Who censored Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  If she was lying, she had the technique down pat. She didn’t so much as tremble an eyelid. “What’s the deal between Little Rock and Jessica Rabbit?”

  She shook her head ruefully. “The poor guy loves her, but Jessica feels toward him the way she would toward a lottery ticket. If Little Rock inherits Rocco’s estate, Jessica’s number comes up, and she wins big. She’ll marry him and live happily ever after on his money. If he doesn’t inherit, she’ll rip him into teeny pieces and toss him into her wastebasket.”

  I pulled out my notebook and read Carol the issue number I had copied off the comic in Rocco’s fireplace. “Any idea what comic that could be?”

  She was shaking her head even before I’d finished my question. “No. There are hundreds of tiny syndicates putting out comics. Each uses its own numbering system. It could be anything.”

  “Do you know of anyone with the initials SS who may have had a grudge against Rocco?”

  “Can’t say I do. Rocco had a few ‘toons with those initials under contract, but they’re all decent, hard workers. If you’re trying to pin his murder on one of them, I think you’re way off base.”

  I hauled out the photos of the stolen artworks. “Know anything about these?”

  She flipped through them quickly, without interest.

  “They’re some strips I shot a while back. Rocco put them up for sale in his gallery. I heard somebody stole them.”

  “Odd, wouldn’t you say, that whoever did it stole only strips shot by you?”

  She shrugged. “A discriminating thief. What more can I say?” She handed the photos back.

  “Have you heard of anyone offering these works for sale or for ransom?”

  “Afraid not, but then there’s really no reason why I should. These works were never my property. Everything I shoot belongs to Rocco. It was part of our contractual arrangement, and also one of the biggest points of contention between us. I said I should have a cut of each sale. He said no.”

  “And there was nothing you could do about it?”

  “Not a thing. He owned them, lock, stock, and barrel. Pretty much the way he owned everything in his syndicate. Pretty much the way he owned Roger Rabbit. Pretty much the way he owned me.”

  Sounded like a passable motive for murder if I ever heard one.

  I asked her enough questions to get back around to the front side of the mulberry bush, and said good-bye.

  Chapter: •23•

  I got back to my apartment just in time to spruce it up for my weekly poker game. Anything lying around loose I kicked under the sofa. I swabbed last week’s dried beer off my card table, cracked open a fresh deck of pasteboards, tossed some chips into a bowl, and threw three cases of suds on ice.

  Billy Donovan arrived first. Billy was a construction worker who had drifted in from the deep South. He wore bulb-toed, clodhopper shoes, bib overalls, a gingham checked shirt, and a ratty straw hat. He sucked on a long shaft of barley grass from the shock his country kin included along with a Baggie of homemade grits, a plug of prime chawing tobacco, and a Mason jar of white lightning in their weekly Kentucky Special Care package. Whenever he won a hand, Billy slapped his knee and said “Aw, shucks.” On any given night he said it a lot. For a down-home hillbilly, he played a big-city brand of poker.

  Next came Jess Westerfninster, the moneyed one of our group. Jess was descended from a long line of distinguished forebears. His great-great-great had crossed over from the old country on board the Mayflower and had been the guy who arranged to have the nation’s first Thanksgiving dinner catered by the ‘toons the colonists found living here. For this Jess’s ancestor got his name in the history books. Another of Jess’s relatives had imported thousands of ‘toons from China to build the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. They became known as the Yellow Kids and won that relative a spot in the history books, too.

  The last person to arrive was Harry Wayne. Harry worked in a body shop and owned the snazziest set of wheels. It had started out life as a stock Chevy eight-stroker before Harry took over. He chopped and channeled the body, bored out the engine, recovered the seats, threw on a set of super-wide whitewalls, and traded a pound of hamburger to a ‘toon dragon for two flaming belches, which he glued to either side of the car just behind the front wheel wells. When Harry finished with it, that car went a hundred miles an hour standing still.

  We cut for deal. I won and called spit in the ocean. Everybody anted up. I had just dealt myself my third king, and it was starting to look like one of those nights the gods smiled down on me, when I heard an ominous sound—a key turning in my front door. Right away I could see it coming, and come it did. The door popped open, and Roger Rabbit walked in.

