29

I pulled up outside the DeGreasy Gallery. “You know what Little Rock DeGreasy looks like?” I asked Roger.

“Yes,” said the rabbit. “I’ve seen him around.”

“Good. You wait out here on the street. When you see Little Rock come out of the gallery, you tail him. Don’t let him out of your sight. Clear?”

The rabbit’s nod started out fairly enthusiastic but rapidly wound down to nothing more than a slight bob in the tip of his ear.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, ignoring whatever I have in the way of better judgment.

The rabbit burped out a confused jumble of words which he rearranged by hand into a cogent statement. “I’m your official assistant, right?”

“You’ve got the badge to prove it.”

“Correct. Therefore, as official assistant, I should get meaningful assignments, stuff with gristle to it, and the aroma of danger.”

“You and me both, buster. Unfortunately the private-eye business just doesn’t work that way. This is about as action-packed as it gets. I’d hate to tell you how many hours I’ve spent waiting for somebody to come out of somewhere so I could follow him to somewhere else and wait some more. You want wham, bam, slam detective work, stick with the comics. You want to be bored out of your skull, hang around real life with me.”

My message must have gotten through, since the rabbit smoothed the leftover nod out of his ear, climbed out of the car, and slouched into a doorway just across from the gallery. He tugged his hat down to within a finger’s width of his eyes, turned up his collar, and dangled a smoke from his lower lip.

I stuck my fist out the window at him thumb up.

From there I drove to Carol Masters’s studio.

I knocked but nobody answered. Never one to stand on convention, I opened the door and walked in. Carol was bent over a light table, examining negatives. I picked up one of her props, a rubber mask that looked like the results of breeding Broomhilda the Witch to a wart hog, put it in front of my face, tapped her shoulder, and said, “Boo,” when she turned around.

She had a semicircular contraption over her head that magnified her eyes enough to startle me more than I startled her. “Valiant?” she said. “I might have known. It’s just your level of humor.”

“Then you should have laughed.” I lobbed the mask onto a nearby table. “It might be the last chuckle you get for a while.”

“No more Mister Nice Guy, I see.” She removed her wraparound magnifier and turned off the light table. “From your crusty demeanor, I assume we’ve reached the point in our relationship where you get tough.” She collected her negatives and slid them gently into an envelope. “Where you punch me around until I spill my guts.”

She must have halfway believed her smart-alecky crack. She visibly cringed when I reached into my breast pocket, expecting me to pull out my rubber hose, I suppose. Instead, I hauled out something that would hurt her a lot worse, one of the photos I’d gotten from Rocco’s office. I snapped it to attention in front of her perky nose. “Recognize this?”

She gave it barely a glance. “Sure. It’s a strip I shot a few years back. So what?”

“It’s also one of the pieces of artwork stolen from DeGreasy’s gallery.”

“I repeat. So what?”

“When I first saw it, when I found it in Rocco’s office, it looked very familiar to me. It took me a while to remember where I had seen it before. Then it came to me. I saw it in your apartment. It was one of the prints you were developing in your closet.”

She said nothing, so I turned up the heat a notch, to see if that would make her boil. “This morning I talked to a Speedy Messenger Service clerk who accepted the artwork for delivery to Hiram Toner. She remembered that the woman who dropped it off smelled bad. She assumed it was because the woman didn’t take baths. She didn’t know the real reason was because the woman keeps her wardrobe hanging right outside her photo lab, and her clothes pick up the smell of photographic chemicals. It all sifts down to one tidy conclusion. You stole your own stuff. You duplicated the negatives and the prints and used Hiram Toner as a middleman to peddle the copies as originals.”

She looked at me without blinking. “Sure I did it. That was the only way I could get what was rightly mine. As I told you, my contract with Rocco specified that he owned the prints and negatives of everything I shot for him. He took the better stuff, framed it, and sold it through his art gallery but refused to cut me in on the profits.”

She walked across the studio, winding up in front of a backdrop that pictured a sylvan glade with green trees and clean water and pure air. I took it to be some never-never fantasy-land, the world of the future, until I realized it was a decade-old backdrop and was really the world of the past. “One day I offered to watch the gallery for Little Rock while he wined and dined a prospective client. While he was gone, I photographed his key and later had a duplicate made.

“I went back several days after and helped myself to a number of my early works. I reproduced the prints, duplicated the negatives, and set out to sell the copies as real. I got into trouble my very first try.

“I gave my first set to Hiram Toner. He has a reputation as someone willing to deal in that kind of merchandise. I told him outright the stuff was stolen. I told him to peddle it to out-of-towners. So what does he do? He offers it for sale to Rocco himself. Naturally Rocco recognized it immediately for what it was. With his resources, it didn’t take him long to find out where it came from. That’s the real reason he called me the night he died. To tell me he knew I had stolen his stuff, and that he was going to have me jailed for it.”

“Lucky for you he didn’t last through until morning.”

