Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  He reoriented his headpiece to customary position, slightly askew, exactly like the thinking going on underneath. “My idea, my vision, my project. I’m envisioning a movie that will live forever. A hundred years from now people will still be talking about Barney Sands and Hi, Toon! Tell me honestly, a century on, who’s going to remember a dead clown?”

  I shook a smoke out of my pack and stoked my doorway to lung cancer to life mainly to give my hands something to occupy them that didn’t involve socking Sands. “Ain’t you the regular humanitarian? I hear the Academy gives an award for selfless actions. Maybe you’ll win it come Oscar time. Because from what I’m hearing and seeing so far, you’re not gonna be winning any prizes, or setting box office records either, for a movie starring a bubble-headed rabbit and a great actor playing completely against type.

  “No offense,” I told Cooper.

  “None taken,” he answered.

  “Don’t get flip with me,” said Sands. “ I can fire you as easily as I hired you.”

  “Ain’t you forgetting one minor point?” I said. “ I don’t work for you no more. I’m working for Cooper.”

  “I’m sure Coop will back me on this. What do you say, Coop?”

  “He stays,” said Cooper ending Sands’ little insurrection.

  “Film the laundered money,” I said.

  “Do it,” said Cooper.

  Sands hoisted both his britches and his camera.

  He went into the grocery store.

  Sands came back about ten minutes later. “Got the shot.” Once he had caved in and agreed to shoot, he approached the project with his usual creative overkill. “I could have used a touch of fill lighting—the breeze patterns were too sporadic and the angle was bad. Maybe we could come back later for a second shoot.”

  “Whatever you got will be fine,” I said.

  “What now?” asked Roger.

  “We wait and see what happens.”

  I hate working a stakeout. Stakeouts start boring and uncomfortable then gradually degenerate to mind-numbing and bladder-busting. Add a Toon to the mix, you can tack on lunacy.

  We took up a watching position behind a row of garbage cans in an alleyway across the street from the laundromat.

  I paid the cans a couple of simoleons apiece to keep their yaps shut.

  I told Roger he had to pipe down and be still. No talking out loud as long as we were on lookout. No word balloons which could give away our position.

  Roger lasted lots longer than I expected him to before he cracked.

  We’d been there about ten minutes before he piped up. “Let’s play a game to relieve the monotony. How about I spy, with my little eye, something that’s…a gorilla!”

  “I told you to zip your lip. Besides that’s not even how the stupid game goes. You’re supposed to name a color. Green or blue or red.”

  “No, no,” said Roger. He purposefully kept the air level of his balloon to a minimum. The barely inflated gasbag floated at trash can lid height, well out of view of anybody glancing into the alley. “I see a gorilla. A real gorilla. There.” He pointed at the laundromat.

  I looked across the street. Will wonders never cease? The rabbit had spotted what I hadn’t. A gorilla hulked inside the laundromat. The simian definitely hadn’t walked in the front door or I would have seen him. He must have sneaked in the back door, or through some hidden entrance.

  The laundry workers, a game bunch of young Chinese as round as marbles, presided over by a wizened Chinese checker, presented the gorilla with laundry baskets full of freshly washed, fully dried, neatly pressed, paper banded stacks of money. Each band bore a label indicating the stack’s contents.

  One thousand simoleons.

  The simp watched as the Mandarin marbles transferred the stacks of moola into a number of plain wooden crates. They nailed the crates shut.

  The fully packed crates had to go two hundred, two hundred and fifty pounds easy.

  The gorilla picked up the crates two at a time, one under each arm.

  He carried the crates out of sight.

  “Where’d he go? Where’d he go?” said Roger. “We gotta go in there. We gotta tail him. We can’t let him get away.”

  “Cool your cottontail,” I said. “We’re staying put. I got a hunch where this is heading.”

  The laundromat had a big garage door in front so the delivery truck could drive straight into and out of the laundromat’s wishy-washy innards.

