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again. And next time they might not miss.”
    “Believe what you want, just be aware that in my opinion this pie guy has no connection with your other predicament, and chasing after him will most likely be a big waste of effort.” Pie tin in hand, I got up and headed for the door, where I stopped, turned, and almost as an afterthought said, “By the way, I talked to your wife today.”
    Roger couldn’t have brightened up any quicker had he plugged his tail into an electrical outlet. “Jessica? You saw Jessica? Did you give her my message?”
    “Yes.”
    “And what did she say?”
    I hit him with it the only way I knew how—hard, fast, and straight to the chops. Leave tact to the slick talkers wearing pressed three-piece suits. If you had a terminal illness, I’d tell you point-blank not to start any all-day suckers. “She’s not coming back to you. And she says the reason she’s not is because it was you, not her, that changed. She said you used to be a fun guy, but that, after you got your contract, you turned into an ogre. She said she couldn’t take it, so she left you.”
    “She said that? Jessica said that?” The tiny dots that gave color to Roger’s skin coalesced into splotches so large that, given an ear bob and a transplanted tail, he could have passed for a calico cat. “Well, that’s the silliest thing I ever heard. Me? An ogre?” He launched a partial balloon, but the feigned hah-hah inside fizzled out through the balloon’s stem and, with a resounding blat, splattered across the rug.
    “She also said a few other things.”
    “Such as?”
    “I’m not so sure you want to hear them.”
    “I’m a big bunny. I can take it.”
    “Suit yourself. She said you were nuts. She also said you had no talent.”
    “She doesn’t mean that, not any of it. Rocco is pressuring her to say those things.”
    “She also insisted that you made up the part about the DeGreasys promising you your own strip.”
    “Widdle on that Rocco DeGreasy!” Roger’s word balloon had originally contained something far stronger, but, always conscious of his family-rated image, he had hastily X’d it out and replaced it with a statement less profane. “He has some evil hold over Jessica. For the year Jessica and I were together, we were as in love as two people can be. There was no faking how she felt about me. She couldn’t possibly have reversed herself so quickly. Rocco forced her to leave me, and he’s forcing her to say things about me that she doesn’t mean. I want you to find out how he’s doing it, and I want you to make him stop.” Roger crossed his hands over his head but couldn’t cork the flood of tear-shaped balloons blubbering out of him.
    I nodded as though I really took seriously this whole monumental bit of goofiness. “Exactly what I planned to do next.”

Chapter •9•
    Carol Masters wasn’t at her studio, so I tried her at home. She lived in a partially ‘toon, partially human neighborhood that real estate agents called ethnically enriched, and urban renewers called blighted. Depending on which way you happened to be facing—toward the gossiping, front-stoop ‘toon and human housewives or toward the babbling, back-alley ‘toon and human drunks—either term could apply.
    Carol’s apartment occupied half a floor in what had been, in the late forties, a fashionable row house. Now it and the houses linked together on either side of it resembled a rickety roller coaster already well over its summit and plunging pell-mell on its long run downhill.
    Carol’s door-bell wires drooped stiffly out of their housing like twin copper fangs, so I rapped on the door. Carol answered it, dressed as she had been at her studio, and invited me in.
    I took an immediate liking to her home decoration. No wall to wall furniture to trip you up every time you went to the kitchen for a late-night beer. No chintz to gather dust. A few comfortable chairs placed for easy face-to-face conversation, some scattered