The Topless Tulip Caper

by Lawrence Block

  Afterward she sat back on her haunches, grinned, wiped one elusive drop from the tip of her chin with the tip of her forefinger, and told me she was glad I had come. She wasn’t the only one. “I like it when you drop by,” she said. “It gets lonely here.”

  “You should get out more.”

  “I guess. The shrink says we’re making progress.”

  “Well, that’s good, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, I’ll, uh, see you.”

  “Take care, Chip.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  Okay.

  I feel I owe you an explanation. You’re probably wondering why the hell that episode was dragged in out of the blue and thrust in front of your eyes. Of course it took place during the time we were working on this case, but lots of things take place that I don’t plague you with. I don’t mention every time I go to the toilet for instance. Which is not to say that seeing Ruthellen is like going to the toilet. Except, come to think of it, it is, sort of.

  Okay.

  When I wrote this book, the Ruthellen bit wasn’t in it. And then I got a call from Joe Elder, who is my editor at Gold Medal.

  “Like the book,” he said. “But there’s a problem.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not enough sex.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sure you can think of something.”

  I argued a lot, but I didn’t get anyplace. “We’re not in business to sell books,” he said. “We’re selling hard-ons. Hard-ons sell books. You need a sex scene fairly early on in the book to hook the reader’s attention and rivet his eye to the page.”

  Well, that’s why the Ruthellen bit is in. I mean, it did happen, so I suppose it’s legitimate. But I’m not really happy with it, and I’d be much happier if Mr. Elder would change his mind and cut it out after all, and—

  Oh, the hell with it. Let’s get back to the story.

  Eight

  SIMON BARCKOVER’S OFFICE was in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway. I went into the lobby and found his name on the board while half the musicians and performers in America walked past me. I rode up to the seventh floor in an elevator I shared with two men carrying saxophones and one swarthy woman toting a caged parrot. I got off and found a door with a frosted glass window labeled Simon BarckoverArtists Representative. There was a buzzer. I pressed it, and a female voice told me to come in.

  A girl with red hair and freckles smiled at me from behind a green metal desk that almost matched her eyes. She asked if she could help me. “My name is Harrison,” I said, “and I work for Leo Haig. I believe Mr. Barckover is expecting me.”

  “Oh, yes. You called earlier.”

  “That’s right.”

  She glanced at the phone on her desk. One of its four buttons was glowing. “He’s on a call right now. Won’t you have a seat?”

  “Thanks but I’ll stand.”

  She took a cigarette from a pack on her desk. “I guess you want to see him about Cherry,” she said. “That was a shock. It was really terrible.”

  “Did you know her? I guess you must have, working in this office.”

  “I’ve only been here a couple months.”

  I looked at her for a moment. “I’ve seen you before,” I said. “You were there last night.”

  “I was working there. Sometimes if I have a free night I do substitute waitress work in some of the clubs that book a lot of acts through Mr. Barckover. Mostly as a favor, but the extra money helps. Some places you get really decent tips.”

  “Do they tip well at Treasure Chest?”

  “They didn’t last night. I’ve only worked there a couple times and actually they never tip well there. They figure they’re being taken, you know, paying such high prices for such rotten drinks, and then there’s a cover charge at the tables, so they take it out on the poor waitress by leaving her next to nothing. Last night most of the people didn’t even pay their checks in the confusion and everything. But I don’t like clubs like Treasure Chest. I just did it last night as a favor to Mr. Barckover.”

  “Is he a good man to work for?”

  Her hesitation answered the question for me. “Well, the pay isn’t great,” she said. “He’s a nice man. He loses his temper a lot but that’s because he’s in such a high-pressure business. And he’s very tolerant. He doesn’t get uptight if I smoke dope or like that, and we have an agreement that I can take off whenever there’s an audition I want to check out.”

  “You’re in show business?”

