by Gary K. Wolf
“Mere words cannot describe the experience.” That didn’t stop Roger from trying. “Savory, delicious, scrumptious, tasty, mouthwatering.” He rubbed his hands together like Ebenezer Scrooge gleefully contemplating a visit to the vault. “I can’t wait to try pork chops, quail, rump roast, beef brisket, pheasant, ham hocks, pickled pigs feet, venison, partridge, mutton, Spam, SOS.”
I opened my office door.
“Hi yah, Valiant,” growled Pepper Potts. “How are the old bells clanging?” Curlicued wood chips sprinkled the floor around his chair. My best piece of furniture, a polished oak desk lamp, rested on his lap. He’d removed the shade, the bulb, and the metal fittings, but not the cord. He had whittled the lamp into a new leg.
He was dressed for the links in a five-button tweed jacket, knickers, and snow-white golfing cap. The six iron he pointed at my stomach came endorsed by two scratch shooters named Smith and Wesson.
Roger grabbed me around the middle. He shook more than a chorus line of Saint Vitus’s dancers. “Oh my gosh, Eddie. It’s Bepper Botts.” At least the cottontail was smart enough to realize that a stutter here pickled him in a peck of problems.
“I’ll pass up the blindfold but not the cigarette,” I told Potts. I extracted a Lucky.
“Pshaw, Eddie.” Potts sighted his gun at me and pulled the trigger. A flame sprouted from the ejection chamber. I leaned forward and let him light my smoke. “You didn’t think I was serious about snuffing you out? The joke’s on you. I was merely spoofing. “
“You got quite the bizarre sense of humor, Pottsie. Remind me to avoid you like poison ivy on April Fool’s Day. I might die laughing. “
“You’re a hot ticket, Valiant. Be careful you don’t burn out early.” Potts waved his flaming lighter across the arm of my easy chair. My nostrils filled with the noxious odor of scorched nylon frisé.
“My interior decorator’s going to be miffed with you, Pepper. She spent months searching for a chair with the proper degree of tawdry elegance, and you ruin it.”
“Let’s cut the crape.” Potts flicked my desk lamp’s light bulb at my head. It zipped past with velocity sufficient to draw applause from a V2 rocket and popped against the wall. “Where’s the rabbit?”
I moved to Potts’s right, hoping to split his attention by putting me on one side of him, Roger on the other. The rabbit missed my message. He stuck to me like graft to a politician. “I haven’t seen Roger since he disappeared into the sunset with you hot on his trail. “
Potts tied his new hardwood leg in place by knotting the electrical cord around his stump. “When the rabbit turns up, give him a message for me.” He stood, shifting his entire weight to his dowel. A floor-shaking test hop won him a loud Gypsy curse from the fortuneteller renting the office below. “Tell Roger I want to work out a trade for the formula.”
Roger stuck his head over my shoulder. “You don’t possess a single article Roger Rabbit could possibly want.”
Potts surplused his old pivot into my wastebasket. The cup end, shaped like a giant golf tee, protruded eight inches over the trash can’s lip. “Who’s your loudmouthed friend, shamus?”
“My apprentice. I’m teaching him the business.”
“Giving him the business more likely.” Potts reached behind the easy chair. “I got plenty the rabbit wants. An item he’d die for. An item that might wind up dying for him if he don’t play my game.” He produced a plain brown paper grocery bag. “Here’s my trade bait, Valiant.” He reached into the bag. “Pass it along to the rabbit when you run into him.” He tossed me the dress Jessica wore last night.
Roger nipped it out of my hands. “You’ve kidnapped Jessica!” He buried his face in the bodice. “You vile, heartless, degenerate, debased, ignoble, depraved fiend!”
“We must have met before ‘cause you sure got me pegged right.” Potts lifted Jessica’s hem with the blade of his whittling knife. “Nothing more fun than peeling a tomato except maybe slicing one for salad.”
Roger removed his puss from the fabric. Jessica’s sequins had left their imprint, lust in reverse, on his forehead. “You would actually murder her?”
