CH04 - The Topless Tulip Caper

by Lawrence Block

“Aren’t you young to be a detective?”

  I’m not exactly a detective. I mean I don’t have a license or anything. But I didn’t see any point in telling her that. What I wanted to say was that you don’t have to be all that old to spoon brine shrimp into a fish tank, but I didn’t say that either. I said, “If you could give me some idea—”

  “Of course.” She leaned forward and I took another quick look at Beethoven’s eyebrows. Her breasts had fantastic stage presence. It was hard not to stare at them, and you sort of got the feeling they were staring back.

  “It’s a murder case,” she said.

  I don’t know if my heartbeat actually quickened, because it had been operating faster than normal ever since I opened the door and took my first look at her. But I certainly did get excited. I mean, people don’t generally turn up on our doorstep wanting us to investigate a murder. But it happens all the time in books, and that’s the kind of detective Haig wants to be, the kind you read about in mystery novels.

  I said, “A homicide.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I thought you said a murder.”

  She nodded. “But homicide means that a person has been killed, doesn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, this is murder. But it’s not homicide.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  She put her hand to her mouth and nibbled thoughtfully at a cuticle. If she ever ran out of cuticles to nibble I decided I’d gladly lend her one of mine. Or any other part of me that interested her. “It’s hard to say this,” she said.

  I waited her out.

  “I had to come to Leo Haig,” she said eventually. “I couldn’t go to the police. I never even considered going to the police. Even if they didn’t actually laugh at me there’s no way they would bother investigating. So I had to go to a private detective, and I couldn’t go to an ordinary private detective. It has to be Leo Haig.”

  That’s the kind of thing you want every client to say, but Tulip Willing was the first one ever to say it.

  “I guess the only way to say it is to come right out with it,” she said. “Someone murdered my tropical fish. I want Leo Haig to catch the killer.”

  I climbed a flight of stairs to the fourth floor, where Haig was playing with his fish. There are tanks in all the rooms on the third floor, but on the fourth floor there are nothing but tanks, rows and rows of them. I found Haig glowering at a school of cichlids from Lake Tanganyika. They had set him back about fifty bucks a fish, which is a lot, and no one had yet induced them to spawn in captivity. Haig intended to be the first, and thus far the fish had shown no sign of preparing to cooperate.

  “There’s an element missing,” he said. “Maybe the rockwork should be extended. Maybe they’re accustomed to spawning in caves. Maybe they want less light.”

  “Maybe they’re all boys,” I suggested.

  “Phooey. There are eight of them. With six fish one is mathematically certain of having a pair. That is to say that the certainty is in excess of ninety-five percent. With eight the certainty is that much greater.”

  “Unless the cunning Africans only ship one sex.”

  He looked at me. “You have a devious mind,” he said. “It will be an asset professionally.”

  “I have a devious mind,” I agreed. “You have a client.”

  “Oh?”

  “A beautiful young woman,” I said.

  “Trust you to notice that.”

  “I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t notice. Her name is Tulip Willing.”

  “Indeed.”

  “She wants you to investigate a murder and trap a killer.”

  He bounced to his feet, and the African cichlids no longer meant a thing to him. He’s about five feet tall and built like a beachball, with a neatly trimmed little black goatee and head of wiry black hair. He likes to touch the beard, and he started doing it now.

  “A homicide,” he said.

  I didn’t make the distinction between murder and homicide. “She says only Leo Haig can help her,” I went on. “She hasn’t been to the police. She needs a private detective, and you’re the only man on earth who can possibly do the job for her.”

  “She honestly said that?”

  “Her very words.”

  “Remarkable.”

  “She’s in the office. I told her I was sure you would want to talk to her yourself.”

  “Of course I want to talk to her.” He was on his way to the stairs and even though his legs are about half the length of mine I had to hustle to catch up with him.

  “One thing you ought to know before you talk to her,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “About the victims.”

