9

Carol Masters wasn’t at her studio, so I tried her at home. She lived in a partially Toon, partially human neighborhood that real estate agents called ethnically enriched, and urban renewers called blighted. Depending on which way you happened to be facing—toward the gossiping, front-stoop Toon and human housewives or toward the babbling, back-alley Toon and human drunks—either term could apply.

Carol’s apartment occupied half a floor in what had been, in the late forties, a fashionable row house. Now it and the houses linked together on either side of it resembled a rickety roller coaster already well over its summit and plunging pell-mell on its long run downhill.

Carol’s doorbell wires drooped stiffly out of their housing like twin copper fangs, so I rapped on the door. Carol answered it, dressed as she had been at her studio, and invited me in.

I took an immediate liking to her home decoration. No wall to wall furniture to trip you up every time you went to the kitchen for a late-night beer. No chintz to gather dust. A few comfortable chairs placed for easy face-to-face conversation, some scattered end tables, and a colorful rainbow painted across two walls, culminating on each end in framed displays of Carol’s photographs. Her record collection filled most of a six-foot-long shelf, bluegrass to the center with a few rock records tacking down either end.

She told me to pour myself a drink while she finished processing some photos in a darkroom she had rigged up in her bedroom closet.

I checked my watch. I never drink until after six. It was then four fifteen. Close enough. I buried the bottom of a glass under three fingers of bourbon, walked into the bedroom after her, and sat down on her bed.

There wasn’t much to be said for this room’s decor. Her clothes, mostly sweaters, shirts, and jeans hyphenated at irregular intervals by a few frilly party numbers, hung on a trapeze style bar suspended from the ceiling. She had cameras, lenses, carrying cases, and other equipment I couldn’t identify scattered everywhere. I could smell her photographic chemicals even through the closed closet door.

She came out after a few minutes carrying some wet prints. “Let me just put these in the dryer,” she said. She placed the prints into a small contraption set on top of her dresser.

I came up behind her and looked over her shoulder at her prints, five copies of the same Baby Herman strip. “How come you don’t do this at your studio?”

“I work when the mood strikes me,” she answered. “There’s no punching a time clock when it comes to creativity.”

I didn’t quite see the creativity involved in smelling up a bedroom by running off five identical prints, but who was I to question art? “How did you get into this business?” I asked while she finished loading the dryer.

“I started out processing film for a small comic book publisher. He gave me a chance to shoot some complete episodes, I liked it, was good at it, and so went upward from there.”

We went back into the living room where Carol poured herself a duplicate of my drink and sank into an easy chair that was slip covered in a pastel print. The chair nearly swallowed her small body whole. “Is this visit business or pleasure?”

I passed up the other easy chair in favor of a wooden kitchen chair which, as usual, I straddled in reverse. “Let’s start with business. I’m just wrapping up Roger’s case. If you could clarify a few minor points, that should do it.”

“However I can help.”

“Give me some background on the syndicate. How long have you worked for the DeGreasys?”

“About five years.”

“You like it?”

“So-so.” Carol kicked off her sneakers, put her feet on the front of her chair cushion, and wrapped her arms around her knees, compressing herself into a compact bundle of prettiness—pretty feet, pretty hands, pretty chin, pretty nose, pretty hair. Anyone seeing her like this, elfin and vulnerable, might be tempted to write her off as a harmless piece of fluff, a cream puff. Until you saw her eyes. The kind of cool, luminous eyes that peek out at you through jungle shrubbery and size you up for lunch. “I could do a lot better financially and have a lot more artistic satisfaction as a free lancer, but I still have five years to go on my contract. I’ve offered to buy myself out, but the DeGreasys won’t play. Or rather one of them won’t.”

“Rocco?”

“Right. He’s the corporate hard nose. He personally negotiates every contract, and he ties down every loose end. Nobody gets out of a Rocco DeGreasy contract unless he lets them out.”

“And if somebody tries?”

“That’s where Dominick comes in. He’s the muscle man.”

“Sounds like a very dynamic duo.”

“They do tend to balance out each other’s weaknesses.”

“You ever heard of Dominick DeGreasy attacking anyone with a pie?”

She got a big yuck out of that. “A pie? Hardly. He’s more the brass knuckles type. Why do you ask?”

I snickered once or twice as I described Roger’s run-in with the pie man. I told her it sounded like a practical joke to me, but to justify my retainer I had to at least go through the motions. “Know of anyone who might want to smother Roger with a pie?” I found it impossible to ask such a question and sound serious.

Carol didn’t laugh. She burrowed sideways into her chair and bounced her answer off the wall. “No, no one. Roger hasn’t any enemy in the world.”

I treated my next question pretty much as a joke, too. I asked her if she had seen anyone hanging around outside her studio this morning when Roger left, maybe someone packing a loaded pie.

No, she told me without so much as cracking a smile, she hadn’t seen anyone. She got up, poured herself another drink, but didn’t offer to do the same for me.

Better lay off, I figured. The lady obviously had no sense of humor. “I talked to Jessica Rabbit this morning,” I said soberly. “She gave me a slightly different version of the story I got earlier from you.”

“How so?”

“According to her, it was Roger who underwent the big personality change that broke up their marriage. She says he became an ogre. You see any evidence of it in your work with him?”

She twisted the ends of her hair around her index finger. “None. She’s lying. Roger’s the same sweet bunny now as he’s always been.”

“She also said that Roger made up that bit about Rocco DeGreasy promising Roger his own strip. She says the rabbit has no talent.”

Carol slammed her drink down on her coffee table. “I don’t know whether or not Rocco promised Roger his own strip. If Roger says yes, I believe him. Roger wouldn’t lie. As for Roger’s talent, the rabbit’s absolutely loaded with it. He deserves a strip of his own. I can’t see why the DeGreasys don’t give it to him. Rocco’s a tyrant, but he does know natural ability when he sees it. Which is a lot more than I can say for Jessica. Not having any talent herself, I would guess it’s probably hard for her to recognize it in others.”

“Funny but you’re the only one with a good word to say about the rabbit. I always wonder when I see one person bucking the crowd. In my experience, the majority’s usually right.”

She got out of her chair and traveled toward me in the kind of half-circle a ballistic missile takes on its way into enemy territory. She pointed at me, standing so close that, if either of us moved forward by so much as an inch, her fingers would hit my nose. “Now I understand. You’re going to dump Roger, aren’t you? He hired you to help him, and you’re going to abandon him, instead. You’re not in this for truth and justice. You’re in it for the money!” She jabbed me in the chest with a fingernail sharp enough to pin me to the wall. “Well, no matter what anybody says, in my book, Roger is one fine rabbit, and he deserves a lot better than he seems to be getting from you.”

I grabbed her tiny hand. “I don’t think you understand, lady,” although quite clearly she understood only too well. “He’s my client, and I care about him, sure. But I’m beginning to suspect he’s a certified nut case. He does go to a psychiatrist, you know. Instead of a detective, I think he might need a padded room ten feet square.”

She pulled back her hand and held it rigid and slightly away from her, as though it had to be sterilized before she could use it again. “Of course, Roger’s a touch goofy. He’s a cartoon rabbit! What do you expect him to be, Albert Einstein?”

She yanked open her front door.

I went through it sideways, to prevent her from kicking me in the pants on my way out.

In a crazy sense I had to envy that fruitcake rabbit. I sure never had a friend that devoted to me.