by Gary K. Wolf
“You got an estimated time of death?” I asked, but Hudson ignored me.
“I did some quick checking around,” he continued, “and found out that this rabbit had previously threatened DeGreasy’s life, in front of witnesses during a photo session at his photographer’s studio. I also discovered that this rabbit bears a grudge because DeGreasy failed to honor a promise to give him his own strip. As if I needed more, DeGreasy has also grabbed the rabbit’s girl. Put that all together, it spells murder. I’ll give odds that the bullet we found in DeGreasy turns out to have come from the rabbit’s gun.”
“Were you able to pinpoint an exact time of death?” asked Cleaver, repeating my earlier question.
Since this time it had come through channels, Hudson answered. “We figure about midnight.”
“Judging from the hardness of the rabbit’s final balloon, he got it about an hour later. You check Jessica Rabbit’s alibi for then?” Cleaver asked.
“No, why should I? What’s she got to do with anything? The rabbit plugged DeGreasy. There’s no doubt in my mind.”
“Great. That takes care of your murder. What about mine?” Cleaver’s word balloon came out so frosty you almost needed a squeegee to read it. “These two deaths are too closely related to be a coincidence. Suppose Jessica Rabbit saw Roger kill Rocco, followed the rabbit back here, and executed him for his crime. A perfect motive. The rabbit shot her lover, so Jessica shot the rabbit.”
“I’ll let you solve that part of it,” said Hudson, buffing his fingernails on his lapel with such intense concentration that a casual onlooker might suspect it was the most important thing he had to do for the entire rest of the day. “When the report comes back from ballistics, I’ll stamp my case closed. What do I care about who blew away some bunny.” With that he left the house, got into his car, and roared off, siren on and lights flashing, a showboat to the end.
Cleaver took a peek through a telescope set up in the front window, but it was way too early to see any stars. “Did that rabbit have what it takes to kill a man?” Cleaver asked me.
“I don’t know. On the one hand, he really hated Rocco DeGreasy. But on the other hand, who can picture a killer rabbit?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Cleaver. He drifted off into the mental never-never land where ‘toons seem to spend three-quarters of their time.
“You finished with me, Captain?”
“What?” A series of tiny balloons, each containing an itsy-bitsy question mark, bubbled out of his head. The balloons popped, letting the question marks parachute to the floor. I was tempted to scoop them up and pocket them, since I knew a book publisher who bought them to cut type-setting costs in his line of whodunits.
“Sure,” Cleaver said, “you can go. Just don’t leave town without checking with me first. And one other thing. I don’t know how you felt about this rabbit, or if you took his case seriously, but from here on out this affair belongs to me. Official police investigation. You want to keep your license, you stay out. Understand?”
“One hundred percent,” I said. “I won’t interfere.” I jammed my hand into my pocket and crossed my fingers. “I promise.”
Chapter: •14•
The elevator in my office building worked so seldom that the ‘toon door-man, a strapping gorilla, made a nice chunk of change carrying people to the upper floors on his back. Today I lucked out. The elevator appeared and whisked me to the twelfth floor in less than a week, which probably set a building speed record.
My three hundred bucks a month bought me a waiting room where a secretary would sit, if I could ever afford to hire one, my office proper, and a small John. The place normally rented for two fifty, but I got charged an extra half-yard because of the view. Open the window, look up, and you see the sky. Look down, and you see the street. Look straight out, and you see the brickwork of the building next door. Great place. Shabby and overpriced, but it suited me better than one of those chrome-and-glass stakes that builders keep pounding into the heart of what used to be a picturesque city.
I noticed something wacky as soon as I took out my keys to open the outer door. The lock was badly scratched, sure sign of an amateur thief. The pros go in and out without leaving a trace, but amateurs always botch it. I slammed open the door and entered the waiting room the way I learned in the Corps, low and fast. I kicked the door shut on my way past, but there was nobody hiding behind it. It didn’t take me long to search the waiting room, since it contained only two folding chairs and a card table with some hardly thumbed magazines on it. Anybody small enough to hide behind any of that stuff didn’t really worry me.
