Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?

by Gary K. Wolf

  “Mutt, fetch,” I said.

  The dog had moved out of the shade. He was stretched out on my folded clothing, catching some rays,

  Mutt stood up, woofed a few times, trotted over, and picked up the word balloon in his mouth.

  I wished everybody I dealt with could be like this dog. Doing what I told them, chop chop quick, no questions asked.

  Mutt dropped the balloon at my feet. As a reward for his behavior, I gave him the salted peanuts that came with my drinks. He gobbled them down. Mutt returned to his towel, circled around a couple of times, and hunkered in to resume his nap and his dreams of better dog days ahead.

  I unfolded the balloon. Like all the other balloons, this one contained letters cut from other balloons. To my eye, this balloon was identical to the threatening balloons Sands had received and to the balloon that had accompanied the shot taken at Cooper.

  “Look familiar?” I showed the balloon to Sands.

  Sands nodded. “Looks just like all the rest.”

  I would have shown the balloon to Cooper, but he was still sound asleep. Probably traipsing through the same dreamland as Mutt.

  I read the balloon out loud. “Come to The Fun Factory at midnight. Meet me at the loading dock. I’ll give you information concerning the disappearance of Clabber Clown.”

  The balloon was signed, “A friend.”

  I thought that was an odd signature considering that this “friend’s” last few missives had consisted of death threats and one actual attempt.

  Looked like our next move was gonna be a tour of Toontown by night.

  Roger stood up, a big smile on his face. He held up the reassembled brick. “Here you go, Eddie.” He studied the brick six ways to Sunday and into Monday morning. He examined that brick straight on, right side up, upside down, long ways, short ways, sideways, every which way. “I’m sorry, Eddie. I can’t make heads or cottontails out of this. Looks like an ordinary brick.” He handed me the brick. “What do you see?”

  “A perfect likeness of your thick head.”

  The Fun Factory was on Big Bang Boulevard.

  The Factory supplied Toontown with exploding cigars, joy buzzers, whoopee cushions, firecrackers, anything that blew up or made noise.

  The Fun Factory had been a big item in the news a few years back. At the start of World War II, women took over the Fun Factory’s production work while their men folk went off to war. Most of these women wore the stylish haircut of the times—Jessica’s peek-a-boo look. Because the women who wore their hair that way couldn’t see what they were doing, the rate of assembly line accidents skyrocketed.

  A bad trend when you’re making skyrockets.

  In a patriotic gesture, Jessica cut her hair into a bob. She asked other women to do the same. They did, and the crisis fell away along with the ladies’ locks.

  This time of night, The Fun Factory was deserted.

  We parked in the empty lot. The Fun Factory had a state of the art security fence secured by a two bit padlock. I picked the lock in five seconds flat.

  The night watchman, an elderly numbat, sat at a desk in a glass fronted shed. He was sound asleep. Based on what little I remembered from high school biology, the numbat was one of the world’s few purely diurnal creatures. Numbats were awake during daylight hours, and asleep in the dark, making him an odd choice for a night watchman. I wasn’t complaining. Him being a sleepyhead made my job a whole lot easier.

  We went around back to the loading dock.

  The dock was loaded all right. With empty canisters of laughing gas identical to the one Louie Louie gave the hyenas.

  I tapped the empties. Cooper and Sands both nodded. They got the implication immediately.

  “I don’t see anything here,” said Roger. “Shouldn’t we start looking for clues or something?”

  “We already found one,” I told him.

  “We did? Where? I would see better if we had some light.”

  Roger lit a match!

  The bright naked flame showed that we were standing in the middle of twenty barrels of gunpowder.

  “Put that out!” I screamed at him. “Blow out the match!”

  For once Roger did what I told him.

  “Wow, Eddie. That was a really close call. We could have all exploded.” Roger wiped his brow, then shook his hand. Sprinkles of perspiration flew off, peppering my face. “Is anybody else getting hot?”

