Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?

03

Miss Smoot pointed me down a hallway. "Third door on the left."

I grabbed her by the elbow. "A friendly word of advice, Toots. Paint something bright and red on that mouth, invest in a tight sweater, let your hair down, and buy some rhinestone eyeglasses. You'd give Dixie Dugan a run for the money."

She slapped my hand loose. "Go flounce a floozy. I want a man with an IQ higher than his hat size." She walked away twisting her bushel just enough to let me catch a brief glimpse of the light that glowed underneath.

Louise Wrightliter had an age-yellowed slip of notepaper thumb-tacked to her door. "Out on assignment," it said. A cardboard clock with "Will return at" printed across the bottom hung from her doorknob. Both of the hands were missing.

I checked the door. Locked, with a pot metal dead bolt too cheesy for Mortimer Mouse. I popped it open without even scuffing my nails.

I needed a machete to hack through her jungle of books. Judging from the titles of those that fell on my toe, they covered every weirdity from eyewitness accounts of outer space invasions to psychic predictions to horoscopes to how-to-do-it manuals for hexing your neighbor. A complete collection of the hokum every good Telltale reporter needs to know.

Caribbean travel brochures layered her desk top three deep. Glancing through them brought back memories of Doris, me, and my brother Freddy in Cuba.

Freddy came into the business with me after a Toon killed my brother Teddy. Freddy and I were a pretty good team, real hotshot operatives, freelancing for Pinkertons. Doris answered our phones, opened our mail, balanced our two sets of accounting ledgers, and, in her spare time, accepted my proposal of marriage.

Pinkertons sent us to Cuba to check security at one of the big casinos. The job took a week, we caught a pit bull pit boss with his paw in the till and we stayed a week extra. Call it a trial honeymoon for me and Doris, with Freddy along to referee. With a fat Pinkertons paycheck burning a hole in our balance sheet, and the promise of plenty more where that came from, our prospects looked rosy indeed.

We drank gallons of rum and Coke, pumped Wurlitzers full of nickels, learned to dance the Carioca from a parrot named Jose, lazed in the sun, and gambled. Doris and I broke about even at craps. Freddy lost his shirt to roulette and his heart to Lupe Chihuahua, the Latin Spitfire.

Between bit roles in the horror movies studios shot on the cheap down there, Lupe performed at Baba de Rum, the wild Havana nightery. She sang and danced in a costume made entirely of fruit. Unlike Freddy, I'm not that attracted to lady Toons, but I must admit Lupe looked better in a bunch of grapes than most women did in a Paris frock. And that was before she peeled!

The plot thickened to the consistency of lumpy gruel after Lupe turned out to be the more or less steady girlfriend of Tom Tom LeTuit, chief of the Cuban secret police.

The trip left me and Doris with horrible sunburns, worse hangovers, and another broken engagement.

Freddy? I don't know. I never saw him again. I went to his room the morning we were scheduled to sail back to Miami, and he was gone. No note, nothing.

I combed the room inch by inch. I found eight cigar butts, a pineapple stem, and a busted castanet-the three blind mice who worked as maids in this joint missed any piece of trash smaller than the Rock of Gibraltar-but nothing to help me find Freddy.

I reported his disappearance to the police. Tom Tom LeTuit surprised me by bounding into action. He assigned a hundred men to the case, and kept them on it for at least half a minute.

No trace of Freddy ever surfaced.

Louise Wrightliter's brochures described Cuba as the Paradise of the Caribbean. I called it worse.

I put the travel brochures back and rifled her drawers.

She chewed spearmint gum and number-two pencils. She never washed her coffee cup or paid her speeding tickets. She smoked my brand and drank it, too, masking her vices with Sen Sen. If the automatic I found in the bottom of her Kleenex box had been two calibers larger, we could have passed for twins.

I rolled her next day's column out of her Remington. She wasn't quite halfway completed and she'd already managed to tally four of the Telltale's five Ns: nefarious, nasty, naughty, and nudity. If she could find a way to work necrophilia into a story about a young, blonde girl storming her way into a country cottage occupied by three bears, she'd score a full house.

I hate that kind of lewd, crude drivel. In my era you learned about the birds and the bees the good old-fashioned way, from your savvy buddies out on the streets. Today kids read about it in the scandal sheets. Or worse. They get it as part of a well-balanced, formal education. Smut 101. What's the world coming to when kids go to school to watch dirty movies? Put that stuff back in the stag parties and smokers where it belongs.

I went through Wrightliter's filing cabinet and located the folders on Jessica Rabbit and Clark Gable. They were color coded, Jessica's in valentine red (naturally), Gable's in yellow. The two folders were the largest she had, each easily twice the size of any other. I'd need two solid days to read them cover to cover. I settled for grabbing a handful of papers at random off the top of each, and returned the leftovers.

I fished one of my cards out of my wallet, wrote a note on it asking Louise to call me, "Urgent," and tacked it to her door.

I walked back to my car in the dark.

Nighttime falls quick in L.A. Like everybody else who works steady in this burg, Old Mister Sun's a union man. The minute his shift's over, he pulls the plug, reels in his beams, and goes home.

I fumbled out my car key under a streetlight that gave off less shine than a two-year-old's birthday cake. All of a sudden the streetlight went dark, and so did I.

Whoever sapped me walloped me pro style, above and slightly behind my ear, with just enough oomph to cave in my knees. He planted his foot in the small of my back and booted me forward into the running board.

My assailant delivered another kick which sent me halfway to lala land. As I drifted in and out of consciousness, he unplugged my heater from under my armpit.

He slapped my eyes open and rolled me sideways enough to shove a balloon into my puss. "Box, and you could get hurt," it said.

He sapped me again.

I woke up stretched out in the gutter. I'd been there before, plenty of times, but this was the first visit I didn't have only myself to blame.

I lurched to hands and knees, and stumbled to my feet, plenty the worse for wear. My head spun. My breath came in short, painful gasps. Drops of blood wept off my cheek. I'd cracked bones I hadn't thought about since I counted them for my high school biology final. My hands trembled like a pair of palsied moths.

I dragged a butt out of my pack and nailed it to my lips, twisted my head sideways to shield my match from the wind, and scraped my nose on the guy's balloon. It hung over my shoulder, dried to the brittle shape of a taco shell. His words were on the inner surface; from my side I saw them backwards. I carefully lifted it off and held it to the side-view mirror, rotating it slowly to bring the whole sentence into view. I blinked a few million times to clear my vision. Yep. "Box, and you could get hurt." That's what it said. It seemed like an obvious point to me. Why nearly kill me to make it?

I popped open my trunk, wrapped the frizzled balloon in the coveralls I keep for dirty work, and bundled the package into my spare tire.

I climbed into the front seat and reached into the glove compartment. Thank God! He'd spared Granddad. I poured the old geezer down until the dent in his bottle matched the size of the one in my head.