9

Back when the world was a ball of ferns, when a good front lawn was a half acre of bubbling slime, a giant amoeba split in two. The front half, the end with the brains, called itself Los Angeles. The butt end became Toontown.

I live in a bungalow apartment near the border.

My landlady swears my place comes with a great view. If so, I never saw it. L.A. air’s too fouled with dense, hazy, aimlessly drifting babble. I wouldn’t mind if it said anything important. I’m not after philosophy. I’d settle for a weather report or yesterday’s ball scores. Instead I get “Yikes,” “Zowwee,” “Bam,” “Pow.” And worse. Vinegary swear words that water my eyes.

I hear the sky’s still clear in the mountains. I’m tempted to make the climb, homestead a cave, invent a religion. Ponder the nature of truth while I gaze at the stars. Except yaks and incense make me sneeze. And I look awful wearing a bed sheet.

An inebriated Toonmobile dozed in my parking slot. I didn’t wake him. On nights I exceeded my recommended octane level, and my hands and knees gave out short of my doorstep, I’d slept between those old white lines myself. I know how cozy warm wavy asphalt can be.

I stored Ferd’s heap on the street and left Louise Wrightliter’s folders in the glove compartment. They’d be as safe there as anyplace. I walked into my courtyard.

The super had drained the swimming pool again. He used it as a grease pit to swap oil in his Model A. The water, after he refilled it, sported a perpetual slick the thickness of a zoot suiter’s pompadour. Let one breast-stroking lightning bug flash his phosphorous, and the whole complex would go up in flames.

I checked my Simple Simon burglar alarm, a strand of gossamer I loop low across my door. I found it busted clean. As Baby Bear would say, somebody’d been nosing my porridge. Far as I knew, he was still in there, licking the bowl.

I eased open the front window and wiggled in through the venetian blinds. I came out the other side knowing how a loaf of pumpernickel feels after do-si-do-ing a bread slicer.

I hit rolling and landed on my belly, senses crackling. I scoped out the living room. Empty.

I fished my backup heater out of the cookie jar. I skipped searching the kitchenette. If my intruder was hiding in my wheezy Frigidaire, the poor sucker was wilted to a puddle by now. Anybody concealed in my toaster was too little to worry about.

I peered around the door frame into my bedroom. I saw somebody sleeping in my bunk. I prayed for Goldilocks. My luck favored the Big Bad Wolf.

I two-fingered back the covers and exposed a bumpus swathed in a baggy white cotton diaper. A baby? I wasn’t taking chances. I been led down the garden path by babes in scanties before. I pistol-poked the nappie and shouted “Freeze!”

“Sure, Eddie. My p-p-p-pleasure,” said Roger Rabbit, jerking awake from under the blankets. He wrapped himself in his macaroni arms, turned frosty blue, and chattered his single bucked tooth. “How’s this? Cold enough for you?”

I nearly pulled the trigger. I’d plead justifiable homicide. Testify that a sweet, lovable, wisecracking bunny drove me, a hardboiled, two-fisted, brass-knuckled private op to coldblooded murder. Would any jury in the country convict me? You bet. In a minute.

I holstered my peashooter. I opened my nightstand drawer. Roger had beaten me to my punch. I shook the hollow brown jug in his fuzzy face. “Ninety-six proofs and you couldn’t leave me one?”

“I’m sorry, Eddie. I got a terrible case of the jumpin’ jitters.” My hooch hadn’t calmed him much. His words be-bopped around the black borders of his balloon like sock hoppers at a kangaroo cotillion.

He pointed to his nether region. He wasn’t wearing a diaper but a bandage. “Somebody p-p-p-plugged me, Eddie! Just like the note said would happen. You gotta help me, or I’m a goner. A cooked goose. A p-p-p-plucked p-p-p-parrot. A skinned cat. A dead dog.” He stuck his head under my pillow. Probably searching for more similes. He’d find only gun oil and lint.

“Calm down. Tell it straight and simple.”

He stood up and strolled the knolls of my Posturepedic. “I was on the radio tonight. With Edward R. Murrow. He asked me terribly hard questions, one after another, but I handled them bippety boppety boop.”

“I know. I heard.”

He stopped short. His hangnail eyebrows boomeranged to the top of his forehead. “You gave up Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy for me?”

“Sure. It wasn’t even a contest.” I never bought the notion of a ventriloquist on the radio. Who’s to say he’s not moving his lips?

