7

A TV-commercial director hand-signaled the ten cameramen evenly spaced along a roped-off length of Rodeo Drive.

His production assistant, perched on a tower halfway down the street, flipped on a specially rigged wireless relay box and set a driverless, open Mercedes convertible rolling along the street at forty miles an hour.

A stubby helicopter overtook the Mercedes from behind and assumed a position just above the driver’s seat. A trim, flight-suited female, wearing a leather flying helmet and aviator goggles, with a rope coiled around her left shoulder, appeared in the helicopter’s cargo door. She secured one end of the rope to a pin ring on the helicopter’s interior bulkhead, threw the remainder of the rope out the door, and shinnied down it toward the moving car. She lowered herself into the front seat, took the wheel, and applied the brakes just in time to prevent the car from crashing into a stationary truck positioned crossways in the street ahead.

The helicopter saluted her with a side-to-side dip, and sped away.

A most impressive operation, easily the equal of anything I’d seen in the Marines. Almost a shame that strategic responsibility for conquering other nations couldn’t be switched from Washington to Madison Avenue. The United States might today be bottling Coke, packaging cornflakes, assembling Pontiacs, battling crabgrass, and eradicating underarm odor in suburban Moscow, Peking, and Hanoi.

The director, decked out in polo pants with side flaps large enough to put him into contention for head bull in a herd of elephants, conferred with a man wearing enough gold chains around his neck to shackle half the prisoners in a Southern road gang. The chain man framed the final scene between his thumbs and forefingers and gave the director an exaggerated nod.

“That’s a keeper,” yelled the director. “Let’s break for breakfast while we check the rushes.”

The car backed, turned, and squealed to a stop alongside the curb in front of where I stood. The girl driver pulled herself free of the cockpit and swung athletically across the door and out. She unsnapped her goggles, peeled away her helmet, and gave me my first, real-life look at Jessica Rabbit.

Her photos, as stunning as they were, hadn’t begun to capture the full scope of her beauty. Curly hair the color of a lingering sunset. Porcelain skin. Incendiary gray-blue eyes. Lips the softness of pink rose petals. And a body straight out of one of the magazines adolescent boys pore over in locked bathrooms. The kind of woman usually portrayed floating down the Nile on a barge, nibbling at stuffed pheasant and peeled grapes, enticing some beguiled Roman into conquering half the civilized world on her behalf.

All of which only served to deepen the mystery. What had a woman like this ever seen in a dippy Toon rabbit? I approached her. “Mrs. Rabbit? My name’s Eddie Valiant. I’m a private investigator. I’d like to have a word with you about your husband.”

“My husband?” She inclined her head, squinted her eyes, and up-tilted the corners of her mouth into the amused yet perplexed expression of someone confronted by an especially ridiculous riddle. “I’m afraid you have the wrong person. I’ve never been married. I have no husband.”

Surely I couldn’t have made a mistake. There couldn’t be two women this gorgeous. “You are Jessica Rabbit?”

“Correct.”

“Then what, if I may ask, is your relationship to Roger Rabbit?”

“Who?” In the best Orphan Annie tradition, Jessica demonstrated her innocent bewilderment by revolving her eyes upward and tucking them out of sight underneath her open eyelids. “Roger Rabbit? Sorry, I never heard of him.”

A blatant lie, no question about it. As though to illustrate what happens to people who lie, her brilliant smile dribbled off her chin and fluttered to the ground like a bicuspid butterfly.

I reacted the way I would have had she dropped her hankie. I reached down, scooped up her smile, and handed it back, only to find that, while I had been bent over, other assorted portions of her anatomy, including both ears and her nose, had also fallen off.

I gallantly scrambled to retrieve these bits and pieces for her too, but they disintegrated before I could reach them.

I stood upright just in time to witness the rest of her disappear the same way.

My hand still shaped to the bow of her smile, I circled the spot where she had stood, kicking my toe against the concrete. Not a smidgeon of her remained.

Suddenly I heard bemused, husky, feminine laughter behind me. “I take it you’ve never seen a doppelganger erode before?”

I turned around and found myself facing—Jessica Rabbit!

