by Gary K. Wolf
Empty costumes reached off their hangers to touch him as he walked past. Either he was a fabric Messiah, or his sky-blue sharkskin suit carried a charge of static electricity that could short out the Underwriters’ Lab.
He walked with a bumpity limp, like Long John Silver, and for the same reason. He wore a shoe on one foot, a broomstick on the other.
Selznick made introductions. “Eddie Valiant, meet Pepper Potts.”
My handshake was a vise. Potts’s was the hydraulic press that forged it, strong enough to squeeze blood out of a turnip.
“I stunted in a Western a few years back,” I said, “starred a peg-legged man name of Pepper Potts.”
Potts shrugged, a motion equivalent to twin derricks pumping oil. “I been in a few flicks in my day.”
“The Pepper Potts I’m remembering always played the villain. Loved nothing better than tying a perky young lass to a railroad track and watching her wiggle while the Iron Horse bore down. Always seemed real disappointed seeing the hero gallop in at the last minute to slice her loose. Ornery cuss, this Pepper Potts. Rustled cattle, murdered lawmen, terrorized womenfolk, pillaged ranch houses, and never died easy. ‘Course that was only pretend. In real life, he could be a whole nother story.”
Potts’s voice dropped half an octave, from the screechy mutter of a mal-tuned bass fiddle to the dissonant wheeze of a leaky bassoon. “You making a point, or just flapping your gums to breeze the room?”
“The peg legged Pepper Potts I knew was a Toon.”
“Lets me out.” He and Frankenstein shared the same lipless smile with one minor difference. Frankenstein stole his from a moldy cadaver. Potts came by it naturally. “I’m human as they come.”
Selznick, apparently no fan of sparkling repartee, snapped his fingers. “What have you got for me, Pepper?” He reached out to Potts the same way the empty costumes had.
Potts handed Selznick a sheaf of printed surveys. “The upshoots of my meet with our West Coast distribs.”
Selznick leafed through the forms. It didn’t take long. Very few of the respondees had answered the questions. Most had summarized their response by scrawling one word, four letters long, horizontally across the page. Selznick whipped through the sheets like they were a deck of animated flash cards and the faster he flipped, the smoother their moving image would appear.
“It’s exactly the way I told you, Davey,” said Potts. “Costume epics is dead as door mice. You got the poop right in front of you. Read it and weep. Theater owners don’t want any more movies where everybody writes with feathers.”
With a single backhanded stroke, Selznick swept the surveys into his trash basket. He pointed his index finger at his desk top. “See that? There?” His flat-ended fingernail underscored faint traces of dark blue ink. “Henry Fonda used this desk to sign the Emancipation Proclamation in Young Mister Lincoln. Last year. With a quill pen. In front of sizable audiences.”
Potts’s rumbly laugh rattled the room with the smack of a ten-ton blockbuster coming home to roost. “You’re living in a cloud, Davey. Times change. Nobody wants the movie you’re selling.”
If Selznick had been a dynamite stick, I’d have pitched him out the window, he was that close to exploding. “For goodness sake, man, it’s your job to convince them! Why else am I paying you?”
Selznick arose so quickly his ancient chair toppled backwards. It hit his throw rug and splintered into a messy pile of pickup sticks. “Get me their support,” said Selznick softly. I’d heard such hushiness before. Once, in the tropics, in the middle of a typhoon.
“Bring them into line.” Selznick pressed his back against his wall. “Put a halt to their incessant carping.” He couldn’t stand where he was for long or the steam leaking out from under his collar would peel his wallpaper. “I don’t care how.” He shifted around to relieve the stabbing pressure between his shoulder blades caused by a gilt-framed photo of him accepting some sob sister society’s Humanitarian Award.
Potts smirked with uncivilized glee, like Attila the first time a fellow barbarian called him “Hun.”
“Whatever’s your pleasure, Davey.” One of his caterpillar eyebrows wiggled in its cocoon. “It would be a big helper if I could leak who was going to headline.”
