27

I figured Roger needed a perk up, so I told him to tag along and watch me grill Sid Sleaze. For the amount of enthusiasm he showed for it, I might just as well have asked him to watch me fold my laundry. I don’t know. You bend over backward to accommodate these creatures, and you get zippo appreciation for it. No wonder nobody goes out of their way to be nice to them. Where’s the percentage in it?

The Sleazy Press occupied a steel and glass high-rise surrounded by small one-story family owned businesses. Roger and I hadn’t gotten three feet from the curb before a grandmotherly woman who should have been home in a rocking chair crocheting afghans stuck a petition under my nose, the gist of which was that Sid Sleaze should be tarred, feathered, and run out of the neighborhood lashed to a rail. She also carried a shopping bag of rotten cabbages to throw at Sleaze when he came through the door. When Roger blurted out that we were on our way in to see Sleaze up close and personal, she locked my arm in a vice grip and refused to release me until I promised to spit in his eye.

I expected Sid Sleaze to be a short, dumpy guy with Vaselined hair, no neck, and an armful of tattooed naked ladies that would do obscene dances when he flexed his muscles. Sporting a dayglow-orange suit, a tie that lit up and said, “Kiss me in the dark,” a diamond stickpin, and a gold front tooth. Oh, yeah, and with plenty of drool dripping down his chin.

At least I got one right. He was short but as solid and well-proportioned as a bantamweight contender. His dark suit wouldn’t have drawn a second glance at a morticians’ convention. He walked more gracefully than I danced and had a melodious baritone that could have charmed the bloomers off the Virgin Queen. Certainly not the slime ball type you walk up to on the street and bop with a rotten cabbage.

Needless to say, I didn’t spit in his eye.

Every stick of furniture in Sleaze’s office cried out big bucks. Lamps made out of Chinese vases. An Italian desk old enough to have come across the ocean with Columbus. And leather chairs with enough moxie to keep a solid guy like me from sinking through to the floor.

I introduced Roger as my research assistant and sat him on a chair against the wall far enough away so he didn’t cramp my style.

Sleaze served us coffee in translucent china cups with handle holes you’d be hard pressed to stick a pencil through. I made two stabs at taking a drink without extending my pinkie, failed both times, and finally let my java go cold.

“What can I do for you, Mister Valiant?” Sleaze asked congenially. “I’ve talked to many vice-squad officers in my days, but never to a private detective. I must say I’m rather intrigued. What would anyone want to privately detect about me? I have absolutely nothing to hide. Lord knows you only have to look at my comics to realize I have nothing to hide.” He laughed heartily and took a sip of coffee. Out went his pinkie.

“I’m working on a case involving the cartoon publishing industry, and a mutual friend suggested you might be able to help me. Carol Masters, remember her? She said it had been quite awhile.”

Sleaze set his wonderfully modulated voice to work, conveying us on a nostalgic journey backward through time. “Of course, I remember Carol. I provided her with her first break. A hard worker and a terribly talented lady. I’ve often wished she would come back to work for me now. I’ve asked her to on numerous occasions, but she turned me down cold.” He plucked a few stray pieces of lint off a sleeve that already looked like he vacuumed it every hour. “Carol told me she won’t shoot for the skin trade anymore, and I can’t say I blame her. It’s a filthy, rotten business, and I grow more disenchanted with it every day. Lately I’ve toyed quite seriously with the idea of getting out of it, getting back into main-stream comics again.” He settled back in his chair and crossed his feet at the ankles. “What specific case is it you’re here to see me about, Mister Valiant?”

“The Rocco DeGreasy murder.” I watched his face for a reaction, but none came.

“What exactly is it you want to know?”

I went straight for the jugular. “I understand you’re responsible for a crassity that Rocco’s live-in girlfriend Jessica Rabbit starred in several years ago. Lewd, Crude, and In the Mood. Remember it?”

He smiled the way a proud papa does when discussing his precocious child. “How could I forget? My masterpiece. When I still believed it possible to produce quality pornography. Before I realized the two terms are mutually exclusive.”

“Jessica says you Shanghaied her into making that comic, that you drugged her and shot it while she was under.”

A melancholy sadness crinkled his eyes. “I’ve heard that story before. It’s Jessica’s way of rationalizing a youthful indiscretion. In truth there was no need to coerce her with drugs or anything else. She did it quite willingly, for the money, I expect, since she was awfully poor in those days. We shot Lewd in my downtown studio in a couple of days. A few months after the comic appeared, she came back and asked to star in another. I would have loved to oblige her, but by then she had acquired a fine sense of her own worth and had escalated her salary demands accordingly. I simply couldn’t afford her, so I had to turn her down.”

I checked Roger’s reaction to these revelations concerning the base-metal core of his pedestal’s ivory statue, but he seemed more interested in getting his thumbs to twiddle. Maybe doppels degenerate from the inside out. Maybe the attention span goes first. So far, I loved it. I’d love it even more if his head fell off. “You later threatened to blackmail Jessica unless she gave you money for the negatives to that comic,” I said to Sleaze.

Sleaze spread his hands, so I could see where the spike would go when an inflamed public nailed him unjustly to a cross. “I wouldn’t call it blackmail exactly. I’d call it a quid pro quo. She came to me when she needed money. I went to her when I needed money. The only difference was that she wasn’t quite as willing to pay me as I had been to pay her. You may not believe this, but I had no intention of following through on my threat to print more copies of that comic. It was pure bluff on my part.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe it,” I said. “You went to see Rocco DeGreasy night before last. What for?”

