by Gary K. Wolf
His smile proved ducks do have teeth, and sharp ones. “We inform. We also entertain.” Delancey shinnied down his chair leg, duck-walked to the wall behind me, and fastidiously wiped a bit of grime off a diploma, magna cum laude from Drake.
“What category does your story on Jessica Rabbit fall into?”
“To which one do you refer? There have been so many over the years.” He opened a cupboard beneath his sheepskin and hauled out a chilled bottle of Cold Duck. He exhaled a transparent balloon, poked it into goblet shape with his thumb, and filled it full of bubbly. “She’s one of our reliables, so to speak.” I watched in thirsty silence as he took a sip, sip here, and a sip, sip there. “We can always count on Jessica Rabbit whenever circulation, or male blood pressures, need a boost.”
“I’m talking about the pieces of smudge romantically linking her with Clark Gable.”
“Ah, yes. Some of our more recent efforts. If memory serves me correctly, and it usually does, those fall into the category of absolutely true. They were researched and written by Louise Wrightliter. One of our best and most tenacious reporters.” Delancey Duck spread his tail feathers open. It turned him into a dead ringer for the centerpiece at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “I personally taught her everything she knows.”
“She’s following in the foot webs of the master.”
“So to speak.”
“Where’d she get her information?”
He opened his center desk drawer and hauled out a word balloon. He sailed it across the room. I caught it on the fly.
I examined it, front and back. Typical size, eighteen inches across, the grayish color of cheap newsprint. I fanned it under my nose. It smelled faintly of perfume. It said “Jessica Rabbit and Clark Gable” in pasted-on letters sliced from other balloons.
“That came to me in the mail. Just as you see it there. No return address. I passed it along to Louise. She checked it out and returned with the goods.”
I handed it back. “Or the no-goods.”
“I have every confidence in Louise’s integrity.”
“That why you took her under your wing?”
Two angry golf balls of smoke blew out of his ears. Either he was inhaling his cigar into crossed cranial plumbing, or he didn’t take kindly to ethnic jokes. Remind me never to ask him how many Toons it takes to screw in a light bulb. “Miss Smoot will escort you to Louise’s office. I’ll instruct Louise to cooperate fully in your investigation. She will answer all of your questions, within the confines of journalistic privilege.” He couldn’t shoehorn that many polysyllabic words into one balloon. He needed two. They emerged a translucent, milky white, brittle, with narrow gold rims, like the plates stuffy dowagers use to serve crumpets.
I walked over them on my way out, crushing them to slivers under my heel. For a lark.
3
Miss Smoot pointed me down a hallway. “Third door on the left.”
I grabbed her by the elbow. “A friendly word of advice, Toots. Paint something bright and red on that mouth, invest in a tight sweater, let your hair down, and buy some rhinestone eyeglasses. You’d give Dixie Dugan a run for the money.”
She slapped my hand loose. “Go flounce a floozy. I want a man with an IQ higher than his hat size.” She walked away twisting her bushel just enough to let me catch a brief glimpse of the light that glowed underneath.
Louise Wrightliter had an age-yellowed slip of notepaper thumb-tacked to her door. “Out on assignment,” it said. A cardboard clock with “Will return at” printed across the bottom hung from her doorknob. Both of the hands were missing.
I checked the door. Locked, with a pot metal dead bolt too cheesy for Mortimer Mouse. I popped it open without even scuffing my nails.
I needed a machete to hack through her jungle of books. Judging from the titles of those that fell on my toe, they covered every weirdity from eyewitness accounts of outer space invasions to psychic predictions to horoscopes to how-to-do-it manuals for hexing your neighbor. A complete collection of the hokum every good Telltale reporter needs to know.
Caribbean travel brochures layered her desk top three deep. Glancing through them brought back memories of Doris, me, and my brother Freddy in Cuba.
Freddy came into the business with me after a Toon killed my brother Teddy. Freddy and I were a pretty good team, real hotshot operatives, freelancing for Pinkertons. Doris answered our phones, opened our mail, balanced our two sets of accounting ledgers, and, in her spare time, accepted my proposal of marriage.
