by Gary K. Wolf
“Hardly a thing. Answer a few questions about your brother.”
He looked across the desk at his brother’s chair. For the first time in his life, there was nobody in it to tell him what to do. “I guess I can go that far,” he said finally.
“Swell. Oh, and also I need to look through your brother’s personal effects. See if there’s anything in there that might throw some light on who besides the rabbit might have had a motive to kill him.”
He balked slightly at that. “The cops already went through Rocco’s stuff.”
“Sure they did, but with the preconceived notion that the rabbit committed the crime. I come to the task with an open mind.”
He eyeballed the empty chair again, but it still wasn’t talking. “Go ahead and search,” he said at last.
“Would you mind?” I made shooing motions toward the door. “I’d like to do it alone. It helps me concentrate.”
“Sure.” Dominick got to his feet, happy to have an excuse for motion. “Rocco kept his stuff in his drawers. Just stick your head out when you’re done.”
Before he left, Dominick made a big production out of locking the file cabinet and his desk.
As soon as he shut the door, I picked the lock on his desk drawer.
He must have had fifty pornographic magazines of the whips and chains variety stuffed in there. I searched around but found nothing else, and I mean nothing. His drawers contained no files, no calendar, no paper, not even a pencil. I put his magazines back and locked up. With a perverted dodo like Dominick at its helm, this company would be lucky to last twelve months.
I used my picks again on the company files.
Based on what I found in there, I revised my prognosis to six months. The company’s financial statements showed that the DeGreasys had been steadily losing money for nearly a year. They had less operating capital than I did, and I had enough checks kited to lift me halfway up the hill to the poorhouse.
I checked under “R” and found one of those green cardboard dividers the cops put into place whenever they take something out. According to the divider’s notation, they had removed the Roger Rabbit file. I fanned through the rest of the folders, but they’d taken nothing else. Obviously, as far as the cops were concerned, Roger was it.
I closed up the files and was just about to start in on Rocco’s desk when something clicked, something odd. The file drawers appeared to be a few inches shorter than the file cabinet properT pulled the cabinet away from the wall and examined its backside. It took me a while, but I finally found it, a secret compartment. When you pressed a certain screw, the whole rear of the cabinet swung away to reveal a narrow space maybe two inches deep. I had expected to find a few file folders inside, but instead the space held snapshots of original segments of comic-strip artwork. Each piece of artwork contained a framed print of a comic strip and the negative used to produce it, the same kind of stuff Rocco had hanging in here on the walls. If I remembered rightly, he had said such segments were worth big bucks. This artwork portrayed Baby Herman strips. Roger Rabbit appeared in all of them, so they must be fairly recent. Each segment had been signed by its photographer—Carol Masters in every case.
I flipped one of the snapshots over and found a price penciled on the back. Five grand. Certainly not small potatoes on my side of town, but hardly the mighty moola Rocco had led me to believe the stuff fetched. Of course what I knew about art you could put into one blank of a paint-by-numbers set. Maybe these were inferior quality segments and didn’t command very high a price. But if that were the case, why go to so much trouble to hide them?
I studied the segments up close, but couldn’t see any difference between them and the ones on the wall. One of the segments did have a familiar look to it, but I couldn’t place it, and it was hardly likely that I’d have seen it in the paper since I never read the funnies. I put the snapshots in my pocket, closed up the compartment, and pushed the filing cabinet back into place.
Next I went to work on Rocco’s desk.
He kept his desk calendar inside his upper center drawer. I checked it for yesterday and discovered he had penciled in an appointment at home with someone he identified only by the initials SS. The meeting was set for eleven o’clock P.M., barely an hour before he had been killed.
In his bottom drawer I found a few books on ancient mythology, and that was about it.
I stuck my head out the door and asked Dominick to rejoin me.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I answered. “How about giving me some background to set my findings into perspective?”
“Shoot.”
“What’s your opinion of Jessica Rabbit?”
He picked up a letter opener and jabbed it so hard into his desktop blotter that it cut through to the wood beneath. I wondered if anybody in the world besides Roger saw any good in that woman. “She was a bimbo when he met her, and she’s still a bimbo. I never could figure out what he saw in her.”
“How did they meet?”
“Rocco discovered her dancing in a slimy downtown strip club. He took her out of there, groomed her, bought her expensive clothes, and taught her to act. As her way of saying thanks, she dumped him for a stupid rabbit.”
“But she did come back to him,” I pointed out.
He pulled the letter opener up and took a piece of the blotter with it. “Sure she came back to him, but only when she found out that the rabbit couldn’t give her what Rocco could. She was out for nobody but herself, and Rocco would have been better off without her. I told him not to take her back, but the guy loved her so much he would have forgiven her anything.”
“The word is that Jessica pressured Rocco into giving Roger a contract. You know anything about that?”
“Not really. Like I said, I never got involved much in the business end of it. I personally never wanted to sign the rabbit. I never thought he had all that much talent, but Rocco insisted, although he never once gave me a good reason why. Said it was just a hunch he had, a feeling. But I always thought, pretty much like everybody else did, that it was really Jessica behind it. He took the rabbit on because Jessica asked him to. Sure, it turned out to be the right move. The rabbit wound up making a spiffy second banana, but nobody would have guessed that going in.”