  He was positively beaming. “Victims? Plural? More than one victim?”

  “Over a hundred of them.”

  He stared, and his face showed a struggle between delight and disbelief. He really wanted it to be a murder case with a hundred victims, and at the same time he was beginning to read the whole number as a put-on.

  “One thing you ought to know,” I said. “The victims aren’t people. They’re fish.”

  He said, “Miss Willing? I’m Leo Haig. I believe you’ve already met my assistant, Mr. Harrison.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “I understand some fishes of yours were murdered. Could you give me some specific information on the crime?”

  I had to hand it to him. I don’t know what kind of reaction I’d been hoping for but it wasn’t what I got. I had sent him up in a pretty rotten way, when you stop to think of it, and he was returning the favor by treating Tulip Willing and her massacred fish like the crime of the century. Instead of telling me to get rid of her, either by showing her the door or calling the men in the white coats, he was going to take his time getting her whole story, and I was going to have to write it all down in my notebook. I made it game, set and match to him.

  So I sat there with my notebook on my side of the desk, and Haig sat on his side of the desk and played with a pipe, and Tulip Willing sat in the chair I’d put her in originally. I sensed that the three of us were going to waste an hour or so of each other’s time. I didn’t really mind. I hadn’t been doing anything that sensational with my time in the first place, and I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather waste it with. (Than Tulip, I mean. Wasting time with Haig is something I do almost every day of my life. It’s enjoyable, but there’s nothing all that exotic about it.)

  “There are many ways an entire tank of fishes can be destroyed at once,” he was saying. He has this professorial air that he likes to use. “Certain diseases strike with the rapidity and force of the Black Death, wiping out a whole fish population overnight. Air pollution, paint fumes, these can cause annihilation on an extraordinary scale.”

  “Mr. Haig—”

  “Occasionally equipment malfunctions. A thermostat may go haywire, boiling the inhabitants of an aquarium. On the other hand, a heater may burn out and the resulting drop in temperature may prove fatal, although this is more likely to be a gradual matter. In other situations—”

  “Mr. Haig, I’m not an idiot.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that you were.”

  “I’m familiar with the ways fishes can die. Naturally you would assume that the death was accidental. I made the same assumption myself. I ruled out the possibilities of natural and accidental death.”

  “Indeed.”

  “The fish were poisoned.”

  He took his pipe apart. He’s given up smoking them because they burn his tongue, but he likes to fiddle with them. He bought the pipes originally because he thought they might be a good character tag and he knows that great detectives have to have charming idiosyncracies. He keeps trying on idiosyncracies looking for one that will fit. I’ve wanted to tell him that he’s odd enough all by himself, but I can’t think of an acceptable way to phrase it.

  I waited for him to ask how she knew the fish were poisoned. Instead he said, “What sort
of fish? A community tank, I suppose? Mollies and swordtails and the like?”

  “No. I don’t have a community tank. These were Scats.”

  “Ah. Scatophagus argus.”

  “These were Scatophagus tetracanthus, actually.”

  “Indeed.” He seemed impressed. He thinks everybody should know the Latin name of everything, and I get a lecture to that effect on the average of once every three days. “The tetracanthus are imported less often. And most retailers sell them as argus because few hobbyists know the difference. These were definitely tetracanthus, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many did you have?”

  “One hundred twenty-three.”

  “Indeed. You must be rather fond of the species. You must also have had an extremely large tank.”

  “It’s a twenty-nine gallon tank.”

  He frowned. “Good heavens!’ he said. “You must have stacked them like cordwood.”

  “All but two were fry. They had plenty of room.”

  “Fry?” His eyebrows went up, first at the word she used, then at the implications. Most people who keep fish, and certainly most people who look anything like Tulip Willing, call baby fish baby fish. She called them fry. Then, when the whole idea sank in, he leaned forward and waggled a finger at her. “Impossible,” he said.

  “What’s impossible?”

  “Neither of the Scatophagus species has ever spawned in captivity.”

