by Gary K. Wolf
“How about the law of common decency? Where do you stand on that one?”
“Guilty of breaking that one every day and twice on Sunday. Last I heard, violating that law ain’t a punishable offense, at least not in this universe. I might go to Hell, but I ain’t going to jail.” Willy P stoked up a stogie the thickness of the hawser line that secures a tugboat to a pier. “Why are you on my case, Valiant? What’s your beef with me?”
“Clabber Clown hired me to keep him safe. I didn’t.”
“Then I guess your job would be done.”
“Naw, we shamuses have our code of honor. If somebody pays you to keep them alive and you don’t, then you’re duty bound to find out who killed them and why. You also have to bring the killer to justice.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility. Me, I’d take the money, go to the betting window, and put the whole wad on a long shot. Cause that’s about how much chance you got of finding out who cacked the clown.”
“You gotta have more faith, Willy. I’m damn good at my job. I’ll find the killer, and I’ll send him to the chair.”
“Good luck with that. How you doing so far?”
“I got a real good motive. I’m looking into the land out along the ocean. Everything the other side of Pelagic Pike.”
“Beautiful stretch of road. Wish I owned a piece of that property. I’d build myself a big house and live out there full time.”
“Way I hear, you already do own almost all that land.”
Willy sucked air in through his snout and exhaled a big piggy snort balloon half full of snot. I jumped backward when the balloon broke open, but the mucus still splashed to my knees. “You got yourself bad information. I don’t own any land along the ocean.”
“You do own every one of the dummy corporations that does own the land. So I guess we could conclude, ipso facto, that you do indeed own that oceanfront property.”
“Maybe. I own a lot of stuff. So much I’ve lost track. So what?”
“Ever hear of Dowdy Chemicals?”
“That’s the company what makes DIP.”
“Along with plenty of other noxious stuff. I hear you’re planning on turning that whole stretch of beach into a chemical dumping ground.”
“You heard erroneously.”
“The only piece you’re missing is Toonie Island. Owned by the recently deceased Clabber Clown.”
“Wonder what’ll happen to that parcel now that the clown’s gone?”
“Ain’t you heard? Toonie Island’s going up for auction. I figured you was planning on going. Putting in the winning bid.”
“Not unless I have a very lucky day at the track. I ain’t got that kind of scratch.”
The Fifth Race started.
Prosciutto’s horse came in dead last.
“I ain’t doing so hot accumulating any bidding money today,” he said.
He tore up his betting slips and dropped them on the floor.
I went down to the paddock to check out the horses running in the next race, the day’s major event, The Brown Derby.
I spied Willy Prosciutto’s louse passing a note to one of the jockeys.
The jockey wore the silks for horse number three. I looked in my racing form. Number three was a nag named Slow Poke.
Slow Poke’s jockey read the note. He passed the note to the other jockeys. When they had all finished reading, they gave the note back to Louie Louie. The louse pulled out a match and set the note to flames.
Willy Prosciutto had put in the fix. Slow Poke was gonna win.
Roger joined me. “Double R took care of me good. I got a trifecta on numbers one, two, and four. A perfecta on horses number five, six, and seven. Plus I’ve got all those same horses to win, place kick, and show up. I’m covered every which way, up, down, and sideways. I can’t lose!”
“What about horse number three?”
“Double R didn’t mention that horse.” Roger perused his racing form. “Slow Poke? He’s never won a race in his life. He’s never come in better than…” Roger checked the horse’s history. “…dead last. In every race he’s ever run, he’s been the last horse to finish. Why would I want to bet on him?”
“What are his odds?”
Roger checked. “A zillion to one. That’s not a long shot. That’s a no shot.”
“I think Slow Poke’s due for a break out.”
Roger pulled out his magnifying glass and studied Slow Poke’s historical statistics in closer detail. “I don’t know, Eddie. I don’t think this poky pony’s got a chance.”
“We’ll find out soon enough. The race is starting.”
Slow Poke more than lived up to his name. He was so slow the other jockeys had to dismount and have a picnic on the far turn to avoid passing him.
Slow Poke won The Brown Derby by two lengths.
Ring Wordhollow stood by the rail, a few spots down from us. The bettors around him showered the air with torn up betting slips. Not Wordhollow. He was grinning ear to ear.
“You look happy, Prerfessor.” I said.
“Yes, Eddie,” he said. “My horse finally came in.”
“You bet on Number Three. Slow Poke,” I said.
“I did indeed. I played a hunch. Wagered every simoleon I have to my name.”
“Kind of foolhardy wouldn’t you say?”
“Only if you lose, Eddie. Only if you lose.”
Willy Prosciutto waddled past us on the way to the Payout window.
“Ain’t this my lucky day?” he said. “I bet every simoleon I had on Slow Poke to win.”
Willy P fanned open his large stack of winning tickets. “You know, Valiant, now that I’m flush with cash, I think maybe I will bid on Toonie Island.”
“Wow,” said Roger. “Professor Wordhollow, Willy. Some guys have all the luck.”
I didn’t bother explaining to the stupid bunny that luck had nothing to do with it.
