25

I rousted Roger off my couch. “Rise and shine, tiger.”

He rose fine, but his shine fell a pallid pale short of luster. “I feel p-p-p-positively p-p-p-putrid.” He had opted for my typical bedtime attire, whatever I happened to be wearing when I passed out. “My head’s exploding.” He yanked his earlobes. “Oooooh, that only makes it worse.”

“Naturally, rum dum. What did you expect?”

He gave his danglers another tug with equally painful results. “Pulling my ears normally activates a factory steam whistle that releases the pressure caused by over-imbibing.”

“You’re in a different union, chum.” I handed him an ice bag. “Here’s how humans signal a hangover that it’s quitting time.”

He squished the bag and heard water sloshing inside. He unscrewed the metal cap and tilted the bag to his mouth.

I felt like a foster father to a man from Mars. I relieved him of the bag, resealed it, and laid it across his cheekbones. “Leave it there until the pain goes away or your brain freezes solid, whichever comes first.” Since the bag covered his eyes, I guide-dogged him to my kitchen table. “Sit down. I cooked us breakfast.”

Roger peeked out from under the red rubber cooler and stared at the T-bone I forked unto his plate. He crinkled his nose. “I can’t eat that!”

“Try it first. I might not be a gourmet chef, but I know how to fry a steak.”

He scooted the plate away with his fingertip. “I’m a strict vegetarian. “

“No stomach for meat?”

“No teeth.”

With my untucked shirttail, I polished the shiny bottom of a steel pot, and held it to his face. “Check what’s protruding from your gums, horse. Courtesy of Toon Tonic you now come equipped with a full set of Grade-A choppers. Put them to the use for which they were intended.”

Roger ran his tongue across his newly sprouted incisors. “I don’t know.”

I sliced a tiny hunk of well done, stuck it on a fork, and airplaned it toward his mouth.

“One bite,” I said.

He opened wide.

We climbed the stairs to my office.

“Mere words cannot describe the experience.” That didn’t stop Roger from trying. “Savory, delicious, scrumptious, tasty, mouthwatering.” He rubbed his hands together like Ebenezer Scrooge gleefully contemplating a visit to the vault. “I can’t wait to try pork chops, quail, rump roast, beef brisket, pheasant, ham hocks, pickled pigs feet, venison, partridge, mutton, Spam, SOS.”

I opened my office door.

“Hi yah, Valiant,” growled Pepper Potts. “How are the old bells clanging?” Curlicued wood chips sprinkled the floor around his chair. My best piece of furniture, a polished oak desk lamp, rested on his lap. He’d removed the shade, the bulb, and the metal fittings, but not the cord. He had whittled the lamp into a new leg.

He was dressed for the links in a five-button tweed jacket, knickers, and snow-white golfing cap. The six iron he pointed at my stomach came endorsed by two scratch shooters named Smith and Wesson.

Roger grabbed me around the middle. He shook more than a chorus line of Saint Vitus’s dancers. “Oh my gosh, Eddie. It’s Bepper Botts.” At least the cottontail was smart enough to realize that a stutter here pickled him in a peck of problems.

“I’ll pass up the blindfold but not the cigarette,” I told Potts. I extracted a Lucky.

“Pshaw, Eddie.” Potts sighted his gun at me and pulled the trigger. A flame sprouted from the ejection chamber. I leaned forward and let him light my smoke. “You didn’t think I was serious about snuffing you out? The joke’s on you. I was merely spoofing. “

“You got quite the bizarre sense of humor, Pottsie. Remind me to avoid you like poison ivy on April Fool’s Day. I might die laughing. “

“You’re a hot ticket, Valiant. Be careful you don’t burn out early.” Potts waved his flaming lighter across the arm of my easy chair. My nostrils filled with the noxious odor of scorched nylon frisé.

“My interior decorator’s going to be miffed with you, Pepper. She spent months searching for a chair with the proper degree of tawdry elegance, and you ruin it.”

“Let’s cut the crape.” Potts flicked my desk lamp’s light bulb at my head. It zipped past with velocity sufficient to draw applause from a V2 rocket and popped against the wall. “Where’s the rabbit?”

