by Gary K. Wolf
I doodled a few large cuckoo birds in the margin of my notebook. The beaver’s comments clinched it. Roger Rabbit was as looney as a bedbug. If my next stop turned out as I expected it to, I could legitimately consider this case closed.
First thing the next morning, I brought Roger’s pie tin to the pie shop whose name was stamped on the bottom. Sure enough, the pie man remembered selling such a pie to none other than Roger Rabbit.
The pie man took fifteen cents out of the register and handed it to me. The deposit, he said, for the tin.
I gave it to him, took the money, and felt I had earned every last penny.
Chapter: •12•
From the pie shop I went directly to Roger’s place. As I walked to the front door, a gray-and-white tour bus rumbled past, the human passengers inside craning for a better look at how the other half lived. “I’m only visiting!” I nearly shouted when a few of the bus-borne sightseers snapped my photo.
I banged my fist heartily against Roger’s front door. To my surprise, it swung open a few inches and then snapped shut, as though hinged by a stout rubber band. I reopened it and pushed it inward, but encountered the same elastic resistance. “Hello, Roger, you in there?” I called out through the narrow crack. I received no response. I braced my feet and pressed against the door with both hands. The door eased open enough for me to see the obstruction, a musical scale, one end sprouting forth from the inside of Roger’s grand piano, the other free end looped across a hat rack beside the door. I put my shoulder to the door and shoved. The scale held for a moment and then parted, allowing me to enter. I gathered up the scale and examined it. I didn’t read music very well, but then this was no Beethoven symphony, either. Rather it appeared to be a simple version of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” I wrapped the scale around my arm between elbow and thumb, knotted it at the end, and hooked it across the edge of the piano bench. That way Roger could iron it flat later, snip it into eight-inch segments, and paste it into his piano book for future reference. What a considerate guy I am, even in the face of the big kiss-off. “Roger,” I called out. “You here?”
Again I got no response.
I ventured further into the house, through the front hall, past the living and dining rooms. No Roger anywhere.
Then I stepped into a connecting hallway containing the stairs leading to the second floor.
There I found Roger.
The rabbit lay sprawled chest down across the stairway banister. Only the finial at the banister’s end prevented his body from sliding off to the floor. Triangular flaps, the kind you get when you push a pencil through a piece of paper, ringed a gaping bullet hole in Roger’s back. I laid my fingertips across the rabbit’s fuzzy wrist and felt for a pulse. Nothing. I rolled back the rabbit’s eyelids to expose twin black olives adrift in two oblong saucers of curdled cream.
No doubt about it. Roger had gone to bunny heaven.
I leaned against the wall and evaluated my alternatives. I could turn around, walk out, phone the cops anonymously, and never talk about ‘toons, think about ‘toons, or get involved with ‘toons ever again. That was the logical choice.
Then there was the other alternative, the one that forced me to accept the unpleasant conclusion that I, Eddie Valiant, private eye extraordinaire, had made a colossal boner. If I had taken the rabbit seriously, if I hadn’t been so anxious to grab his money and dump him down the toilet, Roger Rabbit might still be alive.
I had done Roger a great disservice, and Roger had died for it. Nobody, not even a dippy ‘toon rabbit, deserved to pay that high a price. While I couldn’t resurrect the bunny, I could at least do the honorable thing—see the case through to conclusion, find out who censored Roger Rabbit, and why.
I climbed the staircase and took a closer look at the hole in Roger’s back. It was an exit wound indicating he had been shot from the front. Most of his blood had come out through the downward facing wound in his chest. Except for an almost unnoticeable trickle, the wound in his back had hardly bled at all.
I sighted around in a half-circle to see if I could pinpoint the source of the fatal shot.
Looking through the doorway into the kitchen, I saw a smoky balloon barely visible on the floor on the near side of the stove. I went into the kitchen, stuck a pencil under the balloon, lifted it up, and sniffed it. It smelled faintly of gunpowder. I shook the folds out of it so I could read it. It contained one word. Bang. I stretched my hand across it to measure its size. It reached from the tip of my pinky to several inches beyond my thumb. At least a .45 caliber, possibly even bigger. I returned the balloon to the floor.