Pinkertons sent us to Cuba to check security at one of the big casinos. The job took a week, we caught a pit bull pit boss with his paw in the till and we stayed a week extra. Call it a trial honeymoon for me and Doris, with Freddy along to referee. With a fat Pinkertons paycheck burning a hole in our balance sheet, and the promise of plenty more where that came from, our prospects looked rosy indeed.
We drank gallons of rum and Coke, pumped Wurlitzers full of nickels, learned to dance the Carioca from a parrot named Jose, lazed in the sun, and gambled. Doris and I broke about even at craps. Freddy lost his shirt to roulette and his heart to Lupe Chihuahua, the Latin Spitfire.
Between bit roles in the horror movies studios shot on the cheap down there, Lupe performed at Baba de Rum, the wild Havana nightery. She sang and danced in a costume made entirely of fruit. Unlike Freddy, I’m not that attracted to lady Toons, but I must admit Lupe looked better in a bunch of grapes than most women did in a Paris frock. And that was before she peeled!
The plot thickened to the consistency of lumpy gruel after Lupe turned out to be the more or less steady girlfriend of Tom Tom LeTuit, chief of the Cuban secret police.
The trip left me and Doris with horrible sunburns, worse hangovers, and another broken engagement.
Freddy? I don’t know. I never saw him again. I went to his room the morning we were scheduled to sail back to Miami, and he was gone. No note, nothing.
I combed the room inch by inch. I found eight cigar butts, a pineapple stem, and a busted castanet—the three blind mice who worked as maids in this joint missed any piece of trash smaller than the Rock of Gibraltar—but nothing to help me find Freddy.
I reported his disappearance to the police. Tom Tom LeTuit surprised me by bounding into action. He assigned a hundred men to the case, and kept them on it for at least half a minute.
No trace of Freddy ever surfaced.
Louise Wrightliter’s brochures described Cuba as the Paradise of the Caribbean. I called it worse.
I put the travel brochures back and rifled her drawers.
She chewed spearmint gum and number-two pencils. She never washed her coffee cup or paid her speeding tickets. She smoked my brand and drank it, too, masking her vices with Sen Sen. If the automatic I found in the bottom of her Kleenex box had been two calibers larger, we could have passed for twins.
I rolled her next day’s column out of her Remington. She wasn’t quite halfway completed and she’d already managed to tally four of the Telltale’s five Ns: nefarious, nasty, naughty, and nudity. If she could find a way to work necrophilia into a story about a young, blonde girl storming her way into a country cottage occupied by three bears, she’d score a full house.
I hate that kind of lewd, crude drivel. In my era you learned about the birds and the bees the good old-fashioned way, from your savvy buddies out on the streets. Today kids read about it in the scandal sheets. Or worse. They get it as part of a well-balanced, formal education. Smut 101. What’s the world coming to when kids go to school to watch dirty movies? Put that stuff back in the stag parties and smokers where it belongs.
I went through Wrightliter’s filing cabinet and located the folders on Jessica Rabbit and Clark Gable. They were color coded, Jessica’s in valentine red (naturally), Gable’s in yellow. The two folders were the largest she had, each easily twice the size of any other. I
’d need two solid days to read them cover to cover. I settled for grabbing a handful of papers at random off the top of each, and returned the leftovers.
I fished one of my cards out of my wallet, wrote a note on it asking Louise to call me, “Urgent,” and tacked it to her door.
I walked back to my car in the dark.
Nighttime falls quick in L.A. Like everybody else who works steady in this burg, Old Mister Sun’s a union man. The minute his shift’s over, he pulls the plug, reels in his beams, and goes home.
I fumbled out my car key under a streetlight that gave off less shine than a two-year-old’s birthday cake. All of a sudden the streetlight went dark, and so did I.
Whoever sapped me walloped me pro style, above and slightly behind my ear, with just enough oomph to cave in my knees. He planted his foot in the small of my back and booted me forward into the running board.
My assailant delivered another kick which sent me halfway to lala land. As I drifted in and out of consciousness, he unplugged my heater from under my armpit.
