28

I found Dominick DeGreasy stalking through the syndicate’s production studio, glaring his work force to higher levels of productivity. The few people crazy enough to ask him a question got, instead of an answer, a public dressing down for not knowing their jobs. Quite a manager, DeGreasy.

“Got a minute, Mister DeGreasy?” I said to him.

“Don’t bring your problems to me,” he said, mistaking me for one of his employees. “That’s why I pay you good money. To know how to deal with problems.”

“No problem, Mister DeGreasy. Just a few questions. I’m Eddie Valiant, remember me? The guy looking into your brother’s murder? The guy who’s going to return your teakettle?”

“Oh, sure, Valiant.” He looped an arm the size of an oak tree around my shoulders. “You got a line on my teakettle yet?”

I nodded. “Maybe, just maybe. Can we go someplace private and discuss it?”

“Sure, sure. In here.” He led me into the employees’ lounge.

When he entered, every employee inside walked out. “Respect,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the retreating multitude. “That’s what it takes to run a big company. Respect. You either got it, or you ain’t.”

“And you got it?”

“In spades. There’s not a worker in this company who doesn’t respect Dominick DeGreasy.” The coffee machine showed its respect by serving him up a freebie when he rapped it with his fist. “Tell me what you found out about the teakettle.”

“In a minute. First, I’ve got some other stuff to go over with you, stuff that bears directly on the case.”

“Stuff? What kind of stuff? I want that teakettle. Period.”

“And your brother’s murderer. You want him too, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure. Sure, I want him too. It’s just that I sometimes forget what I want more. Rocco was a great one for always taking care of me. It’s hard for me to keep my priorities straight now that I have to take care of myself.” He walloped the candy dispenser, but it refused to knuckle under to management pressure. Must have had a stronger union than the coffee machine.

“On the day he died, your brother wrote a check to Hiram Toner at the Hi Tone Gallery. The check went to pay for return of that stolen artwork I found photos of in Rocco’s office. Rocco mention anything about that to you?”

“No. Rocco took care of the money. I took care of discipline.” Dominick stuck his gargantuan hand into the candy machine’s delivery slot. The rankest amateur soothsayer could have predicted what would happen next. He was going to get that massive paw of his stuck up there, and, sure enough, he did. In a lot of ways, I hated dealing with Dominick DeGreasy worse than dealing with a Toon. At least with a Toon you knew enough to expect the ridiculous. With Dominick, you expected the normal, but got the ridiculous anyway.

I put a shoulder to the machine. Two healthy grunts, and I set him free. Although, for as much gratitude as he showed, I’m sorry I bothered. I should have left it on him and let him explain to his respectful employees how he came to be wearing their candy machine for an ID bracelet. “Did Rocco have many dealings with Hiram Toner?” I asked him.

“Enough. He had arrangements with most of the art dealers around. If anything interesting turned up on the market, legit or otherwise, the dealers gave him first crack. If he liked it, he bought it, no questions asked.”

After getting caught once, you’d think even the numbest numbskull would get the message, but some numbskulls never learn. It took Dominick less than two seconds to get in up to his elbow, again. I got him loose, dug some change out of my pockets, and pumped it into the coin slot.

“You know Sid Sleaze?” I asked.

“Never heard of him.” Dominick stabbed at the buttons with his broad, lumpy finger. He hit two buttons at once, but only one bar came out. He tore off the wrapper, jammed the bar into his mouth, and swallowed it whole.

“How about Sid Baumgartner?” I asked, trying Sleaze’s real name.

“Yeah, I know Baumgartner.” Dominick straightened out the only two pictures in the room, one of him, one of his brother Rocco, with a metal plaque that said “Our Founder” bolted under each. “This Baumgartner approached the syndicate a bunch of times with an offer to buy out one of our contract players.”

“Which one?”

His sandpaper voice gained another layer of grittiness. “Always the same. Roger Rabbit. I wanted to go for it, but Rocco told me he would never sell that rabbit in a million years. I told him he was nuts. Baumgartner offered a lot more than I thought the rabbit was worth. But Rocco refused to even consider the idea. He never told me why, but I always suspected Jessica was behind it.”

“Strange. When I asked Rocco if anybody had ever wanted to buy out Roger’s contract, he said no. Any idea why he lied?”

A few employees drifted into the coffee room, saw Dominick, and promptly drifted right out again. “Beats me. Rocco had a peculiar obsession with that rabbit.”

“Rocco ever mention anything about Jessica’s starring in a pornographic comic book?”

His lips curled back across his teeth in a leer. “She do that? No kidding? I told Rocco that woman was a doxie. I told him, but he never listened. No, he never mentioned nothing about any comic book like that, not that he would. He was nuts over that broad.”

He leaned close to me. His breath smelled like he’d been gnawing on garlic cloves. “I hear she’s the leading candidate to take the fall for Roger Rabbit’s murder. I hear the cops think they can make it stick. That the angle you’re playing? You out to pin it on her too? Because, if you are, I’ll back you one hundred percent. She caused Rocco a lot of heartache, and I want her to pay.”