I eyeballed an imaginary line from the kitchen to the point on the staircase where Roger must have been standing when he got hit. Then I went to the wall to look for the bullet. I found it immediately, burrowed in exactly where I had calculated it should be. One large hole, companion to the big-bore balloon. Remembering previous police accusations of evidence tampering, I resisted the temptation to dig out the slug.
Instead I turned to Roger. The rabbit wore a brightly patterned green, red, and yellow lounging jacket, maroon house slippers the size of swim fins, and baggy orange pants secured to his ankles by elastic bands. Nothing unusual about any of that.
Nothing of interest in his pockets, either. About two dollars in change, a few wilted carrot stems, his housekey, and a gigantic comb.
There did appear to be something underneath him, though.
Gently, I took Roger by the shoulders and lifted him off the banister. Sure enough, hanging over either side of the railing like a sheet of congealed candle wax, I found a balloon containing Roger’s last words. Roger must have mumbled them immediately after being shot, and then fallen across them when he died.
I lifted the U-shaped balloon by its edges off the railing, handling it gently. It had stiffened to the brittleness of a potato chip and that, combined with its natural thinness, made it extremely fragile. When the scientists in the police forensic lab got hold of it, they would measure its rate of hardening and use that to determine exact time of death. I didn’t know enough about the process to estimate what they might find.
The balloon had clouded over, and its words had faded out drastically, but, by holding it up to the light, I found it still quite readable. “No fair!” it said. “You got me everything? Jessica. My contract...” If Roger had been talking to his wife when he was shot, that meant either she shot him or knew who had. I copied the words into my notebook, draped the fragile balloon back across the banister, and set Roger over it.
I checked around the staircase for further clues, but drew a blank.
I went into the living room and examined the coffee table for glasses, cigarettes, or anything else that might indicate that someone had paid Roger a visit shortly before his demise, but I found nothing. The same with the kitchen. A thorough check of the remaining downstairs rooms uncovered no clues there, either.
I slipped past Roger’s body and climbed to the second floor.
The guest room contained only a double bed and a dresser.
The closet was empty. The dresser drawers were, too. The sheets, crisp and clean, had never been slept in.
The medicine cabinet in the bathroom held an assortment of nonprescription drugs, some toothpaste, and two toothbrushes, one jumbo-sized for those big front rabbit incisors, one regular for the teeth further back. Naturally, no shaving cream, razors or razorblades, no electric shaver. A shelf in the shower held a bar of soap, a regular bottle of shampoo, and a plastic bottle in cottontail shape, bearing the legend “Hare Conditioner.”
I moved on to the final room on the second floor, Roger’s room.
The pictures on the wall were from some slapdash school of art. Like everything else about Roger, they made not the slightest bit of sense.
I drew a complete blank in the closet. Roger owned a tuxedo that glowed in the dark but not brightly enough to shed any light on who had killed him. Nothing in the dresser or in the bureau, either.
; I tried his nightstand. There the search got interesting. Pushed to the rear I found a 38 caliber revolver. I sniffed at the barrel. The residue inside smelled fresh. I flipped open the chamber and found it to contain one spent shell. The gun used to kill Roger had been of a much larger caliber, so this wasn’t the murder weapon. Then at what, or at whom, had it been fired? I copied the gun’s serial number into my notebook and returned the weapon to the drawer.
Next, I checked around outside the bungalow. On the ground, behind some bushes, just under a window overlooking the murder scene, I found a plastic squeeze toy in the shape of Kermit the Frog. The toy hadn’t been on the ground long, since the grass underneath it was wet. It had rained early last night, which meant that the toy must have been dropped during or after the storm or the area beneath it would have been dry.
I squeezed the frog. Kermit’s eyes bugged up and his tongue popped out. I put the frog in my pocket.
I finished my search but uncovered nothing of any further interest.