“What murder? Nobody said nothing about murder. I’m talking about making a vegetable salad, period. What you read into it’s your problem.” He stuck his mitt back into the bag. “I figured the rabbit’s one and only might get lonely, so I snatched a chatterbox to keep her company.” He showed me Little Jo’s work shirt. Every button had been ripped off. The garment barely covered his palm. “Regular dolls, those sisters. Trouble with dolls is they break easy. Their arms crack. Their legs twist off. A risky life being a doll, especially one with an uncooperative owner.” He arranged Little Jo’s sleeves so they folded corpse style across the breast.
Roger grabbed for him, his arms extending outward on either side of my body.
Potts drew another gun. “Relax, friend. This one sparks more than flint.” He edged around us. “The dames are safe and sound. They’ll stay that way if the rabbit hands over the formula. Otherwise…well, I’m a volatile person.” He smacked his gun against my bogus diploma. The glass shattered. “When I don’t get what I want, I can’t be held responsible for my own actions.”
“You hurt either one of them,” shouted Roger, “and I’ll hurt you a hundred times worse.”
“I’m quaking in my boot.” Potts backed out and slammed the door behind him. The frosted panel shattered. Between that, the light bulb, and the picture frame, I’d never again be able to skip through my office barefoot.
Roger grabbed my lapels. “Give him what he wants, Eddie. I’ll expire from grief if anything happens to my darling, beloved, sweet patootie.”
I poured us a pair of bracers. “We talking about the woman you swore off once and forever last night?”
He bumped back his nip and splashed himself another. “Eddie, she’s my wife. When we married, I took a vow to love, honor, and obey. Through thick and thin, better and worse, rich and poor, sickness and health, tall and short, fatness and lean. I can’t renounce my word over a minor peccadillo.”
Myself, I’d consider Gable’s cake in Jessica’s oven to be the frosting on a recipe for divorce, but I wasn’t the one cooking up the half-baked notions of what constituted marital fidelity.
Officer Bunk Thunker stuck his broad-beam shoulders through my shattered office door. “You want to improve your ventilation Valiant, try a fan. It’s a lot less messy.” Thunker came in, purposely choosing a path that let him crunch maximum glass into my parquet.
For a plainclothes cop, Thunker was far from plainly clothed. He wore a garish, Hawaiian print, short-sleeved sport shirt pulled out over baggy plaid pants. His tie was wide enough to use for a tablecloth if you didn’t mind eating off a hand-painted water spaniel.
What I took for a black fedora turned out to be a thundercloud. “Bulldog wants you.” He squeezed his fist, causing the dragon tattooed on his forearm to roll over and play dead.
Nobody ever won an argument with Thunker. I wasn’t about to buck the odds. I told Roger to hold down my fort.
Thunker shoved me unceremoniously into Bascomb’s office.
Rows of thumb-tacked red streamers hung down the wall. They were blood lines, what Toons leave behind when they leak. Each came from a public enemy Bascomb had plugged on the run.
“Here, Valiant,” said Bascomb. “Don’t say I never gave you nothing.” He split his midmorning snack, a prune Danish, down the center and scooted half across his desk.
I bit into it. Stale as the joke about firemen wearing red suspenders. “You buy this last year and let it age? That’s for wine, not crullers.”
“You got complaints, take them up with the donut shop. You ought to know first that Big Mo, the pug who owns it, moonlights twisting arms for Lone Loan Shark.” A morsel of prune fell onto Bascomb’s desk. He licked it off without bending over. The darting motion cracked h
is tongue like a bullwhip.
“So much for friendly chitchat, Sarge. Let’s pound brass tacks. To what do I owe the displeasure of my visit?”
Bascomb employed a miniature guillotine to lop the chaff off a rolled bundle of stinkweed pretending to be a cigar. “I’m hearing scuttlebutt, Valiant. In these selfsame hallowed halls.” His lighter produced sufficient heat to fry an innocent man. “Rumors are circulating that there’s pictures of Kirk Enigman’s parting words.” He rested his stogie in an ashtray formed from the hammered end of a spent howitzer shell. “You know what I’m thinking I’ll see when I finally corral that film and give it a view?” He pointed a claw at the precise spot where my breath was caught in my chest. “I’ll see a balloon implicating your rabbit pal.”
I exhaled a quantity of air equal to the cubic volume of the Hindenburg. “What makes you sure?”