  “Let’s say I’m going to be in show business. I’m a singer. So far nobody’s in a rush to pay me money to sing, but I’ll make it. Someday you can hear me at the Persian Room of the Plaza.”

  “I’ll take a ringside table.”

  “You’d better make your reservations now. My opening’s going to be sold out months in advance.” The green eyes twinkled. “That’s why I’m working for Mr. Barckover. He may not be the best agent in the business, but you get a real inside view of things working in an office like this. It’s not just making contacts, although that doesn’t hurt. It’s learning how the business works and how to make your own openings.”

  I considered telling her that if her voice was as pretty as the rest of her she had nothing to worry about. But in a job like that she’d probably heard every line in the world, and mine was neither all that original nor all that terrific. While I hunted for a way to revise it, the little light on the phone went off.

  “I’ll tell him you’re here,” she said, and did. “He’ll see you now,” she said. “Right through that door.”

  I went right through that door. Barckover took a bite out of a sandwich and motioned me toward a seat, chewing furiously. He washed it down with a swig of coffee from a styrofoam container, bit a chunk out of a jelly doughnut, swallowed some more coffee, then lit a half-smoked cigar and leaned back in his chair. It was one hell of a change from Haskell Henderson and the alfalfa sprouts.

  So was the conversation. Barckover didn’t have to try hiding his presence at Treasure Chest from me because the police already knew about it, and he had a bonafide business reason for being there. The police had already pumped him dry. He’d agreed to see me because he couldn’t very well refuse to, since Tulip was his client, but this didn’t make him enthusiastic about it. He figured it was a waste of time. Actually more of my time than his got wasted, because he went ahead taking calls during the course of our interview, telling clients that he didn’t have anything for them, telling club owners how sensational his clients were. The interruptions were a nuisance but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  “I been over this with the police five or six times already,” he said. “I was off in the back with this spastic prick from New Jersey. Like I only looked at the stage every ten minutes or so to make sure somebody was on it. You don’t know what this business is like, man. After a few years you get so sick of tits and asses that the only way you can get a hard-on is if your woman wears clothes to bed. I never even saw Cherry take her fall. I heard the commotion and I looked up and I couldn’t see anything by then because she was lying down and out of sight. I didn’t see anybody do anything suspicious. I didn’t even think to look for anything suspicious. I figure she fainted from popping too many pills or else she had a bad heart or something. What was it, something pygmies put on darts?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “Did Cherry take a lot of drugs?”

  “For all I know she never even dropped an aspirin. Just going on generalities. Most of the go-go dancers and the topless-bottomless chicks do uppers. All that moving around and all those geeks gaping at them and it gets to them, and a little dexie straightens everything out and they can prevail, they can maintain, if you dig it. Like Lennie Bruce, baby, you got to be on top of it in order to get it out.”

  I had already been thinking of Lennie Bruce. One line of his in particular. He said there’s nothing sadder than an old hipster.

  I asked what Cherry was like.r />
  “A comer,” he said. “That kid started with nothing. She showed me some pictures of herself taken four, five years ago. Nothing. Big nose, flat in the chest. Not a pig but you’d never look at her twice.”

  “Cherry?”

  He flicked the ash from his cigar. “Plastic surgery” he said. “Her old lady died and left her a couple of K’s, no fortune, just of couple of K’s, and she went and spent the whole bundle putting herself together. New nose, a trim job for the ears, silicone for the tits, a little of this, a little of that. Changed her name from something nobody can pronounce to Cherry Bounce. Great little name. Usually I pick names for them because most of these girls, they aren’t too long in the imagination line. Cherry already had her name picked out when I got ahold of her.”

  “Did you pick out Tulip’s name?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody picks out anything for that one. She’s smart, you got to hand it to her. Smart, well-educated, the whole bit. I’ll tell you something, I think she’s too fucking smart for her own good. With the face and body she’s got she could have a future in this business. But she won’t put out.”

  “I thought you didn’t really have to do that anymore.”