He pushed his brows together over twinkling eyes. “Business, just business.”

“Yeah, monkey business. You sold Rocco a set of the same negatives you sold Jessica. Plus, you were the last person to see Rocco DeGreasy alive. Which means you might also have been the first person to see him dead.”

The twinkle in his eyes became a worried flicker. “I left Rocco alive. I didn’t kill him.”

“Ever see a cop spin a web of circumstantial evidence into a hangman’s noose? No? Well I have, and unless you come clean with me, I’ll hoof it straight over to the local station house, and the next sound you’ll hear will be the pitter-patter of young flatfeet eager to make their reputations by arresting the infamous Sid Sleaze.”

Sleaze fingered the pieces of a magnificent carved wooden chess set on the corner of his desk. He tipped over the king and watched to make sure I caught the significance. “What is it you want to know?”

“For how much did you nick Rocco?”

No more glib evasions. “Twenty thousand dollars.”

“Why did he write you out two separate checks for ten grand each?”

“I told him he could buy me off in two installments, one then, one in six months. He would get half the negatives each time. When he saw the first batch, he went for the full price up front.”

“You always let your mark make time payments?”

“Depends on the circumstances. Naturally, if that’s what it takes for maximum return. I’m quite the progressive black-mailer.”

I assumed this was his idea of a joke, but I wasn’t laughing. “I should say so, considering this was the second time you’d sold what were supposed to be one-of-a-kind negatives, once to Rocco, once earlier to Jessica.”

He displayed the guilty look you see on a four-year-old kid caught standing beside a broken vase. “In actuality, I shot two sets of those negatives. The ones I sold Jessica were the ones I used to make the comic. Rocco got the second set. The poses were slightly different from the first, but I counted on Rocco’s being too disgusted to examine them closely. I was right. The instant he got his hands on them, he gave them a quick onceover, and tossed them straight into the fireplace. Caveat emptor, Mister Valiant, in blackmail as everywhere else.”

“Did Rocco make any phone calls while you were there?”

“No.”

“What time did you leave his place?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t pay much attention. I’d guess about eleven thirty or so.”

“Did you see anybody else in the house, or outside it?”

He thought for a while. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. As I was driving away, I saw Baby Herman’s stooge, you know the one, the rabbit, Roger Rabbit, walking up the drive.”

That dragged Roger back into the ballgame. He hopped bolt upright. I braced myself for trouble, but Roger only puffed forth an innocuous balloon containing a vague reference to important matters elsewhere and fled out the door.

“Queer fellow, your assistant,” said Sleaze. “You know when I first met him he reminded me of someone. Now I know who. Roger Rabbit. Do you see the resemblance?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it,” I said casually. “I do. The both of them could be twins.”

I bid Sleaze a quick farewell and went out to collar Roger before he did something dumb. About as easy as changing the course of the Mississippi River.

I searched for several blocks in every direction, but couldn’t find hide nor hair of the skedaddled bunny.

On the off chance he might surprise me and do something reasonable, I hot-footed it over to the Persian delicatessen where he’d left the scroll.

I don’t know which smelled worse, the deli’s cuisine or a dead camel. Not that it mattered, since they were probably one and the same.

The deli’s owner, a middle-aged grease ball named Abou Ben Something spoke English about as well as I spoke Toonesian. He tried semaphore, but I couldn’t read his waving arms, either. We finally hit on charades. I got through to him by pretending to read a napkin wound around a fat wiener.

He ran into the back room and returned with the scroll, plus some old codger who should have been hanging in the front window with the rest of the skinny, brown, wrinkled sausages. The old galoot handed me a sheet of paper with marks on it that looked like they had been scratched there by what eventually wound up as the main ingredient in the chicken salad.

I finally got the key to deciphering it when I realized that half the o’s were grease spots. If you ignored them, the message came clear. “Beware,” it said. “Great tragedy will result should this fiendish device ever fall into the hands of a Toon.”

Imagine that, a cursed teakettle. Though oddly enough the scroll’s dire prediction had come true. The teakettle had fallen into the hands of a Toon, and great tragedy had resulted. Maybe the teakettle really did carry a curse. And maybe Santa Claus also swept out my chimney for me every Christmas.

I slipped the deli owner a fin for his trouble and shagged it on out to the sidewalk before the deli’s zingy smell did permanent damage to my nose.

I debated whether to pursue clues or keep after Roger. Clues won.

I made a few phone calls, and in no time located the messenger service that had delivered the stolen artwork to Hiram Toner’s gallery.

The place, called what else but Speedy Messenger Service, told me somebody had dropped the artwork at their office and had paid cash in advance for delivery to Toner. Their records didn’t show the sender’s name.

I sweet-talked a secretary into giving me the name and home address of the clerk on duty when the sender came in, in the hope that maybe he could provide me a description.

When I came out of the messenger service, it was a cool, sunny day, and there wasn’t a Toon anywhere in sight. It made me want to chuck what I was doing, drive back by the Persian deli, pick up a roast goat sandwich and a bottle of camel whiz wine, and head out to the nearest stand of timber for a solitary picnic and drunk.

I flipped a coin. It came up Dominick DeGreasy. I resisted an urge to make it best two out of three, and headed off to do my duty.