  The door opened. A large black van, a real one, not a Toon, drove out.

  The gorilla sat at the wheel.

  I ran out into the street and hailed a cab.

  We all piled in.

  “Follow that truck.”

  “Whatever you say, boss,” belched the cab in a smoky balloon that smelled of exhaust fumes. “You’re the boss. The big boss. The boss man. The boss-a-nova.”

  That was why there were no successful Toon bank robbers. By the time their getaway car has finished cracking wise and putting the engine in gear, the cops have arrived, the trial’s been held, the judge has ruled, and the heister’s gone away for twenty years.

  “How about you put a muffler on and drive?”

  We followed the gorilla’s van for the better part of an hour. The van stopped at the First, Second, Sixty-Fifth, and Second-To-None National Banks. At each bank, the gorilla dropped a crate of bills at the back door.

  A different hyena came out of each bank and picked up the crate.

  The gorilla stopped at the Oysterman’s Sand Bank. He dropped off his last crate. A hyena carried the crate inside.

  The gorilla drove off in his van.

  Our cab scrunched up his rear wheels. “Vroom, vroom, vroom” he revved, emitting three aerodynamic whizz balloons.

  “Put your gears in neutral, sport,” I told the cab. “We’re through gorilla tailing. Keep your meter running, though. Cause we’re going after bigger monkeyshines.”

  Carved pearls of motherly wisdom decorated the Sand Bank’s smoothed coral lintel. These included: If you make your sea bed, you’ll have to sleep in it: The whole world is your oyster: and my personal favorite bit of worldly wise philosophy, Life is shell.

  I ambled casually inside.

  The bank smelled mightily of mollusks, a briny combination of salt water, horseradish, lemon juice, and Tabasco. A portrait of the bank’s founder, Clams Rockefeller, hung above the teller cages.

  I pulled out ten simoleons and went up to the third teller from the left. “Can I get change?”

  “Of course,” said the teller, Henry Hyena according to his name plate. “Would you like bills or coins?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. I wasn’t after change. I wanted to confirm that this teller was the same hyena who accepted the gorilla’s crate.

  I was leaving the bank when I heard the gunshot.

  The shot didn’t come from a Toon gun. You can’t hear a Toon gun. Toon firearms go off silently, producing a bang balloon instead of an audible pop. If the Toon gun is a big bore, you can sometimes hear the spent balloon hit the ground, but that’s all you get for sound effects.

  This shot came from the real McCoy. the kind of pea shooter the Customs gorilla confiscated at the entrance to Toontown. Because, as I recollect him proclaiming, real guns aren’t funny. A real gun is especially not funny going off within shooting distance of the movie star I got hired to protect from death threats.

  I’ve heard a lot of guns go off in my day. I pegged this one as a .38 caliber snub nose.

  I ran out into the street.

  Cooper leaned against the bank’s clamshell motif facade the same way I’d seen him do in Sands’s office. This time, he wasn’t being laconic or insouciant or channeling a sleeping horse. This time he was scared, shaking so badly h
e needed the wall to hold himself upright.

  A bullet hole pocked the wall less than six inches from Cooper’s head. White flakes of burst concrete speckled his motorcycle jacket’s shoulder.

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody took a shot at Mister Cooper,” said my rabbit on the scene. I had to grab his balloon and hold his utterance steady to read what was inside. His balloon was shaking as badly as Cooper. “The bullet barely missed his head!”

  “You okay?” I asked.

  Cooper couldn’t utter even his customary curt comment. The best he could manage was a simple nod.

  A big red lump protruded from the back of Roger’s head.

  “How’d you get that?”

  He rubbed the lump gently with two of the four fingers on his yellow paw. “I don’t know. I heard the shot. Then I got walloped hard on the noggin.”

  I looked around. A brick wrapped in a word balloon was lying on the sidewalk.

  I unwrapped the balloon. The lettering matched the lettering on the threatening balloons somebody had sent to Sands. I warned you. Keep making this movie, and my next shot hits dead center.

