Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?

01

I knocked on the rabbit's door.

A curtain shivered in a second floor window, and I caught a flash of ears. The window flew open.

A word balloon sailed out.

It turned edge-on, slicing the air like the business end of a guillotine, and shattered on the stoop. Six inches farther left, and I'd own one less private eye.

I jig-sawed the pieces together with my toe. "Eddie Valiant," it said, followed by a single exclamation point the size of a major leaguer's bat and ball.

I looked up. There he stood in the open doorway. Six feet tall and change, counting his eighteen-inch ears. His carroty cowlick flopped forward to the tops of his blue-lagoon eyes. Cotton candy ear canals, marshmallow fur, and lemon-drop mittens put him next in line to replace Shirley Temple as First Mate on the Good Ship Lollipop. His red corduroy overalls fit him the way spider webs drape the Headless Horseman's hat rack.

"P-p-p-please come in," he said out loud, spraying me with enough saliva to irrigate the San Fernando Valley.

I entered the low-ceilinged warren he called a living room.

He'd decorated it on the cheap, with props from his movies. I spotted a sofa from Tummy Trouble, a beach chair from Roller Coaster Rabbit, and dishes from Waiter, There's a Hare in My Stew.

I recognized his Oriental rug from the flying scene in Baby Baba and the Forty Thieves. It still bore the stain where Baby Herman had wet his pantaloons during one of Roger's hare-pin turns.

One whole wall displayed autographed photos of famous celebs. Studio prexy Walt Disney and his adopted nephew Mickey. Roger and Baby Herman flanking publicity agent Large Mouth Bassinger. Benny the Cab out for an evening of engine revving with Fangio, the Spanish race car driver. Baby Herman making goo-goo eyes at Carole Lombard and her making them back. Roger even had one of me and Doris. Together and happy. A collector's item if ever there was one.

A faded chunk of wall space contained a hook but no likeness. In a nearby wastebasket, I spied a silver picture frame. I eyeballed its eight by ten. Jessica Rabbit, Roger's hotcha wife. She looked terrific, even scraped and torn by broken glass.

Roger opened the breastplate in the suit of armor he'd worn in Sleepless Knights. With its straight-up-and-pointy iron ears, it would have made a perfect cocktail fork for the giant who lived at the top of Jack's bean stalk. Roger had a better use for it. He'd converted its hollow innards into a bar. "Drink?"

"Every chance I get."

He set out glasses-decaled with his likeness-and poured from a bottle of bourbon with more years on it than a perpetual calendar. I'll say one thing in the rabbit's favor. He didn't know when to stop.

We both drank up.

I lit a smoke and tried to ignore Roger whooping, turning colors, smoking at the ears, pin-wheeling his eyes, and careening around the room with the wobbly abandon of a lopsided skyrocket.

I counted seven points in his imperfect landing. He skidded to a stop with his head stuck in a large vase. He twisted it side to side and levered it with his feet, but it refused to come off.

Wearing his Ming turban, he groped his way blindly around the coffee table until he came to several recent copies of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. He held them up. "Do you read the trades?" His words popped out of the vase individually, strung together like links in a chain.

"Sure."

"Then you know about the plans to film Gone With the Wind. "

"Yeah." Frankly, I didn't give a damn. The only movies that copped my six bits showed John Wayne whaling the living tar out of galoots wearing black ten-gallon hats.

Roger puffed his scrawny chest. "I'm a leading candidate to play Rhett."

Hop hop hooray for Hollywood. With the whole Civil War for chaos, why did Gone With the Wind need Roger Rabbit?

"The producer, David O. Selznick, loved me in Song of the South." His word balloon formed a circle the size of a buttermilk biscuit. The writing inside had the broad, swooping mushiness of a pen dipped in grits. When the word bubble popped, it was with a fragrant whiff of honeysuckle.

"It's a long way, chum, from Br'er Rabbit to Br'er Butler."

"And getting longer every day. That's why I wanted to see you." By touch and feel, he located a wad of newspaper clippings. He handed them in my general direction.

They'd been ripped out of the Toontown Telltale. I gave them a onceover. According to "unnamed but in-the-know sources" Jessica Rabbit was baking her carrot cakes for Clark Gable. The clippings gave the whats, whens, and wherefores in embarrassing detail.

I tossed the articles on an end table. They hit with a juicy smack. "Rabbits will be rabbits."

Roger muttered a string of the gobbledygook you get dragging your finger along the top row of a typewriter. "You can't believe that garbage."

"They can't print what isn't true. First Amendment. Look it up "

The steam coming out of his ears blew the vase off his noodle. It shattered against the wall. Too bad his head wasn't still inside. The impact might have jolted some sense into him. "I want you to make them stop."

"I'm the wrong man for the job. You need a shyster."

The rabbit helped himself to a Big Red One, a brand of cigar artificially colored to resemble a stick of dynamite. Sometimes the goofballs who roll and paint them slip a few of the real thing into the box. That's why so many Toons have only four fingers. Roger lit the fuse. I held my ears. Nothing came out but smell and pollution. "I already contacted one. He told me a lawsuit could drag on for years. By then the damage will have been done."

"What damage?"

"I can't afford a scandal at this point in my career. Mr. Selznick is risking millions on Gone With the Wind. He can't have his major star tainted by even a hint of impropriety. Even though the story's a total fabrication, if the Telltale keeps running this...this bilge about Jessica, I'll lose my chance to be Rhett."

"Sorry, Roger. I promised Doris. No more muscle work."

"I'll pay any price you want."

"My principles can't be bought."

He quoted me a figure that would rent them for a while.

"OK. I'll lean on the Telltale. But I warn you, they're liable to lean back."

"I have faith in you, Eddie. You'll make everything right. You always do."