  Come to think of it, I was feeling warmer.

  I looked down. The heat was coming from a flame traveling along a fuse. The fuse was attached to the barrels of gunpowder. The flame had less than a foot to travel before the gunpowder went kaboom.

  “Run!” I yelled. “Get out of here. This whole place is going to blow!”

  Me, Cooper, and Sands jumped off the loading dock. We ran away, lickety-split.

  Roger stayed put.

  I looked back over my shoulder at him.

  The stupid rabbit was trying to blow out the fuse. He was so scared, he couldn’t catch his wind. When he blew, nothing came out of his bugled lips.

  “Roger, you’re too late!” I yelled back at him. “There’s nothing you can do. Save yourself. Get out of there. Run!”

  The flame on the burning fuse traveled up the side of the powder kegs.

  Roger was a goner. I knew that.

  Roger knew that.

  Roger prepared for the hereafter by stuffing his fingers in his ears and closing his eyes.

  The flame fizzled and died just short of the kegs.

  Amazing! The lucky rabbit had cheated death.

  When nothing happened, Roger cautiously opened first one eye and then the other.

  He leaned over and studied the fizzled fuse up close.

  Roger took his fingers out of his ears.

  He wiped the sweat off his brow.

  “Whew,” he said. “That was really, really close.” To make sure we could read his balloon in the dark, Roger gave the balloon a bright glow.

  Big mistake!

  The glow from Roger’s word balloon reignited the fuse.

  The powder kegs went up with a roar.

  Bye-bye, rabbit.

  The force of the explosion propelled Roger high into the air. I plotted his trajectory as best I could. Me, Cooper, and Sands headed off in the direction the rabbit had traveled.

  We found him dangled, tangled, and mangled, draped across a low-hanging tree limb nearly half a mile away. His clothes were torn, his fur singed and blackened, his ears knotted. His once fluffy tail now had the texture of a Brillo pad.

  Despite his horrific ordeal and dreadful appearance, Roger was still alive. Proving once again the old adage that Toons can take a licking and keep on ticking.

  “How you doing, buddy?” I asked him.

  Roger moved his mouth. No balloons came out. That sometimes happens to Toons who have been really frightened or traumatized. They get the words scared out of them. Unfortunately, their ability to talk always returns.

  Roger was in bad shape. Roger needed medical attention and quick. The Toon kind, not the human.

  “Hey, Mutt,” I called out.

  The pup, who had been dogging us every step of the way, came running.

  I pulled out the little jar of peanut butter I had taken to carrying around after I discovered how much Mutt enjoyed licking Skippy off my fingers.

  I smeared Roger’s face with a healthy dollop of the peanutty stuff.

  Mutt started to lick.

  Roger moaned, than giggled, than burst out laughing. “Stop, stop, please stop!” he said. “That tickles.”

  Roger hopped to his feet. His singed fur had returned to almost normal color. His ears had untangled themselves. I still wouldn’t want to use his wiry tail for
a powder puff, but that too was coming back. Give his hind quarter another hour of regeneration, and you would never know his tail had been ossified.

  Thanks to Mutt, Roger would pull through.

  The four of us, five counting Mutt, returned to site of the exploded Fun Factory.

  Nothing remained of the building. The Toontown Fire Department was on the scene. The Toon firemen were extinguishing the blaze by dousing the embers with seltzer bottles.

  A dead body was laid out in the parking lot. A black tarp covered the stiff. I figured most likely the numbat night watchman. Then I spotted the numbat sitting in the front seat of an ambulance. The numbat was fast asleep.

  I found the fire chief.

  He was a nasty old dragon. I don’t mean his personality. He was a real Toon dragon. An odd choice for fire chief since every time he opened his mouth, little tongues of flame shot out. An assistant followed him around, carrying a seltzer bottle to extinguish the chief’s hot language. Otherwise his fiery words might ignite his surroundings and cause more work for his embattled crew.

