Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (14 page)

He made my money vanish with a skill that would have impressed Mandrake the Magician and gave me a duplicate of the long, hard going-over I get from patrol cops when they catch me hanging around a decent neighborhood at an indecent hour. “You still in the detective racket, Eddie?”

“Some months more than others. This month up to my eyeballs.”

He picked a jawbreaker out of a cardboard box, popped it into his mouth, and poked random holes in it with what he had left of his teeth. “This comic you’re after. It have anything to do with a case?”

I told him it did, and I told him which one.

“No kidding.” His gumball flipped back and forth between his cheeks like he had two competing Mister Tooth Decays in there engaged in a cannon battle over his few remaining molars. “The Rocco DeGreasy murder. Do tell.” He pointed toward a section of his comic rack with more webs on it than you’d find on Spiderman’s laundry line. “I got a big bunch of his syndicate’s stuff over there. Hasn’t been moving too good lately, and DeGreasy’s got this policy of no returns. You want my opinion, I say he got knocked off by an overstocked newsboy.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks for the tip, Pops. I’ll check it out. In the meantime, I’d appreciate whatever you can dig up on that comic I gave you.”

“Be my pleasure,” he said. “Always happy to assist a force of the law. I’ll get right on it.”

I gave him my card and asked him to contact me when he got results.

I called Big Art at the pool hall I used for an answering service. He checked behind the cigar counter and found one message for me, from the rabbit. Roger had connected with my phone company contact and discovered that, the evening he died, Rocco had placed two calls, one to the DeGreasy art gallery, one to Carol Masters’s studio. He had talked to the gallery for ten minutes, and to Carol Masters for five. I wondered what about.

The rabbit had also done some productive spadework on backtracking the teakettle. The
Alice in Wonderland
prop man had bought it from a ‘toontown junkman, and the rabbit was on his way to interview him.

The rabbit said he would call in later for further instructions. I asked Big Art to tell the rabbit to check around with local messenger services and find out which one had delivered the stolen artwork to Hiram Toner at the Hi Tone Gallery of Comic Art.

Next I swung by the office, mainly because it boasted the cheapest drinks in town. When I pulled up outside, I found Clever Cleaver’s car parked at the curb. Since I’ve never been known for my good sense, I went in anyway.

He was waiting for me in the hall. He’d been there for quite a spell, judging from the number of scorch marks his smoky-yellow cigarette puffs had branded into the carpet.

“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” I asked, letting us both inside.

He went straight to my bottom desk drawer, hauled out my bottle, and held it to the light. It contained enough for one whopper or two petites. “You don’t mind, do you, Butch?” he said, pouring the bottle’s contents into a single glass. “After all, I am company.”

I shrugged and shut my mouth to keep my tongue from licking my lips.

He tossed down the last of my hootch and ejected a few projectile-shaped ear puffs, which came at me as low and hard as his next statement. “Get off the Roger Rabbit case,” he said, biting down hard on every word and spitting them one by one in my direction. “I got the wife pegged as the killer, and I’m about this near to proving it.” He sent up two parallel lines so close together you would have been hard pressed to pass a hangman’s noose between them. “You keep poking around, you’re liable to screw up my play, and that would make me very unhappy. So lay off Roger Rabbit.” He took a pencil out of his coat pocket, underlined his words, and stuck them to my wall where I’d have to cover them with a picture, paint them over, or spend the rest of my life looking at them every time I sat down at my desk.

“Sorry to ruin your tough-guy rendition, Captain, but you got your facts wrong. I’m not investigating Roger’s murder. I agree with you one hundred percent. Jessica Rabbit did it, and I wish you all the luck in the world in nailing her for it. I’m after whoever got Rocco DeGreasy.”

That brought him up short. “You kidding me? Roger Rabbit killed DeGreasy. There’s no doubt about it. Rusty Hudson put it to bed once and for all when the lab found the rabbit’s pawprints all over the fatal thirty-eight.”

That bit of information, which came as news to me, sure gave the case an interesting twist. “I know it sounds like a lost cause, but I’m not exactly swamped with work right now, so I think I’ll putter around with it awhile longer, anyway.”

“Suit yourself. Keep chasing hobgoblins until you’re blue in the face. Just don’t mess me up.”