  “I spawned them. And it’s been done before.”

  “By Rachow, yes. But he had an accident and lost the lot, and he was never able to repeat the procedure. Nor has anyone else had any success.”

  “I had success,” she said.

  “Impossible,” he said again. “No one but Rachow ever induced the little devils to spawn. And he was working with argus, not tetracanthus.” He paused abruptly and his eyes crawled upward and examined the ceiling. “Wait just one moment,” he said. “Just one moment.”

  I looked at Tulip and watched her wait one moment. There was the hint of a private smile on her lips.

  “There was a spawning,” he said finally. “Not of argus. Of tetracanthus. It was reported in Copeia a year ago. The fish spawned but a fungus destroyed the spawn before they hatched. The author was—let me think. Wolinski. T. J. Wolinski. He’s done other articles for aquarist publications.”

  “Not he,” Tulip said.

  “Pardon me?”

  She was really smiling now. “Not he,” she repeated. “She. Me, actually. They spawned a second time and I used a fungicide and it worked. I got a seventy percent hatch. One hundred twenty-one fry, and they were doing beautifully. I left the parent fish with them.”

  “Your name is Willing. Tulip Willing.”

  “That’s a stage name.”

  “And your real name is—”

  “Thelma Wolinski.”

  Haig was on his feet, his jaw set firmly beneath the neat little beard. “T. J. Wolinski,” he said, with something verging on reverence. “T. J. Wolinski. Extraordinary. And some creature poisoned your scats? Good heavens. You’ll pardon me, I hope, for treating you like a witling. I never would have guessed—well, that’s by the way. Some villain poisoned your fishes, did he? Well, we shall get to the bottom of this. And I shall have his head, madam. Rest assured of that. I shall have his head.”

  So the whole thing was out of control. It was my fault, and although there was a certain amount of thrill in the idea of being on a case, I can’t say I was anywhere near as thrilled as Haig was.

  Well, I’d asked for it. I’d been baiting him, never figuring he’d bite, and now he was hooked right through the gills.

  Three

  IT MUST HAVE been around three in the afternoon when Tulip Willing rang the doorbell. It was close to five when Haig was finished asking questions. He went over everything and enabled me to fill a great many pages in my notebook with facts that would probably turn out to be unimportant. It’s his theory that there is no such thing as an absolutely inconsequential fact. (The first time he told me this I replied that in 1938 the state of Wyoming produced one-third of a pound of dry edible beans for every man, woman, and child in the nation. He agreed that it was certainly hard to see how that could turn out to be consequential, but he wasn’t going to rule out the possibility entirely.)

  I’m taking matters into my own hands and leaving out some items that never did seem to have any more bearing on the case than the fascinating fact about dry edible beans. That still leaves plenty of bits and pieces to report from Haig’s questioning of Tulip.

  Item: The fish had died four days ago, on a Saturday. Tulip had come home at four Saturday morning after a long night at the Treasure Chest, where she had been working for five months, having been previously employed in a similar capacity at similar nightspots, among them Tippler’s Cove and Shake It Or Leave It (I am not making any of this up.) She came home, exhausted and ready for bed, and she went over to say goodnight to the fish, and they were all floating on the top, which is never a sign of radiant good health. When she was done being hysterical she did something intelligent. She removed the two parent fish and preserved them in jars of rubbing alcohol in case an autopsy should ultimately be indicated, and she took a sample of the water in the tank and another sample of water from another aquarium as a control. These she took to a chemical laboratory on Varick Street for scientific analysis, and Monday the laboratory called her and informed her that the sample from the tank of scats contained strychnine, which is no better for fish than it is for people. There was enough strychnine present to kill any human being who drank a glass of the water, but then not that many people go around drinking out of aquariums, and I’d venture to say that those who do are asking for it.