  To graphically pound home the point, a pair of crossed bones underscored the word “dead.”

  I warned you. Exactly the words Annie Mation spoke after she told me that Doc Trinaire was making her say things against her will. Was she really warning me or giving me an example?

  Of the three wuss-keteers, only Sands maintained his composure. He wasn’t angry, upset, or raving. He seemed almost happy that a potential assassin had taken a pot shot at his big star.

  He held his camera overhead the way a hockey champion hoists the Stanley Cup. “I got the shot, Eddie! I got the whole rotten episode on film. I was shooting close ups of Coop. Filler stuff I can insert into the documentary if I need to. That’s when the shot rang out. I captured everything on film—the bullet barely missing Coop and hitting the wall. Coop reeling backwards like he had taken a punch to the gut. Talk about method acting! He exuded terror. I saw fright in his face, his posture. I panned over and got Roger reeling around after he got clobbered by that brick.” He hugged his camera like a toddler embracing his Christmas teddy bear. “I got gold in here. Pure cinematic gold.”

  “I don’t suppose you got footage of the shooter?”

  He tilted his head sideways. He squished up his face, like he was wondering why in the world I would want that. Realization dawned. “You’re right! That would have made the perfect framing shot. Drat. I didn’t even think of that.”

  “You’re saying no.”

  “Correct.”

  I checked the bullet’s angle. The shot came from behind a lamppost across the street.

  I walked over.

  “Somebody just fired a shot from behind you,” I said to the post. “You see who?”

  “What shot?” asked the post, obviously one of Toontown’s lower wattage bulbs.

  “We gotta report this,” I told Sands.

  “No! Definitely not. Like I said, no publicity, no police.”

  “Okay,” I said.”We’ll play it your way. For now.”

  “What do we do next?” asked Roger.

  “We wait until the bank closes.”

  “Then what?” asked the rabbit.

  “We tail a hyena.”

  Chapter Twelve

  We followed the hyena to Toontown’s Red Light District, located in Pig Alley.

  Toons heavily patronize The Red Light District. I’ve heard the argument that The District served as Toons’ major source of inspiration. Forget what that red light signaled in terms of human bawdiliciousness. Toons came to The District for production, not pleasure. The district sold the light bulbs that appeared over Toons’ heads whenever they got a bright idea.

  Buxom sales girls hung out of shop windows, hawking bulbs of various shapes and wattages. Toons could try one out free for a few seconds before deciding to buy. So many Toons took advantage of that free trial that the whole Red Light District twinkled like a Mason jar full of lightning bugs.

  The hyena teller lived in the high voltage section known as Watts Up. His large house was surprisingly dimly lighted, considering that in this neighborhood light bulbs came easy. Maybe the hyena didn’t do much thinking. He was of a species better known for yucking up than for solving quadrennial equations.

  We took a lookie-loo position in a small coffee shop across the street from the hyena’s place.

  This wasn’t a hardship for me. I love a good cup of Joe. For all their many other foibles, coffee is the one thing Toons do right. Toons enjoy whatever revs them up, makes them shaky, gets them talking faster than normal. Coffee fits that bill. Toons serve their java hot, black, and strong enough to melt your Formica tabletop if you spill some. Sniffing paint thinner, airplane glue, and varnish also revs a Toon. Probably would get me going too, but I pass on that chemical stuff. I stick with the old-fashioned, traditional nerve jangler served in a bottomless cup.

  When you’re running a stakeout, you gotta stay incognito. Three humans hanging around in a Toon neighborhood would usually stick out pretty good. Not here.

  The Red Light District was a prime stop on the Toontown By Night tour. Scores of human tourists were out and about, walking the streets. We pretty much blended right in with the other tourists—a couple of hundred haysticks, checking out the goofy sights, the men struggling to hold up their beltless pants, the women forced to wash their hair and dry it by sticking their heads out the window of their moving tour bus.

  Ah, the things Toons think are funny.

