by Gary K. Wolf
“Knock off the snappy patter, Toner. I’m no sidewalk sucker. You know it as well as I do. My name’s Eddie Valiant.” I showed him my license, and he copied off its number. The man had gone round the block with gumshoes before. “I’m a private detective investigating Rocco DeGreasy’s murder.”
“So what does that have to do with me?”
I handed him the photos of the stolen strips. “You ever see these before?”
He gave them barely a glance before tossing them back to me like a fistful of spuds in a game of hot potato. “Yes, I’m familiar with them. I had them on consignment here in the gallery. Up until today, that is, when I sent them out to their new owner.”
“And who might that be?”
He plucked a piece of thread off his lapel and deposited it into a tubular wooden wastebasket that had the right proportions to be the box the stork had delivered him in. “All right, Valiant. You already know or you wouldn’t be poking around here. I sold them to Rocco DeGreasy. I got a check in the mail from him this morning for the full purchase price. I sent him the strips by messenger.”
“How did Rocco first find out you had them?”
He crossed his arms and legs in the same direction, in the same motion, the way a seated barnyard ‘toon would, except he didn’t turn himself into a pretzel in the process. “Through the efforts of a gentleman who earns his living matching up wealthy collectors with interesting objects. When he makes a connection, he takes a cut off each end, from buyer and seller both. He put Rocco and me together.”
“This matchmaker got a name?”
Toner crooked a bony finger and scratched his head. “Strange, but his name escapes me. I’m really very terrible with names. I keep meaning to take one of those memory courses, but I can never remember when they’re being held.” A fat lot of cooperation I could expect here. “So this mysterious matchmaker showed Rocco DeGreasy the photos. What then?”
“Rocco bought them. I sent him the works within an hour after getting his check.”
“How come so fast?”
“Service, Mister Valiant, service. The hallmark of my business.”
“I suppose it didn’t have anything to do with getting them off the premises as soon as possible? I suppose you had no idea those strips were stolen?”
Toner puckered his lips. Press a bugle to them, and I just knew “God Bless America” would come out the other end. “Stolen? My word. Imagine that. Had I known, I would have turned the nasty things over to the proper authorities immediately.”
“How did you originally come to have them?” Toner swayed ever so gently from side to side. “The strips came to the gallery one day via messenger. The letter with them asked if I would be interested in handling their sale. The letter stated that the strips belonged to a wealthy old family that had fallen upon hard times. This family was being forced to part with some very dear and very precious possessions, including the aforementioned strips. The letter stressed the need for upmost discretion, to protect this family from the ill publicity that would certainly befall it should its plight become known. I sent the messenger back with a note informing the family that I would certainly do my best to secure top dollar for these works on its behalf.”
“This family have a name?”
“Most families do. This one never said.”
“How about an address?”
“Sorry, no. In the interest of discretion, they instructed me to send their cut to a downtown post office box.”
“Got the box number?”
“Sad to say, I do not. I’m such a nit when it comes to keeping records of such matters.”
Talking to Hiram Toner was pretty much like running on a treadmill, lots of effort, but no forward motion. A short dose of him, and I began to understand why guys go off and live on mountaintops. “I’m not diddling with you anymore, Toner. I’m turning this whole sleazy mess over to the cops. Explain your nameless family to them.”
He dismissed my threat with a smile almost longer than he was wide. “Do as you see fit. I have no fear of the police. In fact the police and I are old friends. They pop by and inspect my merchandise quite regularly. As you can see from the fact that I’m still open for business, they have yet to find anything remiss.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
He turned his smile into a smarmy grin that hinted he and he alone had a foolproof method for beating the system.
I wished him well in fulfilling his fantasy.
When I was a kid I patronized a soda shop where for twenty-five cents I got a comic book, a double dip cone, and more candy than I could stuff in a gunny sack. A guy we called Pops ran the joint, and still does.
I walked in and said hello.