Selznick rapped the baseboard with his heel. “How can I tell you if I don’t know myself?” He turned his gaze on me. His tightened lips creased slightly upward at the corners. “You want a star?” He jerked his hip in my direction. “Persuade Mr. Valiant to work faster. He’s the man who’s holding up my decision.”
Potts said “Do tell” and looked at me like I was the roadblock standing between him and the stairway to Paradise.
He chugged over and stuck his puss in mine. His bucked teeth, Neanderthal forehead, and tuberous honker raced to see who could get to me first. His nose won by a hair. “I need a name.” He bonked my chest with an ox-bludgeon finger. “Don’t keep me waiting, chum. Not if you know what’s good for you.”
He kicked out his good leg and spun around on his pin. He plowed his way toward the bookcase, which had the good sense to Open Sesame before he reached it.
Selznick leaned his head backwards and closed his eyes. Air wheezed out of his mouth, deflating his chest like one of Woody Woodpecker’s ratatattered balloons. He shambled listlessly back to his desk, where he evaluated his fallen chair by tickling it with his toe. He could use it for chopsticks the next time he ordered moo goo gai pan. For sure he’d never sit on it again. He kicked it out of his way and pulled up another, a modern one shaped like an angle-sliced egg. He plopped himself into the deep leather cushions. He sat with his arms stretched limply across his desk top and his chin touching his chest. His pale, clammy skin; unblinking, wide-pupiled eyes; and shallow, raspy breathing would get him VIP treatment at any emergency room in town.
No question, he was down. One more kick wouldn’t hurt. “I got news for you, junior. Your history book’s short a reel. I saw that movie about Honest Abe. It ended with him getting elected Prez and leaving for Washington.” I reached across and tapped his desk top’s dark-blue doodling. “All he signed in that film was a few autographs before he climbed on the train.”
Selznick raised his head a whisker and stared at the writing, bracketed on either end by his boneless arms. “I wrote it myself.” His face went from sour to sweet with the elastic ease of Gumby transforming himself into a rubber tree plant. “I alter the story to suit my point.” He straightened up, stuck his pipe between his smiling lips, and kissed it to life. “Works rather well, don’t you agree?”
“Probably would if I was in a better frame of mind, but, to tell you the truth, I’m up to my gills with make-believe today. You got a job for me to do, swell. Give me the details, a hefty down payment, and a hundred-yard head start on your gimpy friend.”
“Done, done, and done.” For as quick as he answered, I knew I’d sold myself short. I should have gone for two hundred yards.
“The problem is quite straightforward.” He handed me his three manila folders. “These are the contenders for the role of Rhett Butler. Two days ago, I invited them to my office for a side-by-side comparison. We chatted together in various groupings for perhaps an hour. After they left, I discovered one of them had stolen a small metal box I keep on my desk.”
“No chance you misplaced it? Maybe somebody copped it before then, or later?”
“Absolutely not. It was here when they arrived. It was gone when they departed.” He rummaged through his center drawer and pulled out an eight-by-ten publicity still of him in shirtsleeves working in this office, at this selfsame desk. In grease pencil he circled a box. It nestled inconspicuously between a sooty ashtray and a round porcelain match holder. As boxes went, it was no great shakes, made of pitted gray pot metal and small, about the size of a mousey eater’s bread basket. Its only notable feature was a small, heart-shaped iron padlock stuck through its rusty
hasp.
“This box valuable?”
“Hardly. I’ve never had it appraised, but I can’t imagine it’s worth more than ten dollars. It serves me as a paperweight.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Here, there. I can’t recall.” He removed his goggles and polished them on his tie. “I seem to recollect receiving it as a present. I don’t remember from whom. I’m sorry, but even the occasion slips my mind. I kept it because I found it appealing in a primitive way.” He held his eyeglasses in front of his face and squinted at me. He must not have liked what he saw since he wrapped his peepers back in his tie and repeated the buffing process. “Why do you care where it came from? Its origins make no difference to the matter at hand.”
