Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (9 page)

In the back of my closet, I found a pair of baggy cords, a wool plaid shirt, and a blue watch cap with enough stretch in it to absorb those ears. I handed him the lot of it. From the flicker of disappointment in his eyes, I could tell that he didn’t care much for my choice, but I knew that, if left to his own devices, he would deck himself out in a zoot suit and consider himself inconspicuous because he didn’t fluoresce when the lights went out.

While I waited for him to change, I went over to my wooden table to work on the chess problem I had set out, but the rabbit had already solved it. I’d been struggling with it for nearly two days, and he solved it in less than ten minutes. Made me wonder what other talents this bunny was hiding under his bushel.

Roger came out of the bathroom wearing my clothes and did a 360-degree turn. “Well, what do you think?” “Your tail’s sticking out the top of your pants.” He tucked it in. “There. Better?”

I nodded. His ears refused to stay folded over inside the watch cap, so his head resembled an inverted woolen ice cream cone, but I could live with that. I gave him my old pea coat and told him to keep the collar pulled up around his face.

“Didn’t you forget something?” he asked me just before we left.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “What?”

“How about a piece?” He flipped his word balloon end over end the way a punk would do with a silver dollar.

“A piece of what?”

“A piece, a piece, you know, a gat, a rod, a
gun.”
He pointed his paw westward and squeezed off an imaginary round at the savages circling his wagon.

“I thought you said you’d never owned or shot a gun before.”

“True.” He fired again and grinned as another phantom injun bit the dust.

“Then what do you want with one now?”

“It seems only appropriate. I mean, if I’m going to be a detective, I ought to pack a gun.”

“I’m a detective, and I don’t.” I opened my coat to prove it.

“Oh,” he said. I don’t know what he needed a gun for. His balloon came out so heavily laden with disappointment he could have sapped Godzilla with it.

We went downstairs, got into my car, and I drove us to Roger’s house.

I picked the lock—without leaving a single scratch on it, I might add—and we went inside.

Roger immediately rushed to turn off the alarm, but he needn’t have bothered. Cleaver’s experts had deactivated it so the cops could come and go freely.

“Remember,” I reminded Roger, “we’re looking for anything out of the ordinary. Anything which I or the cops might have overlooked, but which might be significant to you. Clear?”

“You bet,” said the rabbit. Where he got it I’ll never know, but he pulled a magnifying glass out of my pea coat pocket and walked into the living room with me close behind. You didn’t need any magnifying glass to see what had happened here, though.

I hardly recognized the place. Every sofa and chair cushion had been sliced open. The paintings had been pulled off the walls. Every drawer in every table had been dumped in the middle of the carpet.

We went through the rest of the house and found it in the same state of disarray. We ended up in Roger’s bedroom.

“The police aren’t too neat when it comes to searching a place, are they?” Roger said. He picked some underwear off the floor and put it into a drawer, but the bottom had been kicked out, and his skivvies fell straight through.

“No cop did this,” I said.

“Who, then?” Roger asked. “And why?”

“We answer those questions, and we crack this case.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” countered Roger. “Maybe with the alarm off, some common crook broke in and robbed the place. I have had a few break-ia attempts lately, forced windows mostly, but the alarm went off each time and frightened the burglar away. Maybe this time one of them made it.”

“No.” I poked through the scattered contents of Roger’s jewelry box. He didn’t have much but what he did have would fence for fifty or sixty bucks minimum. No thief would leave that behind. “No, somebody was looking for something very specific. You have anything hidden in this house? Anything you haven’t told me about?”

The rabbit hopped to and fro picking his stuff up off the floor. He got an armload before he figured out that, with the drawers all smashed, he had no place to put it. So he stacked it as neatly as he could along one wall. “There was nothing here,” said the rabbit. “Nothing hidden. Nothing anyone could possibly want.”

“What about your contract with the DeGreasys? Where do you keep that?”

“At the bank, in my safety deposit box.”

“How about your marriage license for you and Jessica?”

“Same place.”

“Stocks, bonds?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Money?”

“It’s in a sock. Under my mattress.”

It would have simplified matters if it had been gone, but no such luck. The mattress and box springs were ripped to shreds, but the sock, money included, was still there.

