13

The cops cruised in under command of a humanoid Toon detective, Captain “Clever” Cleaver. The police force contains one division of humans and one of Toons, with each faction investigating only crimes committed against its own kind. I never saw a Toon cop sharp enough to hack it on the human side, though Cleaver came about as close as any. He carried his gun where other men carry pictures of their loved ones. He wore a trench coat and a broad-brimmed slouch hat, and smoked cigars that smelled like they’d been snipped off the end of something used to tie rowboats to a pier. He had a big, square jaw, grunted a lot, called all women “Honey” and most men “Butch.”

Cleaver sat me down on Roger’s sofa and gave me an evil eyeballing straight out of the Crimestopper’s Textbook. I gave back better than I got. He blinked first and settled down to cases. “From the beginning, Butch,” he growled. “You know the drill as well as I do.”

“Nothing much to it. The dead rabbit hired me to unravel a problem for him. He believed Rocco and Dominick DeGreasy, the two guys heading up his cartoon syndicate, owed him his own strip. According to the rabbit, they had promised it to him when they signed him up. They never delivered, so he asked me to pressure them into it. He also told me to check out a rumor that somebody wanted to buy his contract. I nosed around and came up blank. The DeGreasys insist they never made the promise. The rumor remains a rumor. That’s about everything. I came here this morning to resign the case.”

“With a full refund of any advance monies paid but not earned, I presume,” said Cleaver sarcastically.

“I get no complaints.”

“No referrals, either, from what I hear. At least not from the Toon sector.”

“By design, Captain, by design. I don’t encourage Toon work. It’s a specialized field. I got enough human business to keep me occupied.” I uncrossed my legs and put my feet flat on the floor so he wouldn’t see my rundown heels and the gaping hole in my left sole. I guess I waited too long, because he plopped himself down on the chair across from me and made a big point of propping his feet up on a coffee table so I had a direct shot at his shoes, their bottoms flat as a pancake but in perfect repair.

A sergeant carried in Roger’s last words encased in a plastic sack. “Sir, we found these under the stiff.”

Cleaver got up, took the words, and held them to the light, using his body to shield them so I couldn’t see. He returned them to the sergeant with instructions to rush them to the lab for a rate-of-hardening determination. “Anybody in this case named Jessica?” he asked, rolling his stogie from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Roger’s estranged wife.” I laid out the lurid details concerning the relationships among Jessica, Rocco, and Roger.

No sense concealing it from him. He would find out eventually, and this way I scored a few points for cooperation. “The wife a suspect?” I asked innocently.

Instead of giving me a direct answer, he motioned me into the front entry hall. We got there just in time to watch a brace of burly ambulance attendants wheel Roger out the door on a dolly.

“Know what that is?” Cleaver pointed to a control panel beside the door. Lights on the panel flashed in random sequence. Maybe a hundred individual lights each blinking six or seven times a minute. I found I couldn’t watch it for more than a few seconds without getting a headache.

“A burglar alarm, I guess, although I’ve never seen one quite that sophisticated in a home.”

“That’s because it’s a special custom job put in by the builder of this development. It’s a big selling feature out here, since Toon neighborhoods routinely report the city’s highest burglary rates. Can you imagine? They steal from one another. Almost makes me ashamed to be a Toon.”

If he was waiting for me to say, “I know how you feel,” he was in for a few days of silence. I’ve never been ashamed to be a human.

When he saw I wasn’t going to respond, he resumed his explanation of Roger’s security system. “The alarm cycles on automatically when the front door closes. It wasn’t on when you got here because the music scale had drifted in, gotten wrapped around the door knob, and was holding the door ajar. Disengaging the alarm requires a multi-sequential process it took some of my best experts to figure out.”

“Which means that nobody got into this house unless Roger wanted them to.”

“Correct. Hence the likelihood that Roger knew his killer well enough to invite him inside.”

“So you figure the wife?”

“That would be my first guess. It would also explain how the killer got out without sounding the alarm. Since Jessica had lived here with the rabbit, she must know the code. She could easily have turned the system off and walked away.”

“Very logical,” I said politely. “Congratulations on your sound reasoning. You’ve overlooked only one teeny problem. According to Roger, he’d asked Jessica to meet with him many times before, and she had consistently refused. Why should she suddenly accept his offer now? When I talked to her yesterday, she made it quite clear she had no intention of pursuing a reconciliation. I suggested a get-together between her and Roger, and she gave me a firm no.”

Cleaver seemed quite relieved when another sergeant came up and saved him from having to tiptoe out of the corner he’d painted himself into. The sergeant showed Cleaver two items, both encased in plastic bags. One was the .38 pistol from Roger’s nightstand. The other was a hunk of metal, the fatal bullet, judging from the size of it. “One shot missing from the thirty-eight,” the sergeant said to Cleaver, but Cleaver took more of an interest in the slug.

“Hey, Butch. Ever see one like this?” He held the bullet where I could inspect it.

It looked like it had started life as a perfect sphere before running into Roger Rabbit and a wall. “Seems to be an old-fashioned musket ball from a black-powder long rifle or a flintlock pistol,” I said.

“That’s my guess, too. You run into any antique gun collectors in this case?”

“Can’t say I have.”

Cleaver returned the sack to his sergeant. “Process them both through ballistics,” he instructed.

