25

She swept into my office the way a touring British queen would enter a bushman’s hut, head high, stiff upper lip, determined to maintain proper imperial bearing, but very, very, careful not to breathe too deeply of the foul air or stray too near the mud-caked walls. She wore a casual outfit—blue jeans, T-shirt, and tennis shoes. If she was dressing down to my level, I hope she brought her pick and shovel because she still had three miles deeper to go.

I offered her a chair. The regal way she carried herself made me want to dust off the seat cushion first, but my only handkerchief is the one my dry cleaner stuffs in my breast pocket whenever I get my suit pressed, and it’s no more than a half inch of material stapled to a piece of cardboard.

She accepted my offer of an eye-opener, but when I poured her three good fingers, she barely sucked the thumb. “To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” I asked.

She turned heavy sighing into an athletic event worthy of feature coverage in Sports Illustrated. “I want to hire you,” she said, “as a private detective.” She lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray, but there are none, since I routinely use the floor. I dug out an old coffee cup, one with “I’m proud to be a Toon” written on it with Toon misspelled about six times, and shoved it across the desk at her. She read the inscription, smiled, and dropped her burnt match onto the rug.

“Mind telling me what exactly it is you want me to do?”

She crossed one exquisite leg over the other and tapped her foot against the thick, invisible wall between us. “Since Roger was killed, I’ve been visited several times by a certain police captain named Cleaver. Are you familiar with him?”

I nodded. I poured myself her second drink since it looked like she’d never get around to it, and I hate to see booze spoil.

“I don’t think it’s any great secret that Cleaver considers me the prime suspect in Roger’s murder. I came to you because I want you to get me off.”

I wished I had a month to really think this one out. I wished I had contacts in high places who could supply me with inside info. I wished I had a mind Machiavellian enough to give Jessica Rabbit a run for her money. But most of all I wished I had some ice because this warm bourbon was starting to do me more harm than good. “Rather an odd choice of words you picked there, missy. You mean you want me to prove you didn’t do it, don’t you? Asking me to get you off makes it sound like you’re guilty as charged, like you did kill Roger exactly as Cleaver says you did.”

She backpedaled faster than a bicycle rider careening toward a washed-out bridge. “Yes, of course, you’re right. That’s what I meant. I want you to prove me innocent. I just got my words twisted around. What I meant was that I want you to find out who really killed Roger.”

“If I do that, if I take your case, you’ll assist me however you can? You’ll tell me the absolute truth about your involvement with this affair?”

Her head bobbed up and down like a line float with a firm hook on an angelfish.

“OK. Let’s start with your alibi. Is it true that you spent the entire evening alone, at a movie and out for a walk?”

Had she not suppressed her thought balloons, the air above her head would have been filled with visions of churning gears. I could picture the pasteboard card flopping out the tiny slot at the far end. You weigh one hundred and fifteen pounds, you’re tall and gorgeous, everybody lusts after you, and, if you want to stay out of the slammer, you have no choice but to tell this nasty man what really happened on that fatal night. “I went to a movie. That much is true. But I didn’t go for a walk afterward. I went straight home. I got there at least an hour before Rocco died.”

“You mean you were actually in the house when it happened?”

She lit a new cigarette off the butt of an old one, just like you’d see any ordinary B-girl do in any ordinary juke joint on any ordinary night of the week, except, when Jessica did it, she made it seem extraordinary, as exotic and exciting as watching a jeweler cutting diamonds or a gunsmith engraving steel. She wrapped her lips seductively around the filter tip and sucked rhythmically, making her cigarette darken and glow, darken and glow in a pattern that spelled out temptation in her seductive private code. “Yes, not only was I in the house at the time, I saw the murderer.”

I suddenly felt like one of those milk bottles people whack with softballs at a local county fair. Just when you get settled into a good, solid, upright stance, somebody plunks down two bits and knocks you flat on your keister. “Who might that murderer be?”

The graceful way she tilted her head would have been an excellent subject for a charm school student’s doctoral dissertation. “I thought you already knew.”

“Refresh my memory.”

“Why, it was Roger, of course.”

Of course. Had it been anybody else, this case would have been duck soup, and heaven forbid that Eddie Valiant should ever have a case handed to him on a silver platter. “Tell me what you saw.”

She detailed her story in the flat, unworldly voice that floats around the edges of a séance. “I was in my bedroom, giving my hair two hundred strokes, when I heard a shot. I went running into the hallway to the top of the staircase. From there I had a clear view of Rocco’s study below. I saw the door open, and I saw Roger come charging out, a smoking gun in his paw.”

“He didn’t see you?”

