Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (18 page)

“Impossible.” The rabbit shook his head emphatically enough to put a spin on his next balloon. I had to slow it to a stop by dragging my finger across it before I could read it. “I don’t see how he could have sold either of them a copy,” it said. “A copy negative always comes out slightly fuzzy and easy to spot. I can recognize one easily, so I’m sure both Jessica and Rocco could, too.”

The rabbit spoke his next words staring straight up at the ceiling so that balloon shot out parallel to the floor. It hit the wall and fell down behind the sofa. Since he had his eyes closed, he was totally oblivious to his balloon’s final resting place. I had to snag it with a bent coat hanger and pull it out to see what he had said. “This comic of Jessica’s,” it turned out to be. “Show it to me.”

“I don’t think so. It’s as raw as any I’ve ever seen.”

I was certainly having my troubles conversing with the rabbit today. His next balloon came out so faintly written that I had to drag it to within six inches of my nose before I could decipher it. “Show it to me!”

I pulled the comic out of my jacket pocket and handed it over. “You’re the boss.”

Roger held it the way people handle a dead mouse, at arm’s length, between his first two fingers. Without even glancing at it, he dumped it into my wastecan and flipped a lighted match in after it.

I broke the record for the five yard dash getting across the living room, but still arrived too late. By the time I reached the wastebasket, the comic was nothing but a smouldering ash. It crumbled to dust at my touch. Not so much as a picture or a word remained visible. “That was a terrifically bone-headed play,” I yelled at the sullen bunny. “That comic set me back two hundred bucks. What did you have to go and torch it for?”

The rabbit stood up on his tiptoes, which brought his eyes just about level with mine. “You and I have to get something straight,” he said. I prayed for him to poke me in the chest with his finger so I could snap it off and hand it to him wrapped in a hot dog bun, but no such luck. He kept his arms hanging limply at his side. “There’s a fundamental difference in the way we want to conduct this case. I think we’d better resolve it right here and now.” His toes got wobbly so he put his heels back on the floor and we continued our discussion eye to chest. “You’re getting paid to prove I didn’t kill Rocco,” he said, “and to find out who killed me. I didn’t hire you to harass my wife. So leave her alone. She’s totally innocent.”

“She wasn’t so innocent when she made that pornographic comic,” I reminded him.

That got the rabbit back up on his tiptoes. “You heard what she said. Sleaze gulled her into making that piece of trash. She is not the kind of woman who would do that of her own free will. If she says she was tricked into it, I believe her. I believe everything she says.”

“She says she saw you kill Rocco. You believe that, too?”

Roger waffled so quickly I could almost taste butter and syrup. “No, that I don’t believe. I suspect she’s being pres-sured to implicate me. Possibly by Dominick DeGreasy. He’s that kind of rapscallion.”

“OK, let’s suppose for a minute we play it your way. What does that mean I do?”

“Jessica asked you to prove that she didn’t kill me. I want you to do just that. I want you to prove whatever she wants proved.”

If I’m ever tempted to take a ‘toon case again, I hope somebody puts a bullet through me first. “I can’t oblige. I already have you for a client, and it would be unethical for me to take on somebody else.”

He half-shut his eyelids, the way people do when they pass a cripple on the sidewalk. “From what I heard, ethics never bothered you before. Why the sudden change of heart? Sure it’s two clients, but it’s also two fees.”

That illustrates the first rule of detecting. Always wear your shorts snugged up tight so you don’t feel the pain when your client kicks you below the belt. “You really hurt me with that kind of rotten talk,” I protested. “I’m not in this one for the money. I’m in it because I think you’re almost an all-right guy, for a ‘toon that is, and I want to see you go out happy.”

Here I practically proposed marriage to him, and still he refused to back off. “Then do what I ask. Take Jessica’s case.”

I tried to grab him by the shoulders, but my hands slipped down and I wound up shaking sense into him at about the elbow level. “Damn it, Roger, don’t you understand. Your beloved sweetie Jessica, who you so badly want me to help, is the one who shot you.”