  Conversation around the table ceased. My buddies stared dumbfounded at the ‘toon rabbit standing in the middle of my living room carpet. Totally oblivious, Roger hopped jovially over to the card table, extended a fuzzy paw, and said, “Hello, I’m Roger, Eddie’s new roommate.” I could have crawled under the table and died.

  Naturally nobody hustled to the front of the reception line. Billy leaned over and whispered in my ear, “What’s with the ‘toon, Eddie? I thought we agreed when we started this game. No women and no ‘toons.”

  “Yes, Eddie,” Jess chimed in. “Would you mind explaining? What’s this ‘toon doing here?”

  “Did he call himself your new roommate?” asked Harry. “You mean to tell us you live with this thing?”

  Were I a religious man, my conception of the devil wouldn’t wear a red union suit and carry a pitchfork. He’d have long, furry ears, gnaw on carrots, and answer to the name of Roger. “It’s business, fellows,” I explained lamely. “The rabbit’s a client of mine. He’s staying here temporarily, until I can find him a place of his own.”

  “You’re working for a ‘toon?” said Jess incredulously.

  “Cash me in,” said Harry. “I got business elsewhere.”

  “Ditto,” said Billy. The three of them collected their money and walked out the door. I compared their cast-off hands. They were good, the betting would have been furious, and I had all three of them beat easy.

  “I’m sorry if I spoiled your game,” said Roger in letters so hangdog I expected them to bark and chase their tails. “I didn’t know you had company. If you had told me, I would have taken in a movie or something.”

  I made a royal mess out of putting the potato chips back inside their sack because I kept squeezing my hand into a fist and squashing whatever chips I held.

  Roger hopped along after me, trying to make himself useful. I felt like suggesting that the best way to do that would be to hang himself from my chandelier. “Your friends don’t like ‘toons very much, do they?” asked Roger pensively.

  “Not many humans do.” I counted my take. What with the forfeited ante and betting on the first three cards, I had made six bucks on the night—and I relied on this game to earn my monthly rent. I shut my eyes and imagined a pack of dogs chasing Roger Rabbit across a huge open field, with me close enough behind on horseback to get a front row seat at the tearing of limb from limb. “Tallyho,” I said. “Beg pardon?” said Roger. “Just thinking out loud.”

  “Oh.” Roger helped himself to a beer, but couldn’t get his fat, furry finger through the pull tab. I pretended not to notice. Let him work out his own problem for a change. “I could never figure that,” said Roger. “I mean why humans don’t like ‘toons. We’re no different from humans, not really. We have different mannerisms, and different physical makeups, and a different way of talking, but we have the same emotions. We love and hate and laugh and cry exactly the same way humans do.” He tried his ears, his toes, and even his nose, but struck out all the way around. No part of him was small enough to fit into the ring.

  I yanked the can away from him, popped it open, and handed it back. No big deal. I would have done the same for any bum on the street. Yet from the way the rabbit reacted, you might have thought I’d just crowned him Little King. “Too bad more
humans couldn’t have your attitude toward us, Eddie,” he gushed.

  “Yeah, too bad.” Because there wouldn’t be a ‘toon left alive. I chugged my beer and headed toward my room for eight hours of much needed hibernation.

  “Don’t you want to hear what I found out about the teakettle?” His words circled my head and looped around my shoulders the way a cowboy’s lariat ropes a calf. So much for resting my weary bones. “OK, give,” I said, shrugging free of his last statement. I cracked myself another beer and returned to the living room. “Tell me about the teakettle.”

  Every part of Roger started to twitch, his lips, the whiskers under his nose, his eyebrows, even his two front teeth swung back and forth like a pair of Mah-Jongg tiles hung out on a wash line to dry. “I talked to the ‘toontown junk dealer who sold the prop man the teakettle, and you won’t believe his story.”

  “Try me, and skim it, would you? Just give me the cream.”

  The rabbit pumped out his words in a balloon the size of a billboard. It gave him something to hide behind when I went for his throat after reading what it contained. “The junkman told me such an interesting story that I thought you ought to hear it directly from him. So I told him I’d come over here and get you and bring you back.”