“I’ll do my best. By the way,” I said casually, “did you know Jessica’s also interested in your teakettle?”

If you’ve ever seen a matador wave a red flag in front of a bull, you have some idea how Dominick DeGreasy responded to that one. He did everything but slobber and paw the carpet. “It’s not hers,” he yelled. “It belongs to me and Rocco. What the hell does she want with it?”

“According to her it’s solid gold.”

Dominick’s face lightened from bright crimson to pastel pink to its normal pasty white, and he gave out with a chuckle that sounded like the croak of a dying frog. “Solid gold! She says it’s solid gold? Boy, oh, boy, is she in for a surprise. It’s nothing but an ordinary teakettle. That’s it. Nothing but plain old metal.” He whipped out his fat leather wallet and waved it in my direction. “Whatever she offered you, I’ll double it.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was no way on earth he could double the kind of reward Jessica had promised me. Instead I assured him that, as soon as I got my grubby hands on it, the teakettle would be his.

I found Roger the last place I would have thought to look. Back in my apartment, his feet hanging over one arm of my sofa, his ears drooped limply over the other. The residue from his deep funk had turned his white fur the same shade of blue as a careless grannie’s home rinse. Quite the pleasant sight to walk in on. Home sweet home, assuming you lived in a funeral parlor.

“You sure lit out of Sleaze’s place in a hurry,” I said. “I got kind of worried. I thought you might be starting to disintegrate on me. You’re not, are you?”

The last time I saw eyes with that much pleading and despair in them, they were staring out at me from inside a cage at the city pound. “I didn’t kill Rocco,” he said. “I just don’t have it in me.”

“Sure, you know that, and I know that, but prove it to the rest of the world. Maybe Sleaze is lying about seeing you there the night Rocco died. I don’t know why he would, but it’s possible. Maybe Jessica’s lying, too. I don’t know. That’s what we have to find out. Who’s telling the truth, and who’s not. That’s why we call this a mystery. Otherwise, if everything was cut and dried, we’d call it an unvarnished truth.”

I passed out whiskey and cigars. We both chugged down and lit up. “Look, I got us a great lead,” I said. “I found the messenger service that delivered the stolen artwork to Hiram Toner. I’m on my way over to see the clerk who took the order. Why not come along?”

Roger’s word balloons came out filled with cigar smoke. He had to repeat his answer again after he’d exhaled the smoke, so I could read it. “No, to tell you the truth, I kind of lost my taste for it. You go ahead. Investigate the case however you want to. Without me. I’ll just wait around here for your final report.”

So there was a God in heaven after all, and he did respond to prayers. What more could I want? The rabbit off my back. Freedom to pursue the case any way I saw fit. Yet it failed to give me the rush I would have expected. Lord, let it be a case of the grippe, delirium tremens, terminal scurvy, anything but the nagging suspicion that I might actually be starting to like the dipsy-doodle cottontail. “Sure, sure,” I said. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“That’s the way I want it.”

When I sized Roger up, he seemed somehow smaller, as though some brute had whaled five pounds of stuffing out of him. Try as hard as I might, I just couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.

I left him and went into my bedroom. In my top dresser drawer, underneath my dress white boxer shorts, I found the special deputy’s badge I got awarded a few years back after successfully completing one of those rare jobs where I found myself on the sunny side of the law. I polished it on my sleeve and pinned it into one of my old wallets.

I went back out into the living room where the rabbit was again draped across the sofa. “Stand up.” I told him.

He blinked extra slowly. “What?”

“I said stand up. I’ve got something for you.”

“Can’t you give it to me here?”

“No, I can’t. Now will you stand up, or do I have to help you?”

“Sure, sure, whatever you say.” He stood up, but with such rotten posture that he resembled one of those collapsible wooden rulers that fold into about fourteen sections.

I poked him in the chest. “Snap to,” I said, and he did pull out a few of his kinks, although he still retained about as many bends as a road map of a con man’s morals.

“You’ve been a great help to me in this case,” I said, stretching the truth so far that, if it ever sprang back and hit me in the chest, I’d be a dead man for sure. “I think you should have some official recognition. So I want to swear you in as my assistant.”

“You mean it? As your official assistant?”

“Raise your paw and repeat after me.”

He raised his paw.

“I, state your name.”

“I, Roger Rabbit.”

“Promise to uphold law and order.”

“Promise to uphold law and order.”

“And to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.”

“And to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.”

I handed him the wallet.

He opened it and saw the badge inside. The last remnants of his blue funk flaked off his fur, and he stood before me as pure and white as one of those knights that fight bathroom scum on TV. “I don’t know what to say.” He jammed the wallet into his hip pocket. “This is one of the happiest moments of my life.”

“No more Gloomy Gus?”

“You’ve seen the last of him.”

“No more deep depressions when a witness takes a pot shot at you?”

“From now on I’m strictly hard shell. Let them call me what they will.”