Of course. What I saw wasn’t really her. It was a mentally projected duplicate of her, or doppelganger as Toons call them. Identical to her in every regard, physically and mentally, but existing only by the energy of her mind. Toons can create doppelgangers more or less at will. They merely relax, channel their thoughts in that direction, and magically one of them appears. Toons use them as doubles in risky shots. When you see a Toon stuffed into a trombone or run over by a steamroller or crushed by a falling safe, it’s really a doppelganger. She was right. I never had seen one erode before.

“Isn’t it kind of traumatic to see a part of you just wither away like that?”

“Not particularly. No more so than I imagine it might be for you to throw one of your fingernail clippings into a trash can. Oh, I’m sure there are primitive tribes in Africa or somewhere who treat their doppelgangers as mystic offshoots of their soul. We modern, civilized Toons regard our doppelgangers as animated mannequins, nothing more.”

She leaned gracefully against the Mercedes’s rear fender, instinctively adjusting her posture to display herself to best advantage. She needn’t have bothered. A woman as beautiful as this could have stood on one leg, flapped her arms, stuck out her tongue, and still held my interest.

Like most humanoid Toons, Jessica suppressed her word balloons and spoke vocally only, thus enhancing even further her human image. “I heard you tell my doppel that you wanted to see me about Roger. What’s his problem now?”

“What was his problem before?”

She replied quickly, as though she had been asked the same question so many times that she had committed the answer to memory. “He couldn’t cope with being a celebrity. He turned moody, conceited, belligerent. So I left him.”

A bit of a discrepancy there between Jessica and her husband. Had it been Jessica Rabbit or Roger who had undergone the Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation that had scuttled the marriage? By rights, I should believe my client. That was by rights. From experience, I knew that the one caught with the stolen macaroons often wound up being the same one who had hired me to stake out the cookie jar. “You might be interested to know that Roger says he wants a reconciliation. He says he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get you back.”

She crossed one perfect arm over the other. “If that’s why he hired you, to come here and tell me that, I’m afraid he’s wasted your time. I left Roger for someone else.”

“I guess that translates to Rocco DeGreasy.”

She dipped her chin and held it there, the way a fighter would to protect himself from an uppercut. “That’s right, though I don’t see where it’s any concern of yours.”

Good looks could distract me only so long. “Roger hired me to investigate irregularities in his contract. Rather an odd coincidence that his estranged wife would have such a close relationship with one of the people who gave him that contract. You have anything to do with the DeGreasys signing Roger?”

She shook her head, pushed herself away from the car, and assumed a square stance that, even in its belligerence, gave a certain graceful beauty to her tiny clenched fists and firmly set jaw. “Absolutely not. I never understood why they did it. Roger has no talent whatsoever. I suspect Rocco thought it would please me and perhaps win me back. Or possibly Rocco feared Roger might move to another part of the country and take me with him. A contract tying Roger down might have seemed the easiest way to prevent that.”

“Did the DeGreasys ever promise Roger his own strip?”

Too bad she suppressed her balloons. Her tinkling laugh could have re-outfitted a Swiss bell ringer. “No, never. That’s nothing more than a story Roger concocted. You should not take Roger too seriously. He does see a psychiatrist, you know.”

“You ever hear of anyone wanting to buy out Roger’s contract and give him his own strip?”

“Yes, I heard a rumor to that effect, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to star Roger in anything. Believe me, the rabbit has absolutely no talent. None.”

The director interrupted us before I could follow up. “Jessica, sweetheart,” the director said, “the agency man wants to shoot a slightly different angle. Could you give us another doppel?”

“Of course. Would you excuse me?” she said to me. She stepped into a nearby dressing trailer and several minutes later emerged as twins.

“Ready to shoot,” she told the director.

The two indistinguishable Jessicas climbed into the helicopter and flew off into the morning sky.

While I waited for her to return, I located the nearest pay phone and called my client, hoping to maybe clarify a few of the inconsistencies Jessica had lobbed into the ballgame.

Roger answered in a state of near panic. “Am I glad it’s you! You have to get over here. This isn’t just a matter of a broken promise anymore. It’s escalated drastically.”

“How so?”

Roger gulped audibly. “Somebody just tried to kill me.”