  “Right now?” I checked my wristwatch, but my eyes were so tired I couldn’t tell big hand from little. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “He stays open late.” ,

  “Nothing doing. I’m bushed. I’ll go over there with you first thing in the morning.”

  “Sure,” said the rabbit gloomily. “First thing in the morning.”

  Even before my seven-day intensive training course at the Acme School of Fine Detecting I could have figured the rabbit had something else on his pea-sized mind. “Come on,” I said. “Spill the rest of it.”

  “I don’t want to bother you with my petty problems.”

  Boy, this rabbit really knew how to dish it out. Too bad he had never produced any offspring. He would have made a, brood of bunnies one fine, guilt-inducing mother. “I told you to give me the rest of it, now give me the rest of it.”

  He rocked his head forward to back, making his words about as easy to draw a bead on as ducks in a shooting gallery. “I’ve started to have this feeling,” he said, “that I’m coming apart at the seams. I don’t know for sure, but I believe maybe I’m preparing to disintegrate. I don’t want to pressure you, but I would appreciate whatever you could do to expedite this case.”

  I sighed, tossed down my beer, and got my coat out of the closet. “Let’s go see your junk dealer, rabbit.”

  The junk dealer was a ‘toon beetle, Bennie, by name, shiny and black with a pastel pink head.

  His place had no heat, so he wore a greatcoat with six extra arms sewn onto it to accommodate his multiple extremities. The extra arms had been scissored out of totally mismatched garments. Bennie could easily have wholesaled his coat of many colors to one of those chic boutiques that charged astronomical prices for quilts stitched together by Appalachian ‘toon ragpickers.

  To fit human gloves to his four-fingered ‘toon hands, Bennie had tied off the gloves’ index digits with odd bits of colored yarn. That’s how ‘toons got their reputation for having excessively poor memories, because so many of them traipsed around with string knotted memory-aid fashion around their gloved fingers.

  Some junk stands a chance of metamorphosing into folk art or antiques. Some junk should have been trash-smashed at the factory door and carted straight out to sea in a garbage scow. The beetle stocked the latter, and in such great quantity that a good archaeologist could have traced the decline of civilization by excavating the store’s inventory. The beetle himself scuttled out from under the rubble of World War II. “Welcome back,” said Bennie to the rabbit. “You going to buy something this time or just yak my ears off some more?” He snaked one of his antennae down the back of his coat and scratched vigorously. I wondered, could a beetle have fleas?

  “I’d like you to meet my partner,” said Roger, “Eddie Valiant.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Eddie,” said the beetle. He gave me my choice of four hands to shake. I declined.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell Eddie what you told me. About the teakettle.”

  “Sure. Be my pleasure.” The beetle sat down on his store counter, rolled backward, and went rock-a-bye-baby atop his rounded shell. “A couple of years back I used to have this kid—a cousin to Aquaman, he claimed to be—that I employed as a diver. He brought me in relics from sunken ships and such. Anyway, the kid was diving alone one day off the coast hunting for a yacht supposedly down out there. When he failed to come in at night, the Coast Guard launched a search. They found him lying dead on the deck of his boat. Beside him was an oil drum, the last object he ever brought up. The kid had died of asphyxiation. The Coast Guard figured he came up too fast and got one of those breathing attacks divers get when they do that.” The bug tried to demonstrate by wheezing for us, but didn’t have the lungs for it. Best he could do was a chirp, and a distinctly merry chirp at that. “I bought the diver’s stuff from his widow, oil drum included. When I emptied it out, there was a big pile of ordinary rocks, an old scroll, and that teakettle inside. I peddled the drum to a scrap dealer for twenty-five bucks. I only got fifty cents for the teakettle, though. I let it go cheap, because the prop man who bought it promised me a bit part in his picture. A promise he failed to keep, I might add.”

  “What happened to the scroll?” I asked. “I’ve still got it somewhere around here,” said the beetle. “The prop man wasn’t interested, so I kept it.”

  “Can we see it?” I asked.