I moved to Potts’s right, hoping to split his attention by putting me on one side of him, Roger on the other. The rabbit missed my message. He stuck to me like graft to a politician. “I haven’t seen Roger since he disappeared into the sunset with you hot on his trail. “

Potts tied his new hardwood leg in place by knotting the electrical cord around his stump. “When the rabbit turns up, give him a message for me.” He stood, shifting his entire weight to his dowel. A floor-shaking test hop won him a loud Gypsy curse from the fortuneteller renting the office below. “Tell Roger I want to work out a trade for the formula.”

Roger stuck his head over my shoulder. “You don’t possess a single article Roger Rabbit could possibly want.”

Potts surplused his old pivot into my wastebasket. The cup end, shaped like a giant golf tee, protruded eight inches over the trash can’s lip. “Who’s your loudmouthed friend, shamus?”

“My apprentice. I’m teaching him the business.”

“Giving him the business more likely.” Potts reached behind the easy chair. “I got plenty the rabbit wants. An item he’d die for. An item that might wind up dying for him if he don’t play my game.” He produced a plain brown paper grocery bag. “Here’s my trade bait, Valiant.” He reached into the bag. “Pass it along to the rabbit when you run into him.” He tossed me the dress Jessica wore last night.

Roger nipped it out of my hands. “You’ve kidnapped Jessica!” He buried his face in the bodice. “You vile, heartless, degenerate, debased, ignoble, depraved fiend!”

“We must have met before ‘cause you sure got me pegged right.” Potts lifted Jessica’s hem with the blade of his whittling knife. “Nothing more fun than peeling a tomato except maybe slicing one for salad.”

Roger removed his puss from the fabric. Jessica’s sequins had left their imprint, lust in reverse, on his forehead. “You would actually murder her?”

“What murder? Nobody said nothing about murder. I’m talking about making a vegetable salad, period. What you read into it’s your problem.” He stuck his mitt back into the bag. “I figured the rabbit’s one and only might get lonely, so I snatched a chatterbox to keep her company.” He showed me Little Jo’s work shirt. Every button had been ripped off. The garment barely covered his palm. “Regular dolls, those sisters. Trouble with dolls is they break easy. Their arms crack. Their legs twist off. A risky life being a doll, especially one with an uncooperative owner.” He arranged Little Jo’s sleeves so they folded corpse style across the breast.

Roger grabbed for him, his arms extending outward on either side of my body.

Potts drew another gun. “Relax, friend. This one sparks more than flint.” He edged around us. “The dames are safe and sound. They’ll stay that way if the rabbit hands over the formula. Otherwise…well, I’m a volatile person.” He smacked his gun against my bogus diploma. The glass shattered. “When I don’t get what I want, I can’t be held responsible for my own actions.”

“You hurt either one of them,” shouted Roger, “and I’ll hurt you a hundred times worse.”

“I’m quaking in my boot.” Potts backed out and slammed the door behind him. The frosted panel shattered. Between that, the light bulb, and the picture frame, I’d never again be able to skip through my office barefoot.

Roger grabbed my lapels. “Give him what he wants, Eddie. I’ll expire from grief if anything happens to my darling, beloved, sweet patootie.”

I poured us a pair of bracers. “We talking about the woman you swore off once and forever last night?”

He bumped back his nip and splashed himself another. “Eddie, she’s my wife. When we married, I took a vow to love, honor, and obey. Through thick and thin, better and worse, rich and poor, sickness and health, tall and short, fatness and lean. I can’t renounce my word over a minor peccadillo.”

Myself, I’d consider Gable’s cake in Jessica’s oven to be the frosting on a recipe for divorce, but I wasn’t the one cooking up the half-baked notions of what constituted marital fidelity.

Officer Bunk Thunker stuck his broad-beam shoulders through my shattered office door. “You want to improve your ventilation Valiant, try a fan. It’s a lot less messy.” Thunker came in, purposely choosing a path that let him crunch maximum glass into my parquet.

For a plainclothes cop, Thunker was far from plainly clothed. He wore a garish, Hawaiian print, short-sleeved sport shirt pulled out over baggy plaid pants. His tie was wide enough to use for a tablecloth if you didn’t mind eating off a hand-painted water spaniel.

What I took for a black fedora turned out to be a thundercloud. “Bulldog wants you.” He squeezed his fist, causing the dragon tattooed on his forearm to roll over and play dead.