“Perish the thought. I would like to know one thing about your investigation, though. Did your boys search Roger’s house?”

“You bet. They gave it a thorough going-over.”

“Did they, by chance, take Roger’s teakettle with them when they left?”

Until he knew where this was leading, Cleaver wasn’t so anxious to go. “His teakettle? What could they have wanted with his teakettle? And why do you care, anyway?” His left eyebrow assumed the shape of a hunchbacked caterpillar.

“I collect them, and I need the rabbit’s to complete my set.”

Cleaver scrambled the air alongside his temple. “Valiant, sometimes you slay me.”

He left me with an empty bottle and another big hole in my puzzle.

Carol Masters’s secretary sent me to Carol’s shooting location, a deserted warehouse in Hogan’s Alley, a low-life section of town, where I saw enough denizens floating around to cast an urban remake of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea. I
parked my car, kissed my hubcaps good-bye, and went inside the warehouse.

One of the city’s finest intercepted me and demanded to know my business. I flashed him my license, and he let me by.

Before I had gone another twenty feet, I passed at least eight or nine more cops. Even for Hogan’s Alley, that much security seemed excessive. I wondered how Carol rated it, then I saw her photographic subject, none other than Dick Tracy, every cop’s idol. That explained it. The precinct desk sergeant probably had to hold a lottery to select which of his many volunteers got to come over here and guard their hero’s privacy.

In the episode being shot, Tracy was going up against Mush Face, a guy with a pug resembling a bowl of barely set Wheat-ena. Mush Face had the drop on the ace detective, but, since justice always triumphs, by the time the sequence ended, Tracy had turned the tables and was carting old ugly off to the hoosegow.

A bunch of cops came up to Tracy afterward and asked him for his autograph. While he wrote, Tracy delivered a short sermon on the importance of strict law enforcement in modern society. The cops roundly applauded. A few of them snabbed his word balloons and told him they planned to frame them and hang them above the station house door. The way the cops treated him, you might have thought he really was a cop instead of an actor playing a cop. A guy like Tracy could probably get elected chief of police on the basis of his dashing reflection in the fun-house mirror. In the comic business they call that the power of make-believe. In our nation’s capital, they call it politics.

I offered to give Carol Masters a hand loading her camera stuff into her car, but I got a response so cold I was sorry I’d taken the wool lining out of my trench coat. “I can manage perfectly well by myself, Mister Valiant.” She dragged a box of equipment out the door and across the sidewalk toward her car. She got it as far as the trunk, but couldn’t lift it inside. I grabbed it, muscled it in, and did the same with two more.

“That wasn’t necessary,” she said. “I really could have done it without you.”

“It’s great to be appreciated,” I cracked. “Sometimes I wonder how I keep from getting a swelled head.”

She pulled out the kind of key ring you usually find connected to a jailer and opened the door to her car. She slid into the front seat, positioned the rearview mirror around so she could see herself in it, and perked up her hair with a comb. “What do you want from me now?” she said, with about as much friendliness as I used to get from my drill instructor.

I leaned on her car. It needed a good wash job, but so did I. “I want some more information on Rocco, that’s all. The cops are convinced that Rocco killed him. I think otherwise, and I’m out to prove it.”

She turned sideways in the front seat, giving me a great shot of the wonderful things that happen to a well-built female body when you twist it just right. “But why? Roger’s dead. You no longer have a client. There’s nobody to pay your bill.”

“So what does money matter if I can discover truth?”

I could tell she believed that about as much as she believed in Santa Claus, but she was sharp enough to realize that, until she answered my questions, I’d never leave her alone. “What is it you want to know?”

I went around to the other side of the car and slid in beside her. “I talked to Little Rock DeGreasy over at the gallery. He says Rocco ordered him to cancel your one-woman show and take down your work. Any idea why?”

She dumped her comb into a purse only slightly larger than Spark Plug’s feedbag. “He did it to be ornery,” she said, “to flaunt his control over me. Rocco couldn’t stand to have people cross him, and I’d been doing a lot of that lately.” “How so?”

“My work for ‘toon’s rights, my support of Roger Rabbit.” She turned her palms toward her, bent her fingers forward, and examined her nails. They were far from beautiful, chipped and scratched, like the nails of a rock climber clawing toward the top. “Rocco couldn’t stand uppity women. He retaliated by yanking my work.”

