Who Censored Roger Rabbit? Read Online Free PDF

of her anatomy, including both ears and her nose, had also fallen off. I gallantly scrambled to retrieve these bits and pieces for her too, but they disintegrated before I could reach them. I stood upright just in time to witness the rest of her disappear the same way.
    My hand still shaped to the bow of her smile, I circled the spot where she had stood, kicking my toe against the concrete. Not a smidgeon of her remained.
    Suddenly I heard bemused, husky, feminine laughter be•
    hind me. “I take it you’ve never seen a doppelganger erode before?”
    I turned around and found myself facing— Jessica Rabbitl
    Of course. What I saw wasn’t really her. It was a mentally projected duplicate of her, or doppelganger as ‘toons call them. Identical to her in every regard, physically and mentally, but existing only by the energy of her mind. ‘Toons can create doppelgangers more or less at will. They merely relax, channel their thoughts in that direction, and magically one of them appears. ‘Toons use them as doubles in risky shots. When you see a ‘toon stuffed into a trombone or run over by a steamroller or crushed by a falling safe, it’s really a doppelganger. And she was right. I never had seen one erode before.
    “Isn’t it kind of traumatic to see a part of you just wither away like that?”
    “Not particularly. No more so than I imagine it might be for you to throw one of your fingernail clippings into a trash can. Oh, I’m sure there are primitive tribes in Africa or somewhere who treat their doppelgangers as mystic offshoots of their soul, but we modern, civilized ‘toons regard our doppelgangers as animated mannequins, nothing more.”
    She leaned gracefully against the Mercedes’s rear fender, instinctively adjusting her posture to display herself to best advantage. She needn’t have bothered. A woman as beautiful as this could have stood on one leg, flapped her arms, stuck out her tongue, and still held my interest. Like most human-oid ‘toons, Jessica suppressed her word-balloons and spoke vocally only, thus enhancing even further her human image. “I heard you tell my doppel that you wanted to see me about Roger. What’s his problem now?”
    “What was his problem before?”
    She replied quickly, as though she had been asked the same question so many times that she had committed the answer to memory. “He couldn’t cope with being a celebrity. He turned moody, conceited, belligerent. So I left him.”
    A bit of a discrepancy there between Jessica and her husband. Had it been Jessica Rabbit or Roger who had undergone the Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation that had scuttled the marriage? By rights, I should believe my client. That was by rights. From experience, I knew that the one caught with the stolen macaroons often wound up being the same one who had hired me to stake out the cookie jar. “You might be interested to know that Roger says he wants a reconciliation. He says he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get you back.”
    She crossed one perfect arm over the other. “If that’s why he hired you, to corne here and tell me that, I’m afraid he’s wasted your time. I left Roger for someone else.”
    “I guess that translates to Rocco DeGreasy.”
    She dipped her chin and held it there, the way a fighter would to protect himself from an uppercut. “That’s right, though I don’t see where it’s any concern of yours.”
    Good looks could distract me only so long. “Roger hired me to investigate irregularities in his contract. Rather an odd coincidence that his estranged wife would have such a close relationship with one of the people who gave it to him. You have anything to do with the DeGreasys signing Roger?”
    She shook her head, pushed herself away from the car, and assumed a square stance that, even in its belligerence, gave a certain graceful beauty to her tiny clenched fists and firmly set jaw. “Absolutely not. I never understood why they did it. Roger has no talent