5

I’ll say one thing for the rabbit, he certainly was a persistent little bugger. As soon as I got back to the city, I spotted him again, hanging maybe half a block back, matching me move for move. He wore his trench coat slightly open, exposing purple lederhosen and an orange shirt. His hat brim scaled up on both sides against fully unfurled ears. Inconspicuous? Maybe at a clown convention. Certainly not on Sunset Boulevard at two in the afternoon.

I debated whether or not to brace him again and give him another ultimatum. He’d probably just ignore it the same way he had the last. Obviously not one to give up easily, that Roger, a trait I admired in anybody, Toon rabbits included. What the heck, if he insisted on wasting his time hopping along in my footsteps, let him. So long as he kept his distance and didn’t interfere.

I entered a big downtown office building. The rabbit ducked behind a lamp post across the street, doing his best to appear unconcerned in the presence of a small poodle sniffing at his hydrant-red sneakers. On the building’s directory, I found the listing for Carol Masters, photographer.

I boarded a humans-only elevator and rode it up to Masters’s floor.

I opened the door to her studio and ran smack into a pile of props big enough to challenge Sir Edmund Hillary.

Masters herself, a human, thank God, since I didn’t know if I could handle another Toon today, stood in the studio’s only uncluttered space, a rectangular whitewashed area about ten feet long by five feet wide, positioning her lights and camera.

She had her lean, athletic body nicely displayed in tight jeans and a blue T-shirt sporting an autographed photo of Casper the Friendly Ghost. Baby-soft brown hair played tag with her shoulders. Her tongue underscored her concentration with a thin layer of moisture traced across her creamy red lips. For the sake of male sanity, I hoped she changed perfumes after sundown, since the one she had on could send every male within sniffing range out into the streets to bay at the moon. The lenses in her big, round glasses were the kind that reacted to skin temperature, changing color according to the wearer’s mood, going from dark amber to a rosy pink. Right now they fluttered somewhere in between, not happy, not sad, just doing a good day’s work. “Something I can help you with?” she said.

I laid a card on her and waited for her to read it. She held it up between us, as though comparing the written description with the real thing. Apparently I measured up to my printed notice, since she motioned for me to sit.

Rummaging through the prop pile, I hauled a chair out from between a plastic palm tree and a bus-stop sign. I reversed and straddled it so I faced her across its back. “I represent Roger Rabbit,” I told her. “I’d like to ask you a few questions concerning his relationship to the syndicate.”

“Ask away.” She opened a corner cupboard and, from behind half a dozen jugs of Toonshine, produced a bottle of Burgundy, which she held up with an empty glass.

I nodded.

She splashed out a healthy slug.

I tilted it back, tossed it down in one fast swallow, and extended my empty glass for a refill. “You photograph the Baby Herman strip, right?”

Carol joined me this round, sipping her wine slowly. “I photograph Baby Herman, yes, as well as a number of other DeGreasy strips.”

“And you were present a few days back when Roger went after Rocco DeGreasy with a lunch box?”

She nodded. “Roger accused Rocco of pressuring his wife to leave him. I’ve never seen a rabbit so angry. If I hadn’t stepped between them, I think he might have done Rocco some serious harm.”

“Any truth to Roger’s allegation?”

She studied a hanging photo of Roger Rabbit. It bore the cutesy-pie inscription you’d expect from a professional buffoon. Hop Hop Hooray for Carol. “A sweet bunny, that one,” she said fondly. “My absolute favorite subject. No big-star hang-ups. Never moody or temperamental. A joy to work with. I absolutely adore him.”

She flicked on several spotlights to see how many dark corners she could illuminate without lengthening her own shadow. She pulled over two easy chairs, one for Dagwood, one for Blondie, and set a floor lamp between them. “I believe Jessica left Roger of her own free will without the slightest bit of coercion from anybody.”

“Why do you think that?”

I had seen men break other men’s fingers with less force than Carol used to snap in her wide-angle lens. “Who knows?” She squinted into her camera, but jerked her face instantly away, as though repulsed by the nastiness she saw on the other side. “A real bitch, that Jessica. You ever meet her?”

“No. Kind of hard for me to picture so much allure and such a devious nature in a female rabbit.”

“Rabbit? No, don’t be misled by her name. She isn’t a rabbit. She’s humanoid. Does mainly high-fashion, cosmetic, and car ads.” She went to her file cabinet, removed a portfolio, and passed it to me. “Jessica Rabbit.”

A knockout. Every line perfection. Creamy skin, a hundred and twenty pounds well distributed on a statuesque frame, stunning red hair. Easily able to pass for human. “What did someone like this ever see in a Toon rabbit?”

Carol retrieved the photos and studied them for a moment, as though trying to decide whether to return them to her files or pepper them with voodoo pins. “Nobody knows. Before Roger, she dated humans and other humanoid Toons exclusively. Their marriage came as a total shock to everybody who knew them.”

She slipped Jessica’s photos back into the darkness where she seemed to feel they belonged. “For about a year it appeared to work. Jessica totally changed. She quit her carousing, quit bad-mouthing her rivals, knocked off her on-the-set temper tantrums. She even went to several of Blondie Bumstead’s Tupperware parties.”

She made a bowl out of her hands and extended it toward the right-hand chair. Then she decreased the cup of her hands to about the size of a rancid tart. “Suddenly, almost overnight, the old Jessica came roaring back. Shrieking at her photographers. Backstabbing everybody who disagreed with her in the slightest. She and Roger broke up shortly thereafter, and she went back to living with Rocco DeGreasy.”

“She went back to living with him? You mean she had lived with him before?”

“Sure. She left him to marry Roger. Considering that Roger had just stolen Rocco’s girl, nobody in the industry could understand why, a few weeks after the marriage, the DeGreasys signed Roger to a long-term contract. Everybody figured that Jessica must have gone to them on Roger’s behalf. Rocco would have done anything, even given Jessica’s new husband a contract, if he thought it would get her back.”

Carol picked up my card and reread the inscription, apparently concerned about my competence to practice my stated profession. “I’m surprised your client neglected to tell you any of this.”

“He apparently didn’t consider it relevant.” I walked to the window, where I could see the rabbit still trying to protect his sneakers from the poodle in the street below. “Guess I’d better ask him why.”

“Will you talk to Jessica, too?”

“Probably.”

“Then let me give you some advice. Be careful. She has a nasty way of sinking hooks into photogenic men.” Carol smiled, pointed her camera at me, and clicked the shutter.

My luck held. The lens didn’t break.

“Thanks for the warning. When I see her, I’ll be sure and wear my armored undies. One last question. Have you heard the rumor that someone wants to buy out Roger’s contract and give him a starring role in a strip of his own?”

“Yes, I’ve heard it. Rumors like that spring up with alarming regularity in this business. Most often they prove totally false. For Roger’s sake, I hope this one’s true, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Before I left, I got her home address and phone number, just in case I decided later to ask her a few of the more personal questions that kept jumping to mind every time I saw her move.