Pops peered at me through eyeglasses not quite as big as my car’s headlights. “Well fiddle-dee-dee!” Pops always talked like a man with a ‘toon caught in his throat, a lot of hi-de-hos, by-gums, and Land-o’-Goshens. “Eddie? Eddie Valiant? That you?”
“You got it, Pops. What’s good today?”
He pointed an arthritic finger at a box of candy that probably had been there the first time I came in twenty years ago, and hadn’t been that fresh then. “Got some tasty jujubees and some sweet bottles.” He held up a hollow parafin bottle filled with green syrup. The thing had been on his shelf so long the syrup had turned as solid as the wax surrounding it. “You used to like these pretty well, as I recall.”
I slid a double sawbuck across the counter. “Give me this many jujubees.”
By the look on his face I must have just doubled his yearly gross income. “I don’t think I’ve got that many,” he said, clearly afraid he was about to blow his biggest sale of the decade.
I gave him a brand new lease on life. “Make it an assortment, then. Whatever you got. Surprise me.”
He went through his boxes picking a handful of stale candy out of each. I can’t remember when I’ve seen anybody so happy.
“You still keep up with comics the way you did in the old days, Pops?”
He showed me a set of teeth with more gaps than a guilty man’s alibi. “You bet your life I do. Read every one that comes out. Have to use a magnifying glass anymore to make out the words, but I keep plugging away at them. Right-a-rootie.”
Like I said. Definitely a man with a ‘toon caught in his throat.
I fished out the burned negative I’d found in Rocco’s fireplace. “Know what comic this might be?”
He studied it through a magnifying glass large enough to have started life as a porthole in the Queen Mary. “Can’t say that I do. It looks sort of familiar, but I can’t place it right off. Shouldn’t be too hard to find, though. Every comic company uses its own numbering system. I ought to be able to track this one down easy enough.”
I pulled another twenty out of my wallet. “Here’s something to get you going.”
He made my money vanish with a skill that would have impressed Mandrake the Magician and gave me a duplicate of the long, hard going-over I get from patrol cops when they catch me hanging around a decent neighborhood at an indecent hour. “You still in the detective racket, Eddie?”
“Some months more than others. This month up to my eyeballs.”
He picked a jawbreaker out of a cardboard box, popped it into his mouth, and poked random holes in it with what he had left of his teeth. “This comic you’re after. It have anything to do with a case?”
I told him it did, and I told him which one.
“No kidding.” His gumball flipped back and forth between his cheeks like he had two competing Mister Tooth Decays in there engaged in a cannon battle over his few remaining molars. “The Rocco DeGreasy murder. Do tell.” He pointed toward a section of his comic rack with more webs on it than you’d find on Spiderman’s laundry line. “I got a big bunch of his syndicate’s stuff over there. Hasn’t been moving too good lately, and DeGreasy’s got this policy of no returns. You want my opinion, I say he got knocked off by an overstocked newsboy.”
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nbsp; I patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks for the tip, Pops. I’ll check it out. In the meantime, I’d appreciate whatever you can dig up on that comic I gave you.”
“Be my pleasure,” he said. “Always happy to assist a force of the law. I’ll get right on it.”
I gave him my card and asked him to contact me when he got results.
I called Big Art at the pool hall I used for an answering service. He checked behind the cigar counter and found one message for me, from the rabbit. Roger had connected with my phone company contact and discovered that, the evening he died, Rocco had placed two calls, one to the DeGreasy art gallery, one to Carol Masters’s studio. He had talked to the gallery for ten minutes, and to Carol Masters for five. I wondered what about.
The rabbit had also done some productive spadework on backtracking the teakettle. The Alice in Wonderland prop man had bought it from a ‘toontown junkman, and the rabbit was on his way to interview him.
The rabbit said he would call in later for further instructions. I asked Big Art to tell the rabbit to check around with local messenger services and find out which one had delivered the stolen artwork to Hiram Toner at the Hi Tone Gallery of Comic Art.