Chapter Twenty
Roger got a call from Jessica. She told him she had some blockbuster information that would help us with our case. So we drove to Buffoon Cartoons, Toontown’s pre-eminent cartoon studio, at 16 Millimeter Drive.
We found Jessica on the set of her latest movie, a potboiler entitled Fire Down Below. Jessica played a rebellious young woman, a jungle missionary’s daughter unhappy with her missionary position. A USO-arranged tour group of two dozen G.I. Joes stood on the outer edge of the set, watching Jessica filming her scene. They were all enlisted men. Judging from their service ribbons all of them had seen combat. Many of them wore the Purple Heart which indicated they had been wounded in action.
I had been in plenty of groups like this. Young military guys who talked raunchy and engaged in a great deal of physical horseplay to hide their fear that in a year, a week, or a day they might all be lying dead on a barren patch of foreign land.
No horseplay and barracks language from these boys. I had never seen a quieter, better behaved bunch of dogfaces. They weren’t acting like they were on a movie set in the most rip-roaring, fun-loving city on earth in the presence of the sexiest woman known to man. They comported themselves like they were in Sunday school and Jessica was their head nun.
Flying bullets and exploding bombs had done nothing to prepare these grunts for one of life’s truly dangerous endeavors—being in the presence of a woman so gorgeous and sexy that simply gazing at her for too long could stop your heart.
The Government ought to hire Jessica and put her in charge of discipline at Army bases. All she would have to do to earn her pay would be to sashay across the parade ground in full view of the regiment. Every soldier who saw her would either faint dead away or pop to rigid attention.
“Okay, cut. Everybody take a five minute break while we set up the next shot,” said Jessica’s director.
One soldier, a rosy faced corporal in his mid-twenties left the group. He came up to Jessica.
“Hi, handsome,” she said.
“Miss Rabbit,” he said shyly, “I’m Corporal Bob Hegarty from Massachusetts.”
“Nice to meet you, Corporal Hegarty. All right with you if I call you Bob?”
“Yes ma’am. That would be just fine. Feel free to call me anything you want.”
Like I said, Jessica has a way of turning men’s minds to mush.
She was wearing an outfit thrown together using leftovers from the fruit salad served in the studio commissary. A pair of coconut shells up top. A bunch of bananas below and behind, headgear composed of a pineapple, three pears, and a bunch of grapes.
I didn’t know about those soldiers, but I was ready to eat her up.
Jessica looked at Corporal Hegarty’s chest, a fair exchange since the corporal couldn’t keep his eyes off hers. “I see from your service ribbons that you served in Europe.”
“Yes, ma’am. I was there from D-Day until the end.”
“I want to thank you for your service.”
“Aw, heck, ma’am, wasn’t nothing.”
She tapped his decorations. “The Army doesn’t award the Silver Star for nothing.”
The soldier did something I’ll bet he hadn’t done since he was a kid. He blushed.
“What can I do for you, Corporal Hegarty?”
“Well, ma’am, me and my whole platoon here are shipping out this week. I bet one of my buddies five simoleons that you’d kiss me goodbye. He said that would never happen. He said you weren’t that kind of a girl.”
Jessica laughed. She took Corporal Hegarty by the hand and led him over to his group. She positioned Corporal Hegarty directly in front of his buddies so they all had a perfect view of what happened next.
“I do love a man in uniform,” she said.
Jessica gave Corporal Hegarty a long, deep kiss.
One of Corporal Hegarty’s buddies, a PFC, let out a long, audible sigh.
The PFC pulled out his billfold and extracted a five simoleon bill. He handed the bill to Corporal Hegarty.
Jessica reached inside one of her coconuts. How she found room in there for anything besides her natural glories I’ll never know. Somehow she did. She pulled out her purse. She took out a ten spot. She gave it to Hegarty’s buddy, the guy who lost the bet.
“What’s this for?” he asked.
“For the faith you have in my morals,” she answered sweetly.
Jessica sashayed over to us. “I have to change my costume. Come with me into my dressing room.”
Jessica led us into a silver Airstream trailer. Her name was painted on the door above a big gold star. Roger, Cooper and I sat next to one another on Jessica’s chaise lounge while Sands circled around inside the trailer’s tiny confines, filming our meeting for posterity—or until Jessica’s intensely erotic body heat caused Sand’s unshielded camera to explode.
Sands still had no belt. Contrary to the way he usually handled his plummeting pantaloons, here in Jessica’s trailer he made no effort to hold them up. His pants flopped down around knee level. Sands had let his boxer shorts fall to half mast too.
Like I said, Jessica has strange effects on men.
“We got a big problem,” said Roger to his wife.
Jessica tilted Roger’s head up and gave him a big kiss.
If the lip lock she put on Corporal Hegarty had the explosive power of a hand grenade, the smooch she bestowed on her hubby would have been measured in megatons of TNT. “Honey bunny, I told you. I never met that man before. We were having drinks at the Tiltin’ Hiltin. One thing led to another. The bar closed for the night. He invited me up to his room for a nightcap. I had a little too much to drink. I fell asleep on his bed. With him passed out on top of me. All perfectly innocent.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” said Roger.