“If you’re insinuating I made my own luck, you’re wrong. I didn’t kill him.”

“You did go to see him that night, though, didn’t you?”

She leaned up against a phony palm tree. A phony coconut jostled loose and put a phony lump on a phony sheik sitting in a pile of phony sand. “No, I didn’t.”

I stared her straight in the eye. “I say you did. I say you went to Rocco’s after he called, and shot him to keep him from turning you in to the cops. I say you then went to Roger’s place and shot him, too, leaving the DeGreasy murder weapon behind, so Roger would take the fall for Rocco’s murder.”

“It’s not true,” she said with a thickly clogged voice. “I didn’t leave my place all night.”

“Then how do you explain this?” I pulled out the rubber squeeze frog. “I found this outside Roger’s house the night he died. Photographers use these to make their subjects smile, don’t they?” I squeezed it and smiled nastily. “Tell me who else in this case is likely to have a rubber squeeze frog on them, and I’ll let you off the hook.”

She took the frog and squeezed it. It stuck out its tongue at her. She sat in a director’s chair and set the frog on the arm beside her, so I had two sets of eyes staring at me, one set real, one set rubber, and not the slightest trace of life in either one. “All right, I did go to Rocco’s place that night, and to Roger’s place, too. But it wasn’t the way you said. I didn’t kill anybody. Not Rocco, and certainly not Roger. I went to Rocco’s to beg him to go easy on me. I knew he had me, and I was scared. I was just about to ring the bell when I heard a shot from inside. I stepped back into the bushes just as Roger Rabbit came charging out, a gun in his paw. Roger ran past me, down to his car, and drove away.

“I didn’t know exactly what had happened, but I had a pretty good hunch.

“I peeked through the window in Rocco’s study. Rocco lay dead across his desk. I stumbled back to my car and drove around for a while, trying to sort out my options. Finally, I decided to visit Roger at home. I wanted to tell him I knew what he had done and would help him in any way he wanted—with getaway money, a hideout, an alibi, whatever he figured he needed.

“I parked my car around the corner from his bungalow. I got out and went to the door just in time to see Jessica Rabbit ring the doorbell. Roger answered it, and she went in.”

“Roger was still alive when Jessica got there?”

“He sure was. I didn’t want Jessica to hear what I had to tell Roger, so I didn’t ring the bell. I crouched outside the living room window to wait until Jessica came out. That’s when my frog must have fallen out of my pocket. I waited there for nearly half an hour. Then a bunch of things happened in rapid succession. Somebody started to play the piano. I heard a pair of loud voices, and then a shot. The door opened a crack, something came flying out, and the door slammed shut. I peeked in through the window and saw Roger lying dead across the banister. I expected to see Jessica standing over him, but I didn’t. She was nowhere in sight.”

“Did you see anyone else in there?”

“No, no one. I beat it out of there as quickly as I could. That’s the truth. Judging from what I saw, Roger shot Rocco, and Jessica shot Roger.”

“That seems to be the general consensus. This object that came sailing out the front door. What was it, did you see?”

“Nothing much. An ordinary teakettle.”

A marching band could have taken a quick-step cadence from my loudly thumping heart. “What became of it?”

“I picked it up on my way past and threw it into the trunk of my car, along with my camera stuff. As far as I know, it’s still in there.” Her mouth twisted sideways, the way it would if somebody grabbed her by forehead and chin and wrung her dry. “Are you going to report me to the police?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On a lot of things. On how the case breaks. On how well you cooperate from now on. On how much of what you’ve told me turns out to be fact versus fiction. On whether there’s a full moon tonight.”

She didn’t take kindly to my humor. “You’re going to leave this hanging over my head, aren’t you? You really are a louse, Valiant. A genuine, Grade-A weasel.”

“I’ve been called worse. I’ve been called better, too, though I think the ones who call me worse have a firmer fix on the real me. Now, how about you give me the keys to your car? I want to take a close-up look at that teakettle.”

She reached into her jeans, pulled out a key, and tossed it over.

Although I don’t think she believed I meant it, I wished her a good day.

I walked down the hall, turned, and tiptoed back to her apartment. I put my ear to her door. I heard her pick up the phone and dial it. I didn’t bother to listen to her conversation. I knew well enough who she was calling. And I knew why.

I went downstairs, found her car parked out on the street, and opened the trunk. Sure enough, there, buried beneath a pile of photographic paraphernalia, sat my phantom teakettle.

In its pictures, it looked like an ordinary dime-store teakettle, but not in person. You hear people say they don’t make things like they used to. In the teakettle department, they hadn’t made one like this for a thousand years. It had intricate ornamental doodads and curlicues inscribed over every square inch of it. It had the solid heft of Krazy Kat’s brick. Its top fit tighter than the door to Scrooge McDuck’s vault. It was ancient and well constructed, but so were my grandmother’s false teeth. What made this so much more valuable?

I put Carol’s car key into her mailbox, tucked the teakettle under my arm, and headed for my office.