19

I went back to my office and let my bottom desk drawer buy me a drink.

On the other side of the wall, I could hear my next-door neighbor, an accountant with thick glasses, clickety-clacking his adding machine. I envied the guy. Must be nice to have a job where everything added up. Rarely see it in my line of work.

For instance, Jessica Rabbit could easily have had her pick of any human guy she wanted. Yet she ran off and married a nobody Toon rabbit. Why? To get his teakettle? Hardly seemed likely. She could have spent one night with him, or even just stroked his nose, and he’d have given her his teakettle plus his house and all his money to boot.

And what about that teakettle? What made it so important? Who had it, and how did they get it?

I sank a well into my bottom drawer, and struck more bourbon.

I opened my closet door and flipped on the old black and white TV set I keep in there out of sight of clients. There was a football game on I wanted to catch, the Rams against the Bears with the Rams trying something new, a Toon gorilla as linebacker. Nothing particularly unusual about that. Last statistics I saw, nearly seventy five percent of all pro players were Toons. According to some people, it’s ruined the game, made it not so much football as barnyard brawling.

Anyway, what makes this new Rams player different is that she’s not only a Toon, she’s also a female, the first woman to break into the pros. A lot of sportswriters dismiss it as nothing but a desperate gimmick on the part of a bottom-division team, but I don’t know. I don’t see how you can call anybody a gimmick who’s eight feet tall, three hundred pounds, and can lift the back end of a car with her toes.

The game had barely gotten under way, and the new girl on the block had just thrown the Bears’ quarterback for a ten yard loss, when Roger came in, floating two feet off the ground as usual. “What a hectic day I had,” he said. His words collapsed inside their balloon like so many beanbags. He took off his coat, walked to the open closet, hung it up, and shut the door on a football sailing toward a wide receiver all alone in the end zone.

“Hey, I was watching that,” I said.

He looked at me, and at where I was pointing. “You were watching the closet door?” he asked.

I didn’t have the strength to explain. “Tell me what you found,” I said.

“I hit every one of those gun dealers you sent me to and came up absolutely blank. No luck on the thirty-eight.” He sat down across the desk from me, leaned back in his chair the same way I was, and crossed his feet on the desk top just like mine. It was almost like talking to my reflection in the mirror, except even on my worst morning I never looked as fuzzy as that.

“Too bad. That means it probably came from some minor dealer. It would take us a week to hit those. Tell you what, drop the gun angle for the time being and concentrate on the teakettle instead.”

The rabbit overlapped his upper lip with his lower, achieving exactly the same facial posture he would have if I had bopped him in the jaw. “The teakettle? You can’t be serious. What can possibly be so important about that crummy old teakettle?” His next words came out in the close-set, legalistic lettering you see in the contract for a set of encyclopedias. “You promised me we would go partners in this. I assumed that meant we would share the work evenly, good and bad alike. So far you’ve taken the glamour jobs, and I’ve done the doggy stuff. How about giving me some real detective work for a change? Something that really matters.”

I opened the closet door just in time to miss an eighty six-yard punt return, catching instead Plastic Man’s spiel for his brand of garbage sacks. Lucky me. “You got it wrong, bunny boy,” I told the rabbit. “This teakettle looks like it might be the most important angle of the case.”

“Pish, posh. I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true.” The TV showed a close-up of a Rams cheerleader wiggling her fanny, although I couldn’t get too excited by the sight of a possum in tight pink shorts.

“How can you be so sure? Just because Dominick DeGreasy’s after the teakettle, that doesn’t make it the Holy Grail.”

“It’s not just Dominick anymore. Your ex-wife has a yearning for that teakettle, too.”

“Jessica? You saw Jessica?”

“Less than an hour ago. She says that you and she bought that teakettle at an antique auction. She says she always had a particular fondness for it, that you told her to take it with her when she left, but she forgot it. She asked me to scout it up and give it to her. Any of that sound familiar to you?”

Roger wore the dumbfounded look you see on the face of somebody who walks into a darkened room, flips on the lights, and finds thirty people in there with him all yelling “Surprise!”

“She told you the two of us bought it at auction?”

“So she said.”

“That’s a flat out lie.” His large black eyeballs took a big hop with every word. Almost made me want to sing along. “I got that teakettle where I said I got it.”

“So you see, the teakettle shapes up as being very significant.”

Roger bent his ears forward ninety degrees, like he was caught in a brisk wind pushing him forward into some place he had no desire to go. “Fine. No more static. Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.”

“Good. Check with the studio prop man who bought the teakettle. Find out where he got it from and work backward from there.”

“Right.”

“Also, something else.” I wrote out a name and telephone number and passed it to him. “This is a contact I have at the phone company. Give him a call, set up a meeting, and tell him I want the phone records for Rocco’s house on the night he died. All calls both in and out.”

“He just gives you that kind of data?”

“Not exactly.” I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. “In return I supplement his income slightly.”

“Wow!” Roger’s buoyant balloon sailed up so high, it wrapped itself around the single light bulb that illuminated my office. I had to stand on my desk to peel it off. “Bribery,” said Roger. “That’s what I call real detective work.”

I crushed Roger’s balloon, which the heat from the light bulb had baked into the crackly consistency of a fortune cookie, and dropped it into my ashtray. “How have you done with the double-S initialed characters?” I asked.

Roger pulled out his notebook and studied it, although I don’t know why. Anybody who could memorize a cartoon script shouldn’t have any trouble remembering a report as short as the one he gave me. “I checked Sam Spud and Sad Sack. Both of them had ironclad alibis for the time Rocco died.”

“OK. Keep trying. Make that your number two priority after the teakettle.” I debated whether or not to let Roger in on the piece of negative I’d found in Rocco’s fireplace, but decided not to. It would only encourage him to stick around longer. This way, he put on his hat and coat and got back to business.

I spent the next few hours lowering the alcohol content in my bottle of bourbon.

Oh, yeah. The Rams won fourteen to twelve, they awarded the game ball to Priscilla Gorilla, and a million guys on a million bar stools mourned another fallen tradition.