Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf Page B

its backside. It took me a while, but I finally found it, a secret compartment. When you pressed a certain screw, the whole rear of the cabinet swung away to reveal a narrow space maybe two inches deep. I had expected to find a few file folders inside, but instead the space held snapshots of original segments of comic-strip artwork. Each piece of artwork contained a framed print of a comic strip and the negative used to produce it, the same kind of stuff Rocco had hanging in here on the walls. If I remembered rightly, he had said such segments were worth big bucks. This artwork portrayed Baby Herman strips. Roger Rabbit appeared in all of them, so they must be fairly recent. Each segment had been signed by its photographer—Carol Masters in every case.
    I flipped one of the snapshots over and found a price penciled on the back. Five grand. Certainly not small potatoes on my side of town, but hardly the mighty moola Rocco had led me to believe the stuff fetched. Of course what I knew about art you could put into one blank of a paint-by-numbers set. Maybe these were inferior quality segments and didn’t command very high a price. But if that were the case, why go to so much trouble to hide them?
    I studied the segments up close, but couldn’t see any difference between them and the ones on the wall. One of the segments did have a familiar look to it, but I couldn’t place it, and it was hardly likely that I’d have seen it in the paper since I never read the funnies. I put the snapshots in my pocket, closed up the compartment, and pushed the filing cabinet back into place.
    Next I went to work on Rocco’s desk.
    He kept his desk calendar inside his upper center drawer. I checked it for yesterday and discovered he had penciled in an appointment at home with someone he identified only by the initials SS. The meeting was set for eleven o’clock P.M., barely an hour before he had been killed.
    In his bottom drawer I found a few books on ancient mythology, and that was about it.
    I stuck my head out the door and asked Dominick to rejoin me.
    “Any luck?” he asked.
    “Maybe,” I answered. “How about giving me some background to set my findings into perspective?”
    “Shoot.”
    “What’s your opinion of Jessica Rabbit?”
    He picked up a letter opener and jabbed it so hard into his desktop blotter that it cut through to the wood beneath. I wondered if anybody in the world besides Roger saw any good in that woman. “She was a bimbo when he met her, and she’s still a bimbo. I never could figure out what he saw in her.”
    “How did they meet?”
    “Rocco discovered her dancing in a slimy downtown strip club. He took her out of there, groomed her, bought her expensive clothes, and taught her to act. As her way of saying thanks, she dumped him for a stupid rabbit.”
    “But she did come back to him,” I pointed out.
    He pulled the letter opener up and took a piece of the blotter with it. “Sure she came back to him, but only when she found out that the rabbit couldn’t give her what Rocco could. She was out for nobody but herself, and Rocco would have been better off without her. I told him not to take her back, but the guy loved her so much he would have forgiven her anything.”
    “The word is that Jessica pressured Rocco into giving Roger a contract. You know anything about that?”
    “Not really. Like I said, I never got involved much in the business end of it. I personally never wanted to sign the rabbit. I never thought he had all that much talent, but Rocco insisted, although he never once gave me a good reason why. Said it was just a hunch he had, a feeling. But I always thought, pretty much like everybody else did, that it was really Jessica behind it. He took the rabbit on because Jessica asked him to. Sure, it turned out to be the right move. The rabbit wound up making a spiffy second banana, but nobody would have guessed that going in.”
    “Roger insisted that Rocco promised him a solo strip. Any