“No. He was in too big a hurry to get away. He went straight out the front door and down the sidewalk.”

“Still holding the gun?”

“Still holding the gun.”

“You didn’t see anybody else come out after him?”

“No.” She walked to the window and inhaled some of the loose weave gray flannel that substitutes for fresh air in this burg. “I went into the study and saw what had happened. That Roger had shot Rocco dead. I immediately went back to my room, dressed, got into my car, and drove to Roger’s bungalow.”

“Why do that? Why not just call the cops?”

She gave me a look hard enough to hammer nails into my forehead. “I planned to use what I knew to blackmail Roger.”

“For what? What could the rabbit have that you could want?”

She sat down on the edge of my desk, leaned toward me, and whispered the week’s worst kept secret. “Why, his teakettle, naturally. I wanted his teakettle.”

“Why didn’t you get it from him when you were still living together? He would have given you anything, especially an old teakettle.”

She returned to her chair. I didn’t feel such a compulsion to dust it for her this time, not after the ton of dirt she had dished around my office. “I didn’t find out how valuable it was until after I’d left him. I couldn’t ask him for it then, because I feared he might promise to give it to me only if I returned to him.”

“And you wouldn’t have done that?”

“Not even for the teakettle. I already told you. That rabbit’s a turkey.”

To my eternal credit, I let that one slide. “What is it about this teakettle that makes it such a hot item in your book? Exactly how valuable is it?”

She closed her eyes and launched into a tale fantastic enough to provide a six month scenario for Terry and the Pirates. “In the early tenth century, a dying gourmet potentate wanted to provide for his royal chef. So he had the palace artisan construct for him a solid gold teakettle, inlaid with a single, huge blue-white diamond and a multitude of other slightly smaller but equally precious stones. Several hundred years later this priceless teakettle fell into the hands of the Templar Knights. You’ve heard of the Templar Knights?”

“Sure. They came right after the Templar Days.”

She dismissed my sarcasm with a crinkle of her nose. “The Templar Knights fought for Richard the Lionhearted. They claimed the teakettle for themselves during one of their grand crusades to the Holy Land. To protect it from thieves on the journey home, the Templar Knights disguised it by having it lacquered gray. As fate would have it, thieves stole it anyhow, although as nearly as historians can tell, they had no inkling as to its true worth. To them, it was nothing but a common teakettle. That’s the last record we have of it until it turned up on Roger’s stove.”

“How did you find out about it? Was it Rocco who told you? I understand he’d been studying up on mythology lately. Was this why? Because he was hot on the trail of the caliph’s teakettle?”

She lit a third cigarette and shooed the smoke away from her face with a hand as delicate as any Japanese fan. “Yes, precisely. He first saw it in a still photo taken from the Alice in Wonderland movie. He remembered it from a sketch he had seen years ago while researching a strip on the Arabian Nights. He went out and bought a ton of mythology books and searched through them for every reference to the caliph’s teakettle. He found enough to become convinced that it really existed, and that what Roger had matched its description perfectly. I learned about it one night when I heard Rocco and his brother Dominick discussing how to get their hands on it. Roger hated and distrusted them, so they couldn’t offer to buy it outright. Roger had that complicated burglar alarm system, so they couldn’t break in and steal it. When I overheard them, they were just coming around to the prospect of murder.”

“They intended to kill the rabbit? For his teakettle?”

“So they said.”

“What happened when you got to Roger’s house?”

“I found the door open. I went inside and saw Roger dead. I looked around, but the teakettle was nowhere to be found. I figured that Dominick had probably beaten me to it. So I left. That’s how it happened.” She crossed her heart and hoped to die. “The truth.”

“Why didn’t you report it that way?”

She displayed another side of herself, the confused innocent. “I was afraid. I didn’t want to get involved with murder. Leave it to that stupid bunny to die with my name on his lips and rope me in anyway.”

“When you entered the house, and when you left it again, did you notice some music coming from out of the piano?”

“Yes, I did. That’s what held the door open. The music had gotten wrapped around the knob. I don’t remember what the song was, if that’s what you’re after.”

“That’s what I’m after.”

“Well, I don’t remember.” She leaned forward far enough across the desk to put her hand on my arm. In an earlier, more direct era, that kind of touch would have been all I needed to grab her by the hair, drag her into my cave, and ravage her until morning. Nowadays we have to be satisfied with a silly grin. I gave her a silly grin. “I did not kill Roger,” she said. “You must believe that. I swear it on my honor.”

“That’s a pretty shaky oath in my book.” I pitched her my bean ball. “Ever hear of a man named Sid Sleaze?”

