8

I sat in Roger’s living room doing my best to swallow a chuckle. “Somebody attacked you with what?”

“A custard cream pie,” Roger repeated, nervously fidgeting with the pie tin balanced on his lap. “I was on my way home from an early photo session at Carol Masters’s when somebody jumped out from behind a tree and smacked me in the face with a custard cream pie.”

“It must have been a practical joke. Nobody could kill you with a pie.”

“Oh, you’re wrong. Indeed, they could. In the classic comic pie toss, somebody plops you in the kisser, coming straight in to get maximum splatter, and then pulls up short so as not to mash in your nose. The pie tin slithers off, and that’s it. Not this fellow.”

Roger fanned out his fingers and scrunched them into his face to demonstrate the angle of attack. “He came in from about shoulder level so the custard blocked off my mouth and nose. Then he gave it kind of a half twist so the whipped cream flew up and covered my eyes. And he didn’t let go. He held that pie so tightly against my face that I couldn’t breathe. I kicked him a hearty one in the shins, and I guess I connected, because he grunted, dropped his pie, and ran away.”

“You get a look at him?”

“No. He had turned a corner before I got my eyes scooped off.”

“Human or Toon? Could you tell that?”

“No. I’m sorry. I checked around for witnesses but drew a blank.” He held up a standard nine-inch aluminum pie tin covered with half an inch of dried custard. The custard had solidified into a perfect outline of his mouth and nose. “I did retrieve the weapon, though.” He handed me the tin.

I examined it front and back. No prints evident, but it did bear the stamped-in name and address of a nearby neighborhood pie shop. I wrapped the tin as best I could into my handkerchief. “I’ll check it out,” I said, “even though I suspect this was most likely nothing more than a juvenile prank.”

“Prank?” Angry whipcords of steam puffed out of the rabbit’s nostrils and heated his nose to the color of an apple. “How can you say prank? It was those DeGreasy brothers. They tried to smother me. If we don’t stop them, they’ll try again. And next time they might not miss.”

“Believe what you want, just be aware that in my opinion

this pie guy has no connection with your other predicament, and chasing after him will most likely be a big waste of effort.”

Pie tin in hand, I got up and headed for the door, where I stopped, turned, and almost as an afterthought said, “By the way, I talked to your wife today.”

Roger couldn’t have brightened up any quicker had he plugged his tail into an electrical outlet. “Jessica? You saw Jessica? Did you give her my message?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

I hit him with it the only way I knew how—hard, fast, and straight to the chops. Leave tact to the slick talkers wearing pressed three-piece suits. If you had a terminal illness, I’d tell you pointblank not to start any all-day suckers. “She’s not coming back to you. And she says the reason she’s not is because it was you, not her, that changed. She said you used to be a fun guy, but that, after you got your contract, you turned into an ogre. She said she couldn’t take it, so she left you.”

“She said that? Jessica said that?” The tiny dots that gave color to Roger’s skin coalesced into splotches so large that, given an ear bob and a transplanted tail, he could have passed for a calico cat. “Well, that’s the silliest thing I ever heard. Me? An ogre?” He launched a partial balloon, but the feigned hah-hah inside fizzled out through the balloon’s stem and, with a resounding blat, splattered across the rug.

“She also said a few other things.”

“Such as?”

“I’m not so sure you want to hear them.”

“I’m a big bunny. I can take it.”

“Suit yourself. She said you were nuts. She also said you had no talent.”

“She doesn’t mean that, not any of it. Rocco is pressuring her to say those things.”

“She also insisted that you made up the part about the DeGreasys promising you your own strip.”

“Widdle on that Rocco DeGreasy!” Roger’s word balloon had originally contained something far stronger, but, always conscious of his family-rated image, he had hastily X’d it out and replaced it with a statement less profane. “He has some evil hold over Jessica. For the year Jessica and I were together, we were as in love as two people can be. There was no faking how she felt about me. She couldn’t possibly have reversed herself so quickly. Rocco forced her to leave me, and he’s forcing her to say things about me that she doesn’t mean. I want you to find out how he’s doing it, and I want you to make him stop.” Roger crossed his hands over his head but couldn’t cork the flood of tear-shaped balloons blubbering out of him.

I nodded as though I really took seriously this whole monumental bit of goofiness. “Exactly what I planned to do next.”