16

“A terrible, terrible thing what that rabbit did to my brother,” said Dominick DeGreasy. I could see why he had let his brother do the talking. Instead of a voice he had a throat full of gravel that rattled every word and gave him the tin drum sound you hear in people who lubricate their tonsils with loud talk and cheap gin.

“You going to run the syndicate alone?” I asked.

“You bet. Why not?” He pointed straight down at his desk top the way emperors point at their thrones. “Me and my brother built this syndicate together. I know as much about it as he did. Sure, the last few years he handled the business end of it, and I took care of keeping the talent in line. I just need a week or so to pick up the fine points, and I’ll have the place ticking along better than ever.”

I wished I could find a bookie willing to take a bet on that.

DeGreasy sat down at his desk. He crossed his size-sixteen gunboats in a maneuver worthy of a naval captain. “I got a firm to run here, Valiant,” he said. He interlocked his hands behind his head. His black morning coat pulled open and gave me a clear view of the howitzer he packed under his armpit. It appeared to be about the same big-bore caliber as the gun that got Roger, but it was hardly an antique pirate pistol. “I got no time to waste on cheap gumshoes. If you came by to line up a pigeon to expense your tab while you rehash this case, forget it. That rabbit killed my brother, no doubt about it. Why should I pay you to nose around, come back, and tell me what I already know?”

“That’s not why I’m here, to get a client. I already have a client.”

DeGreasy snorted. “Who?”

“That’s privileged information. Let’s just say that my client believes Roger Rabbit might be getting framed for your brother’s murder and wants me to check into it to see what I can find.”

“Sounds like a waste of money to me.”

“Possibly. The rabbit might be guilty as hell. But, then again, there’s the outside chance he might be getting set up for somebody else, and if that’s so, Rocco’s murderer is right now running around scot free. You wouldn’t want that, would you? You wouldn’t want your brother’s killer to go loose?”

Dominick squirmed around in his chair, unable to find a position that fit. “No, you bet I wouldn’t want that to happen. But why should it? The cops put their top man on the case, this Rusty Hudson. I got connections downtown, and I requested their best man special. The mayor himself gave me Hudson. He’ll find out who really killed Rocco. Why should I think you’ll do anything he won’t?”

“Because he already considers the case closed. He’s not going to follow up any loose ends. Why should he? The rabbit’s a tailor-made fall guy. Hudson hangs it on the rabbit and wraps up the case in record time. But he might just be wrong, and that’s what I intend to find out. It would be a lot easier if I had your help, but I’m going to keep plugging whether I get it or not.”

He shoved some junk from one side of his desk to the other and probably considered that a good day’s work. “If I go along with you, what do I have to do?”

“Hardly a thing. Answer a few questions about your brother.”

He looked across the desk at his brother’s chair. For the first time in his life, there was nobody in it to tell him what to do. “I guess I can go that far,” he said finally.

“Swell. Oh, and also I need to look through your brother’s personal effects. See if there’s anything in there that might throw some light on who besides the rabbit might have had a motive to kill him.”

He balked slightly at that. “The cops already went through Rocco’s stuff.”

“Sure they did, but with the preconceived notion that the rabbit committed the crime. I come to the task with an open mind.”

He eyeballed the empty chair again, but it still wasn’t talking. “Go ahead and search,” he said at last.

“Would you mind?” I made shooing motions toward the door. “I’d like to do it alone. It helps me concentrate.”

“Sure.” Dominick got to his feet, happy to have an excuse for motion. “Rocco kept his stuff in his drawers. Just stick your head out when you’re done.”

Before he left, Dominick made a big production out of locking the file cabinet and his desk.

As soon as he shut the door, I picked the lock on his desk drawer.

He must have had fifty pornographic magazines of the whips and chains variety stuffed in there. I searched around but found nothing else, and I mean nothing. His drawers contained no files, no calendar, no paper, not even a pencil. I put his magazines back and locked up. With a perverted dodo like Dominick at its helm, this company would be lucky to last twelve months.

I used my picks again on the company files.

Based on what I found in there, I revised my prognosis to six months. The company’s financial statements showed that the DeGreasys had been steadily losing money for nearly a year. They had less operating capital than I did, and I had enough checks kited to lift me halfway up the hill to the poorhouse.