“Most likely you’re right. I ask the question mainly to show I’m a thorough guy, so you know you’re getting your money’s worth.” I folded the photo with the box facing out and slipped it into my pocket. “By the way, what’s in it?”
I realized why he soused his hair so liberally with Brylcreem. The oily white grease strangled the brushfires he ignited scratching his scalp with his pipe stem. “I have no idea. It was locked when I got it, and came without a key. I suspect from the age and the style that it contains some insignificant, sentimental, romantic, Victorian geegaw. A lock of hair most likely. Possibly a cut-paper silhouette.”
Outside his window, a stagehand accidentally smacked the Washington Monument with a stepladder and tilted it six inches off plumb.
“Let me emphasize that the box per se isn’t your primary focus,” said Selznick. “I’m not that concerned about getting it back. I’m more interested in finding out who took it, because that will indicate a deep character flaw which will eliminate that particular star from my consideration.”
“Leaving you with a simple flip of the coin.” I opened the folders. “Let’s see who we got for suspects.” I took a gander at the tidbit every gossip columnist in Hollywood would kill to find out: the three finalists for the role of Rhett Butler.
Roger Rabbit had made the cut. To make matters even more ridiculous, so had his perennial nemesis Baby Herman. The third candidate was a dark horse, a player named Kirk Enigman. Two buffoons and a cipher. I wouldn’t pay a wooden nickel to watch any of these three burn Scarlet O’Hara, and I doubt many others would, either.
“You seem pensive, Mr. Valiant. Is there a problem?”
Not if you didn’t count the conflict of interest if I started investigating my only other client. “None whatsoever.”
“Good. Remember, pursue this matter with utmost discretion. If word leaks out that I suspect one of my principal candidates of felonious conduct, the scandal would ruin any chance of my movie’s success.” He handed me a check. “I believe you requested a retainer.”
It was written in the same dark blue ink as Selznick’s forgery of Fonda’s impersonation of Lincoln’s John Henry. It contained more zeros than a winning game of tic-tac-toe. I slipped it into my wallet, very slowly so as not to wake the moths.
“One question.” In my line of work there’re things you’re better off not knowing. There’re questions you don’t want to ask. That’s why I often get the feeling I’m in the wrong line of work. “Why me? Why not one of the studio’s security boys?”
He picked up a wax millinery head, a rosy-cheeked lady with full, pouting lips and marble swirl eyes. He covered her chestnut ringlets with a lady’s bonnet and held her at arm’s length to check the fit. “You’re better than they are.”
“Only at spotting a lie If I hear one.”
He removed the sunbonnet and replaced it with a widow’s veil. It did its job one hundred percent. You’d need a fluoroscope to see the happenings underneath. “Very well, then. I chose you because you’re totally expendable. If the press gets wind of the fact that you’re snooping around, or if one of the three stars complains, I’ll deny we ever met and feed you to the sharks.” He whipped off the manikin’s black silk shroud. He and she flashed me the same inhuman smile. “Anything else you want to know?”
“As a matter of fact.” I pulled out the Life magazine picture of him and Roger in the MGM canteen. “What’s going on here between you and the rabbit?”
“Another of your irrelevancies?” He took the picture and shot it a glance. “Offhand, I’d say lunch.” He wadded it and played bombs away with his circular file. “Do me the favor, Mr. Valiant, of sparing me further demonstrations of due diligence. Find a more positive way to convince me of your worth.”
“Gladly. How’s about you gimmee the slack.” I rescued the picture from its stainless steel grave, smoothed it flat, and dangled it between us. “I repeat. What’d you two talk about?”
“Why could that possibly make a difference?”
“This isn’t Roger Rabbit.”
“That’s absurd.” He snatched the photo out of my grasp and looked at it closer this time. “Of course it is. Who says it’s not?”
I tapped Roger’s nose with my knuckle. “Him truly, and he’s the one oughta know.”
I punched a rivet out of my funeral urn and offered Selznick one of the same. He took it automatically and held it to his mouth. I stoked us both off the same match.