I checked the door connecting this room with my office proper. It, too, bore signs of having been picked. I had a wall safe in my office, and in that I kept my gun. Just my luck to walk in on a burglar and get shot with my own piece.
I took a few deep breaths, opened the door, and went in Marine style again, except this time I added a forward somersault, which might not have been the greatest idea in the world. You have to practice those things a lot or they leave you dizzy, which is just how I wound up when I came out of it. I grabbed the edge of my desk for support and tried to look alert. Nobody shot me, so I figured the burglar had already skedaddled.
But I was wrong. When the room straightened out, I found him, sitting behind my desk, brazen as you please. One thing for sure. I’d have no trouble picking this clown out of a lineup. He wore a long purple coat, a fireman’s hat, and a T-shirt that said, “Kiss me, I’m fuzzy.” If I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn it was ...
“I’m sorry I had to break in on you like this, Mister Valiant, I mean picking your lock and all, but I really didn’t know where else to go, or who else to turn to.”
“Roger? Roger Rabbit?” I went around to his side of the desk, opened the bottom drawer, took out the office bottle, and swigged down a healthy glug. I stared at the rabbit until he got the message and shagged his tail out of my chair. I brushed a few stray pieces of hair off the seat and sat down. “Start explaining,” I said, “and it better be good.”
He went to the window and took in the fifty-dollar view. “I know what you think,” he said. “You think I’m really Roger. But I’m not. I’m his doppelganger, his mentally created duplicate.”
“Yeah, I know about that stuff,” I said, remembering Jessica Rabbit falling to pieces around me.
“Well, Roger conjured me up last night about eleven,” the rabbit went on. “He had a photo session this morning, and he needed a pair of red suspenders to wear at it. He gave me a fifty-dollar bill, and told me to go out and buy him some.”
“He sent you out in the middle of the night to find him a pair of red suspenders?”
“Yes. He ... I mean, we ... I mean, I can be very impulsive at times. Anyway, I left and started hitting those variety stores you see around, the ones that stay open late at night. I must have gone to twenty of them and couldn’t find a pair of red suspenders anywhere. I found green, blue, yellow, polka-dot, orange, striped ...”
I did a few wheelies with my index finger. He caught my drift and kept his story rolling.
“When I finally found a store with the right color suspenders, they couldn’t change my bill. I hung around downtown until my bank opened, broke the bill, went back, and bought the suspenders.” He pointed to a wrapped package lying on top of my desk. “I returned home about ten this morning and found the place crawling with cops. I overheard two of them describing what had happened. That I, or rather the real me, had been killed. I didn’t know what to do. I’m not very decisive when it comes to emergencies. I suppose I should have identified myself to the police, but I was afraid to. I feared that whoever got to the real Roger might come after me, too. Then I thought of you.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Since I’m supposed to be dead, I didn’t want to wait for you out in the hall where somebody might recognize me, so I picked your lock. I didn’t think you would mind. You don’t, do you? I
t’s actually my first try at it. As I told you before, I’ve always had a hankering to be a detective. I believe every detective should know how to pick locks. I’m sure you do, don’t you? So I bought some lock-picking tools I saw advertised on the inside cover of a matchbook.” He showed me a set of picks only slightly smaller and less clumsy than the iron bar I use to pry the hubcaps off my car. “They came with a self-instruction manual. Pretty neat, huh?”
“Tell me,” I said, after giving the office bottle another howdy-doody. “How long before you start to, you know, fall apart?”
The bunny stared with deep foreboding at the far wall, as though the hand of God had just inscribed there the recipe for hasenpfeffer. “Hard to tell. Roger put a large jolt of mental energy into creating me. I could easily last forty-eight hours before I ... until I ...”