Roger’s pencil-lead mouth squiggled itself into a goofy grin. His yellow hands moved up and out. I sniffed a bunny hug aborning. I reached for my gat. I would have used it too, I swear. Except the rabbit, in a rare display of good judgment, cocked his noggin, rotated his mitts around to palms out, and backed off. Though his inky-dinky grin still split open his face like the snaky residue of a shaky-handed shave.

He resumed his pacing. “Halfway through the program, the studio lights went dark.” My bedsprings groaned. I would too if I got tromped by tootsies the shape and circumference of snowshoes. “I heard a shot. Ka pow!” His onomatopoetic exclamation drifted out the open window. Another senseless expression of violence polluting the landscape.

“I felt a stinging pain in my”—he blushed—“overalls. The lights came on, and I found myself holding this.”

He showed me yet another Roger Rabbit doll. They sell in stores for a buck. This one would go for twenty percent less. It had no head.

Roger handed me a balloon. “This was stuffed…” He pointed to the gaping hole where the neck bone connected to the breast bone.

“You’ve got the box, and I want it,” read the balloon. It matched the ones left by the rascal who clobbered me and deposited the tailless rabbit at Roger’s front door. “Put it into a plain paper sack. Bring it tomorrow night to the Toontown graveyard. Leave it outside the Crypt of the Dipped on the stroke of midnight. Come alone. Don’t try anything cute. I will be watching.”

He’d signed it with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones under which he’d added a P.S.: “Cross me, and forget about hats, fright wigs, baseball caps, propeller beanies, eyeglasses, nose cozies, wax lips, chin straps, or anything else worn above the shoulders.”

I crammed the note back in the chest hole it came from. “You know the box he’s talking about?”

Roger’s ears bent outward at right angles. They shrugged.

You got no shoulders, you improvise. A light bulb oozed out of his head and plopped onto my pillowcase. It switched on, filling the room with the fire-sale odor of scorched percale. “My lunch box, my bread box, my shoe box, my tool box, my itty bitty ditty box?”

“How about the one that belongs to Davey Selznick?”

“A box seat!”

“Not hardly. Remember the day you, Kirk Enigman, and Baby Herman went to Selznick’s office to palaver about Gone With the Wind?”

“Of course. I dressed in my finest apparel. Red overalls with brass buttons. I cut quite the impressive figure, if I do say so myself.”

“When you three skedaddled, a box belonging to Selznick snuck out with you.” I gave him the rundown.

The accumulated weight of the mogul’s accusation pressed him low. By the end of it, he was under the carpet with yesterday’s dust. “Mr. Selznick thinks I swiped his dumb box? That’s ridiculous. I’m as honest as…as…”

I braced myself for another round of parallels on parade. He didn’t disappoint.

“…as the day is long. As the mountain is high. As the river is deep. As the cheese is binding. As the…”

“Spare me the indignation.” I went into the living room. I propped Trudy Hammerschlemmer’s photo against my fish tank, figuring it might keep the scum at bay. I threw the mutilated rabbit doll under my coffee table, out of Roger’s sight. “I can square you on the rap. Enigman took the box. He as much as admitted it to me. Before person unknown booted his bucket.”

Roger’s jaw took the elevator to the basement. “Kirk Enigman’s dead?”

“Done in, unless I miss my guess, by the sharpshooter who slung lead at you. The box holds the key. I find it, unlock it, and I throw this case wide open.”

“Do it, Eddie, and quick. Or I’ll be playing the lead in The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.” He bent his fruitcake backwards and tucked it under his arm, worming his neck into the shape of a bar pretzel.

A fist hit my front door with the impact of a rutting goat. “Open up, scuzz hamper.” Pepper Potts. There went my hundred-yard head start.

I shoved Roger into my hall closet.

“Hold it,” he protested, his head snapping out from under his armpit with the whooshing velocity of Jack Kramer’s second serve. “I’m your buddy, your sidekick. I go where you go, do what you do, see who you”

I slammed the door on his balloon, tore off the half circle caught on the outside, and flipped it under an easy chair.

I threw the dead bolt and opened the front door.

“Took you long enough,” snarled Potts.

“Sorry, I was in the greenhouse pollinating my posies.”

He shoved me aside and hobbled in. His phony leg clattered like a castanet on the linoleum.