  “Huh?”

  “Put out.”

  He waved the cigar impatiently. “I don’t mean sexual. I mean give out with everything you’ve got. Take the singing lessons, take the dancing lessons, make all the auditions, cultivate the right people. Cherry took the trouble. She put out. Tulip, she’s got so much going for her, and all she wants to do is coast on what she’s got. Pick up the easy bread showing her tits to the visiting firemen and waste all her time with those fucking fish.”

  “Well, that’s her career.”

  “Career?” He looked at me as though I was an ambulatory psychotic. “You call that a career? Siphoning shit out of fish tanks? What’s she gonna make, fifteen K a year running some fucking museum? You call that a career? There’s chicks clearing that much a week in Vegas that haven’t got half the equipment that girl has.”

  “But that’s not what she wants.”

  “This year it’s not what she wants. Five years from now she’ll be Assistant Fish Librarian in East Jesus, Kansas, and that’s when she’ll realize what she wanted all along was a career in show business. And by then it’ll be too late.”

  I turned the conversation back to Cherry and tried to learn more about her personal life. Barckover turned out to be a less than perfect source. At one point he said that an agent was always in the middle, he was the one with the shoulders that everybody cried on, but Cherry evidently either didn’t cry or found other shoulders. He didn’t know much of anything about the men in her life, and in his opinion she had been murdered by some sort of weird pervert who got a thrill out of killing strange girls. “You watch it,” he said. “There’s gonna be a string of hits like this, a Jack the Ripper type killing topless dancers. Probably a religious fanatic.” Evidently he didn’t know that Tulip’s fish had been poisoned, which poked a few holes in the Ripper theory.

  An admirable thing about Cherry, according to Barckover, was that she never got seriously involved with any individual male. “Her career always came first,” he said. “You get chicks who get hung up on one guy, and I get ’em a week in the mountains and they don’t want to leave the guy, so either they pass up a gig or they take it and then they’re lousy because they spend all their time pissing and moaning about being lonely. Not Cherry. She knows the priorities. If she’s playing house and I get her two weeks in Monticello she goes without a second thought. There’s always some dude around to go to bed with, but there aren’t always jobs growing on trees.”

  (He would have been proud of a girl I know named Kim Trelawney. For a while we were almost living together, and she got signed for the ingnue part in a road company version of The Estimable Sailor, and although she may have shed a tear or two, off she went. That had been three months ago, and she was still treading the boards in places like Memphis, and we didn’t bother writing to each other, and by the time she came back I had the feeling we wouldn’t have much to say to each other. It had been a long three months, let me tell you, and maybe that was a contributing factor to the way I reacted to Tulip, but I have to say I’d have probably gone just as bananas over her anyway, to be perfectly honest.)

  I asked him about some of the people on our suspects list, and others who had been around Treasure Chest when Cherry was murdered. He had never heard of Haskell Henderson. He’d met Andrew Mallard while Mallard and Tulip were living together, and he said that in his book Mallard was a total feeb. His word, not mine. He’d been delighted when Tulip and Mallard split up.

  He knew Leonard Danzig by sight and reputation and could not recall having seen him at the club. And he was surprised to know that Danzig had been keeping company with Cherry. “He’s no good,” he said. “He’s trouble.”

  “What does he do for a living?”

  “You hear lots of things,” he said.

  “Would you happen to remember any of them?”

  “A little of this, a little of that. He plays angles, he hangs with some heavies. I don’t know what he does but if it’s honest I’ll spread it on toast and eat it.” He hesitated for a moment. “If he had a beef with a chick, he wouldn’t get fancy with poison darts. I don’t even think he’d kill her. Maybe he’d beat her up. Or with a beautiful girl like Cherry he’d do something like throw acid on her or cut her so it would leave a scar. That’s more his style.”