A dark, watery boo-hoo balloon plopped to the floor, but I give him this much, it didn’t spill any tears. “You have any idea who murdered me?” he asked.
“Yeah, I got an idea. You get a call from anyone last night?” I asked. “Or anybody come to see you?”
He shrugged, a ridiculous move for a guy with next to no shoulders. “I don’t know. The mental strain of creating a doppel tends to disrupt short-term memory. I remember up to early yesterday evening, but not much after.”
“You don’t remember getting a call from your wife? Saying that she wanted to come over for a talk?”
“Jessica? Jessica carne by to see me? Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.” Talk about happiness. If Roger had been Flash Gordon, he would have been outside his rocket ship swinging on a star. “I knew you could pull it off, Mister Valiant. I knew I picked the right man. I knew you could get me Jessica back. How did you do it? Put the arm on Rocco? That it? I’ll bet that’s it. You found out what he had on her and forced him to stop.”
With a swift left jab, I punched a jumbo hole in the biggest of his balloons. “Not so fast. I don’t know for sure whether or not Jessica came to see you last night. If she did, it wasn’t for a reconciliation.”
“Why then?”
“The police think she killed you, and I go along with them.”
The rabbit shook his head so vigorously hjs flopping ears left spiral marks on the fur around his head. “Not a chance. She loves me! She would never do something like that. What makes you suspect her?”
“For starters, your last words.” I took out my notebook and read them to him. “No fair! You got me everything? Jessica. My contract.” I turned the notebook and laid it on the corner of the desk so he could read his final statement himself.
Twice he followed the words with his finger and both times wound up in exactly the same place. “Wait! I’ve got it,” he said, holding a finger straight up as if to test the wind. “I wasn’t talking to Jessica. No, I was talking about her. To someone else. To Rocco DeGreasy! I was talking about Jessica to Rocco DeGreasy, and he shot me.”
“Try again,” I said. “According to the cops, it’s the other way around. You shot him.”
“I shot who?”
“Rocco DeGreasy.”
“Rocco?” Granted, the guy acted for a living, but his googly-wide eyes and puckered nose sure said dumbfounded to me. “You mean the police think I shot Rocco?”
“Dead as a doornail. He got his about an hour before you got yours. The way the cops figure it, you went to DeGreasy’s house and killed him. Jessica saw you do it, followed you home, and took her revenge.”
“That’s ridiculous. I could never kill anybody. Not even Rocco DeGreasy.”
“You threatened to once. Remember? At a photo session? In front of two reliable witnesses.”
Roger began to bounce around so actively I checked the rug for hopscotch boxes, but I saw only lifeless shag and yesterday’s ashes. “Right. I did do that. But I didn’t mean it. I could never kill another living being. It’s not in my nature. I even sidestep ants on the street. I was being irrational that day. Look at it from my viewpoint. There I was peacefully going about my job, when in walked Rocco DeGreasy. He started giving me guff about how he and I ought to get together and resolve this ‘misunderstanding’ about my contract. That’s a direct quote. ‘Misunderstanding.’ I’ll never forget how his fat face jiggled when he said it.
“I told him there was no misunderstanding. He had promised me my own strip, and that was it. End of negotiation. That’s when he laughed at me, and I went after him. I guess I became a tad irrational, what with his laughter and this being the first time I’d seen him since he’d coerced Jessica into leaving me.”
“Assuming that he did coerce her.”
“Of course, he coerced her. I told you before, she would never have left me of her own free will. She loved me. Jessica loved me, and I’m positive she still does. Anyway, yes, I attacked Rocco that day, and, yes, I threatened to kill him, but I never intended to follow through.”
“What exactly do you remember about last night?”
Most of the rabbit’s thought balloons came up either totally blank or slightly hazy. “Not much, I’m afraid. I spent pretty much of an ordinary evening. I had dinner, watched some television, and read awhile. No visitors, no phone calls, nothing out of the ordinary.” He dribbled out a few more empty memories and finally gave up trying. “Where was Rocco killed?”