So I went to the phone and called the cops.
Chapter: •I3•
The cops cruised in under command of a humanoid ‘toon detective, Captain “Clever” Cleaver. The police force contains one division of humans and one of ‘toons, with each faction investigating only crimes committed against its own kind. I never saw a ‘toon cop sharp enough to hack it on the human side, though Cleaver came about as close as any. He carried his gun where other men carry pictures of their loved ones. He wore a trench coat and a broad-brimmed slouch hat, and smoked cigars that smelled like they’d been snipped off the end of something used to tie rowboats to a pier. He had a big, square jaw, grunted a lot, called all women “Honey” and most men “Butch.”
Cleaver sat me down on Roger’s sofa and gave me an evil eyeballing straight out of the Crime-stopper’s Textbook. I gave back better than I got. He blinked first and settled down to cases. “From the beginning, Butch,” he growled. “You know the drill as well as I do.”
“Nothing much to it. The dead rabbit hired me to unravel a problem for him. He believed Rocco and Dominick De-Greasy, the two guys heading up his cartoon syndicate, owed him his own strip. According to the rabbit, they had promised it to him when they signed him up. They never delivered, so he asked me to pressure them into it. He also told me to check out a rumor that somebody wanted to buy his contract. I nosed around and came up blank. The DeGreasys insist they never made the promise. The rumor remains a rumor. That’s about everything. I came here this morning to resign the case.”
“With a full refund of any advance monies paid but not earned, I presume,” said Cleaver sarcastically.
“I get no complaints.”
“And no referrals, either, from what I hear. At least not from the ‘toon sector.”
“By design, Captain, by design. I don’t encourage ‘toon work. It’s a specialized field. I got enough human business to keep me occupied.” I uncrossed my legs and put my feet flat on the floor so he wouldn’t see my run-down heels and the gaping hole in my left sole. I guess I waited too long, because he plopped himself down on the chair across from me and made a big point of propping his feet up on a coffee table so I had a direct shot at his shoes, their bottoms flat as a pancake but in perfect repair.
A sergeant carried in Roger’s last words encased in a plastic sack. “Sir, we found these under the stiff.”
Cleaver got up, took the words, and held them to the light, using his body to shield them so I couldn’t see. He returned them to the sergeant with instructions to rush them to the lab for a rate-of-hardening determination. “Anybody in this case named Jessica?” he asked, rolling his stogie from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Roger’s estranged wife.” I laid out the lurid details concerning the relationships among Jessica, Rocco, and Roger.
No sense concealing it from him. He would find out eventually, and this way I scored a few points for cooperation. “The wife a suspect?” I asked innocently.
Instead of giving me a direct answer, he motioned me into the front entry hall. We got there just in time to watch a brace of burly ambulance attendants wheel Roger out the door on a dolly.
“Know what that is?” Cleaver pointed to a control panel beside the door. Lights on the panel flashed in random sequence. Maybe a hundred individual lights each blinking six or seven times a minute. I found I couldn’t watch it for more than a few seconds without getting a headache.
“A burglar alarm, I guess, although I’ve never seen one quite that sophisticated in a home.”
“That’s because it’s a special custom job put in by the builder of this development. It’s a big selling feature out here, since ‘toon neighborhoods routinely report the city’s highest burglary rates. Can you imagine? They steal from one another. Almost makes me ashamed to be a ‘toon.”
If he was waiting for me to say, “I know how you feel,” he was in for a few days of silence. I’ve never been ashamed to be a human.
When he saw I wasn’t going to respond, he resumed his explanation of Roger’s security system. “The alarm cycles on automatically when the front door closes. It wasn’t on when you got here because the music scale had drifted in, gotten wrapped around the door knob, and was holding the door ajar. Disengaging the alarm requires a multisequential process it took some of my best experts to figure out.”
“Which means that nobody got into this house unless Roger wanted them to.”
“Correct. Hence the likelihood that Roger knew his killer well enough to invite him inside.”
“So you figure the wife?”