  Item: She assumed that the murder of the scats was motivated not by a specific hatred of the fish themselves but by hatred of their owner. Someone was trying to upset her or punish her or terrify her by killing her pets. This was, as far as she could determine, the first instance of hostile behavior to be directed at her, aside from the usual obscene telephone calls she received intermittently. The phone calls had not increased in frequency lately, and in fact she hadn’t heard from one of the callers in a long time and was a little concerned that something might have happened to him. She said that he had a very unusual approach, but she didn’t go into detail.

  Item: The scats had been in fine fettle when she left the apartment Friday afternoon at two o’clock. The strychnine would presumably have worked instantly upon its introduction into the aquarium, but she had been unable to determine just how long the fish had been dead. So somewhere between two Friday afternoon and four Saturday morning the villain had entered her apartment and had done the dirty deed.

  Item: While I don’t guess there was anybody who could properly be labeled a suspect at this stage of the game, the following people were sufficiently a part of Tulip’s life to find their way into my notebook:

  Cherry Bounce. I know, I know, but if you can accept a name like Tulip Willing, why be put off by Cherry Bounce? Cherry and Tulip had been roommates for just about five months. They met when Tulip went to work at Treasure Chest, where Cherry had already been employed. Tulip had recently broken up with her boyfriend and needed a place to live, and Cherry had recently broken up with a boyfriend of her own and needed someone to share her rent. The two of them had been getting along well enough, although they didn’t have much in common outside of their profession. Tulip characterized her as flighty, flitting from one pursuit to another, health foods to astrology to bio-feedback. As far as the fish were concerned, Cherry thought they were cute. Cherry’s name off-stage was Mabel Abramowicz, so I guess she would have had to change it to something.

  Glenn Flatt. Tulip’s ex-husband, whom she had met and married four years ago when she was picking up a doctorate in marine biology at the University of Miami, and whom she had divorced two years later. I could understand why she had divorced him—she wanted her own name back. No one built like
Tulip could be happy with Flatt for a surname. (According to her, she left her husband because he was a compulsive gambler. If you said Good Morning to him he’d lay odds that it wasn’t. This would have been all right if he won, but he evidently didn’t.) Flatt lived on Long Island where he was employed as a research biochemist by a pharmaceutical manufacturer. This fact prompted Haig and me to glance meaningfully at each other—Flatt’s job would undoubtedly give him access to strychnine. On the other hand, it would probably give him just as good access to any number of non-detectable vehicles for ichthyicide. Flatt and Tulip were “very good friends now,” she said, and they occasionally had dinner or drinks together, and now and then he turned up at the club to catch her act. Flatt had never remarried.

  Haskell Henderson. Tulip’s current boyfriend and the owner of a half-dozen local health food stores. They had been seeing each other for almost three months. Henderson would spend two or three afternoons a week at Tulip’s apartment. I don’t guess he devoted much of this time to staring at the fish. When he wasn’t keeping company with Tulip or minding the stores he was in Closter, New Jersey, where he shared a cozy little house with . . .

  Mrs. Haskell Henderson. Tulip had never met Mrs. H.H., and had no way of knowing whether or not the woman even knew of her existence, but anyone with that sound a reason for wanting unpleasant things to happen to Tulip certainly deserved an entry in my notebook. The entry was pretty much limited to her name because Henderson evidently didn’t talk about his wife very much.

  Simon Barckover. Tulip’s agent, and Cherry’s agent too, for that matter. His relationship with both clients was strictly professional, but he got in the notebook because he was the only person around who might have a specific grudge against the fish. He thought Tulip was genuinely talented and that she had a future in show business if she applied herself. Tulip admitted that he might be right but she wasn’t interested. The topless dancing paid well and was generally undemanding, leaving her free to concentrate on her chief interest, which was ichthyology. Barckover had told her on several occasions that the damn fish were standing in the way of her career and that he would like to flush the lot of them down the toilet. She couldn’t believe he would actually do it, but then she couldn’t believe anybody would want to poison the scats, so he got in the notebook.