  The frizzy-headed, wild-haired ladies were shopping for decorative lighting fixtures. The men, taking advantage of the fact that their pants could fall to half staff with ease, flirted with the sales girls, all of whom had been picked as much for their good looks as their ability to move wattage.

  So long as Cooper kept his head down to make sure nobody recognized him, Sands, Cooper, and me wouldn’t rate a second glance. Nobody paid any attention to Roger, either.

  What’s one more dim bulb in this neighborhood?

  Mutt hopped into my lap and begged for a slurp out of my bottomless cup of coffee. I didn’t want the little tyke picking up my bad habits and sleepless nights. I had the waitress bring him a bowl of warm milk. I did indulge Mutt with half of my crème-filled glazed donut. I used my paper napkin to wipe the crusted sugar off his whiskers.

  Mutt fell asleep curled up between my legs.

  Roger wanted to keep watch on the hyena by using binoculars. I vetoed that. Toon binocs worked by compressing a Toon’s eyeballs through the binoculars’ twin empty barrels. The Toon’s eyeballs popped out the other end so focused that they could see a fly’s wing at a hundred yards. Bulging eyeballs drew too much attention, especially when you were sitting at a table in a coffee shop.

  Over the next hour, a number of hyenas went into the house. To me, hyenas look pretty much alike. You seen one, you seen them all.

  Sands, with his sharp director’s eye, spotted differences. “That one’s fur is a bit longer,” he said. “That one is a shade browner. That one has a slightly longer snout.”

  After the sixth hyena, Sands put it together. “They’re all the hyenas we saw at the banks. The ones who picked up the bales of laundered simoleons.”

  You couldn’t prove it by me, but I took Sands’s word.

  “What do we do now?” asked Roger after the last of the banking hyenas had gone into their house.

  “We wait,” I said. “That’s what a stakeout is all about.”

  “Swell,” said Roger. “Let’s play a game while we’re waiting. I love Hide and Seek. Or maybe Goose, Goose, Duck.”

  He reached into his overall pocket and pulled out a tiny box. He opened the box and removed a little bitty folded piece of cardboard. He un
folded that into a full-sized Monopoly board.

  How do Toons do that?

  I guess that’s why the best magicians like Harry How-did-he all have a little Toon in them.

  This Monopoly board had locations that related to Toontown instead of Atlantic City. There was The Toonerville Railroad. Plank Place where animated boards walk. I also spotted a Get Into Jail Free card.

  “We can’t do that,” I said. “This is serious business.”

  “Oh, Eddie,” said Roger. “You’re such an old stick in the mud.”

  “I’ll play,” said Cooper.

  “Great!” said Roger.

  “Me too,” said the container of cream in the middle of the table.

  “Oh, what the heck,” said Sands. “I’m in.”

  They were still playing a couple of hours later. I was still being the good doobie, keeping my eyes on the hyena house.

  Great minds must run in small circles. Through clever money management, the dip-wicky rabbit was walloping his three opponents. He owned nearly every piece of property on the board. Roger had been to jail a hundred times. In Toontown Monopoly, that was a good thing. You didn’t need to play by any set rules when you were in the slammer, so you got a big advantage over your opponents who had to abide by a strict hundred page rule book. Sands had made it to jail a couple of times as had the creamer. Cooper hadn’t visited the hoosegow once.

  “Wrap up your game, gents,” I told them. “ Our surveillance is paying off.”

  A black sedan drove up and stopped in front of the hyena house.

  Louie Louie Louse got out of the car. He opened his trunk and pulled out a big canister. The label read LAUGHING GAS.

  Louie Louie knocked on the hyenas’ front door. “Hey, youse guys. Open up for Louie Louie.”

  The porch light went on, the first light I’d seen in or on the house.

  A giggling gaggle of hyenas came pouring out of every orifice the house had to offer, the front door, the first and second story windows and the basement windows. A couple popped out of the chimney and slid down the drainpipes.