He slapped my eyes open and rolled me sideways enough to shove a balloon into my puss. “Box, and you could get hurt,” it said.
He sapped me again.
I woke up stretched out in the gutter. I’d been there before, plenty of times, but this was the first visit I didn’t have only myself to blame.
I lurched to hands and knees, and stumbled to my feet, plenty the worse for wear. My head spun. My breath came in short, painful gasps. Drops of blood wept off my cheek. I’d cracked bones I hadn’t thought about since I counted them for my high school biology final. My hands trembled like a pair of palsied moths.
I dragged a butt out of my pack and nailed it to my lips, twisted my head sideways to shield my match from the wind, and scraped my nose on the guy’s balloon. It hung over my shoulder, dried to the brittle shape of a taco shell. His words were on the inner surface; from my side I saw them backwards. I carefully lifted it off and held it to the side-view mirror, rotating it slowly to bring the whole sentence into view. I blinked a few million times to clear my vision. Yep. “Box, and you could get hurt.” That’s what it said. It seemed like an obvious point to me. Why nearly kill me to make it?
I popped open my trunk, wrapped the frizzled balloon in the coveralls I keep for dirty work, and bundled the package into my spare tire.
I climbed into the front seat and reached into the glove compartment. Thank God! He’d spared Granddad. I poured the old geezer down until the dent in his bottle matched the size of the one in my head.
4
I slept in my jalopy and showered in the morning mist that blows off the ocean. My chenille seat cover toweled me dry. I finished my toilette by lathering on enough Ben Gay to parboil a yam, then dressed standing on the curb.
My mood brightened right along with the landscape as Big Sol punched in for work right on schedule and threw the master switch that drapes this town with tinsel.
A Toon mockingbird flew by, littering the landscape with a bad impression of a canary. I brushed its ersatz warbles off my car before they cracked open and blistered the paint.
I cranked up my engine and headed on down the yellow brick freeway.
Breakfast consisted of auto exhaust and two Almond Joys nutty side up chased with the dynamic duo, a shot of gargle and a gasper.
I paid a quick visit and twenty bucks to Arnie Johnson, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. I didn’t have an appointment, but Arnie squeezed me in, between a mangy dog and a bloated goldfish. He taped my cracked ribs, stuck three stitches in my head, advised me to find a safer line of work, and agreed, as usual, not to report my assorted bumps, cuts, and bruises to the proper authorities.
He updated my chart, informing me that my head now bore only three less stitches than a regulation Spalding baseball, and was only ten shy of a world’s record. He told me to hurry up and take a few more lumps so he could secure his place in medical history. I promised to do my best.
I found Professor Ring Wordhollow in his office, surrounded by piles and piles of Toon balloons.
With his slender, rounded appendages and limber joints, Wordhollow resembled a stick doll manufactured out of LifeSavers and rubber bands. He wore a shapeless pair of nubbly blue wool trousers, a white shirt, an ink-spotted green tie tucked into his waistband, and a belted shooting jacket with half a dozen pens and pencils filling the loops designed to hold shotgun shells.
As head of UCLA’s Visual Linguistics Department, Wordhollow devoted his life to the study of Toon conversation. He pored over balloons the way touts read the racing form. He could point out subtle—and to him, thrilling—differences in texture, thickness, circumference, lettering style. As a human, he had a major handicap in the exercise of his chosen academic specialty. A scholar of American history could easily learn to speak English. Wordhollow could hold his nose and blow until his face turned blue. He’d never produce a balloon.
I gave him the one my attacker left behind. He promised to take a look.
A revolving circle of Toons picketed the entrance to Schwab’s. Seems Hollywood’s most famous drugstore discriminated. It refused to serve Toons their daily dose of tutti-frutti.
I say throw open the door and invite them inside. They want to spend five bits for a two-bit soda, let them. They want to sit next to humans and gobble overpriced French fries, who cares? Eddie Valiant’s definition of civil rights. Their money’s as good as anybody else’s. I ought to know. I’m the one working for a rabbit.
I ducked my head, stiffened my arm, and plowed into the tightly packed bubble clusters of protest which blocked the front door. It was like swimming through the sting and pop in a bottle of beer.