Dick Tracy came over to the car. I’d never seen him in person before, and I couldn’t believe how tall he was. Usually ‘toons turn actor to compensate for being shrimpy, but Tracy could look me straight in the eye with no trouble. And talk about square-jawed. I could have used his chin for a letter opener. Carol introduced us, and his grip almost broke my hand. He yakked with us for a while and impressed me as a gutsy, stand-up guy. I nearly asked him for his autograph myself.

“I understand Rocco called you the night he died,” I said after Tracy left. “What did he say?”

“Nothing much, really.” I started to light a cigarette but doused it when I saw her unsullied ashtray. A nonsmoker, but that didn’t surprise me. I had her pegged as a woman with vices a lot more complex than tobacco. “Rocco’s only reason for calling was to torment me. He crowed on and on about how he had cancelled my show. He told me he would make sure I never showed in any gallery again. It was a typically disgusting Rocco performance. I finally hung up on him.”

“How long did you talk to him?”

“I don’t know exactly. I didn’t look at the clock. I would guess about five or ten minutes.”

“Anyone with you when the call came in?”

“No, I was alone.”

“After you got off the phone, what did you do?”

“I had a stiff drink and went to bed.”

“You didn’t go out?”

“In the middle of the night? Of course not.”

If she was lying, she had the technique down pat. She didn’t so much as tremble an eyelid. “What’s the deal between Little Rock and Jessica Rabbit?”

She shook her head ruefully. “The poor guy loves her, but Jessica feels toward him the way she would toward a lottery ticket. If Little Rock inherits Rocco’s estate, Jessica’s number comes up, and she wins big. She’ll marry him and live happily ever after on his money. If he doesn’t inherit, she’ll rip him into teeny pieces and toss him into her wastebasket.”

I pulled out my notebook and read Carol the issue number I had copied off the comic in Rocco’s fireplace. “Any idea what comic that could be?”

She was shaking her head even before I’d finished my question. “No. There are hundreds of tiny syndicates putting out comics. Each uses its own numbering system. It could be anything.”

“Do you know of anyone with the initials SS who may have had a grudge against Rocco?”

“Can’t say I do. Rocco had a few ‘toons with those initials under contract, but they’re all decent, hard workers. If you’re trying to pin his murder on one of them, I think you’re way off base.”

I hauled out the photos of the stolen artworks. “Know anything about these?”

She flipped through them quickly, without interest.

“They’re some strips I shot a while back. Rocco put them up for sale in his gallery. I heard somebody stole them.”

“Odd, wouldn’t you say, that whoever did it stole only strips shot by you?”

She shrugged. “A discriminating thief. What more can I say?” She handed the photos back.

“Have you heard of anyone offering these works for sale or for ransom?”

“Afraid not, but then there’s really no reason why I should. These works were never my property. Everything I shoot belongs to Rocco. It was part of our contractual arrangement, and also one of the biggest points of contention between us. I said I should have a cut of each sale. He said no.”

“And there was nothing you could do about it?”

“Not a thing. He owned them, lock, stock, and barrel. Pretty much the way he owned everything in his syndicate. Pretty much the way he owned Roger Rabbit. Pretty much the way he owned me.”

Sounded like a passable motive for murder if I ever heard one.

I asked her enough questions to get back around to the front side of the mulberry bush, and said good-bye.

I got back to my apartment just in time to spruce it up for my weekly poker game. Anything lying around loose I kicked under the sofa. I swabbed last week’s dried beer off my card table, cracked open a fresh deck of pasteboards, tossed some chips into a bowl, and threw three cases of suds on ice.

Billy Donovan arrived first. Billy was a construction worker who had drifted in from the deep South. He wore bulb-toed, clodhopper shoes, bib overalls, a gingham checked shirt, and a ratty straw hat. He sucked on a long shaft of barley grass from the shock his country kin included along with a Baggie of homemade grits, a plug of prime chawing tobacco, and a Mason jar of white lightning in their weekly Kentucky Special Care package. Whenever he won a hand, Billy slapped his knee and said “Aw, shucks.” On any given night he said it a lot. For a down-home hillbilly, he played a big-city brand of poker.