At this point any rational being would have given in to logic. That’s what makes ‘toons so frustrating. There’s not a one of them with the rationality of a dead frog. “I don’t care
how
incriminating the evidence is against Jessica. I don’t care
what
she said in your office. I don’t care
what
you think about her guilt or innocence. I only know that Jessica loved me and would not have harmed me. If you won’t take on two clients, drop me and accept her. In fact, I’ll go even further than that. Consider yourself fired. As of right this instant. You’re off my case. So there’s no more conflict for your precious ethics.”

“I’m sorry Roger. No go. I’m going to clear your name and bring in your murderer, whether you want me to or not.”

Roger huffed and he puffed, but he couldn’t blow me down, not once I had my mind bricked up. Best he could do was to try for a compromise. “Play it your way then, but if it turns out to be Jessica who killed me, I don’t want her punished for it. I want you to get her off the hook. Will you at least humor me that far?”

“That’s about the dopiest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.

“What did you expect from a rabbit?” said Roger. “Will you do it my way? If she’s guilty, will you get her off?”

“I’ll think about it,” I promised. And I did. For maybe half a second. Just long enough to picture Jessica Rabbit dangling by her gorgeous neck from the top of the nearest tree.

I figured Roger needed a perk-up, so I told him to tag along and watch me grill Sid Sleaze. For the amount of enthusiasm he showed for it, I might just as well have asked him to watch me fold my laundry. I don’t know. You bend over backward to accommodate these creatures, and you get zippo appreciation for it. No wonder nobody goes out of their way to be nice to them. Where’s the percentage in it?

The Sleazy Press occupied a steel and glass high-rise surrounded by small one-story family-owned businesses. Roger and I hadn’t gotten three feet from the curb before a grandmotherly woman who should have been home in a rocking chair crocheting afghans stuck a petition under my nose, the gist of which was that Sid Sleaze should be tarred, feathered, and run out of the neighborhood lashed to a rail. She also carried a shopping bag of rotten cabbages to throw at Sleaze when he came through the door. When Roger blurted out that we were on our way in to see Sleaze up close and personal, she locked my arm in a vice grip and refused to release me until I promised to spit in his eye.

I expected Sid Sleaze to be a short, dumpy guy with Vas-olined hair, no neck, and an armful of tattooed naked ladies that would do obscene dances when he flexed his muscles. Sporting a dayglow-orange suit, a tie that lit up and said, “Kiss me in the dark,” a diamond stickpin, and a gold front tooth. Oh, yeah, and with plenty of drool dripping down his chin.

At least I got one right. He was short but as solid and well-proportioned as a bantamweight contender. His dark suit wouldn’t have drawn a second glance at a morticians’ convention. He walked more gracefully than I danced and had a melodious baritone that could have charmed the bloomers off the Virgin Queen. Certainly not the slime-ball type you walk up to on the street and bop with a rotten cabbage.

Needless to say, I didn’t spit in his eye.

Every stick of furniture in Sleaze’s office cried out big bucks. Lamps made out of Chinese vases. An Italian desk old enough to have come across the ocean with Columbus. And leather chairs with enough moxie to keep a solid guy like me from sinking through to the floor.

I introduced Roger as my research assistant and sat him on a chair against the wall far enough away so he didn’t cramp my style.

Sleaze served us coffee in translucent china cups with handle holes you’d be hard-pressed to stick a pencil through. I made two stabs at taking a drink without extending my pinkie, failed both times, and finally let my Java go cold.

“What can I do for you, Mister Valiant?” Sleaze asked congenially. “I’ve talked to many vice-squad officers in my days, but never to a private detective. I must say I’m rather intrigued. What would anyone want to privately detect about me? I have absolutely nothing to hide. Lord knows you only have to look at my comics to realize I have nothing to hide.” He laughed heartily and took a sip of coffee. Out went his pinkie.

“I’m working on a case involving the cartoon publishing industry, and a mutual friend suggested you might be able to help me. Carol Masters, remember her? She said it had been quite awhile.”

Sleaze set his wonderfully modulated voice to work, conveying us on a nostalgic journey backward through time. “Of course, I remember Carol. I provided her with her first break. A hard worker and a terribly talented lady. I’ve often wished she would come back to work for me now, and I’ve asked her to on numerous occasions, but she turned me down cold.” He plucked a few stray pieces of lint off a sleeve that already looked like he vacuumed it every hour. “Carol told me she won’t shoot for the skin trade anymore, and I can’t say I blame her. It’s a filthy, rotten business, and I grow more disenchanted with it every day. Lately I’ve toyed quite seriously with the idea of getting out of it, getting back into mainstream comics again.” He settled back in his chair and crossed his feet at the ankles. “What specific case is it you’re here to see me about, Mister Valiant?”