“Then let’s get to work. We’ll start by interviewing that messenger service clerk. What’s more, you ask the questions.”

“You mean it? Honest? I ask the questions?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Oh, boy. Stand back and make way for Roger Rabbit, special deputy, barreling through.”

He took off out the door so fast he left behind a hefty shock of the whizz lines Toons produce when they blast off in a hurry. I kicked what I could under the sofa, stuffed the rest into a closet, and went out after him.

The messenger service clerk, Mrs. Ida Koontz, lived in a house that looked like it had been built by a bakery school dropout. It had gingerbread trim, ladyfinger shutters, a mint-frosting front lawn, and a vanilla-wafer walkway. The gutters were peppered with stunned woodpeckers who had taken a whack at the milk chocolate roof only to bash a beak against solid slate. A brightly colored carpet of the kind Arabians use when they fly economy class lay draped over the porch railing. Two others hung from a clothesline in the side yard. As I watched, a window opened, and a portly woman dumped the contents of a dustpan into the flower bed outside. The Toon flowers living there coughed and gagged horribly, but, as soon as the woman retreated into the house, the Ritz Brothers of the pansy set exchanged their hacking for a swell case of the giggles.

The front door was the strong, solid kind you like to put between you and the cold, cruel world. I gave it a hearty rap, knowing I wouldn’t have to worry about winding up with my hand buried to the wrist in splintered wood.

How Mrs. Koontz ever came to be associated with the Speedy Messenger Service I’ll never know, unless she was an old-line employee who had started with them when they used to ride horses and called themselves the Pony Express. She took forever to answer the door, another forever to examine my license, and yet a third forever to show us into her parlor. She offered us a beer, and I would have accepted but didn’t want to waste the rest of the day waiting for her to return from the kitchen. “Thanks anyway,” I said, “but we just have a few questions to ask, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Whatever I can do to help,” she said obligingly enough. She picked up her knitting and went to work putting her single daily stitch into a sweater that had gone out of style twenty years ago.

I nodded at Roger and waited for him to begin.

He stared at old Mrs. Koontz, his feet did a fast tap shuffle straight out of Flying Down to Rio, and he sent up two balloons. One contained a hem, the other a haw. He grabbed them out of the air, stuffed them under his coat, and jerked his head in the direction of the hallway.

“Would you excuse us, please,” I asked Mrs. Koontz, “while I confer with my partner?”

She nodded absently, too intent upon getting her sweater done in time for the New Year’s party celebrating the start of the next century to pay us much mind.

“I have a problem,” said the rabbit once we were out of the woman’s eye- and earshot. “I’m supposed to ask the questions here.”

“Right. So, what’s the problem?”

His cheeks flushed red. “I don’t know what questions to ask.” He turned his paws palms upward at shoulder level and tilted his head.

I patted his arm. “My boy, you just relax and watch the master at work.”

We rejoined the old lady. “You work for the Speedy Messenger Service,” I asked, “right?”

She mulled my question over in her mind for a couple of minutes. “That’s correct.”

Since I hadn’t brought my overnight bag, I skipped any further background stuff and got right to the nitty-gritty. “A few days ago you accepted a parcel for delivery to the Hi Tone Gallery of Comic Art, a parcel about so big by so high.” I sized it for her with my hands.

She nodded, but I couldn’t tell if that was because she remembered it, or because she had fallen asleep. “Can you tell me anything about the person who dropped it off?”

She looked at me, then tended to her knitting for a while. “It was a woman,” she said finally.

“Human or Toon?”

“I’m sorry, but I really couldn’t tell. She didn’t say anything, and she wore a veil.”

“What else was she wearing?”

“Nothing unusual. A long, dark, baggy dress.”

“How tall was she?”

“I really don’t know. I was sitting down at the time, and she was standing up. It’s hard for me to judge heights in that situation.”

Now it was my turn to head-signal Roger out into the hall. “I’m out of questions myself,” I confessed. “Can you think of anything else I can ask her?”

He scratched his head. “Try asking her how the woman smelled.”

“How she smelled?”

“Sure. Women often notice other women’s perfumes. If she was wearing something distinctive, it could be a clue.”

“How she smelled?”

“Try it, you never know,” he said.

So I tried it. “You notice how this woman smelled?”

Ida put down her knitting and looked at me like I had just made an elephant appear in the middle of her parlor. “Why, come to think of it, I do remember something unusual about that.”

Roger’s grin tickled the bases of both his ears.

“You do?” I said. “You remember something about how she smelled?”

“Yes. She had a very pungent odor about her. Like she hadn’t taken a bath for a while. The way some of these younger girls smell nowadays. Positively disgusting. When I was young I had to cart water in from a well and heat it over a stove, but at least I took a bath.”

I almost walked right over and gave Roger a hug. Too bad he wasn’t going to be around much longer. Another few months of working with me, and he might, just might, turn into a fairly competent gumshoe. Nothing to compare to a human, of course, but better than most any Toon. Thanks to him and his perfect question, I now knew enough to crack this lousy case open like a rotten walnut.