28

My doctor prescribed an absolute minimum three weeks of hospital bed rest. I cut him short by twenty days. I’d rather bleed to death on the street than be bled to death by the room rate.

I rummaged through the paper bag containing my personal effects. I hauled out a cigarette and the formula for Toon Tonic. I used the same match to torch both.

I stopped at a phone booth and checked my answering service. Skipper read me my lone message, from publicity agent and flicker flack Large Mouth Bassinger. Large Mouth’s client roster boasted many of Hollywood’s most notable stars. His well-deserved reputation as the slickest fish in the pond derived from his oft-proven ability to turn horse manure into the Lipizzaner stallions.

He wanted to see me pronto.

Large Mouth’s secretary, a trim young perch with undulating fins and a pouty smile, sat behind her desk scissoring her boss’s utterances to eight and a half by eleven and embossing them with his letterhead. An efficient way to handle correspondence. Saves a bundle on White Out. Not to mention the hours normally wasted practicing “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”

She migrated me into Large Mouth’s office. All it needed to become a fish tank was caulk, a hundred gallons of water, and a giant cat staring in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The gritty layer of sand carpeting the floor nurtured large clumps of snaky, pastel-colored ferns. A copper-helmeted diver’s suit stood in a corner. Slightly below the cornice, a plaster fisherman sat on the end of a mock dock. He was reeling in a scuba diver.

Large Mouth’s desk replicated a sunken ship. Telephone and intercom resided on the bridge. Work in progress occupied the poop deck.

Large Mouth shook my hand with the vigor of a thirsty man priming a pump. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Eddie.”

“It’s mutual, Mr. Bassinger.”

“L.M., please. All my intimate, close, sincere, good friends call me L.M.” His gills labored to suck in air, shrouding his lippy face. Large Mouth’s glassy peepers bulged outward with the curve of cat’s-eye marbles. His dorsal fin undulated as daintily as a Japanese fan. A liberal coating of fish oil gave his scales the shimmer of interlocked rainbows. He stood on his tail, flattening the ends to solidify his base of operations. “Simply because we’ve only just met doesn’t preclude you from joining the immense, worldwide fraternity comprised of my oldest and dearest acquaintances.”

“Fine by me, old buddy, old pal. What’s on your mind?”

He opened a gold-foil-lined tin box of expensive English blends, the brand advertised as decorator items in better fashion magazines. He slid one out and inserted it into an ivory holder the size of an elephant’s toothache. He flipped open his lighter and removed an eel. The eel grabbed a deep breath, flicked its flinty tongue across its ratchety incisors, and belched an impressive electrical arc which Large Mouth used to light his smoke. He extinguished the eel by dipping it headfirst into a bowl of lemon-scented water with a gardenia floating on top. Nero burned Rome with less showmanship. “I invited you here to hire you on behalf of a client of mine, Baby Herman.”

“He’s got no friends? His publicity agent has to pay six men to carry him to the grave?”

Large Mouth dipped a manicured flipper-tip into a pink shell filled with sea salt. He sniffed the crystalline residue up one of his double-barreled, sixteen-gauge nostrils. “Suppose I were to assure you, Mr. Valiant, quite confidentially, that the rumors of Baby Herman’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

I grabbed a smoke of my own, a garden-variety Lucky right from the pack, and lit it with a plain wooden match. “I’ll believe that when I hear it straight from the horse’s toothless, pacifier-sucking mouth.”

“Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. Baby is in strict seclusion, under a doctor’s care. Recuperating from an extremely frightening experience.” His words emerged as a string of bubbles the size of seed pearls. They barely made it into my field of vision before popping to smithereens. “Baby was kidnapped. Threatened with death. He escaped from captivity only hours ago. Baby has been quite traumatized by the whole, horrible ordeal.”

“How does that involve me?”

“Baby requires your aid in the resolution of a rather delicate personal matter, totally unrelated to his recent tribulation.” His balloons orbited his head like tiny moons, slowing slightly as they passed his eyes so he could have the pleasure of watching himself talk. “Baby committed a minor peccadillo, a slight malfeasance, a bit of an indiscretion.”

“Skip the disclaimers. Open the floodgates and spill the swill.”

With a clanking of heavy chains, the drawbridge descended from the ersatz castle that functioned as Large Mouth’s private toilet. “Jeez, L.M., throw a squirt of Lysol in there. The whole place reeks of silt.” Baby Herman toddled out.

“Baby, I don’t believe it’s advisable for you to make an appearance quite yet,” counseled Large Mouth. “Wait until I’ve had an adequate opportunity to outline your situation and justify your position.”

“Route it out your snout. I’m not hiding in a fish crapper while you bleach my dirty diapers.” Herman ripped the cellophane off a cigar. Large Mouth hastened to offer him the eel. Herman kept it, dropping it into his nappie. “Here’s my problem, Valiant. I need muscle. To protect me from one of my soon-to-be-former buddies.”

“What’s the beef?”

Herman waded across the sandy floor. “Do something about your carpeting, L.M. It makes me feel like the fritter in a cat box.” He halted at a leather sofa sewn to the shape of a snail. “Seems I started this quaint little rumor concerning a friend of mine.”

“Let me guess. Clark Gable.”

