2

I opened my office door and held my hat in front of it. My fedora came back with no holes. Which meant Doris had either forgiven me or run out of bullets.

I turned out to be only half wrong.

Doris wasn’t around, at least not any place I could see. Maybe she was hiding in my bottom desk drawer. I checked. Nope. Nothing in there but that nasty old bottle of firewater. I put it to my lips and tilted it back.

Not a drop dripped out.

I spotted her note. She’d stuffed it down the bottle’s neck. The one place she knew I’d find it.

I read her writing through a liquid haze.

“I’m leaving you, Eddie,” she wrote in her tiny, precise hand. The booze, or maybe a tear, had smeared the ink that formed my name. “I’m a simple girl. I’d be real happy living in a tiny cottage, raising a couple of kids, married to a common working stiff with a better-than-average chance of living to a ripe old age. Maybe, in time, I could learn to abide your crazy schedule, your financial peaks and valleys, and your lowlife friends. But I’m afraid I’ll never shake the dreadful feeling that one day I’ll find a policeman on my doorstep come to tell me the worst news a woman can hear.” I twisted the bottle around, and the next line swam into view. “Don’t bother calling, and don’t try to see me. You can’t change my mind.” She signed it simply, “Doris.”

I emptied the bottle by pouring it down my throat. I hooked her note out with a pencil. It didn’t read any better blotted dry.

I heaved the empty out my office window. We both hit bottom in a dead heat.

A stiff Santa Ana would send the Toontown Telltale Building sailing out into the Pacific. Considering its fishy journalism, maybe that’s where it belonged.

The building’s four massive corner columns duplicated in painted stucco the muckraking mutton heads who changed the Toontown Telltale from a paper that wrapped garbage to one that printed it. The one called Sleazy had the pained, elongated snout of a constipated alligator. Slimey, with his triangular face, grayish pink pallor, sharply right-angled ears, and prominent, bony nose, resembled a fresh pork chop. An X-shaped scar crisscrossed Dreck’s cheek like the carved-on signature of an illiterate buccaneer. Profane had the profile of a wrecked four-hole Buick.

I tried a nearby parking lot, but the attendant had a medical problem. He refused to touch eyesores, so I docked my heap on the street.

I entered the publisher’s office.

His plain Jane receptionist with her shiny nose, dull lipstick, bun-coiled hair, pince-nez, and ruffled, high-collared frock had “Agnes Smoot” engraved on her nameplate, and permanent spinster stamped across her forehead.

I flashed dear, sweet Agnes my badge. After reading the front, she checked the back for a dime store price tag. She take me for a fool? I washed it off last month, same time I laundered my underwear and socks. Agnes relayed my essentials to her boss. He told her to show me in.

I entered an office twice the size of my biggest aspiration.

The Telltale’s publisher, Delancey Duck, waddled out from behind his desk atop a webbed pair of orange size-fourteens. In a Mr. Universe contest, he’d lose to the fat soprano who sang the national anthem. His skinny white arms were just the right size for fishing quarters out of sidewalk grates. A basketball could roll between his legs and not touch either knee. An orange bill the wobbly shape of a sledge-hammered pumpkin underlined a bulging pair of hardboiled-egg-and-black-olive eyes. He measured three feet even but that included the good four inches of ruffled head fuzz you’d call a ducklick.

He sported a tan cutaway with expanding shoulders for freer wing movement, a matching vest also tailored loose in the flappers, a buttoned-down duck cloth shirt in goosey gander white, canvas-back pants with extra give in the drumsticks, and a set of spats borrowed from his tropical cousin, the blue-footed booby. His feathery handshake removed the lint from my shirt cuff.

He motioned me to a seat in an antique side chair. The duck shinnied up the leg of a ditto and plunked himself atop a plush eiderdown cushion.

He coaxed a great impersonation of the Chattanooga Choo Choo out of an expensive Havana Corona-Corona. My mouth watered, but the implication rolled right off his back. He tipped the end of his butt into a gold-crested ashtray, a souvenir from the Stork Club.

“You’re wasting your time, Mr. Valiant. Our reputation for spurious journalistic ethics far belies situational reality.” His balloon was as crisp as an English muffin. Printer’s devils could sort his letters and use them to set type for his morning edition.

“Translate that for me.”

A string of musical notes floated from a concealed speaker and tinkled into broken circles and stems against the wall. Swan Lake. “We print the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

I hauled out today’s edition and read him the cover headline. ‘Husband reborn as parrot. Says he never loved her.’” I flipped it in his face.

His smile proved ducks do have teeth, and sharp ones. “We inform. We also entertain.” Delancey shinnied down his chair leg, duck-walked to the wall behind me, and fastidiously wiped a bit of grime off a diploma, magna cum laude from Drake.

“What category does your story on Jessica Rabbit fall into?”

“To which one do you refer? There have been so many over the years.” He opened a cupboard beneath his sheepskin and hauled out a chilled bottle of Cold Duck. He exhaled a transparent balloon, poked it into goblet shape with his thumb, and filled it full of bubbly. “She’s one of our reliables, so to speak.” I watched in thirsty silence as he took a sip, sip here, and a sip, sip there. “We can always count on Jessica Rabbit whenever circulation, or male blood pressures, need a boost.”

“I’m talking about the pieces of smudge romantically linking her with Clark Gable.”

“Ah, yes. Some of our more recent efforts. If memory serves me correctly, and it usually does, those fall into the category of absolutely true. They were researched and written by Louise Wrightliter. One of our best and most tenacious reporters.” Delancey Duck spread his tail feathers open. It turned him into a dead ringer for the centerpiece at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “I personally taught her everything she knows.”

“She’s following in the foot webs of the master.”

“So to speak.”

“Where’d she get her information?”

He opened his center desk drawer and hauled out a word balloon. He sailed it across the room. I caught it on the fly.

I examined it, front and back. Typical size, eighteen inches across, the grayish color of cheap newsprint. I fanned it under my nose. It smelled faintly of perfume. It said “Jessica Rabbit and Clark Gable” in pasted-on letters sliced from other balloons.

“That came to me in the mail. Just as you see it there. No return address. I passed it along to Louise. She checked it out and returned with the goods.”

I handed it back. “Or the no-goods.”

“I have every confidence in Louise’s integrity.”

“That why you took her under your wing?”

Two angry golf balls of smoke blew out of his ears. Either he was inhaling his cigar into crossed cranial plumbing, or he didn’t take kindly to ethnic jokes. Remind me never to ask him how many Toons it takes to screw in a light bulb. “Miss Smoot will escort you to Louise’s office. I’ll instruct Louise to cooperate fully in your investigation. She will answer all of your questions, within the confines of journalistic privilege.” He couldn’t shoehorn that many polysyllabic words into one balloon. He needed two. They emerged a translucent, milky white, brittle, with narrow gold rims, like the plates stuffy dowagers use to serve crumpets.

I walked over them on my way out, crushing them to slivers under my heel. For a lark.