CH04 - The Topless Tulip Caper

by Lawrence Block

  “I siphoned out the dead fry,” she said. “Then I was going to get rid of the rest of the water, but is it safe to pour it down the sink? There’s poison in it, after all, and I don’t want to wipe out half of Manhattan.”

  “It would just go in the sewers,” I said. “It would probably get completely diluted. But if you don’t want to risk it I guess you can let the water evaporate and then throw out the tank.”

  “Throw out the tank?”

  “Well, I don’t know much about strychnine. Would it evaporate along with the water? And meanwhile there’s the chance someone would drink out of the aquarium. I admit it’s not much of a chance, but why take it?”

  “Maybe we’d better flush it down the toilet,” she said. “I can find out later how to clean the tank so that it’s usable again. It won’t be destroying the evidence will it? I have the lab report and everything.”

  I assured her that it wouldn’t be destroying evidence, and the two of us lugged the tank into the bathroom and emptied it down the toilet. And yet, it did take two of us, and if she hadn’t been a big strong lady it would have taken three of us, because water is a lot heavier than you might think. After it was empty Tulip sloshed water into it from a bucket and rinsed it out a few times, and then she put it in the closet where it could rest until she found out how to cleanse it thoroughly.

  I couldn’t see how we had destroyed any evidence, but what I didn’t bother to tell her was that evidence didn’t make much difference. Granted that she wanted to know who had killed her fish, but with all the evidence in the world we weren’t going to take whoever it was to court and prosecute him. I didn’t mention this because it might lead her to wonder why she was spending good money to track the villain down, and didn’t want this thought to cross her mind until her check cleared.

  When the tank was tucked away in the closet, Tulip heaved a sigh. “That’s a lot of exercise,” she said. “Not like dancing all night, but all that lifting and toting. I used muscles I don’t normally have any call for. Look! I’m all sweated up.”

  She didn’t have to tell me to look. I was already looking. Her tee-shirt was damp now and Beethoven was plastered all over her. I’ve been apt to envy a lot of people in the course of my young life, but this was the first time I had ever been jealous of a dead composer.

  “Just look at me,” she said, lifting her arms to show the circles of perspiration beneath them, and then she saw that I was indeed looking at her, and she managed to read the expression on my face, which I guess you didn’t have to be a genius to read anyhow, and then she laughed again. “Bourbon and yogurt! On the rocks!”

  I told her to stop it.

  And that was about that. She had a dinner date, and she was going to have to shower and change, but we had time to sit around and talk for a while. She told me a little about some of the names in my notebook but nothing worth recording, or even worth training my memory to retain. She also told me a great deal about herself—how someone had given her a couple of baby guppies when she was eleven years old, and how she had really gotten into fish in a big way until her parents’ house was hip-deep in fish tanks, and how in high school she had grown profoundly interested in biology and genetics, and how someday she hoped to make an important contribution to ichthyological knowledge. In the meantime she was dancing naked, making decent money, saving as much of it as she could, and not at all certain where her career should go from here.

  “I suppose I could get some sort of institutional job,” she said. “At a public aquarium, or preparing specimens for museum collections. I have good qualifications. But I haven’t found an opening that turns me on at all, and I’d rather prefer to live in New York, and I can’t see myself clerking in some place like Aquarium Stock Company for two-fifty an hour.”

  There was a lot of conversation which I didn’t bother reporting to Haig and won’t bother reporting I to you because it was trivial. But trivial or not, it was also pleasant, and I was sorry when it got to be time to go.

  “Come to the club tonight,” she said. “Come around one and you can catch my last set, and you’ll get to see Cherry too. You’ll want to talk to her, won’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But she might have plans, and—”

  “So at least you’ll get to see my number, Chip.” She grinned hugely. “You wouldn’t mind watching me do I my dance, would you?”

  I took the subway to 23rd and Eighth and walked the few blocks to Leo Haig’s house. Wong had waited dinner until my return. He doesn’t say much, but he cooks really fantastic Chinese things, and he never seems to dish up the same thing twice. Which is a shame, because there are plenty of dishes I’d like to return to.

  I hope he throws out the roaches—

  We talked business throughout our dinner. Haig has this tendency to imitate Nero Wolfe, and he attempts to avoid it by not making Wolfean rules for himself, like no business at meals and set hours with the orchids—which is to say fish in his case. So we talked, or rather I talked and he gave the appearance of listening, pausing periodically in his eating to ask a question or wipe some hoisin sauce from his beard. When the meal was finished we went back into the office and Wong brought the coffee. There was no dessert. There never is at Haig’s house. He thinks if he never has dessert he will get thin. So we skipped dessert, as usual, and he opened his desk drawer, the second from the top on the left, and took out a Mars bar and two Mallo Cups. I passed, and he ate all three of them. If he keeps up like this he’ll be nothing but skin and bones before you know it.

  “Five hundred dollars,” he said at one point, between bites, “is a rather large retainer for a case involving the murder of fish.”

  “It’s standard,” I said.

  “Phooey.”