Large stooped over and let Herman use his spine as a stair step onto the sofa. “You heard it?” Herman waddled to the sofa’s apex.

“Of course he heard it,” stated Large Mouth. He brushed the sandy outlines of baby feet off his sofa’s buttery leather. “The entire Hollywood community heard it. That rumor couldn’t have spread faster if I’d planted it myself.”

“Why’d you slice that particular hunk of phony baloney?” I asked.

“My way of discrediting the competition.” Herman spit on his balloon, slipped it under his bumpus, and rode it down the sofa’s spiral curved spine. “Wheeeeeeeee.” He hit the floor and skidded on his ample rump, cutting parallel ruts in the sand. He stood and pulled his chappie away from his legs to drain out the grit. “Five foot two, eyes of blue, anything I want she’ll do.”

“Carole Lombard.”

“The man wins twenty-four silver dollars.” Herman opened a pirate’s treasure chest containing a fully stocked bar. “I don’t know where you got your scoop about me and Carole, but every word was true. I went for Carole”—Herman ground his pudgy pelvis—“as bad as she went for me.”

“You’re a lucky stiff.”

“You got that right.” He flicked his solid-gold diaper pin. “Women go ga ga over my goo goo.” Herman poured two fingers of rye into a baby bottle.

“I’ll issue a press release at once,” Large Mouth enthused. “Herman and Lombard hear wedding bells.”

“Save your balloons,” said Herman. “I dumped her. Love ‘em and leave ‘em, that’s my motto. I sent her packing back to Gable.”

I saw his problem. “Now you’re afraid of what Gable will do when he finds out his best so-called buddy vamped his best so-called girl.”

“He’ll turn me over his knee and spank me black and blue. Or worse.” Difficult to tell which Herman enjoyed more, the taste of the liquor or the act of sucking it through the nipple. “Unless I find a bigger bullyboy willing and able to paddle him first. How’s about it, Valiant? Are you my man?”

“Probably. First, answer me a question. Where you been the last few days?”

He cocked his head. His blue-ribboned topknot flopped sideways like a reaped shock of wheat. “What’s that got to do with me and Gable?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Give me the gories, and let me decide.”

He hauled himself onto a knotty-pine chair carved in the shape of a mermaid. “I was crawling saloons night before last, hunting for company of the female persuasion.” He stowed his bottle in the cleft formed by the mermaid’s wooden brassiere. “This Toon doxie ambled up and gave me a how-do-you-do. I asked her the sixty-four-dollar question, and she won my jackpot. We were no sooner out the swinging door than she bopped me with her purse. Knocked me silly. Next thing I know, I’m tied up and blindfolded. Which I normally enjoy, except here the only action I got was this bimbo grilling me as to the whereabouts of Dave Selznick’s box.”

“You knew the box she was talking about?”

“Sure.” His wiggly pink fingers explored one of the mermaid’s knotholes. “I dropped it into Roger Rabbit’s pants cuff the day me and him and Kirk Enigman met in Selznick’s office.”

“Why’d you do that?”

He chinned himself on the mermaid’s bosom. “The three of us were up for the same role. I figured if Selznick thought Roger was light-fingered, it would cut the competition.”

Large Mouth’s secretary fishtailed into the office bearing a stack of unsigned balloons.

Herman winked at her lewdly. “I could get hooked on you in a big way, butterfish.” He jostled his diaper. “Want to feel my eel?” Sparks came out.

“I’d swim up her stream,” he said to me after she’d gone.

“Did you tell your kidnapper that Roger Rabbit had Selznick’s box?”

“You kidding? I’ll give a dame half the night but never the time of day.” His diaper ballooned out, lifting his rear end with it. “I told her to soak her head in a bucket of Dip.”

“How did you escape?”

“I didn’t. That’s L.M.’s concoction.” He tugged out his waistband, releasing a string of bright green bubbles. His posterior sunk to its normal level. “The ditz let me go. Dumped me in a ravine across town. I figured I’d better check with L.M. before I squealed to the cops. See how to get maximum mileage out of my plight.” He touched the glowing tip of his cigar to one of the floating bubbles. It burst into flames, leaving behind an airborne smudge of green soot and the smell of Limburger cheese. “Maybe parlay it into a sympathy bump or two.”

“Describe your kidnapper.”

Herman rolled his baby-browns. “Supremely ugly sucker. The kind I’d la-de-la only if she wore a bag over her head, and another over that in case the first one broke.” He tilted his head and gave me a onceover lightly. “She kind of resembled you. Oh, yeah. One other thing. Every third sentence she repeated the same stupid phrase. Over, and over, and over. Hi-de-ho-ho-ho. If she said it once, she said it a jillion times.”

Herman motioned to Large Mouth. The fish obligingly lifted the Baby so he could throw a fat, dimpled arm around my shoulder. “How’s about it, Valiant? You want to guard the body that’s going to win the Academy Award playing Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind?”

“I’d be foolish to refuse.”

On my way out, I handed Large Mouth the photo and bio of Charlie’s niece. “L.M., do an old, dear, sweet, longtime friend a favor. See what you can arrange for this young lovely.”

Large Mouth took a gander. His jaw dropped open. “What a face! I can make this woman a star! She has that…that…raw animal quality.”

To put it mildly.