I checked under “R” and found one of those green cardboard dividers the cops put into place whenever they take something out. According to the divider’s notation, they had removed the Roger Rabbit file. I fanned through the rest of the folders, but they’d taken nothing else. Obviously, as far as the cops were concerned, Roger was the killer.

I closed up the files and was just about to start in on Rocco’s desk when something clicked, something odd. The file drawers appeared to be a few inches shorter than the file cabinet proper. I pulled the cabinet away from the wall and examined its backside. It took me a while, but I finally found it, a secret compartment. When you pressed a certain screw, the whole rear of the cabinet swung away to reveal a narrow space maybe two inches deep. I had expected to find a few file folders inside, but instead the space held snapshots of original segments of comic strip artwork. Each piece of artwork contained a framed print of a comic strip and the negative used to produce it, the same kind of stuff Rocco had hanging in here on the walls. If I remembered rightly, he had said such segments were worth big bucks. This artwork portrayed Baby Herman strips. Roger Rabbit appeared in all of them, so they must be fairly recent. Each segment had been signed by its photographer—Carol Masters in every case.

I flipped one of the snapshots over and found a price penciled on the back. Five grand. Certainly not small potatoes on my side of town, but hardly the mighty moola Rocco had led me to believe the stuff fetched. Of course what I knew about art you could put into one blank of a paint-by-numbers set. Maybe these were inferior quality segments and didn’t command very high a price. But if that were the case, why go to so much trouble to hide them?

I studied the segments up close, but couldn’t see any difference between them and the ones on the wall. One of the segments did have a familiar look to it, but I couldn’t place it, and it was hardly likely that I’d have seen it in the paper since I never read the funnies. I put the snapshots in my pocket, closed up the compartment, and pushed the filing cabinet back into place.

Next I went to work on Rocco’s desk.

He kept his desk calendar inside his upper center drawer. I checked it for yesterday and discovered he had penciled in an appointment at home with someone he identified only by the initials SS. The meeting was set for eleven o’clock P.M., barely an hour before he had been killed.

In his bottom drawer I found a few books on ancient mythology, and that was about it.

I stuck my head out the door and asked Dominick to rejoin me.

“Any luck?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I answered. “How about giving me some background to set my findings into perspective?”

“Shoot.”

“What’s your opinion of Jessica Rabbit?”

He picked up a letter opener and jabbed it so hard into his desktop blotter that it cut through to the wood beneath. I wondered if anybody in the world besides Roger saw any good in that woman. “She was a bimbo when he met her, and she’s still a bimbo. I never could figure out what he saw in her.”

“How did they meet?”

“Rocco discovered her dancing in a slimy downtown strip club. He took her out of there, groomed her, bought her expensive clothes, and taught her to act. As her way of saying thanks, she dumped him for a stupid rabbit.”

“But she did come back to him,” I pointed out.

He pulled the letter opener up and took a piece of the blotter with it. “Sure she came back to him, but only when she found out that the rabbit couldn’t give her what Rocco could. She was out for nobody but herself, and Rocco would have been better off without her. I told him not to take her back, but the guy loved her so much he would have forgiven her anything.”

“The word is that Jessica pressured Rocco into giving Roger a contract. You know anything about that?”

“Not really. Like I said, I never got involved much in the business end of it. I personally never wanted to sign the rabbit. I never thought he had all that much talent, but Rocco insisted, although he never once gave me a good reason why. Said it was just a hunch he had, a feeling. But I always thought, pretty much like everybody else did, that it was really Jessica behind it. He took the rabbit on because Jessica asked him to. Sure, it turned out to be the right move. The rabbit wound up making a spiffy second banana, but nobody would have guessed that going in.”

“Roger insisted that Rocco promised him a solo strip. Any truth to that?”

“I dunno. Like I said, I didn’t get involved much with that end of it, but it wouldn’t surprise me. If Rocco wanted someone bad enough he’d promise them anything. Never put it into the contract though. He’d tell the character that it wasn’t necessary, that it was his word, and he always kept his word.”

“Did he?”

“You kidding?” Dominick tried to laugh, but I don’t think he had ever learned how. “Nobody could lie like Rocco.”