Cleaver picked up Roger’s cigar box, opened it, and saw the carrots inside. His granite jaw cracked upward slightly at either end of his mouth. Poor guy. But that’s what happens when you hang around with Toons all day. You start to develop a sense of humor. Next thing you know, nobody takes you seriously anymore, and you wind up laughing yourself straight into the morgue. “The deceased have any enemies you know of?” asked Cleaver.

I shrugged. “Who could hate a rabbit?”

Just then another police car squealed up outside. The rear door opened, and out came Captain Rusty Hudson. He worked the human side and had a well-earned reputation as the most feared kind of law-and-order fanatic, one with a self-starter but no brake. He wrapped up his assignments so quickly and so neatly that he routinely had the lowest active case load of any human detective. I wondered why the department had sent its superstar to investigate a case involving a dead rabbit.

Hudson came inside, took a look around, and saw me. “Finally found your level down here with the rest of the crazies, huh, Valiant?”

“Nice to see you again, too, Captain,” I replied.

“What can I do for you, sir?” asked Cleaver. Even though they held the same rank, the department’s age-old unwritten law required a Toon officer to defer to a human, and everybody who knew Hudson knew he would make life extremely miserable for any Toon colleague deviating from tradition.

“When I heard the report about this Roger Rabbit character being killed,” said Hudson, “I figured I’d better shag it right over here before your bunch gets too far into their search. No offense, but I’ve had lots of problems with the Toon side losing evidence on me before.”

“What kind of evidence you after?”

“A thirty-eight-caliber revolver, maybe has one shot gone. You find anything like that when you tossed this place?”

Cleaver nodded. “Sure did. Upstairs in the nightstand. One bullet fired. I sent it to ballistics. Why? You got something on it?”

“I have reason to suspect it was the murder weapon in a human homicide last night.”

“A human homicide? Who?” I asked.

Hudson looked at me the way people look at escargot when they find out that means snails. “You got a reason to be here, gumshoe? You a witness, a suspect, or what?”

“He was employed by the rabbit,” explained Cleaver. “I was just taking his statement when you arrived.”

Hudson nodded to show he understood that police work often forced officers to associate against their wills with guys like me. He expanded his narrative, but for Cleaver’s benefit, not mine. “About one this morning we got a call from a hysterical woman who turned out to be this rabbit’s wife. Seems she lives with a guy named Rocco DeGreasy, a big wheel in the comic industry. She was out late. When she came home, she saw a light on in DeGreasy’s study. She went in to check and found DeGreasy slumped across his desk, dead.”

“You got an estimated time of death?” I asked, but Hudson ignored me.

“I did some quick checking around,” he continued, “and found out that this rabbit had previously threatened DeGreasy’s life, in front of witnesses during a photo session at his photographer’s studio. I also discovered that this rabbit bears a grudge because DeGreasy failed to honor a promise to give him his own strip. As if I needed more, DeGreasy has also grabbed the rabbit’s girl. Put that all together, it spells murder. I’ll give odds that the bullet we found in DeGreasy turns out to have come from the rabbit’s gun.”

“Were you able to pinpoint an exact time of death?” asked Cleaver, repeating my earlier question.

Since this time it had come through channels, Hudson answered. “We figure about midnight.”

“Judging from the hardness of the rabbit’s final balloon, he got it about an hour later. You check Jessica Rabbit’s alibi for then?” Cleaver asked.

“No, why should I? What’s she got to do with anything? The rabbit plugged DeGreasy. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

“Great. That takes care of your murder. What about mine?” Cleaver’s word balloon came out so frosty you almost needed a squeegee to read it. “These two deaths are too closely related to be a coincidence. Suppose Jessica Rabbit saw Roger kill Rocco, followed the rabbit back here, and executed him for his crime. A perfect motive. The rabbit shot her lover, so Jessica shot the rabbit.”

“I’ll let you solve that part of it,” said Hudson, buffing his fingernails on his lapel with such intense concentration that a casual onlooker might suspect it was the most important thing he had to do for the entire rest of the day. “When the report comes back from ballistics, I’ll stamp my case closed. What do I care about who blew away some bunny.” With that he left the house, got into his car, and roared off, siren on and lights flashing, a showboat to the end.

Cleaver took a peek through a telescope set up in the front window, but it was way too early to see any stars. “Did that rabbit have what it takes to kill a man?” Cleaver asked me.

“I don’t know. On the one hand, he really hated Rocco DeGreasy. But on the other hand, who can picture a killer rabbit?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Cleaver. He drifted off into the mental never-never land where Toons seem to spend three-quarters of their time.

“You finished with me, Captain?”

“What?” A series of tiny balloons, each containing an itsy-bitsy question mark, bubbled out of his head. The balloons popped, letting the question marks parachute to the floor. I was tempted to scoop them up and pocket them, since I knew a book publisher who bought them to cut typesetting costs in his line of whodunits.

“Sure,” Cleaver said, “you can go. Just don’t leave town without checking with me first. And one other thing. I don’t know how you felt about this rabbit, or if you took his case seriously, but from here on out this affair belongs to me. Official police investigation. You want to keep your license, you stay out. Understand?”

“One hundred percent,” I said. “I won’t interfere.” I jammed my hand into my pocket and crossed my fingers. “I promise.”