Next I swung by the office, mainly because it boasted the cheapest drinks in town. When I pulled up outside, I found Clever Cleaver’s car parked at the curb. Since I’ve never been known for my good sense, I went in anyway.
He was waiting for me in the hall. He’d been there for quite a spell, judging from the number of scorch marks his smoky-yellow cigarette puffs had branded into the carpet.
“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” I asked, letting us both inside.
He went straight to my bottom desk drawer, hauled out my bottle, and held it to the light. It contained enough for one whopper or two petites. “You don’t mind, do you, Butch?” he said, pouring the bottle’s contents into a single glass. “After all, I am company.”
I shrugged and shut my mouth to keep my tongue from licking my lips.
He tossed down the last of my hootch and ejected a few projectile-shaped ear puffs, which came at me as low and hard as his next statement. “Get off the Roger Rabbit case,” he said, biting down hard on every word and spitting them one by one in my direction. “I got the wife pegged as the killer, and I’m about this near to proving it.” He sent up two parallel lines so close together you would have been hard pressed to pass a hangman’s noose between them. “You keep poking around, you’re liable to screw up my play, and that would make me very unhappy. So lay off Roger Rabbit.” He took a pencil out of his coat pocket, underlined his words, and stuck them to my wall where I’d have to cover them with a picture, paint them over, or spend the rest of my life looking at them every time I sat down at my desk.
“Sorry to ruin your tough-guy rendition, Captain, but you got your facts wrong. I’m not investigating Roger’s murder. I agree with you one hundred percent. Jessica Rabbit did it, and I wish you all the luck in the world in nailing her for it. I’m after whoever got Rocco DeGreasy.”
That brought him up short. “You kidding me? Roger Rabbit killed DeGreasy. There’s no doubt about it. Rusty Hudson put it to bed once and for all when the lab found the rabbit’s pawprints all over the fatal thirty-eight.”
That bit of information, which came as news to me, sure gave the case an interesting twist. “I know it sounds like a lost cause, but I’m not exactly swamped with work right now, so I think I’ll putter around with it awhile longer, anyway.”
“Suit yourself. Keep chasing hobgoblins until you’re blue in the face. Just don’t mess me up.”
“Perish the thought. I would like to know one thing about your investigation, though. Did your boys search Roger’s house?”
“You bet. They gave it a thorough going-over.”
“Did they, by chance, take Roger’s teakettle with them when they left?”
Until he knew where this was leading, Cleaver wasn’t so anxious to go. “His teakettle? What could they have wanted with his teakettle? And why do you care, anyway?” His left eyebrow assumed the shape of a hunchbacked caterpillar.
“I collect them, and I need the rabbit’s to complete my set.”
Cleaver scrambled the air alongside his temple. “Valiant, sometimes you slay me.”
He left me with an empty bottle and another big hole in my puzzle.
Chapter: •22•
Carol Masters’s secretary sent me to Carol’s shooting location, a deserted warehouse in Hogan’s Alley, a low-life section of town, where I saw enough denizens floating around to cast an urban remake of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I parked my car, kissed my hubcaps good-bye, and went inside the warehouse.
One of the city’s finest intercepted me and demanded to know my business. I flashed him my license, and he let me by.
Before I had gone another twenty feet, I passed at least eight or nine more cops. Even for Hogan’s Alley, that much security seemed excessive. I wondered how Carol rated it, then I saw her photographic subject, none other than Dick Tracy, every cop’s idol. That explained it. The precinct desk sergeant probably had to hold a lottery to select which of his many volunteers got to come over here and guard their hero’s privacy.
In the episode being shot, Tracy was going up against Mush Face, a guy with a pug resembling a bowl of barely set Wheat-ena. Mush Face had the drop on the ace detective, but, since justice always triumphs, by the time the sequence ended, Tracy had turned the tables and was carting old ugly off to the hoosegow.