  “What you got, Chief?” I pointed toward the stiff.

  “What’s it look like? A dead body.” He leaned in so close to me I could smell the brimstone on his breath. “What business is that of yours?”

  “I’m Eddie Valiant. Private eye.” I showed him the badge I’d bought in the toy section at the Five and Dime. Probably wouldn’t have fooled him in broad daylight, but in the darkness, the buzzer didn’t look half bad. “I’m working a case in Toontown. This might tie in. You got an I.D. on the cadaver?”

  The fire chief nodded. “A local celebrity. Name’s Clabber Clown. The explosion left him in more pieces than that daredevil egghead Humpty Dumpty after his wall fall. When we put Clabber together again, we found the blast wasn’t what killed him. He was already dead. Shot through the chest.”

  With a flashing light and a siren trailing a long blare balloon, Chief Hanker arrived on the scene.

  “Chief, hey Chief,” squawked a news hawk with a press badge identifying him as a reporter with the Telltale. “What can you tell me?”

  Chief Hanker stood tall. He liked nothing better than talking to the press. “I can tell you with absolute certainty that there will be a full and complete investigation of this terrible murder. We will find out who killed our beloved Clabber Clown. We will bring that heinous murderer to justice.”

  “Right,” I told my compadres. “This one is gonna be way up high on his priority list. Right up there with finding Judge Crater.”

  “Who do you think set off the explosion?” asked Roger.

  “I got a pretty good idea,” I said.

  “I know,” said Cooper.

  “You know I got a pretty good idea,” I said, “or you know who set off the explosion?” Cooper was picking up bad habits. Talking to Cooper was getting to be as frustrating as talking to a Toon.

  “Louie Louie,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Did this,” he answered.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Saw him.”

  “You saw Louie Louie? Here?”

  “Think so.”

  “When?”

  “Right before.”

  “You saw Louie Louie here. Right before the explosion.”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “How sure?”

  “Sixty percent.”

  Good enough for me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I got up early the next morning, way before my confreres.

  Sometimes I like having a posse. Strength in numbers, the more the mightier. That kind of thing.

  Right now, I needed to go solo, move fast, get things done. Without having a movie star beside me attracting huge crowds of fans. Without having a director pointing a camera in my face. Most of all, without having to explain every single move I made to a boneheaded bunny.

  Alone, I headed over to the Toon Inn, located on a quiet side street called Lovers Lane.

  Toon Inn was the clandestine meeting spot in Toontown for assignations between couples who didn’t want anybody knowing that their asses were being ignated.

  In addition to renting rooms by the hour, or by the minute in the case of older male Toons, the Toon Inn also kept several suites available for long term rental.

  The sign out front promised a Continental breakfast, a pool, and radio in every room.

  I’d stayed here a few times. The Continental breakfast rang true if your continent was Antarctica where edibles came frozen. I ran a waffle through my toaster three times and still got a frostbitten lip when I bit in.

  You could do laps in the pool, assuming you didn’t mind sucking in several autumns’ worth of fallen leaves.

  At least the radio part wasn’t false advertising, although the one in my room only picked up one station—the local crop report. With typical Toon contrariness, the Toon crop report covered riding whips, ear marking cows, cutting off pants legs, hedge tops, assorted dog parts, sizing photographs, and the biology underlying enlarged bird gullets. The last was a new one for me, but kind of interesting once I started listening.

  Never, not once, did the crop report station do any reporting on agricultural crops.

  While staying at the Toon Inn, I’d met Professor Ring Wordhollow. He lived at the Inn full time.

  According to Who’s Who In American Highbrows, Longhairs, Eggheads, Nob Noddles, and Double Domes, Professor Wordhollow presided over UCLA’s visual linguistics department. Wordhollow had made studying Toon balloons his life’s work. His research consisted of following Toons around and snaring their utterances with a butterfly net. He sprayed the balloons with instant starch and pinned the utterances into notebooks for later analysis.