  “Sure, if I can find it.” Bennie waved his arms in the air until he had enough momentum built up to flip himself off his back. Then he launched into the kind of massive search the Spaniards mounted to find the Fountain of Youth. He didn’t have any more luck than they did. They discovered some future Florida land grifts; he found an old piece of sheepskin rolled around a wooden stick. “Here she be.” I reached for my billfold. “How much?” He scratched under each of his arms in rotation. He used no deodorant, and if you ever want to experience misery, try standing downwind of somebody with eight stale armpits. “I got storage costs, inventory, sales tax. Call it a hundred bucks even.”

  “A hundred bucks? You sold the teakettle that went with it for fifty cents.”

  He shrugged his eight shoulders in a motion that duplicated almost exactly a rippling wheatfield on a breezy day. “Yeah, so I did, and it’s stuck in my craw ever since. A hundred bucks. Take it or leave it.”

  I took it and told him I’d think of him fondly every time I passed a can of Raid.

  Outside the shop, under a streetlight, Roger and I unraveled the scroll. Strange writing covered it top to bottom. I couldn’t make out a single word. “Swell. A hundred bucks I shell out for this thing, and I can’t even read it.” I flipped it to Roger. “Here’s your next assignment. Get this translated.”

  “Where?” asked the rabbit.

  “You’re the detective,” I answered. “You figure it out. I’m going home to bed.”

  The rabbit told me he planned to stay on the job straight through the night. I guess he must have been feeling a lot of pressure to wrap this case up before he dissolved.

  I told him he could do whatever he wanted to, that I was going to sleep, and that I’d see him in the morning.

  The phone was ringing when I opened my apartment door.

  “Eddie Valiant,” I said, hoping desperately for a wrong number.

  “Eddie, whoop-di-do,” said Pops from down at the soda shop. “I didn’t wake you, did I? I hope not because I’ve got some real exciting news. I collared your comic for you, the one you wanted! I had to look everywhere, but I found it. Boy oh boy, what a job. There weren’t many printed, not many at all, but I located you one. Old Pops, he came through just like he promised you he would.”

  “Great, Pops, great. I’ll pi
ck it up first thing in the morning.”

  “I’ll be here late tonight, Eddie boy, if you want to come down now.”

  Add somebody else out to deprive me of my beauty sleep. “Thanks anyway, Pops, but I’m beat. There’s time enough tomorrow.”

  “Oh, sure. Sure. It’s just that I was real tickled to find it for you, and I thought you’d want to see it right away. But you’re right. Tomorrow’s soon enough.” He sounded lower than my bank balance on the last day of the month.

  I remembered all the extra gumballs Pops had slipped into my candy sacks, the extra nuts he had put on my sundaes, the extra shots of vanilla he had squirted into my cokes. How do you ever get even-Steven with somebody for giving you your only fond memories of youth?

  “I’ll be there in half an hour,” I said.

  “Land o’ Goshen,” he prattled when I walked in, “did I have a time tracking this one down.” He handed me a comic wrapped in a plain brown wrapper.

  I took a look at it while he gave me a play by play of the rigmarole he went through to get it. Whatever he did, believe me, it was worth it. What he gave me was a pornographic piece—the smut peddlers euphemistically call them adult comics—printed several years ago by the date on the masthead. It was titled Lewd, Crude, and In the Mood, and it portrayed in graphic detail the antics of a randy female nurse. The nurse was played by a younger, slimmer, blonder, but definitely recognizable Jessica Rabbit.

  And the fine print inside the front cover identified the publisher as somebody named Sid Sleaze, my good old double S in person, I’d lay odds on it.

  “That what you wanted, Eddie? Did I do good?”

  I helped myself to a piece of rock candy, because all of a sudden this felt like a very sweet night indeed. “You did fine, Pops. You did just fine.”

  Chapter: •24•

  I never did make it to bed that night. Instead I bought a fifth of rotgut for inspiration, went to my office, and drew large circles on a piece of paper. Into each circle I put either a name or a fact. Some of the names overlapped each other, and so did some of the facts. Some of the names overlapped some of the facts, and some of the facts overlapped some of the names. No answers came of it. I wound up punchy from lack of sleep and with a headache to boot. Who was I kidding, anyway? Analytical cogitation never had been my strong suit. I function best when the solution to a case requires a direct, physical approach. It might never win me a turn as king of beasts, but at least it gets me my own small, jackal-free corner of the jungle. And what more could any snake in the grass want?