively. Think about it, Eddie.” She put her hand on top of mine, halting the progress I was making shoveling frosting into my mouth. “We’ll be together side by side, day and night. Naturally, I’ll reward you handsomely for your cooperation. In any form of currency you desire.”
I demurred. It was a generous offer, but I didn’t need any more notoriety. I’d gotten enough in the past few days to last me a lifetime.
30
I finally received the message I’d been waiting for. It came in the form of a balloon mailed to my office. It told me to be at Ten Pin Lane’s bar that evening at eight.
The lettering style duplicated that left behind by the mug who sapped me, and shot Roger during his session with Ed Murrow.
There wasn’t much difference in shape between Ten Pin Lane and the long-necked beer bottle he delivered to my table. Ten Pin had been one of the greats on the pro bowling circuit. He and the other nine members of his team, the Splinters, worked the far end of the alley, dodging the likes of Cannonball Spin and his Rolling Rockets. Ten Pin wore the old uniform, a bright red neck stripe. I tried engaging him in conversation, but found him too wooden for words. He fell twice on his way back to the bar, once taking a table of four out with him.
At the stroke of eight, the pinsetter door lifted open, and my brother Freddy more or less walked in.
I stress “more or less” because he didn’t exactly walk. He couldn’t. His body had shrunk to a height of eighteen inches, but his feet remained size ten. He reminded me of a clown balloon stuck through footprint-shaped cardboard, and he traveled the same way. Hop, boing, hop, boing. He reached the bar in six arcs. He needed three launches to order a short beer.
He bounced to my table. Embracing him was like hugging Froggy the Gremlin. When I squeezed, his tongue poked out, his feet expanded, and his belly button made rude noises. “You’ve changed, Freddy,” was the best I could manage.
“I’m a Toon now, Eddie, in case you hadn’t noticed.” His balloon paraded proudly across the space between us, without the slightest trace of shame. “I can be whatever shape and size I want. Small, tall, anything at all.” To prove it, he metamorphosed into the Freddy I knew from the old days except this version came in a single plane, no deeper than a sheet of glass, and totally transparent.
We drank in silence. Neither of us wanted to start this conversation because we both knew how it would finish. Finally, I took the leap. “As soon as I spread out the whole puzzle, I knew the missing piece was you.”
Freddy mock-punched my jaw. His hand felt as icy cold as a dead man’s. “I knew you would, Eddie. You always were the brainy one.” His lettering left no doubt. Freddy was the mug who rapped me, and the shooter who plugged Roger Rabbit. “Me, Teddy, at best we tagged along on your coattails. Neither of us could hold a candle to you when it came to solving crime.” He glugged a swallow of lager. The foamy liquid gurgled through his visible esophagus.
“Stop it. You’re making me sick. It’s worse than watching you chew with your mouth open.”
“You always offended too easy, Eddie. I only ate that way to get your goat.” He opaqued out his innards anyhow. “What next? You arrest me? Toss me in the hoosegow? Put me on trial?” He stretched his neck to the length of a hoe handle. “Swing me from the highest tree? Hi-de-ho-ho-ho.”
“I’ll decide that after a few questions.”
“Why bother asking?” He expanded, quadrant by quadrant, like a rubber doll filling with air. He ended up thinner than I remembered him. “You generally have all the answers.”
“I always like to confirm what I already know.”
“Same as ever. You, death, and taxes never change.” He flashed me a perfect smile. At least in his new, Nutty Putty existence, he’d had the good sense to straighten his teeth. “Fire away.”
“What’s it mean, Freddy? ‘Box, and you could get hurt’?”
“Hi-de-ho-ho-ho.” He pushed his balloon out slowly, proofing it letter by letter, word by word, to make sure he got it exactly right. “It should have said ‘Suppress the contents of the box, and you could get hurt.’ I left off the first part. Chalk it up to inexperience speaking visually.” With the backside of his hand he batted his round, white, grammatically perfect balloon across the table like a Ping Pong ball.
“Why’d you want to shoo me off?”
“I know how you feel about Toons.” His expression of distaste was almost human. “I knew you’d try and queer any plan to peddle Toon Tonic.”
“Are you kidding? Selznick, Potts, Enigman, LeTuit, they intended to sell that stuff to anybody with the cash to pay for it. Men, women, old people, kids on the street.”
“So what?”
“Freddy, look at yourself. We’re talking about a brew that turns a human into a Toon!”
His balloon came out with its edges softened to the point of blurriness, like the billowy clouds that Peter Pan rides around on in Never-Never Land. “Eddie, this will be hard for you to be
lieve, harder still to accept, but my life began the day I became a Toon. Every day’s a barrel of sunshine. I don’t age. I have no cares, no worries. I have nothing but fun. It’s the perfect life. Being a human was never this good. Hi-de-ho-ho-ho. I want every person in the whole world to experience the rapture of Toonhood.”
“How do you jibe your newfound, jovial, elevated nature with the fact you murdered Tom Tom LeTuit?”
He scratched his nose, rubbing too hard, pushing it an inch off center. “He had it coming.”
“Nobody deserves to die.”
“LeTuit turned me into a zombie!” Freddy tried to float a balloon picturing what it was like, but the form wouldn’t come. He’d suppressed the memory of it. “Hi-de-ho-ho-ho. Thank goodness Lupe weaned me off those infernal cocktails before they did permanent harm.”
“We’ve both got a lot to thank her for. It was Lupe who tipped me to Toon Tonic.”
“She thought you’d back off if she made the situation sound deadly.”
“She was wrong. How’d you come by the formula?”
“Lupe heisted it from LeTuit.” Freddy finished his glass of suds. He left the foam that circled his lips, like he did in the old days when he drank a root beer. He’d tell me he’d been bitten by a mad dog and had gone stark raving crazy. It never frightened me then. It scared the daylights out of me now. “Me and her hopped a tramp freighter from Havana to Miami, and hitchhiked from there to L.A.”
“Where you figured to raise cash by ransoming the formula back to LeTuit’s partners, Pepper Potts and Kirk Enigman.”
“I don’t know what you need me for, Eddie.” He scaled a balloon to the bar. Ten Pin loaded a beer on it and scaled it back. “Hi-de-ho-ho-ho. You’re chalking up a perfect score. One hundred percent accurate.”