“The Rocco DeGreasy murder.” I watched his face for a reaction, but none came.

“And what exactly is it you want to know?”

I went straight for the jugular. “I understand you’re responsible for a crassity that Rocco’s live-in girlfriend Jessica Rabbit starred in several years ago.
Lewd, Crude, and In the Mood.
Remember it?”

He smiled the way a proud papa does when discussing his precocious child. “How could I forget? My masterpiece. When I still believed it possible to produce quality pornography. Before I realized the two terms are mutually exclusive.” “Jessica says you Shanghaied her into making that comic, that you drugged her and shot it while she was under.”

A melancholy sadness crinkled his eyes. “I’ve heard that story before. It’s Jessica’s way of rationalizing a youthful indiscretion. In truth there was no need to coerce her with drugs or anything else. She did it quite willingly, for the money, I expect, since she was awfully poor in those days. We shot
Lewd
in my downtown studio in a couple of days. A few months after the comic appeared, she came back and asked to star in another. I would have loved to oblige her, but by then she had acquired a fine sense of her own worth and had escalated her salary demands accordingly. I simply couldn’t afford her, so I had to turn her down.”

I checked Roger’s reaction to these revelations concerning the base-metal core of his pedestal’s ivory statue, but he seemed more interested in getting his thumbs to twiddle. Maybe doppels degenerate from the inside out. Maybe the attention span goes first. So far, I loved it. I’d love it even more if his head fell off. “You later threatened to blackmail Jessica unless she gave you money for the negatives to that comic,” I said to Sleaze.

Sleaze spread his hands, so I could see where the spike would go when an inflamed public nailed him unjustly to a cross. “I wouldn’t call it blackmail exactly. I’d call it a quid pro quo. She came to me when she needed money. I went to her when I needed money. The only difference was that she wasn’t quite as willing to pay me as I had been to pay her. You may not believe this, but I had no intention of following through on my threat to print more copies of that comic. It was pure bluff on my part.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe it,” I said. “You went to see Rocco DeGreasy night before last. What for?”

He pushed his brows together over twinkling eyes. “Business, just business.”

“Yeah, monkey business. You sold Rocco a set of the same negatives you sold Jessica. Plus, you were the last person to see Rocco DeGreasy alive. Which means you might also have been the first person to see him dead.”

The twinkle in his eyes became a worried flicker. “I left Rocco alive. I didn’t kill him.”

“Ever see a cop spin a web of circumstantial evidence into a hangman’s noose? No? Well I have, and unless you come clean with me, I’ll hoof it straight over to the local station house, and the next sound you’ll hear will be the pitter-patter of young flatfeet eager to make their reputations by arresting the infamous Sid Sleaze.”

Sleaze fingered the pieces of a magnificent carved wooden chess set on the corner of his desk. He tipped over the king and watched to make sure I caught the significance. “What is it you want to know?” “For how much did you nick Rocco?” No more glib evasions. “Twenty thousand dollars.” “Why did he write you out two separate checks for ten grand each?”

“I told him he could buy me off in two installments, one then, one in six months. He would get half the negatives each time. When he saw the first batch, he went for the full price up front.”

“You always let your mark make time payments?” “Depends on the circumstances. Naturally, if that’s what it takes for maximum return. I’m quite the progressive blackmailer.”

I assumed this was his idea of a joke, but I wasn’t laughing. “I should say so, considering this was the second time you’d sold what were supposed to be one-of-a-kind negatives, once to Rocco, once earlier to Jessica.”

He displayed the guilty look you see on a four-year-old kid caught standing beside a broken vase. “In actuality, I shot two sets of those negatives. The ones I sold Jessica were the ones I used to make the comic. Rocco got the second set. The poses were slightly different from the first, but I counted on Rocco’s being too disgusted to examine them closely. And I was right. The instant he got his hands on them, he gave them a quick once-over, and tossed them straight into the fireplace. Caveat ernptor, Mister Valiant, in blackmail as everywhere else.”