A bunch of cops came up to Tracy afterward and asked him for his autograph. While he wrote, Tracy delivered a short sermon on the importance of strict law enforcement in modern society. The cops roundly applauded. A few of them snabbed his word balloons and told him they planned to frame them and hang them above the station house door. The way the cops treated him, you might have thought he really was a cop instead of an actor playing a cop. A guy like Tracy could probably get elected chief of police on the basis of his dashing reflection in the fun-house mirror. In the comic business they call that the power of make-believe. In our nation’s capital, they call it politics.
I offered to give Carol Masters a hand loading her camera stuff into her car, but I got a response so cold I was sorry I’d taken the wool lining out of my trench coat. “I can manage perfectly well by myself, Mister Valiant.” She dragged a box of equipment out the door and across the sidewalk toward her car. She got it as far as the trunk, but couldn’t lift it inside. I grabbed it, muscled it in, and did the same with two more.
“That wasn’t necessary,” she said. “I really could have done it without you.”
“It’s great to be appreciated,” I cracked. “Sometimes I wonder how I keep from getting a swelled head.”
She pulled out the kind of key ring you usually find connected to a jailer and opened the door to her car. She slid into the front seat, positioned the rearview mirror around so she could see herself in it, and perked up her hair with a comb. “What do you want from me now?” she said, with about as much friendliness as I used to get from my drill instructor.
I leaned on her car. It needed a good wash job, but so did I. “I want some more information on Rocco, that’s all. The cops are convinced that Rocco killed him. I think otherwise, and I’m out to prove it.”
She turned sideways in the front seat, giving me a great shot of the wonderful things that happen to a well-built female body when you twist it just right. “But why? Roger’s dead. You no longer have a client. There’s nobody to pay your bill.”
“So what does money matter if I can discover truth?”
I could tell she believed that about as much as she believed in Santa Claus, but she was sharp enough to realize that, until she answered my questions, I’d never leave her alone. “What is it you want to know?”
I went around to the other side of the car and slid in beside her. “I talked to Little Rock DeGreasy over at the gallery. He says Rocco ordered him to cancel your one-woman show
and take down your work. Any idea why?”
She dumped her comb into a purse only slightly larger than Spark Plug’s feedbag. “He did it to be ornery,” she said, “to flaunt his control over me. Rocco couldn’t stand to have people cross him, and I’d been doing a lot of that lately.”
“How so?”
“My work for ‘toon’s rights, my support of Roger Rabbit.” She turned her palms toward her, bent her fingers forward, and examined her nails. They were far from beautiful, chipped and scratched, like the nails of a rock climber clawing toward the top. “Rocco couldn’t stand uppity women. He retaliated by yanking my work.”
Dick Tracy came over to the car. I’d never seen him in person before, and I couldn’t believe how tall he was. Usually ‘toons turn actor to compensate for being shrimpy, but Tracy could look me straight in the eye with no trouble. And talk about square-jawed. I could have used his chin for a letter opener. Carol introduced us, and his grip almost broke my hand. He yakked with us for a while and impressed me as a gutsy, stand-up guy. I nearly asked him for his autograph myself.
“I understand Rocco called you the night he died,” I said after Tracy left. “What did he say?”
“Nothing much, really.” I started to light a cigarette but doused it when I saw her unsullied ashtray. A nonsmoker, but that didn’t surprise me. I had her pegged as a woman with vices a lot more complex than tobacco. “Rocco’s only reason for calling was to torment me. He crowed on and on about how he had cancelled my show. He told me he would make sure I never showed in any gallery again. It was a typically disgusting Rocco performance. I finally hung up on him.”
“How long did you talk to him?”
“I don’t know exactly. I didn’t look at the clock. I would guess about five or ten minutes.”
“Anyone with you when the call came in?”
“No, I was alone.”
“After you got off the phone, what did you do?”
“I had a stiff drink and went to bed.”
“You didn’t go out?”
“In the middle of the night? Of course not.”