Nobody ever won an argument with Thunker. I wasn’t about to buck the odds. I told Roger to hold down my fort.

Thunker shoved me unceremoniously into Bascomb’s office.

Rows of thumb-tacked red streamers hung down the wall. They were blood lines, what Toons leave behind when they leak. Each came from a public enemy Bascomb had plugged on the run.

“Here, Valiant,” said Bascomb. “Don’t say I never gave you nothing.” He split his midmorning snack, a prune Danish, down the center and scooted half across his desk.

I bit into it. Stale as the joke about firemen wearing red suspenders. “You buy this last year and let it age? That’s for wine, not crullers.”

“You got complaints, take them up with the donut shop. You ought to know first that Big Mo, the pug who owns it, moonlights twisting arms for Lone Loan Shark.” A morsel of prune fell onto Bascomb’s desk. He licked it off without bending over. The darting motion cracked his tongue like a bullwhip.

“So much for friendly chitchat, Sarge. Let’s pound brass tacks. To what do I owe the displeasure of my visit?”

Bascomb employed a miniature guillotine to lop the chaff off a rolled bundle of stinkweed pretending to be a cigar. “I’m hearing scuttlebutt, Valiant. In these selfsame hallowed halls.” His lighter produced sufficient heat to fry an innocent man. “Rumors are circulating that there’s pictures of Kirk Enigman’s parting words.” He rested his stogie in an ashtray formed from the hammered end of a spent howitzer shell. “You know what I’m thinking I’ll see when I finally corral that film and give it a view?” He pointed a claw at the precise spot where my breath was caught in my chest. “I’ll see a balloon implicating your rabbit pal.”

I exhaled a quantity of air equal to the cubic volume of the Hindenburg. “What makes you sure?”

“Previous history.” Bascomb unzippered a scarred leather vanity case and extracted a steel fingernail file. “As I recollect, Roger’s the rabbit who was chief suspect in the murder of that studio exec a while back.” He stuck his file into his mouth and whipsawed it back and forth across the sides of his teeth.

“I cleared him of that. You can’t hold it against him.”

“Oh, but I can, and I do. I’m the law in Toontown, Valiant. I’m not constrained by the normal legal niceties.” He tested the sharpness of his snappers by biting into a tablet of lined paper. He left a double semicircle of holes the size of carpet tacks. “In my book, a rabbit’s guilty until proven innocent.”

“That the official police motto these days? I always thought it was `We’re here to serve you.’ Or do I have you cops confused with the busboys’ union again?”

“Clever banter don’t become you, Valiant.” He picked a piece of gristle out of his mouth. I’m assuming it came from a butcher shop and not his upper jaw. “If you’re hiding the rabbit, you’re an accessory to murder.” Bascomb blew a smoke ring in the shape of a noose. It settled around my shoulders. “That’s the way the D.A. will lay it out. And you know what a terror he can be.”

Indeed I did. In his office, the D.A. kept a box containing the skeletons in my family closet. He had enough bones in it to build his own dinosaur, and would the instant a cage opened up at the zoo.

“If I was you, Valiant, I’d stop off at Schwab’s and buy a tube of Chapstick. After I find the rabbit, you’ll need it to keep your lips from cracking when you kiss your sweet license goodbye.”

“You’re barking down the wrong warren, Bascomb. The rabbit’s pure as snow.”

“Toss me one other name had a reason to bump Enigman and Herman, both.”

I did more than that. I tossed him the morning edition of the Toontown Telltale.

“You win, Pottsie,” I told him over the phone. “The rabbit capitulates. The formula swapped even Steven for the women.”

His voice dripped with smugness. “That’s real smart of him. You instruct the rabbit to bring the goods to the end of Lonesome Canyon Road in an hour. If the formula checks out, I’ll contact him tomorrow and tell him where to find the broads.”

I clanged the mouthpiece on the edge of the phone booth.

“Hey! You want to give me an earache?”

“I’m only making sure I’ve got your undivided attention. Listen close, Pottsie. I’m rewriting your scenario. Here’s how it plays out. I make the delivery, not the rabbit. It happens in a public place. When you get the formula, I get the girls. On the spot, immediately, no waiting. Those are my terms, and they’re not negotiable. You want the formula, or not?”

He wanted it, and bad.