“Previous history.” Bascomb unzippered a scarred leather vanity case and extracted a steel fingernail file. “As I recollect, Roger’s the rabbit who was chief suspect in the murder of that studio exec a while back.” He stuck his file into his mouth and whipsawed it back and forth across the sides of his teeth.
“I cleared him of that. You can’t hold it against him.”
“Oh, but I can, and I do. I’m the law in Toontown, Valiant. I’m not constrained by the normal legal niceties.” He tested the sharpness of his snappers by biting into a tablet of lined paper. He left a double semicircle of holes the size of carpet tacks. “In my book, a rabbit’s guilty until proven innocent.”
“That the official police motto these days? I always thought it was `We’re here to serve you.’ Or do I have you cops confused with the busboys’ union again?”
“Clever banter don’t become you, Valiant.” He picked a piece of gristle out of his mouth. I’m assuming it came from a butcher shop and not his upper jaw. “If you’re hiding the rabbit, you’re an accessory to murder.” Bascomb blew a smoke ring in the shape of a noose. It settled around my shoulders. “That’s the way the D.A. will lay it out. And you know what a terror he can be.”
Indeed I did. In his office, the D.A. kept a box containing the skeletons in my family closet. He had enough bones in it to build his own dinosaur, and would the instant a cage opened up at the zoo.
“If I was you, Valiant, I’d stop off at Schwab’s and buy a tube of Chapstick. After I find the rabbit, you’ll need it to keep your lips from cracking when you kiss your sweet license goodbye.”
“You’re barking down the wrong warren, Bascomb. The rabbit’s pure as snow.”
“Toss me one other name had a reason to bump Enigman and Herman, both.”
I did more than that. I tossed him the morning edition of the Toontown Telltale.
“You win, Pottsie,” I told him over the phone. “The rabbit capitulates. The formula swapped even Steven for the women.”
His voice dripped with smugness. “That’s real smart of him. You instruct the rabbit to bring the goods to the end of Lonesome Canyon Road in an hour. If the formula checks out, I’ll contact him tomorrow and tell him where to find the broads.”
I clanged the mouthpiece on the edge of the phone booth.
“Hey! You want to give me an earache?”
“I’m only making sure I’ve got your undivided attention. Listen close, Pottsie. I’m rewriting your scenario. Here’s how it plays out. I make the delivery, not the rabbit. It happens in a public place. When you get the formula, I get the girls. On the spot, immediately, no waiting. Those are my terms, and they’re not negotiable. You want the formula, or not?”
He wanted it, and bad.
26
The Museum of Visible Locution was a tiddly-wink of a building, as flat and white as the art it displayed.
The museum’s gift shop prominently featured The Word on Words, Ring Wordhollow’s latest scholarly tome cogitating on the semantic and aesthetic aspects of Toon balloons. The shop also peddled actual-sized reproductions of utterances from the museum collection, though I can’t imagine why anybody would pay for a balloon jigsawn out of painted plywood when you could strangle the real McCoy out of a Toon for free.
The main exhibition hall boasted a major extravaganza, a hanging of Toon balloons from what the museum catalog grandly titled “The NeoComical Era.” It proved my own personal rule of thumb—beware the pretensions of any art form with more than three syllables in its description. The turning lane of this cultural crossroads consisted of duh, grunt, ugh, booga booga, and that giant linguistic leap forward kowabunga.
The sparse batch of culture vultures viewing the exhibit included a fidgety and bored grade-school class on a field trip and a half dozen bereted and bespectacled art students copying the balloons line for line, syllable for syllable, onto large sketch pads.
I entered a small auxiliary salon housing turn-of-the-century Western word work, yippies, giddyups, woopie-ti-yi-yos, and their ilk. These priceless creations were being watched over by a guard with more years on him than most of the museum’s antiquities. Judging from his buzzsaw snoring, he had mastered the same, and only, skill I had learned in high school, the ability to sleep with his eyes open.
I perused the artistic creations. To my surprise, I saw several I’d nail up in my apartment. They were exactly the right size to cover the cracks in my plaster.