  I didn’t get a whole lot more than that. If Cherry was having trouble with Helen Tattersall, the downstairs neighbor, Barckover didn’t know about it. He had never met Glenn Flatt, Tulip’s ex-husband, and didn’t know anything about him. He was on nodding terms with Buddy Lippa, Leemy’s bouncer and gate-tender, and said only that Lippa was a former boxer, a good club fighter who did a decent job of keeping order in the joint. He got evasive when I asked about Leemy, and when I probed to find out who really owned the nightclub he made it obvious that he didn’t want to carry that particular ball any further. I asked if either Leemy or Lippa made a practice of making passes at the hired help. He assured me they were both happily married men, which didn’t strike me as an answer to the question I had asked, but I let it go.

  He didn’t know the other waitress or the barmaid, and I didn’t ask him about his own secretary because I figured it would be more fun to ask her myself. I wound up the session with Barckover and went into the outer office and perched on the corner of her desk, notebook in hand. “I’m playing detective,” I said “Mind if I ask a couple of questions?”

  She grinned. “You mean you’re going to grill me? I already told you everything I know.”

  I told her we’d just go over a couple of things, and we did. I didn’t learn much. I found out that the other waitress was named Rita and that was all she knew about her. Jan the barmaid was a regular at Treasure Chest, but my green-eyed friend hadn’t had much contact with her except to order drinks and get change. She hadn’t seen anything suspicious, hadn’t recognized anybody except for Barckover and the people who worked at the club, and she knew nothing about Cherry’s private life.

  “There’s something else,” I said. “How am I going to catch you at the Persian Room if I don’t know your name?”

  She smiled. She didn’t show me as many teeth as Haskell Henderson, but they looked better on her. “It’s Maeve O’Connor,” she said. I made her spell her first name and she did. She also told me it was Irish, but I could have figured that part out by myself. Then she pointed out that she didn’t know my first name, so I supplied it, and then I told her I’d better take down her phone number.

  “Is that what detectives always do?”

  “Not always,” I said.

  “You could reach me through the office.”

  “But what if a case starts to break in the middle of the night and I need to check something with you? Mr. Haig would give me hell if I didn’t have your number.”

  S
he gave it to me and I wrote it down. Then we looked at each other for a minute or two, and I could feel myself beginning to fall in love, which is something I probably do more readily than I should. I would have enjoyed perching on her desk for the rest of the afternoon, but Haig had given me a million things to do and there wasn’t all that much time to do them in. I said I guessed I’d better be going, and she said “Goodbye, Chip,” and I said, “I’ll see you, Maeve,” and that was that.

  I called the advertising agency where Andrew Mallard worked and got a secretary who said that he was away from his desk. I asked when he would be likely to return to his desk and she said she didn’t know. I pressed a little, and it turned out that he hadn’t been at his desk all day, that he in fact had evidently taken the day off. I don’t know why she couldn’t come right out and tell me this straight out, but I guess when you work in advertising you get in the habit of doing things obliquely.

  I tried Mallard at his home number and the line was busy. I looked at my watch and saw that it was almost three and remembered that I hadn’t had anything to eat all day except for a sip of dandelion coffee substitute. I realized that I had to be hungry. I don’t know if this would have occurred to me if I hadn’t happened to look at my watch, but once I did I was starving. I found a luncheonette down the block and had a hamburger and three glasses of milk and a cup of coffee. I decided not to look at my watch again because it might remind me how little sleep I had had and I wanted to be awake when I talked to Mallard. Except that I wasn’t destined to talk to Mallard. I called him after I’d finished my meal and the line was busy again, and I decided it wasn’t the usual sort of busy signal, and I called the operator and asked her to check the line for me. She went into a huddle and came back with the news that the phone was off the hook. (What she actually said was that the instrument’s receiver was disengaged, and it took me a second or two to translate it.) That had been my guess, and I decided Mallard had been up half the night with the police and the other half brooding, and now he was taking the day off and having himself a nap.