“That would be my first guess. It would also explain how the killer got out without sounding the alarm. Since Jessica had lived here with the rabbit, she must know the code. She could easily have turned the system off and walked away.”
“Very logical,” I said politely. “Congratulations on your sound reasoning. You’ve overlooked only one teeny problem. According to Roger, he’d asked Jessica to meet with him many times before, and she had consistently refused. Why should she suddenly accept his offer now? When I talked to her yesterday, she made it quite clear she had no intention of pursuing a reconciliation. I suggested a get-together between her and Roger, and she gave me a firm no.”
Cleaver seemed quite relieved when another sergeant came up and saved him from having to tiptoe out of the corner he’d painted himself into. The sergeant showed Cleaver two items, both encased in plastic bags. One was the .38 pistol from Roger’s nightstand. The other was a hunk of metal, the fatal bullet, judging from the size of it. “One shot missing from the thirty-eight,” the sergeant said to Cleaver, but Cleaver took more of an interest in the slug.
“Hey, Butch. Ever see one like this?” He held the bullet where I could inspect it.
It looked like it had started life as a perfect sphere before running into Roger Rabbit and a wall. “Seems to be an old-fashioned musket ball from a black-powder long-rifle or a flintlock pistol.”
“That’s my guess, too. You run into any antique gun collectors in this case?”
“Can’t say I have.”
Cleaver returned the sack to his sergeant. “Process them both through ballistics,” he instructed.
Cleaver picked up Roger’s cigar box, opened it, and saw the carrots inside. His granite jaw cracked upward slightly at either end of his mouth. Poor guy. But that’s what happens when you hang around with ‘toons all day. You start to develop a sense of humor. Next thing you know, nobody takes you seriously anymore, and you wind up laughing yourself straight into the morgue. “The deceased have any enemies you know of?” asked Cleaver.
I shrugged. “Who could hate a rabbit?”
Just then another police car squealed up outside. The rear door opened, and out came Captain Rusty Hudson. He worked the human side and had a well-earned reputation as the most feared kind of law-and-order fanatic, one with a self-starter but no brake. He wrapped up his assignments so quickly and so neatly that he routinely had the lowest active
case load of any human detective. I wondered why the department had sent its superstar to investigate a case involving a dead rabbit.
Hudson came inside, took a look around, and saw me. “Finally found your level down here with the rest of the crazies, huh, Valiant?”
“Nice to see you again, too, Captain,” I replied.
“What can I do for you, sir?” asked Cleaver. Even though they held the same rank, the department’s age-old unwritten law required a ‘toon officer to defer to a human, and everybody who knew Hudson knew he would make life extremely miserable for any ‘toon colleague deviating from tradition.
“When I heard the report about this Roger Rabbit character being killed,” said Hudson, “I figured I’d better shag it right over here before your bunch gets too far into their search. No offense, but I’ve had lots of problems with the ‘toon side losing evidence on me before.”
“What kind of evidence you after?”
“A thirty-eight-caliber revolver, maybe has one shot gone. You find anything like that when you tossed this place?”
Cleaver nodded. “Sure did. Upstairs in the nightstand. One bullet fired. I sent it to ballistics. Why? You got something on it?”
“I have reason to suspect it was the murder weapon in a human homicide last night.”
“A human homicide? Who?” I asked.
Hudson looked at me the way people look at escargot when they find out that means snails. “You got a reason to be here, gumshoe? You a witness, a suspect, or what?”
“He was employed by the rabbit,” explained Cleaver. “I was just taking his statement when you arrived.”
Hudson nodded to show he understood that police work often forced officers to associate against their wills with guys like me. He expanded his narrative, but for Cleaver’s benefit, not mine. “About one this morning we got a call from a hysterical woman who turned out to be this rabbit’s wife. Seems she lives with a guy named Rocco DeGreasy, a big wheel in the comic industry. She was out late. When she came home, she saw a light on in DeGreasy’s study. She went in to check and found DeGreasy slumped across his desk, dead.”