“Roger insisted that Rocco promised him a solo strip. Any truth to that?”
“I dunno. Like I said, I didn’t get involved much with that end of it, but it wouldn’t surprise me. If Rocco wanted someone bad enough he’d promise them anything. Never put it into the contract though. He’d tell the character that it wasn’t necessary, that it was his word, and he always kept his word.”
“Did he?”
“You kidding?” Dominick tried to laugh, but I don’t think he had ever learned how. “Nobody could lie like Rocco.”
“Supposing for a minute that Roger didn’t kill Rocco, do you think that Jessica could have?”
“I can’t figure why. Rocco gave her everything she wanted. It would have been like snuffing the goose that laid the golden egg.”
“Does Jessica stand to inherit Rocco’s estate?”
He stoked up a slim, black, unfiltered cigarette, centered it in his mouth, and blew smoke out of either side around it. “I don’t know. The will ain’t been read yet. The lawyer does it tomorrow right after the funeral.”
“You know the rabbit’s dead, too.”
He flipped his match into his wastebasket. He didn’t have to worry about starting a fire. His wastebasket held no paper. He was either very neat or very unproductive. No question which got my vote. “I heard, and I think it’s a real shame.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I think it’s a shame that somebody else got to him before I did.” He hacked another piece out of his blotter. “After what he did to my brother, it would have given me great pleasure to shoot that rabbit myself.”
“Any idea who might have spared you the trouble?”
He shrugged and shook his head.
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br /> “Do you think Jessica could have done it?”
“Possible, I suppose. I think she could kill anybody, any time, anywhere.”
I held up the comic strip segments I had found in the secret compartment. “You know anything about these?”
Dominick took them and looked them over. He read them, but only with great difficulty, by running his fingers across them and sounding out the words. “Where did you get these? You didn’t have them when you came in.”
“They were in Rocco’s bottom desk drawer. What are they?”
“They’re some segments that disappeared from Rocco’s gallery about a month ago. Rocco had this place downtown that he used as an outlet for this kind of art. His son, Little Rock, runs it for him. One day these segments turned up missing from there. Little Rock couldn’t explain how. Rocco never reported it because he didn’t want to publicize the sloppy way the kid ran the gallery. He figured that would only invite in more thieves.”
“What about the prices on the back?”
Dom turned the segments over. At least he read numbers. “I don’t keep up much with prices, but these look to be awful low. It could be that somebody offered them to Rocco for sale. He dealt in original segments all the time, so it would be natural for somebody who had them to see if Rocco wanted to buy. Maybe the seller didn’t know they were stolen. Or maybe the thief got Rocco to pay to get them back. Rocco probably would have done it to protect his kid’s reputation.”
“Your brother had an appointment with somebody last night, somebody with the initials SS. You know who that might have been?”
“SS? Beats me.”
“What about mythology?”
“Huh?”
“The study of ancient legends. Your brother had some books on the subject in his desk. You have any idea why?”
“Probably research material for a new strip. He did a lot of that. He’d get the idea, work out and cast the characters, and then turn it over to some photographer and writer team to script up and shoot.”
I took the comic segments back from Dominick. “You mind if I hang onto these for a while?”
“Be my guest, just make sure I get them back.”
I was almost out the door when, almost as an afterthought, Dominick said, “By the way, as long as you’re poking into that rabbit’s affairs, maybe you could do me a favor.”
“If I can. What?”
Dominick lowered his voice and became as coy as a debutante sidling up to a bowl of spiked punch. “Well, when Rocco and the rabbit were having their run-in, the rabbit one day swiped something out of the office here. It was a family momento, and it was very precious to Rocco and me. The rabbit took it, I think, because he figured he might be able to hold it for ransom or something. I’d appreciate it if you could keep your eye out for it. If you come across it, I’d be willing to pay you to get it back.”
“What exactly was it?”
“Nothing valuable. It’s a teakettle.”
“A teakettle, you say?”
“Yeah. It belonged to my grandmother. She gave it to me and Rocco just before she died. We, ah, used it to brew tea here in the office.”
“Describe it for me,” I said, although I had a sneaky hunch exactly how the description would go.
“It weighs about three pounds and has gray paint on the outside. There’s not much else I can tell you about it. It looks like any other cheap teakettle. Will you keep your eye out for it?”
“You bet. Glad to do it. You wouldn’t believe how interested I am in finding that teakettle.”
The guy could have done wonders with oranges at breakfast judging from the way he wrapped his gigantic hands around mine and squeezed. “You know, Valiant,” he said, “I’m starting to like you.”
Now that really made my day. I can honestly say I had met ‘toons brighter than this bozo.
Chapter: •17•
Fresh from a session with one dumbbell, I wanted nothing less than to spend my lunch hour with another, but no such luck. My apartment door lock bore the same amateurish pick marks I had found on the locks at my office. Roger Rabbit, apprentice locksmith, strikes again. I opened the door and went in.