“Oh,” said Jessica. “Then never mind.”
Jessica peeled off what little of her costume there was.
She didn’t go into another room. She didn’t step behind a screen. She stripped bare right there in front of us.
Cooper gallantly turned his back.
I didn’t.
Neither did Sands. He captured the peel off on film. I wondered what kind of theater would show a documentary that included this scene. The only ones I knew of catered to middle aged balding men who wore raincoats and watched the film with hats over their laps.
“Jessica!” said Roger. He stood up and placed his paws over Jessica’s ta-tas. The rabbit had abnormally large hands, but they weren’t up to this job. He needed a pair of catcher’s mitts. Better yet, two milk buckets. “You know we have company.” He nodded at me, Cooper, and Sands.
“My, my. Forgetful little old me.” said Jessica, completely naked. She turned her back to us, giving us a great view of her perfectly formed posterior. “You boys want a drink?”
She turned back around. She was holding a bottle of champagne. She had four glasses balanced on her natural shelves.
“You bet,” I said.
Sands shook his head. “Not while I’m shooting. Throws off my focus.”
“Pass,” said Cooper.
I admired Cooper’s will power. He still hadn’t looked at Jessica. That was okay. I was ogling enough for two.
“None for me, either,” said Roger. “Liquor makes me too goofy.”
“ Just you and me,” Mister Valiant.”
“My fondest dream.”
She poured twin snifters of bubbly. She kept one for herself, and handed one to me.
Jessica stood head and shoulders taller than me. When she gave me my glass, I found myself gazing up at the underside of twin peaks that would have been a worthy challenge for Sir Edmond Hillary.
“Jessica!” said Roger. His balloon wrapped his wife in the equivalent of a bath towel. “Have some modesty.”
“Oh, Roger, you’re such a prude.”
“Yes I am.”
To my regret, she didn’t remove the balloon.
“As I was saying before, we got a big problem,” said Roger. “Unless we can stop Willy Prosciutto from buying Toonie Island at auction tomorrow, the entire coastline of Toontown will become a dumping ground for toxic chemicals.”
Whoopee! Jessica dropped her word balloon towel.
Take that previous whoopee right back. If her film career ever fizzled out, the lady could find work as a stage magician. She had managed to don her new costume underneath the balloon without displaying the teensiest bit of flesh or as much as a wayward wiggle.
Jessica was dressed as a slave princess.
What little there was of her outfit had been fabricated out of bronze. There wasn’t much substance behind the execution. Maybe twenty minutes of hammering and shaping by a competent metalworker. Two discuses from an Olympic flea circus up top and an African spear point below.
The way Jessica exposed her metallic creation, and the way her creation exposed her, I knew the fashion mags were going to be heralding the arrival of a new Bronze Age as soon as her flicker hit the screens.
Jessica bent over.
Her taut breasts nearly came unplated. Her African spear point shifted sideways giving me a perfect view of her dark continent.
She kissed her hubby’s topknot.
Roger’s orange hair tuft sprang to attention. Jessica stroked Roger’s harey erection with her fingertips.
“Don’t worry my hunny bunny. I have an appointment at the beauty parlor which will solve this little problem of yours.”
We took Jessica’s limo to the Toontown Beauty Parlor located on Hairpin Turn.
“Come inside with me,” she said. Jessica Rabbit never had to ask
twice for any man, or in this case three men and a rabbit, to do anything. Me, Cooper, Roger, and Sands trailed obediently after her.
I had to duck my head as we walked through the place to avoid being smothered by wafting clouds of juicy gossip.
“Wow, they’ve got lots of beauties in here today,” said Roger. “There’s Sleeping Beauty. Hiya, Sleeping.”
She didn’t respond. She was stretched out on a sofa, taking a nap.
“Sleeping’s a narcoleptic. She slept through her own movie and her wedding ceremony afterwards. I hear Prince Charming is gonna divorce her on the grounds that she’s sleeping around. But not the way you think. She’s sleeping around the clock.”
Roger waved at a black Toon horse.
“There’s Black Beauty.”
Black Beauty was getting her hooves manicured and her mane straightened. Everybody else in the salon was drinking wine out of crystal goblets. Black Beauty was lapping hers out of a foot square watering trough.
Roger pointed to one more beauty, a man. He resembled a cross between Bigfoot and your worst nightmare. “That’s Beauty Andy-Beast,” said Roger. “Looks mean, but he’s really a sweetheart once you get to know him.”
Jessica proceeded to get her hair straightened and colored.
Me, Roger, and Cooper took seats in the waiting area. Sands strolled around the salon, poking his lens into everybody’s business.
Roger wiggle-waggled his ears. “As long as we’re here, I’m gonna get my ears straightened.”
Roger turned to Cooper. I figured Cooper must be uncomfortable hanging around a sissy joint like this since he was doing his best to hide behind an open magazine he’d picked at random off the salon’s magazine rack.
I bet Walter Windchill would pay a pretty penny for a photo of this man’s man seemingly engrossed in the latest issue of Woman’s Home Companion.
“How’s about you, Mister Cooper? Maybe a perm? Or a tint. Whatever you need done to your noggin.”