The dull clatter of hardwood limping across the museum’s polished marble floor cut short my excursion into cultural appreciation. I braced for trouble on the oaken hoof. “Swell place you picked for a meet, Valiant.” Pepper Potts showed me his ticket stub. “I had to fork over a buck to get in.”
“That why I don’t see the ladies? You couldn’t afford the entry fee?”
He swung his yard-long arm in a motion that took in here, there, and everywhere. “They’re close by. Within screaming distance, if you follow my drift.” He held his meat hooks with their palms up, one higher than the other. “You give me the formula…” He dropped his high hand and raised his low. “I produce the dames. You don’t…” He squeezed his mitt into a fist.
“That wasn’t the deal.”
“I’m cutting a new deal. You turn over the goods right here, right now, or the doxies expire.” He extended a pincer and wiggled his nippers.
I dipped into my pocket, extracted the formula, and passed it over.
Potts gave it a browse and grinned wolfishly. “Thanks, Valiant.” He tucked it into his underwear. “Wish I could say it’s been a pleasure knowing you.” He emerged from his shorts fondling a gun. “Nothing personal, but I can’t let you live.”
“That go for the women, too?”
“Naturally. What kind of dunce you take me for? With the stuff they know, they could put me away until the cows troop home.” To preserve the hushed sanctity of the locale, Potts screwed a silencer to the business end of his rod. He pointed the final result at my head with a nod to one of the Western graphics. It read “Adios, amigo.”
I jerked my thumb at another one reading “Whoaaaa.”
“Since this is my final chapter, at least let me close the book knowing I figured out the story.”
“Make it the Reader’s Digest version,” said Potts. “You ain’t got many pages left until your ending.”
I ripped a triptych, “Yip yip yip,” off the wall. I bent its three tails under to form a stool. I sat on my creation directly beneath the No Smoking sign and lit a gasper. I dropped the flaming match on the floor. The dozing guard didn’t move. “You were in the screening room with me and Enigman.”
Potts’s chin stubble scraped his rayon foulard.
“You shot him with my Dragoon.”
He nodded again. “I was never much for sharing, especially where money’s concerned.”
The guard uncorked a snuffle capable of waking the dead, though he himself slept through it. “You went in and out of Selznick’s office every day. Why didn’t you
steal the formula away from him? You could have done it easy.”
“We mere mortals ain’t as quick on the uptake as you, Valiant. By the time I figured out it was Selznick who had the merchandise, somebody else had beat me to it. But I got it now.” He gave it a tender pat. “Proving all’s well that ends well.” He thumbed back his hammer. “Which brings us to the conclusion of our fable.”
“Not quite. There’s another question nagging my fanny. Why’d you cancel Tom Tom LeTuit’s ticket? And why did you blast Dodger Rabbit?” I flipped away my burning butt. It landed red hot in the guard’s lap, burned through the loose fabric of his uniform pants and fell to the floor. He didn’t stir.
“I didn’t thump LeTuit. I needed him. He was in charge of procuring my raw materials. I didn’t ventilate the rabbit, either. Though I got to admit I considered it more than once. That rabbit was so squirrely.”
A tour group cut through the salon on the way to someplace better. Potts ripped a balloon off the wall and draped it over his gun. He removed it after the parade finished. He didn’t want anything, even a sixteenth inch of cowboy babble slowing his bullet.
I jangled my coins, tapped my cleats on the marble floor, and coughed. The guard didn’t budge. “Why’d you kill Baby Herman?”
“You want to live by grasping at straws, go to work in a soda fountain. I ain’t guilty of that, either, and you’ve asked your last question.” He sighted down his barrel. “Goodbye, sucker.”
“Belt him hard and put him under,” I said, glancing past Potts to the doorway in back of him. “Don’t count on a second chance.”
“No dice,” said Potts. “You ain’t fooling me with that old gag.”
“Your mistake, p-p-p-peckerwood!” Roger Rabbit cold-cocked Potts from behind with the cry of “Hi yo, Silver.” The blow rocked Potts hard. He crashed into the wall, dislodging a blistered assortment of cowboy curses and the first chorus of “I’m Ridin’ Old Paint.” He dropped his peashooter.
“He’s all yours, Eddie,” proclaimed Roger gleefully. “Take him in and book him.”