CH04 - The Topless Tulip Caper

by Lawrence Block

  Leonard Danzig. Cherry’s boyfriend. She had been dating him for a month or so, although she continued to see other men as well. He got on the list because Tulip couldn’t stand him, describing him charitably as “a kind of a slimy character.” I gather she disliked him because he kept trying to get her into bed, either just with him or with Cherry along for threesies. Tulip was spectacularly uninterested in either prospect. No one seemed to know what Danzig did for a living, but Tulip guessed it was at least somewhat criminal. Cherry had met him at the club. He always seemed to have a lot of money, and if he worked at all he didn’t seem to have any set hours. His feelings toward the fish were unknown, except that he had once remarked that it would “take a hell of a lot of the bastards to make a decent meal.”

  Helen Tattersall. All that Tulip knew about Mrs. Tattersall was that she lived in the apartment immediately below hers and was a pain in the ass, constantly complaining about noise, even when no noise whatsoever was emanating from the apartment. She had on one occasion reported Tulip and Cherry to the police, alleging that the two were running a bordello in their apartment. Tulip wasn’t sure whether the woman actually believed this or was just making a nuisance of herself. “She’s the sort of frustrated old bitch who might poison somebody’s pets just out of meanness,” Tulip said.

  Andrew Mallard. Tulip’s former boyfriend, the one she was living with before she got together with Cherry. He was an advertising account executive, recently divorced, and evidently rather strange. He had moved in with Tulip; then, when they broke up, she had moved out and let him keep the apartment because the idea of actually going out and finding a place of his own gave him anxiety attacks. He still called her occasionally when he was drunk, generally at an hour when he should have known she was sleeping. Now and then he caught her act at Treasure Chest, always tipping heavily in order to get a ringside table, always attending by himself, always staring at her breasts as if hypnotized, and never speaking a word to her. Every once in a while she got flowers delivered backstage with no note enclosed—though never on nights when he was in the audience—and she sort of assumed he was the source. He had liked the fish very much while they lived together, but she figured he was a possible suspect because murdering fish was clearly an insane act, and Andrew Mallard was hardly playing with a full deck himself.

  Gus Leemy. He owned the Treasure Chest. At least he was the owner of record, but Tulip had the impression that the club was a Mafia joint of one sort or another and that Leemy was fronting for the real owners. She wasn’t even sure he knew she had fish and couldn’t imagine why he would have anything against her or them. I think she brought his name up because she didn’t like him.

  So I had those nine names in my notebook, and there was a fourteen-hour period of time during which any of them could have gone to Tulip’s apartment and done something fishy to her fish. Possibly any or all of them could account for their time, but Tulip didn’t know about it. And possibly one of the fourteen million other residents of the New York metropolitan area was the killer. I mean, if you’re going to do something as fundamentally insane as feeding strychnine to tropical fish, they wouldn’t have to be the fish of someone you know, would they? If you’re going to be a lunatic about it, one fish tank is as good as another.

  A little before five Haig leaned back in his chair and put his feet on top of his desk. I’ve tried to break him of this habit but it’s impossible. Tulip and I sat there respectfully and studied the soles of his shoes while the great man searched for meaning in the ceiling.

  Without opening his eyes he said, “Chip.”

  “Sir.”

  “I need your eyes and ears and legs. The scene of the crime must be examined. You will go with Miss Wolinski to her apartment. Miss Wolinski? I assume that will be convenient?”

  Tulip agreed that it would be. She had a dinner date at eight-thirty and a performance at ten o’clock but she was free until then.

  “Satisfactory,” Haig said. He swung his feet down from the desk. “You will visit Miss Wolinski’s apartment. You will be guided by your intelligence and intuition and experience. You will then return here to report.”

  “If that’s all—’“ Tulip said.

  Haig had turned to look at the Rasboras. They’re little pinkish fish with dark triangles on their sides, and Haig has a ten-gallon tank of them directly behind his desk chair at eye level. He’s apt to turn around and study them in the middle of a conversation. This time, though, his attention to the Rasboras was a sign that the conversation was over.

  The hell it was. I said, “I’ll make out a receipt for Miss Wolinski for her retainer.”

  Haig said, “Retainer?”

  Tulip said, “Oh, of course. You’ll be wanting a retainer, won’t you?”

  I don’t know what he’d do without me. I swear I don’t. The trouble is, Haig keeps forgetting that if you’re going to be a detective for a living you ought to do your best to make a living out of it. For most of his life he lived in two ratty rooms in the Bronx, breeding tropical fish and trucking plastic bags around to pet shops, peddling his little babies for a nickel here and a dime there. All the while he read every mystery and detective story ever published, and then his uncle died and left him a fortune, and he bought this house and let Madam Juana keep the lower two floors and set up shop as a detective, which is terrific, no question about it. But his capital isn’t really enough to keep us together, so when we get a case it’s a good idea for us to get money out of it, and here he was going to let Tulip hire us without paying anything.

  “Of course,” Tulip said again, digging in her bag for a checkbook. When she came up with it I uncapped a pen and handed it to her. She started to make out the check, then looked up to ask the amount.

  “Five hundred is standard,” I said.