“You need a pedicure, chum. Hang on. I’ll fetch my rasp.”

“Don’t crack wise, peeper.” He kicked my early American rocker so hard its maple slats wept pancake syrup.

“Pick on something your own size. The sofa, maybe, or the daybed.”

“You’re a piece of work, Valiant. A regular Wisenheimer.” He wore baggy-knee britches and a matching back-belted jacket the color and texture of a mangy ferret. “We got a problem, you and me.”

“Let’s solve it quick. I had a long, tiring day. I’m bushed. I need my beauty rest.”

“Har har. That’s a pip. You could sleep through to the next stone age and still be plug-ugly.” He leaned on my bookshelf, his shoulder next to my fish tank. “I got a job to do, and you’re standing in my way.”

“I’ll move aside and let you past if it gets you out of my life.”

He picked up the picture of Charley’s niece. “Quite a looker.”

His ligneous leg rubbed against the bookcase with sufficient friction to start his calf smoking.

“I’ll introduce you.”

“Skip it. I’d owe you, and I wouldn’t want that.” He took two steps toward me. His spindle sank to the ankle through my cast-iron heating grate.

“Need a saw?”

“What I need is a star for Gone With the Wind.” He lifted his pin and two square feet of metal grate came with it. He took another step. The extra weight didn’t slow him, but the noise, the sound of a tap-dancing telephone pole, stopped him dead. “What I got is a dead actor and two prime suspects. That ain’t gonna hack it with my financiers.” He stamped his gimp hard enough to dent the underside of China. The iron grate snapped in half. “Mr. Selznick is not a happy man. The cops been sniffing around. Davey don’t like it when cops ask him questions. It’s bad for his image. Not to mention it upsets him. He can’t work. And when Davey’s testy, I’m an absolute screaming banshee.”

I uncorked my volcano and flowed molten lava into a matched set of jelly glasses. I handed one to him.

“Never touch the stuff.” The smell of rum on his clothes said otherwise, but I wasn’t about to argue. More booze for me. “Mr. Selznick wants this matter wrapped up pronto. Before any further damage gets done.” Potts laced his digits together, turned them inside out, and crunched them, producing the pop a firebug makes when he snaps his kindling. “To that end, Davey authorized me to persuade you to hurry it up.”

I got a flash of what literates call déjà view. Meaning I don’t have to get hit in the head to know I’m about to get hit in the head. I made what flyboys call a preemptive strike, meaning I cheap-kicked Porter low with sufficient force to pulverize any stone short of a diamond. Men hit that way will double over, fall down, choke, turn blue, puke, pass out, die, or worse. Porter reacted like I’d tickled him with a feather.

He stepped forward and planted his wooden size one on my instep. While the force of his broom handle pinned me upright, he played xylophone on my ribs, and glockenspiel on my kisser.

When he’d finished his recital, he lifted his pinion and let me sink to the floor. By the light of the constellation of stars whirling around me, I made a quick calculation. According to my unofficial tally, I’d taken more beatings than an old maid’s living-room carpet.

Potts sunk his spindle into my gut. “Davey says you’ve gotten too notorious for him to deal with direct. He don’t want you calling him or coming around his office. From now on, you deal with yours truly and nobody else. This box Davey’s got you hunting for. You tell me who stole it. You give it to me and only me when you get it back.” He peeled open my eyelid. “Clear?” He let loose of my head. It hit the floor. Potts mashed my puss for luck. “You get a break in this case, you call me on the horn.”

“French or fluegel?”

“Keep talking like that and it’ll be a bugle blowing taps over your casket.”

As he walked out, he tromped on Roger’s beheaded doll. His leg went through its stomach. “Remember, Valiant. Davey don’t want to see you, hear you, smell you, or taste you. From here on, you deal with me.” The doll impaled on his pinewood muffled the sound of his leaving.

I sterilized my wounds with Potts’s untouched drink, then opened my hall closet. Roger had fallen asleep draped over the hanger supporting my green checked slacks. I lifted his head, laid it on the shoulder of my raincoat, and let him snooze.

I drove to Arnie Johnson’s. He complained when I woke him until he realized he’d just secured Guinness Book of Records immortality for most stitches laced into a single head.

I returned home, went to bed, and tried logging Z’s but didn’t have much success. I’ve slept through earthquakes, but none rattled me as much as Pepper Potts.