I found the rabbit bustling around in the kitchen, making a monumental production out of throwing stuff into a pot. “Welcome home,” he said, dipping a big wooden spoon into his bubbling cauldron and bailing out a taste. “Lunch will be ready in a jiff.” He had a bath towel wrapped around his waist apron-fashion. “I hope you don’t mind my using your kitchen. Since you’ve been so kind to me, I thought a nice meal was the least I could do to repay you. So I picked up a few odds and ends at the store, and threw something together.”
I squeezed past him, opened the cupboard under the sink, and poured myself a dose of liquid composure.
The rabbit handed me a cocktail napkin. A cocktail napkin! I wondered if he also had a cigarette girl stashed in the hall ready to flounce in and sell me coffin nails at two bucks a pack. I tossed down another slug, wiped my lips on the rabbit’s cocktail napkin—it had “Down the hatch!” printed across it in ten different languages, wadded it up, and stuffed it into the trash deeply enough, I hoped, so the janitor wouldn’t find it and give me a rough time about going high class on him. “Quit picking my locks,” I said, as sternly as you can to a rabbit wearing an apron. “Here.” I reached into the drawer where I kept my spare keys, took out two, and gave them to Roger. “This one opens my apartment, this one opens my office. Do me a favor and use them from now on.”
The way he looked at them you’d have thought I’d just given him the crown jewels of England. “Thank you, Mister Valiant,” he said. “I’ll guard them with my life.”
“And knock off this Mister Valiant stuff. Call me Eddie like everybody else.”
“Oh, yes, thank you ... Eddie.” He flashed me a grin sunny enough to grow pansies in a window box.
I went to the stove, lifted his pot lid, and found a lot of vegetables boiling in water. “What’s this?”
“It’s ratatouille,” he said.
“That mean you make it with rats?” You never knew. ‘Toons eat some of the weirdest stuff.
He guffawed. “No, hardly. It’s a vegetable stew. You prepare it with eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, swiss cheese, and spices. It’s very tasty.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it is, and it sounds great, but I’m on this special diet. Doctor’s orders.” I opened my freezer, took out a turkey pot pie and some frozen french fries, and slid them into the oven. “You’re back early,” I said. “Give up on being a detective?”
“Hardly.” The rabbit proudly puffed out his skinny chest. A mountaineering mouse would have had a field day scaling his protruding ribs. “I finished both my assignments, so I came back here to report in.”
“You got everything I told you to?”
“Sure did.” The rabbit wiped his paws on his towel apron, went into my closet, and took a book from out of my pea coat pocket. The book, published by some scholarly society with about ten words in its name, all of them three syllables or more, traced cartoon history from the late eighteen hundreds on. Roger opened the book to a page near the end. “There it is,” he said.
I took the book. The page showed the tea-party scene out of the Alice in Wonderland remake. Alice herself sat at one end of a long, rustic table; the white rabbit sat at the other. In between them sat a titmouse, a grinning Cheshire cat, and a beagle who looked kind of familiar. I tapped my finger on the dog. “Who’s the mutt?” I asked.
Roger’s cheeks flushed a bright red. “That’s me. I told you I had a minor role in the film.”
“You played a beagle?”
Roger stirred his pot a few stout licks, banging the spoon vigorously on the edge to clean if off. “The rabbit part went to Bugs Bunny. He was really hot that year, and totally monopolized rabbit roles. He had just won an Academy Award, and everybody wanted him. While he made this movie, he also appeared on Broadway in that redo of Harvey where the human’s the invisible one, an
d he shot a million commercials. With nothing in the rabbit line available, I read for the part of the dog and got it. It wasn’t much, but it was something.”
I studied the photo. “I’m impressed. You look great. If I didn’t know, I’d swear you were really a beagle.”
“Thanks. I worked hard at it. I wore brown face makeup and folded my ears to either side of my head. And I spent hours learning to woof. In my big scene I fetched a stick for the Queen of Hearts. I got a brief mention from Rex Reed in his review. It’s at the house in my scrapbook. If we ever go back, I’ll show it to you. It’s the first real review I ever got. I can still quote it. ‘A young unknown named Roger Rabbit played the beagle so convincingly it sent fleas up and down my spine.’”
“This the teakettle?” I pointed to the object set in the middle of the photographed table.
“That’s it. See what I told you. Nothing but a cheap, ordinary teakettle.”
“Certainly seems to be.” I grabbed the page and ripped it out of the book.
“Do you know what you just did?” wailed the rabbit. “You just tore a page out of that book!”
“Good observation. We’ll make a detective out of you yet.”
“But that’s a library book. You’re not supposed to tear pages out of a library book. It’s on my card. I’ll have to pay a fine.”
I looped my arm around his shoulder. “Sometimes in this detective game you have to step outside the law.”
My oven timer informed me that my lunch had thawed.
Roger and I sat down at my kitchen table, he with a bowlful of his veggie stew, me with my pot pie and french fries. “You stole that teakettle off the movie set, you say.”
“Right. As a souvenir.” He pointed to the pot of stew. “There’s plenty in there. You sure you won’t have some?”
It did smell pretty good—for rabbit food, that is. Curiosity got the better of me. “Maybe just a taste,” I said.
He ladled me out a generous helping.