“Ridiculous,” said Selznick, dragging deep and holding it there. “The rabbit must be insane.” He dangled the ciggie off his lower lip, like any common stew bum.
“Normally, I’d say yessiree Bob, in spades, but here I think otherwise. Roger says no, and I believe him.”
Selznick stashed his specs on his crown while he examined the photo through a magnifying lens the thickness of the stargazer on Palomar Mountain. He held it close to the paper as he moved it across the rabbit’s face. “If that’s not Roger, it’s a rabbit bearing a remarkable resemblance.”
“Exactly my comment, and Roger’s, too. Now, care to tell me the gist of this meet?”
He rubbed the red, half-moon indentations his eyepieces had left on the bridge of his nose. “I can’t exactly recall. I take hundreds of meetings a week. But it will be noted in here.”
He opened a side drawer and hauled out a leather-bound diary. He checked the date on the photo caption and flipped to the diary’s corresponding page. “According to my notation, we weren’t having lunch together that day. Roger accidentally ran into me in the canteen. And I mean that literally. Roger came galumping around a corner, and we collided. He hit me so hard, he knocked me over. He apologized profusely, and helped me to my feet. We chatted amiably for a moment. The studio publicist and his photographer happened by and snapped our picture. That’s all there was to it.”
He read farther down the page. “No, wait. There’s more. Later that day, I discovered a pickpocket had stolen my wallet!” He raised his head. “My wallet, my box, my God! That deceitful fur ball was there both times. By George, man! You’ve solved the case.” He closed the book on Roger Rabbit. “The hare’s the thief.”
I returned the photo to my pocket. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Leave that to me.”
He proved the feasibility of one-handed applauding by drumming his desk with his palm. “With pleasure. I’ve no complaints thus far.” His Lucky shortened to the length of his nose, and the smoke drifted straight up into his nostril. He yanked the ciggie out of his mouth and looked at it like he’d never seen one before. “Can you believe this? I quit these eight years ago. Amazing how one regresses under stress.” He mashed the offending butt to death in his ashtray. “Anything else I can tell you? No holds barred. Nothing off-limits. Whatever you want to know.”
Might as well go for broke. “Cut me in on the big secret. Who’s playing Scarlet O’Hara?”
He held his hands up shoulder high and shoulder wide. “Who else?” He traced a figure in the air. It would order him a bottle of Coke at any bar in the country.
I got the picture. Jessica Rabbit. The best-built redhead in town. She got my vote too, hands
down. That shot the rabbit’s theory about sleazy publicity ruining any chance for stardom. “One more thing.” I showed him Trudy Hammerschlemmer’s likeness. “Got a part in your picture for her?”
He held a frilly ball gown below the picture. He exchanged the frock for a bridle and bit. “That’s better. Have her talk to my head wrangler.” He handed me the picture back. “If there’s nothing further…”
I took that as my cue to leave.
I found my trail of bread crumbs and was almost out of the woods when Selznick snapped his fingers like Admiral Byrd did after realizing he’d gone off without packing his compass. “I almost forgot. After you find the box…” Selznick’s face harbored more perils than Pauline. “…whatever you do, don’t open it.”
I picked up one of the Colt Dragoons and twirled it around on my trigger finger. “No peeking?” I did a hand-to-hand Durango shift, surprisingly slick considering my lack of practice, and slipped the gun into my empty shoulder holster. “No problem.”
He didn’t say a word.
7
The state’s vehicular motor code requires a full and complete stop at a flashing red light. I passed one flashing “Jake’s Saloon.” Law-abiding citizen that I am, I immediately pulled over and stopped my motor.
I never interrogate a suspect on a dry whistle. Call it tradition, superstition, anything you want. Point is, it got me where I am today, and why rock the bottle?
Jake was my style of barkeep, a big, beefy galoot with jackhammer arms, a nose the size of a pickled egg and the color of jerky, a crosshatched facial scar that could pass for a railroad siding, butch-cut hair, a vocabulary limited to “Name your poison,” and a repertoire of libations that began and ended with whiskey, neat.