“Supposing for a minute that Roger didn’t kill Rocco, do you think that Jessica could have?”

“I can’t figure why. Rocco gave her everything she wanted. It would have been like snuffing the goose that laid the golden egg.”

“Does Jessica stand to inherit Rocco’s estate?”

He stoked up a slim, black, unfiltered cigarette, centered it in his mouth, and blew smoke out of either side around it. “I don’t know. The will ain’t been read yet. The lawyer does it tomorrow right after the funeral.”

“You know the rabbit’s dead, too.”

He flipped his match into his wastebasket. He didn’t have to worry about starting a fire. His wastebasket held no paper. He was either very neat or very unproductive. No question which got my vote. “I heard, and I think it’s a real shame.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I think it’s a shame that somebody else got to him before I did.” He hacked another piece out of his blotter. “After what he did to my brother, it would have given me great pleasure to shoot that rabbit myself.”

“Any idea who might have spared you the trouble?”

He shrugged and shook his head.

“Do you think Jessica could have done it?”

“Possible, I suppose. I think she could kill anybody, any time, anywhere.”

I held up the comic strip segments I had found in the secret compartment. “You know anything about these?” Dominick took them and looked them over. He read them, but only with great difficulty, by running his fingers across them and sounding out the words. “Where did you get these? You didn’t have them when you came in.”

“They were in Rocco’s bottom desk drawer. What are they?”

“They’re some segments that disappeared from Rocco’s gallery about a month ago. Rocco had this place downtown that he used as an outlet for this kind of art. His son, Little Rock, runs it for him. One day these segments turned up missing from there. Little Rock couldn’t explain how. Rocco never reported it because he didn’t want to publicize the sloppy way the kid ran the gallery. He figured that would only invite in more thieves.”

“What about the prices on the back?”

Dom turned the segments over. At least he read numbers. “I don’t keep up much with prices, but these look to be awful low. It could be that somebody offered them to Rocco for sale. He dealt in original segments all the time, so it would be natural for somebody who had them to see if Rocco wanted to buy. Maybe the seller didn’t know they were stolen. Or maybe the thief got Rocco to pay to get them back. Rocco probably would have done it to protect his kid’s reputation.”

“Your brother had an appointment with somebody last night, somebody with the initials SS. You know who that might have been?”

“SS? Beats me.”

“What about mythology?”

“Huh?”

“The study of ancient legends. Your brother had some books on the subject in his desk. You have any idea why?”

“Probably research material for a new strip. He did a lot of that. He’d get the idea, work out and cast the characters, and then turn it over to some photographer and writer team to script up and shoot.”

I took the comic segments back from Dominick. “You mind if I hang onto these for a while?”

“Be my guest. Just make sure I get them back.”

I was almost out the door when, almost as an afterthought, Dominick said, “By the way, as long as you’re poking into that rabbit’s affairs, maybe you could do me a favor.”

“If I can. What?”

Dominick lowered his voice and became as coy as a debutante sidling up to a bowl of spiked punch. “Well, when Rocco and the rabbit were having their run-in, the rabbit one day swiped something out of the office here. It was a family memento, and it was very precious to Rocco and me. The rabbit took it, I think, because he figured he might be able to hold it for ransom or something. I’d appreciate it if you could keep your eye out for it. If you come across it, I’d be willing to pay you to get it back.”

“What exactly was it?”

“Nothing valuable. It’s a teakettle.”

“A teakettle, you say?”

“Yeah. It belonged to my grandmother. She gave it to me and Rocco just before she died. We, ah, used it to brew tea here in the office.”

“Describe it for me,” I said, although I had a sneaky hunch exactly how the description would go.

“It weighs about three pounds and has gray paint on the outside. There’s not much else I can tell you about it. It looks like any other cheap teakettle. Will you keep your eye out for it?”

“You bet. Glad to do it. You wouldn’t believe how interested I am in finding that teakettle.”

The guy could have done wonders with oranges at breakfast judging from the way he wrapped his gigantic hands around mine and squeezed. “You know, Valiant,” he said, “I’m starting to like you.”

Now that really made my day. I can honestly say I had met Toons brighter than this bozo.