11

Roger’s psychiatrist agreed to see me after office hours. In person he presented as imposing a demeanor as a Toon beaver could. He moved slowly and with great precision, so that the layer of fat that plumped out his lower body gave him an air of portly dignity rather than jiggly overindulgence. He kept his broad, flat, oblong tail tucked up and away in a special pocket sewn on the underside of his white jacket, a gimmick that made him resemble a cross between the hunchback of Notre Dame and a ping-pong paddle. His head hair, the same slightly muddy brown as a river bottom, was parted down the middle and combed to each side, hiding his stubby ears. He waxed his scraggly nose whiskers and twisted them into a handlebar so curvaceous that, in bad light, he might be mistaken for a Harley Davidson. Yellow-tinted aviator glasses camouflaged his ridiculously bulging button eyes and broke up the solid arch extending from the tip of his nose to the top of his head.

To satisfy his cravings for something to gnaw, he kept a number of mahogany wood turnings in an antique umbrella stand beside his desk. A solid silver dustpan and whisk broom took care of the wood chips.

His medical diploma, dated twenty years earlier, proclaimed him a graduate of TCU, Toon Christian University.

His word balloons resembled the scrawly prescription forms you take to the drugstore. “Naturally,” he said, “since Roger is a patient, I can’t discuss his case clinically, but if he’s in trouble of some sort, and I might be able to help, I would be only too happy to oblige. So long as I compromise no professional ethics in the process, of course.” He ran his nose the length of a wooden pencil, then devoured it as casually as someone eating a piece of candy. He plucked the eraser discreetly off his lips and dropped it into his wastebasket. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked with great solemnity.

That nearly put the capper on it. How could I conduct a serious interrogation of a psychiatrist who snacked on pencils? I thought about the retainer and pressed forward. “My main concern is an incident involving an attack with a custard cream pie.”

When the beaver leaned back and stroked his severely receding chin, his white coat flapped open to reveal a three piece, dark-blue pinstripe suit, expertly tailored to disguise his spreading paunch. “Ah, yes, I’m quite familiar with it,” he said after a short period of contemplation.

“You are?”

“Most assuredly.” Doctor Beaver rolled his front paw across a desktop dispenser containing a giant ball of extra-heavy-duty dental floss, a necessity for those prone to munch on mahogany. “Let me phrase this as delicately as possible. Roger has undergone a tremendous amount of strain recently. His continued role as a subordinate to Baby Herman. His marital problems climaxed by the loss of his wife. In my opinion, Roger must be considered a very sick rabbit, fully capable of concocting the most fantastic stories to rationalize his failures in life. There exist a number of quite complex psychological theories which explain such behavior. To put it into layman’s language for you, Roger has become incapable of separating reality from fantasy. One of Roger’s most persistent nightmares involves an attack of some faceless aggressor wielding a pie. He’s reported it to me numerous times. Although he normally specifies lemon meringue.”

“But I saw the empty pie tin.”

“I’m sure you did.” The beaver tilted his bullet-shaped head forward on his squatty neck and tweaked a stray kink out of his moustache. “Most likely Roger either hired someone to hit him with it or did the deed himself and fabricated the attacker. He’s done such things before with other of his nightmares. Acted them out, that is. At my encouragement, naturally. I consider it quite beneficial to dramatize these deep-seated terrors, to disentangle them from the subconscious, to confront them head on, to see that they’re nowhere near as frightening in actuality as they are when kept locked in the mind. Roger’s never acted out the pie episode before, though I’ve urged him to do so quite often. I have a hunch I’ll hear him confess to it at his next session. It would be a major breakthrough.”

I doodled a few large cuckoo birds in the margin of my notebook. The beaver’s comments clinched it. Roger Rabbit was as looney as a bedbug. If my next stop turned out as I expected it to, I could legitimately consider this case closed.

First thing the next morning, I brought Roger’s pie tin to the pie shop whose name was stamped on the bottom. Sure enough, the pie man remembered selling such a pie to none other than Roger Rabbit.

The pie man took fifteen cents out of the register and handed it to me. The deposit, he said, for the tin.

I gave it to him, took the money, and felt I had earned every last penny.