“What do you suppose they could possibly have wanted?” said Roger.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s go through the house room by room. Try and reconstruct in your memory what each room contained. See if anything’s missing.”

We started there in his bedroom and finished up in the kitchen.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Nothing of any importance,” reported Roger. “Only my teakettle.”

“Your what?”

“My teakettle.”

I had been thinking more in terms of the sterling silver or maybe a painting. I might have known better where ‘toons were concerned. “Was it an antique? Did it have any value?”

“None that I know of.”

“Where did you get it?”

Roger showed me what had to be a real oddity, a rabbit wearing a sheepish expression. “Off a movie set. It was the teakettle used in the tea-party scene from last year’s remake of
Alice in Wonderland.
I had a bit part in the picture. On a whim, I sneaked the teakettle off the set as a souvenir after the movie wrapped. But it was only an ordinary, cheap teakettle, similar to any number of others from the five and dime.”

“Is that where it came from, this teakettle? A five and dime?”

“No, not this one. From what I remember of it, the studio prop man bought it for fifty cents in a local junk shop.”

“What was it made of?”

“I don’t know. Iron, I suppose. It had a gray lacquer coating and was very heavy. It must have weighed in at about two pounds. Boy, did it ever brew great tea! But that’s about all it was good for. It certainly had no value.”

“Maybe none you know about. It could be very valuable indeed if that two pounds turned out to be solid gold.”

“Two pounds of solid gold,” said the rabbit. “For my life.” He hefted his two word balloons, one in each paw, but it wasn’t even a close contest. The one with his life in it outweighed the other by more than half. He faced me head on, stood up ramrod straight, and said, “Show me, would you please, the … the … the scene of the crime.”

I pointed through the kitchen door to the staircase. “You were standing there. Whoever shot you was here in the kitchen. You can see the hole in the wall where the bullet hit. You muttered your last words and fell forward across them onto the banister. That’s where I found you.”

“I see,” said Roger. He climbed the stairway and stuck a finger into the bullet hole. Then he took a look at the banister. I noticed some dark brown stains at the banister’s base. Dried blood. Roger’s blood. I did my best to spare him the sight of it. “Hey,” I said distracting him. “We’re finished here. Let’s get out.”

Roger nodded but kept staring at the banister.

“Look,” I said. “If we want to get this case wrapped up, we’ve got to keep cracking. I’ve got some important stuff for you to do. Important
detective
stuff.”

Roger’s head snapped in my direction. “You do? What?”

“I want you to go to the public library and search through books on film history until you find a photo of the tea-party scene from that
Alice in Wonderland
movie you were in. I want a photo that clearly shows the teakettle. And something else, too.” I opened my notebook and tore out a slip of paper.

“Here’s the serial number of the thirty-eight they found in your nightstand. Go down to city hall and check the gun registration records. Determine who owns that gun. While you do that, I’m going to pay a call on Dominick DeGreasy. When you finish, go back to my place. We’ll meet there and compare notes.”

“Right, chief,” said Roger. He walked down the stairs and out the door.

With what I thought showed real class, he never once looked back.

“A terrible, terrible thing what that rabbit did to my brother,” said Dominick DeGreasy. I could see why he had let his brother do the talking. Instead of a voice he had a throat-ful of gravel that rattled every word and gave him the tin drum sound you hear in people who lubricate their tonsils with loud talk and cheap gin.

“You going to run the syndicate alone?” I asked.

“You bet. Why not?” He pointed straight down at his desk top the way emperors point at their thrones. “Me and my brother built this syndicate together. I know as much about it as he did. Sure, the last few years he handled the business end of it, and I took care of keeping the talent in line. I just need a week or so to pick up the fine points, and I’ll have the place ricking along better than ever.”

I wished I could find a bookie willing to take a bet on that.

DeGreasy sat down at his desk. He crossed his size-sixteen gunboats in a maneuver worthy of a naval captain. “I got a firm to run here, Valiant,” he said. He interlocked his hands behind his head. His black morning coat pulled open and gave me a clear view of the howitzer he packed under his armpit. It appeared to be about the same big-bore caliber as the gun that got Roger, but it was hardly an antique pirate pistol. “I got no time to waste on cheap gumshoes. If you came by to line up a pigeon to expense your tab while you rehash this case, forget it. That rabbit killed my brother, no doubt about it. Why should I pay you to nose around, come back, and tell me what I already know?”

