Who Censored Roger Rabbit? Read Online Free PDF Page A

production assistant, perched on a tower halfway down the street, flipped on a specially rigged wireless relay box and set a driverless, open Mercedes convertible rolling along the street at forty miles an hour.
    A stubby helicopter overtook the Mercedes from behind and assumed a position just above the driver’s seat.
    A trim, flight-suited female, wearing a leather flying helmet and aviator goggles, with a rope coiled around her left shoul•
    der, appeared in the helicopter’s cargo door. She secured one end of the rope to a pin ring on the helicopter’s interior bulkhead, threw the remainder of the rope out the door, and shinnied down it toward the moving car. She lowered herself into the front seat, took the wheel, and applied the brakes just in time to prevent the car from crashing into a stationary truck positioned crossways in the street ahead.
    The helicopter saluted her with a side-to-side dip, and sped away.
    A most impressive operation, easily the equal of anything I’d seen in the Marines. Almost a shame that strategic responsibility for conquering other nations couldn’t be switched from Washington to Madison Avenue. The United States might today be bottling Coke, packaging cornflakes, assembling Pontiacs, battling crabgrass, and eradicating underarm odor in suburban Moscow, Peking, and Hanoi.
    The director, decked out in polo pants with side flaps large enough to put him into contention for head bull in a herd of elephants, conferred with a man wearing enough gold chains around his neck to shackle half the prisoners in a Southern road gang. The chain man framed the final scene between his thumbs and forefingers and gave the director an exaggerated nod.
    “That’s a keeper,” yelled the director. “Let’s break for breakfast while we check the rushes.”
    The car backed, turned, and squealed to a stop alongside the curb in front of where I stood. The girl driver pulled herself free of the cockpit and swung athletically across the door and out. She unsnapped her goggles, peeled away her helmet, and gave me my first, real-life look at Jessica Rabbit.
    Her photos, as stunning as they were, hadn’t begun to capture the full scope of her beauty. Curly hair the color of a lingering sunset. Porcelain skin. Incendiary gray-blue eyes. Lips the softness of pink rose petals. And a body straight out of one of the magazines adolescent boys pore over in locked bathrooms. The kind of woman usually portrayed floating down the Nile on a barge, nibbling at stuffed pheasant and peeled grapes, enticing some beguiled Roman into conquering half the civilized world on her behalf.
    All of which only served to deepen the mystery. What had a woman like this ever seen in a dippy ‘toon rabbit?
    I approached her. “Mrs. Rabbit? My name’s Eddie Valiant. I’m a private investigator. I’d like to have a word with you about your husband.”
    “My husband?” She inclined her head, squinted her eyes, and up-tilted the corners of her mouth into the amused yet perplexed expression of someone confronted by an especially ridiculous riddle. “I’m afraid you have the wrong person. I’ve never been married. I have no husband.”
    Surely I couldn’t have made a mistake. There couldn’t be two women this gorgeous. “You are Jessica Rabbit?”
    “Correct.”
    “Then what, if I may ask, is your relationship to Roger Rabbit?”
    “Who?” In the best Orphan Annie tradition, Jessica demonstrated her innocent bewilderment by revolving her eyes upward and tucking them out of sight underneath her open eyelids. “Roger Rabbit? Sorry, I never heard of him.” A blatant lie, no question about it, and, as though to illustrate what happens to people who lie, her brilliant smile dribbled off her chin and fluttered to the ground like a bicuspid butterfly. I reacted the way I would have had she dropped her hankie. I reached down, scooped up her smile, and handed it back, only to find that, while I had been bent over, other assorted portions