Once you got past the turmoil, it was a typical day at Schwab’s. Out-of-work actors and actresses hogged the counter stools nursing cheeseburgers, lime rickeys, and the hope of being discovered. The only stars I saw sparkled in the eyes of the rubbernecked tourists lined up for booths.
On my way to the fountain, I checked out the counter dollies. I tallied four pairs of pretty good legs, one set of blue eyes so fiery they could melt the Tin Man, and enough angora sweaters to wrap King Kong’s high school ring. My purely unofficial opinion was good quality, but not great. Nobody likely to replace Jean Harlow this year. Or any year, for that matter.
Skipper, the counter boy, had his nose buried in a Hollywood fan magazine. His lips moved as he read. I watched his mouth and caught the gist. Baby Herman confesses to being Heddy Lamar’s love child. For this they turn perfectly good trees into paper?
“Any messages?” I asked.
Without raising his eyes, Skipper reached under the counter. He handed me a single note. A phone message. “Slow week,” he said. I never heard Skipper utter more than two words running. He aspired to laconic, saw himself as the drugstore Gary Cooper. I slapped half a buck into his open palm.
“Thanks, Eddie,” he said with his usual one, two. He tried doing George Raft flipping the silver but muffed the catch. Miss Liberty plopped in the sink. “Oh, drat.” I left him up to his elbows in Lux detergent and warned him to beware of sharks. He laughed. But he would. He yuks at anything. Skipper’s the kind Toons were made for.
A mean eye and hostile attitude swept the Iowa hayseeds out of my usual booth. I slid in and unfolded Louise Wrightliter’s notes.
I set the two stars side by side and ran an eenie meenie miney moe. I caught Jessica Rabbit by the toe. I picked her up and started to read.
Less than two pages later, with a five-alarm fire pouring smoke out from under my collar, I signaled Skipper to draw me a seltzer, light on spritz, heavy on ice. I needed cooling, and I needed it bad. The last time I read anything this spicy, it spelled Burp and exploded out of a Toon who’d overindulged in a chili parlor.
A hot number, Jessica Rabbit. Louise Wrightliter meticulously itemized times, dates, and places of Jessica’s multiple ren
dezvous with Gable. Plus, Louise had a battalion of witnesses—hotel clerks and bellboys, mostly—who had seen the two together. Louise even snapped photos of the happy couple. One showed them clinking champagne glasses and wearing the monogrammed cashmere bathrobes that come with a fruit basket and complete discretion if you rent a bungalow at one of the swankier Hollywood hideaways.
In the pictures of them on the street, both wore sunglasses, slouch hats, trench coats, and baggy britches. Adequate disguises for most people, but not this pair. Anybody on the short side of total myopia would recognize Jessica Rabbit even stuffed in a gunnysack. As for Gable, there was no mistaking him, either. I only saw one other with ears as big as his, and he answered to the name of Dumbo. Forget ordinary earmuffs. Give Gable a set of fur-lined peach baskets.
“Your seltzer,” said Skipper without taking his nose out of his magazine or his mind out of the sewer.
I slipped the waspwaisted glass discreetly under the table, added a dollop of joy juice from my hip flask, and swizzled the mix with my tonsils.
This was the poop Louise had used to write her exposes, and it backed her up six ways to Sunday. I folded the report and stuck it back in my pocket. Looked like I’d have to tell Roger he didn’t have a case. Judging from the swill in Louise Wrightliter’s journalistic garbage pail, maybe he didn’t have a wife anymore, either.
Even though Jessica’s material told the tale, I took a gander at Gable’s anyway. The mark of the consummate professional.
Wrightliter had turned over one of Gable’s stones and found an ugly serpent lurking underneath. According to a “reliable” source, Gable wasn’t the man’s man he appeared to be. He swung more toward a hint of mint, if you get my drift.
Rumors that Hollywood’s premier heartthrob was a nancy. That was a revelation that would rock a neighborhood Bijou or two. I wondered why Louise Wrightliter hadn’t branded her byline on that juicy tidbit. And what did that do to Gable’s supposed romance with Jessica Rabbit?