“That’s not why I’m here, to get a client. I already have a client.”

DeGreasy snorted. “Who?”

“That’s privileged information. Let’s just say that my client believes Roger Rabbit might be getting framed for your brother’s murder and wants me to check into it to see what I can find.”

“Sounds like a waste of money to me.”

“Possibly. The rabbit might be guilty as hell. But, then again, there’s the outside chance he might be getting set up for somebody else, and if that’s so, Rocco’s murderer is right now running around scot-free. You wouldn’t want that, would you? You wouldn’t want your brother’s killer to go loose?”

Dominick squirmed around in his chair, unable to find a position that fit. “No, you bet I wouldn’t want that to happen. But why should it? The cops put their top man on the case, this Rusty Hudson. I got connections downtown, and I requested their best man special. The mayor himself gave me Hudson. He’ll find out who really killed Rocco. Why should I think you’ll do anything he won’t?”

“Because he already considers the case closed. He’s not going to follow up any loose ends. Why should he? The rabbit’s a tailor-made fall guy. Hudson hangs it on the rabbit and wraps up the case in record time. But he might just be wrong, and that’s what I intend to find out. It would be a lot easier if I had your help, but I’m going to keep plugging whether I get it or not.”

He shoved some junk from one side of his desk to the other and probably considered that a good day’s work. “If I go along with you, what do I have to do?”

“Hardly a thing. Answer a few questions about your brother.”

He looked across the desk at his brother’s chair. For the first time in his life, there was nobody in it to tell him what to do. “I guess I can go that far,” he said finally.

“Swell. Oh, and also I need to look through your brother’s personal effects. See if there’s anything in there that might throw some light on who besides the rabbit might have had a motive to kill him.”

He balked slightly at that. “The cops already went through Rocco’s stuff.”

“Sure they did, but with the preconceived notion that the rabbit committed the crime. I come to the task with an open mind.”

He eyeballed the empty chair again, but it still wasn’t talking. “Go ahead and search,” he said at last.

“Would you mind?” I made shooing motions toward the door. “I’d like to do it alone. It helps me concentrate.”

“Sure.” Dominick got to his feet, happy to have an excuse for motion. “Rocco kept his stuff in his drawers. Just stick your head out when you’re done.”

Before he left, Dominick made a big production out of locking the file cabinet and his desk.

As soon as he shut the door, I picked the lock on his desk drawer.

He must have had fifty pornographic magazines of the whips and chains variety stuffed in there. I searched around but found nothing else, and I mean nothing. His drawers contained no files, no calendar, no paper, not even a pencil. I put his magazines back and locked up. With a perverted dodo like Dominick at its helm, this company would be lucky to last twelve months.

I used my picks again on the company files.

Based on what I found in there, I revised my prognosis to six months. The company’s financial statements showed that the DeGreasys had been steadily losing money for nearly a year. They had less operating capital than I did, and I had enough checks kited to lift me halfway up the hill to the poorhouse.

I checked under “R” and found one of those green cardboard dividers the cops put into place whenever they take something out. According to the divider’s notation, they had removed the Roger Rabbit file. I fanned through the rest of the folders, but they’d taken nothing else. Obviously, as far as the cops were concerned, Roger was it.

I closed up the files and was just about to start in on Rocco’s desk when something clicked, something odd. The file drawers appeared to be a few inches shorter than the file cabinet properT pulled the cabinet away from the wall and examined its backside. It took me a while, but I finally found it, a secret compartment. When you pressed a certain screw, the whole rear of the cabinet swung away to reveal a narrow space maybe two inches deep. I had expected to find a few file folders inside, but instead the space held snapshots of original segments of comic-strip artwork. Each piece of artwork contained a framed print of a comic strip and the negative used to produce it, the same kind of stuff Rocco had hanging in here on the walls. If I remembered rightly, he had said such segments were worth big bucks. This artwork portrayed Baby Herman strips. Roger Rabbit appeared in all of them, so they must be fairly recent. Each segment had been signed by its photographer—Carol Masters in every case.