  “All right, it’s large. It works out to almost five dollars a fish, which is about the going rate for scats, although I don’t suppose fry would bring that much, would they? On the other hand she lost a breeding pair, and since they’re the only known breeding pair of Scatophagus Tetracanthus they might be worth the full five hundred all by themselves. On the other hand—”

  “You already said that.”

  “On the third hand, if you prefer, we’re not going to bring the fish back to life even if you are a genius, so maybe that’s the wrong way to approach it. Look at it this way—”

  “Chip.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I assume you had a reason for setting so high a price.”

  “Yes. A few of them. First of all, the rent Madam Juana pays you isn’t enough to cover our overhead, and I have a vested interest in that overhead since I’m part of it. We can use the money. That’s one. Two is I wanted to see if she could write a check for five hundred dollars without batting an eyelash. I watched her closely and she didn’t bat a single one of them.”

  “You were not looking at her eyelashes.”

  “I’ll let that go. The third reason is I thought that a high retainer might shame you into telling her to go swim upstream and spawn. How the hell are we going to find out who wiped out her scats? And where’s the glory in it for you if we do? I know you didn’t take the case for the money or you would have remembered to ask for the money, so you’ve got to be doing it for the glory, and if you think this is going to make your name a household word like stove and refrigerator and carpet—”

  “Chip.”

  I stopped in midsentence. When he uses that particular tone of voice I stop. I stopped, and he spun around and regarded the Rasboras, and I waited for something to happen.

  He spoke without turning from his fish. “I suppose it must be as it is,” he said. “The Watson character is expected to lack subtlety. Thus the detective sparkles in comparison to his less nimble-witted assistant.”

  “You always pick the nicest ways to tell me how stupid I am.”

  “Indeed. You’re quite useful to me, you know, and yet it’s remarkable how you can simultaneously ignore subtleties while overlooking the obvious.”

  �
��I can also walk down the street while chewing gum.”

  “I’ll accept your word on that.” He turned around again and put his feet up, dammit. “Of course you’ll go see our client perform tonight.”

  “All right. If you’re determined that she’s still our client—”

  “I am.”

  “Then I’ll go.”

  “And you’ll interview Miss Bounce after the performance.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. With whom is Miss Wolinski dining tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Someone who’s luckier than I am.

  “Why?”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “Sure I asked. She said it wasn’t one of the names in the notebook, so I—”

  “But she didn’t give the name.”

  “No.”

  He closed his eyes. I was still there when he opened them, and I don’t think the fact delighted him. “You may leave,” he said. “I want to read. Could you get me that new Bill Pronzini mystery?” He pointed and I fetched. I asked politely if the book was part of Pronzini’s series in which the detective does not have a name.

  “He has a name,” Haig said. “The name is not revealed to the reader, but clearly the man has a name.”

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  “What Pronzini’s detective does not have,” he said, “is an assistant.” He glared at me, then lowered his eyes to the book. I thought about wishing him goodnight and decided against it.

  I went out and killed time. I had a beer at Dominick’s and watched the Mets. They were playing the Padres and they lost anyhow. It took some doing. They went into the ninth two runs ahead. Then Sadecki struck out the first two batters and it looked hard to lose. He hit the next batter, and this rattled him so that he walked the next two, at which point Berra yanked him and sent in Harry Parker, who got the batter to hit a slow grounder to Garrett. Garrett fielded it cleanly but didn’t throw to first because he couldn’t find the ball. It was lost somewhere in his glove. That loaded the bases and upset Parker, who threw the next pitch six feet over Grote’s head, cutting the lead to one. That was it for Parker. Berra brought in somebody just up from Tidewater, who made his major league debut by promptly hanging a curve for Nate Colbert. I think the ball’s still in the air somewhere over Queens. That made it 5 to 3, and we went down in order in our half of the ninth, and that, to coin a phrase, was the ballgame.

  “Jeez, they stink,” Dominick said.

  I couldn’t argue with that. I walked around for a while, and then I went to Treasure Chest, and I guess that brings you up to date, because there I was on the stage and there was a beautiful girl named Cherry Bounce on the stage next to me and she was a hundred percent dead and this was something my ingenuity and intelligence and experience had not prepared me for.

  Four

  I JUMPED DOWN from the stage, and then I vaulted up onto the bar and slid on the residue of someone’s drink. I landed somewhat imperfectly on the customers’ side of the bar. A lot of people were moving toward the stage, curious to know what was happening, and a lot of other people were moving toward the door, and the second group were the ones I was concerned with. I did some fancy broken-field running and got to the door ahead of most of them. I planted myself in the doorway with my arms and legs wide and tried to look as substantial as possible.

  “Nobody leaves,” I said. “A girl has been killed. Nobody leaves until the cops get here.”

  A couple of men took my word and turned away. I was on the point of congratulating myself on my menacing snarl when a few other guys headed toward me and looked prepared to walk right through me.

  “Nobody leaves,” I said again, terrified that my voice would crack. They kept right on walking.

  Then someone moved up against me from my right, and I turned my head, and it was my friend the doortender, plaid pants and striped jacket and sky blue shirt and all. He moved into the doorway and I moved over to give him room, and he planted himself there in the identical stance I had taken, but he looked as though he meant it.