Her hand tightened around my arm, but she didn’t seem to have enough strength in it to squash a cockroach. “Yes, I know him. He asked me to appear in a porno comic book once. He hounds most of the top Toons. He’s a filthy, perverted beast, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

“You never gave in and appeared in one of his goodies?”

“Of course not. What kind of woman do you take me for? I have my standards.”

There was only one reply to that. I pulled out Lewd, Crude, and In the Mood, and threw it on the desk.

She stared down at the printed goody the way an innocent bystander stares at a body which has just fallen ten stories to the sidewalk. “Where did you get this?”

“From a book dealer I know. It cost me a bundle. I must say it’s worth every penny. You naughty girl, you.”

She reached for it, but I quickly hauled it back and stuffed it into my top desk drawer.

She uncorked a stream of tears that would have made a crocodile proud. “I was trying to break into modeling when I first met Sid Sleaze,” she said. “He passed himself off as a big time movie producer. He told me he would make me a star. Some star. He invited me to his apartment and slipped me a spiked drink that left me able to function physically, but made me totally uninhibited. When the effects wore off, Sleaze showed me prints of the porno material he had shot of me while I was under. The same stuff he later used to prepare that horrid book. He gave me five thousand dollars and told me there would be a lot more in it for me if I did it again, of my own free will this time. I threw the money at him, and ran out.”

“Did you go to the cops?”

“I was afraid to, and embarrassed. I was only eighteen at the time. Besides, while I was drugged, Sleaze had me sign a formal release. Luckily, Sleaze printed up only a small quantity of those comics. This was when he was first getting started in the business, and he couldn’t afford a large press run. After I became famous, and he realized what a potential gold mine he had, he approached me again, shortly after I married Roger. He said if I didn’t give him money, he would print up another hundred thousand copies for general release.” She brought her cigarette up between us and watched it burn.

“What did you do?”

She killed her smoke by grinding it viciously into my cup. She kept grinding it long after it had gone out, until nothing remained except loose strands of tobacco and thoroughly shredded paper. “I paid him, naturally. What else could I do? I had my career to consider. Luckily for me, Sleaze proved to be a lot more honorable as a crook than he was as a porno producer. Once he had his money, he gave me the negatives, exactly as promised.”

“He gave you the negatives?”

“That’s right.”

“What did you do with them?”

“I cut them into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.”

“Did Rocco ever see them, or see the comic?”

“No, never. It’s hardly a subject I’d discuss with a man who worshipped me as the embodiment of sophistication.” As she talked, Jessica came around to my side of the desk, took up a position behind my chair, and ran her fingers through my hair and along the side of my face. “You have beautiful features,” she said. “So strong and well defined.”

“Chipped out of granite, that’s me.”

She brushed a kiss across my ear. “You will take my case, won’t you?” she said in a throaty whisper that spoke of pleasures rarely experienced by the common man.

“Not a chance,” I whispered back, a lot less heartily than I had intended to.

Her voice shot up like a rocket. “What do you mean, not a chance?”

“Just what I said. I won’t take your case.” I held her lovely hand in mine, and ticked off my reasons on her slender fingers. “First, I think you’re lying about seeing Roger coming out of Rocco’s study after the shooting. Why, I don’t know. Maybe to protect somebody else, maybe to cover yourself. Secondly, for once in my life, I agree one hundred percent with the police. I think you shot Roger. I’d stake my life on it. You had the teakettle for a motive, and you had the opportunity. Thirdly, I won’t take your case because I already have a client, Roger Rabbit, dead though he may be.” I ran out of reasons before I ran out of fingers, so I took the two of hers I had remaining, and squeezed them together. “And these two little piggies went to the gas chamber,” I said.

She jerked her hand away and hid it behind her where I couldn’t intimidate it anymore. “You’re wrong, you’re terribly wrong. I’ve told you the truth. I beg you to reconsider.”

Again I told her no dice.

She cried me another half a river as I shooed her into the hall.

No sooner had she gone than I heard a noise outside my window, like somebody stumbling over their own feet as they descended the fire escape.

I jerked the window open but found nobody there. Down at the bottom of the iron escape ladder, on the street, I did see Roger Rabbit though. Strange. He should have been halfway to my apartment by now. Could it be he stayed behind and eavesdropped on my conversation with Jessica? If so, he knew my true feelings toward her. Even worse, he knew her true feelings toward him, and right now I didn’t think the little guy could handle it. For his sake I hoped he had been far, far away when Jessica told her tale. But knowing snoopy Roger, fat chance of that.

I prescribed myself one final bracer and set resolutely off to face the morose scene I knew I’d find at home.