  Professor Wordhollow was the first to prove conclusively that prepubescent Toons with less than fully developed pitoonitary glands were incapable of speaking in anything but lower case letters. For that sterling discovery, the prof won some prestigious prize.

  The Ignoble Award comes to mind, but I don’t follow the doings in academia much, so I could be wrong.

  Outside of his scholarly research, Wordhollow was best known as a cartoon dialogue coach. He taught Daffy Duck to lisp and Porky Pig to stutter. Before Sylvester the Cat came to Wordhollow, he spoke like an Oxford don.

  Wordhollow took tweediness to a higher level. He wore a brown Harris tweed sport coat, dark green Donegal tweed pants, a tan herringbone tweed pork pie hat, and a black and white houndstooth tweed shirt. I didn’t know about his underwear, but judging from what I saw on the outside, I was willing to bet his skivvies were tweed patterned too.

  I found Wordhollow at the soda machine.

  The soda machine was arguing with Wordhollow, telling the Prof that he had only put in a dime and not a quarter. The machine refused to give Wordhollow his Coke until he came up with another fifteen cents.

  Wordhollow, a stubborn man, refused to ante up.

  “Allow me, Prof,” I said, stuffing three nickels into the machine’s coin slot.

  “Now was that so hard?” said the machine.

  The machine handed Wordhollow his soda.

  “Thank you, Eddie. That was most generous, but entirely unnecessary and even uncalled for,” said Wordhollow. “I did indeed put in the correct amount of money. That disreputable and infernal contraption was trying to cheat me by bamboozling me into believing I was guilty of short changing.”

  “Good thing easily-bamboozled old me came along when I did, or you might have died of thirst.”

  “So true,” he chuckled. He saluted me with his glass bottle and took a swig. “What brings you to my neighborhood? Coming to stay at the Inn for a while? That would be great fun. Like the old days.”

  “Naw, I got better digs thi
s visit. I’m at the Tiltin’ Hiltin.”

  “Fancy,” he said.

  “Come over for a visit. The Tiltin’s got a real pool. Full of water, not cess.”

  “With any kind of luck, I might be joining you there shortly. I’ve started working as a highly paid linguistics consultant for a top shelf pharmaceutical company with very deep pockets. I go through their proposals and translate simple declarative sentences into the unintelligible argot required for government contracts.”

  “Beats working with Toons.”

  “Toons can be trying at times, but, no linguistic pun intended, what can I say? Toon talk made my reputation.”

  I handed Wordhollow the balloon message that came wrapped around the latest brick. “I’d like you to take a look at this.”

  Wordhollow, the consummate scholar, studied the balloon front and back. He pulled out a small pair of calipers and measured the balloon’s thickness. He scratched the balloon’s glued-on lettering. He held the balloon up to the light, gauging the balloon’s viscosity. He put the balloon to his nose and smelled. “Nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Except, of course, that this balloon is a construct. made up of words, and in a few cases letters, snipped from other balloons. Obviously, you already know that.”

  “Give me a thorough analysis. I’m specifically interested in origins. Of the balloon, the letters, the words.”

  “Easily done.” He tucked the balloon into his briefcase made of—what else but—Islay tweed.

  Wordhollow pointed toward the top floor location of his personal digs. “A bit early in the day, but care to come upstairs and join me for an eye opener?”

  Me and the prof had only two things in common. We both loved to drink, and we both hated to drink alone. Treaties between sovereign nations have been forged over bonds far less strong than those.

  I hated to run out on the Prof. He was a lonely guy and appreciated company. Didn’t we all? I could usually do a good job of faking interest in whatever the prof had to say. Not today. I was too focused on my case to be sociable. The only company I had to offer was bad company. My mind would wander whenever I heard a word with more than three syllables, and the prof used nothing but.