  “Everybody stay where you are,” he said. He didn’t speak as loudly as I had. Then again, he didn’t have to. The people milled a little, but then they turned back and resigned themselves to the fact that they weren’t going anywhere.

  “I gotta hand it to you, kid,” the doorstop grunted. “You got moxie.”

  I beamed idiotically for a moment, then ducked back into the club myself. A lot of people were behaving pretty hysterically at this point and I can’t say I blamed them much. I hadn’t noticed any women in the club—except for Tulip and Cherry and the barmaid, obviously—but evidently there had been women at some of the back tables, or else someone had hired a batch of women to run into the club and scream when Cherry’s body hit the stage. There was plenty of screaming, that’s for sure.

  I managed to find Tulip, who was not contributing to the screaming one bit. At first she looked oddly calm, but then I took a second look and recognized her expression as the kind of calm you get when someone has recently hit you over the head with a mallet.

  She said, “She’s—”

  I was going to let her finish the sentence herself but she just plain stopped. So I finished it for her. “Dead,” I said.

  “What was it? A heart attack?”

  “It was murder.”

  “But—”

  “There’s no time,” I said. “This must be tied in with the scats and it proves Leo Haig is a lot smarter than I’ll ever be but I already knew that. Listen to me. Are you listening?”

  She nodded.

  “All right. You and I don’t know each other. No, the barmaid knows we do. Shit. All right.”

  “Chip?”

  “You don’t know anything about Haig. You don’t mention anything about fish. You don’t even know Cherry was murdered except that’s what people have been saying. Are you a good liar?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Well, do the best you can. Now all I have to do is figure out a way to get the hell out of here.” I looked at the door, and my friend the gorilla was still in place; now that I had taught him not to let anybody out, it was a cinch he wasn’t going to let me out. I tried to figure out something, and while I was standing there like an idiot a man in a tuxedo came along and supplied the one powerful argument that would have whisked me past the gorilla in nothing flat.

  “You!”

  He was looking at me, and he was pointing at me, but the expression of absolute fury and indignation on the face of a man I had never seen before in my life convinced me that he had someone else in mind. I figured maybe he was a little cockeyed, and I looked over my shoulder to see who it was that he was furious with, but there was nobody there. Then he was standing right in front of me and his finger would have been touching my nose if either the finger or the nose had been half an inch longer.

  “You!”

  Tulip said, “Mr. Leemy—”

  “Shut up,” Leemy said, and my trained memory remembered that one Gus Leemy was the owner of record of Treasure Chest, and it stood to reason, Leemy being in another class entirely from Smith and Jones, that the Leemy with his finger in my face was Gus himself. Tulip said his name again, and he told her brusquely to shut up again, and that inspired exchange gave me a couple of seconds to look him over.

  I decided that what he looked like was a bald penguin. The tuxedo, of course, and an absolutely hairless dome atop a long narrow head. He moved like a penguin, too; little jerky motions like old silent movies before they learned how to get the timing right.

  “You’re not twenty-one,” Leemy said.

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. Somehow I didn’t think another portrait of Alexander Hamilton was going to cut much ice with the man.

  “My fucking dancer drops dead on the fucking stage and the place is going to crawl with fucking cops and I need you like a fucking hole in my head. Out!”

  “But—”

  “Out!” He gra
bbed me by the arm, tugged me toward the door. He wasn’t all that big or strong and at first I stood my ground, and then I remembered that he and I agreed that I should get out of there. At which point I stopped resisting.

  He said, “Joint crawling with cops and all I need is trouble with the fucking S.L.A. about my fucking liquor license, all I fucking need, out, you little prick, and don’t come back, and—”

  I couldn’t have agreed with him more, and I could have walked faster if he’d just let go of my arm. But he didn’t, and I couldn’t have walked fast enough anyway, because we were still maybe a dozen steps from the door when three or four gentlemen in blue uniforms filled the doorway.

  “Oh, shit,” Gus Leemy said.

  The patrolmen mostly stood around and made sure that nobody entered or left the premises. One of them went up on the stage to confirm that Cherry was dead. When he came back down somebody asked if the girl was dead and he refused to commit himself. “We’ll let the medical examiner settle that question,” he said. I guess Dylan was wrong; some people really do need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

  I did manage one feat while the patrolmen stood around waiting for the heavyweights to reach the scene. I found the phone booth and looked in my pocket for a dime. I only had a quarter, and my ingenuity and experience told me not to waste time getting change. I dropped the quarter and dialed my favorite telephone number, and when Wong Fat answered I told him to wake Haig, and he said he couldn’t because Haig hadn’t gone to sleep yet. He put the great man on the phone and I talked a little and listened a little and was off the phone by the time the detectives from Homicide, flanked by a couple of other detectives from Midtown West, came plainclothesing their way through the door.

  The phone booth was not far from the door they entered. I saw them before they saw me, but not very much before. Just long enough for my heart to sink a little. I recognized them right away, but they needed two looks at me to make the connection. They worked in perfect unison, those two homicide cops in the middle, looking simultaneously at me, looking away, then doing a beautifully synchronized double-take.