“At his home, in his study. You ever been there?”
“No, never. We conducted our dealings exclusively at his office. How was he killed?”
“He got shot with a thirty-eight-caliber revolver.”
The rabbit opened my cigar box and seemed rather disappointed to find it contained cigars. “Well, there you are. That should clear me. I’ve never fired a gun in my life, or owned one, either.”
“What about the one in your nightstand?”
Roger’s words came out with at least a yard of spacing between them, and so tiny I nearly got eye strain reading them. “What one in my nightstand?”
“A thirty-eight-caliber revolver with one bullet missing. The cops have it. They’re running it through ballistics right now, but I’d be willing to bet it turns out to be the murder weapon.”
* * *
“You’re kidding. In my nightstand? How could that be? I’ve never owned a gun in my life.”
“You have no idea how it got there?”
“None.” His eyelids rolled down. “Don’t you see? This is a frameup. Somebody is trying to saddle me with Rocco’s murder. Somebody killed him and planted the gun at my place. I probably caught them at it, and they killed me to keep me quiet. Does that make sense?”
It did, and I told him so.
“That’s it, then.” He used a big, blue bandana to wipe the perspiration off his face, and a teasing comb to refluff his fur. “You find out who killed Rocco, and you also find out who killed me. You clear my name, and you also bring my killer to justice.”
“You might not like what I find.”
“How so?”
“For starters, when I got to your house this morning, I found a musical scale trailing out of the piano. The song was ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’ That have any significance to you?”
A light bulb flashed on over Roger’s head. It was less than a five-watter, but it would get a lot brighter and a lot hotter before I was done. “It was my favorite piece. I play it a lot, and sing along.”
“I remember you telling me you serenaded Jessica the evening you proposed. ‘When You Wish Upon a Star,’ by any chance?”
The light bulb grew to twenty-five watts. “Yes, as a matter of fact, that was the song I played and sang for Jessica that evening. After that, we always considered it our song.”
“So if she had been there with you last night, it would have been natural for you to play it for her again?”
Seventy-five watts. “I suppose so, yes.”
“Now tell me about your burglar-alarm system. How does it work?”
“It’s a marvelous device. It connects to every door and window in the house. It goes on automatically when the front do
or closes. You have to disengage it after you go in and before you go out, or the thing sets off a wail you wouldn’t believe.”
“When I got to your place this morning, the door was ajar. The musical scale had gotten wrapped around the door handle. That’s how I got in without setting off the alarm. The question is, how did the killer get out?”
“Beats me.”
“Jessica lived there in that house with you for nearly a year. Did she know the code to disengage that alarm?”
A hundred watts. “Yes, she did.”
“So she could very easily have disengaged it after she shot you and walked out without setting it off?”
“Yes, I suppose she could have.”
“Did anyone else know the alarm code?”
“Sure, lots of people.”
“Name them.”
Two hundred watts and flashing caution. “OK, OK, so she was the only one.”
“Right. The only one besides you who could have gotten out without tripping the alarm. Now let’s investigate the other end. In order for the killer to get in, you had to disengage the alarm, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Would you have done that for Rocco DeGreasy?”
“Of course not.”
“His brother Dominick?”
“Noway.”
“How about Jessica?”
“Stop right here,” he said in a fragmented balloon you would expect to come out of somebody with his head buried to the shoulders in sand. “I know in my heart that Jessica did not kill me, just as I know in my heart that I did not kill Rocco DeGreasy. So you can stop that line of questioning here and now.”
“OK. Let’s try this one.” I pulled the rubber Kermit the Frog toy out of my pocket. “Ever see this before?”
Roger squeezed it several times, giggling when Kermit’s tongue unfurled. “You see them around. It’s a pretty popular toy. I can’t say I recognize this one as being any different from a hundred others I’ve seen. Where did you get it?”