  Haig almost fainted. I think he would have asked her for fifty bucks and let her talk him down. But the five hundred didn’t phase our client for a second. I guess all she had to be told was that it was standard. She finished making out the check and passed it to me, and I wrote out a receipt on a sheet from my notebook and gave it to Haig for him to sign. He wrote his name with a flourish, as usual. Imagine what he could do if he had more than seven letters to work with.

  “I intend to earn this,” he said, holding the check in his pudgy little hand. “You’ll receive full value for your money, Miss Wolinski. In a sense, you might say your troubles are over.”

  And ours are just beginning, I thought. But then Tulip got to her feet, sort of uncoiling from her chair like a trained cobra responding to a flute, and I decided that any case that forced me to go to her apartment with her couldn’t possibly be all bad.

  “He’s quite a man,” Tulip said. “It must be very inspiring to work for someone like Leo Haig.”

  “It’s all of that,” I agreed. “And do I call you Miss Wolinski or Miss Willing?”

  “Call me Tulip. And may I call you Chip?”

  Call me darling, I thought. “Sure,” I said. “Call me Chip.”

  “What’s that a nickname for?”

  “It’s the only name I’ve got,” I said, which is certainly true now. I had started life as Leigh Harvey Harrison, both Leigh and Harvey being proper names in my less-than-proper family, but in the fall of ’63 my parents decided that wouldn’t do at all, and I’ve been Chip ever since. I understand there are a lot of Jews named Arthur who were known to the world as Adolph until sometime in the ’30s.

  We talked a little more about Haig, and then the cab dropped us at her building, a high-rise on the corner of 54th and Eighth. The lobby reminded you a little of an airline terminal. “It’s not exactly overflowing with warmth and charm,” Tulip said. “It’s sort of sterile, isn’t it? Before I moved here I lived in a brownstone in the Village. I really liked that apartment and I would have kept it except it would have meant keeping Andrew, too. This place has all the character of an office building, but on the other hand the elevators are fast and there’s plenty of closet sp
ace and there aren’t any cockroaches. My other place was crawling with them, and of course I couldn’t spray because of the fish.”

  “Couldn’t you try trapping them and feeding them to the fish?”

  “Is that what Leo Haig does?”

  “No, it just occurred to me. What we do, Wong Fat puts some kind of crystals in the corners of the kitchen, and the roaches eat it and die. They come from miles around to do themselves in. I don’t know what Wong does with them. I suppose he throws them out.” I thought for a moment. “I hope he throws them out.”

  On the elevator she told me another bad feature of the building. “There are prostitutes living here,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind if they just lived here. They also work here, and you can’t imagine what that’s like.”

  I could imagine.

  “There are these men coming and going all the time,” she said, which was probably true in more ways than she meant. “And they see a girl in the building, any girl, and they take it for granted that you’re in the business yourself. It’s very unpleasant.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “As if I didn’t get enough of that aggravation at the dub. Just because a girl displays her body men tend to assume that it’s for sale. I mean, I don’t kid myself, Chip. Cherry thinks she’s an artist, she takes singing lessons and dancing lessons, the whole bit. She’s waiting to be discovered. I think she’s a little bit whacky. Men don’t come to watch me because I’m such a sensational dancer. I’m a pretty rotten dancer, as a matter of fact. They come to see me and they pay two dollars a drink for watered rotgut because they enjoy looking at my tits.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s all it is, really. Tits.”

  “Uh.”

  “If it weren’t for my tits,” she said, “I’d be teaching high school biology.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that one, but as it turned out I didn’t have to because we had reached her door and she was fishing in her purse for the key. She got it out, then rang the bell. “In case Cherry’s home,” she explained. We stood around for a while, long enough for her to conclude that Cherry wasn’t home, and then she opened the door and walked inside. I didn’t follow her, and she asked me what I was waiting out in the hall for.

  “Just a minute,” I said. I dropped to one knee and examined the lock. There were two cylinders but one was just a blind to confuse burglars. The other was a Rabson, a good one, and I couldn’t find any scratches on the cylinder or on the bolt. That didn’t necessarily mean the killer had had a key; if he had a good set of picks and knew how to use them he could open the lock without leaving evidence behind. “Of the nine people you mentioned before,” I said, “how many have keys?”

  “Oh. He got in with a key?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “So you want to know who has keys?”

  I got out my notebook and went through the nine of them. Cherry had a key, of course, it being her apartment. Glenn Flatt, the ex-husband, had been to the apartment a few times but had never been given a key. Haskell Henderson, the current boyfriend, had a key. Mrs. Haskell Henderson hadn’t been given one, but she could have swiped or duplicated her husband’s, assuming she knew anything about it. Leonard Danzig had a key, as did any number of past and present boyfriends of Cherry’s. Helen Tattersall, the neighbor, didn’t, but there was always the possibility that she had access to the building’s master key. There was a chainbolt on the inside of the door, but when nobody was home it wasn’t locked and the master key would open the other lock.

  Andrew Mallard did not have a key and had never been to the apartment. Maybe Tulip was afraid that if she ever let him in she would have to move again. Simon Barckover might well have a key, since Cheny gave them out rather indiscriminately, but Tulip wasn’t sure one way or the other. And Gus Leemy probably didn’t have a key.

  “But anybody could have one easily enough,” Tulip said. “The thing about Cherry, she tends to misplace things. Especially keys. I think she’s borrowed my key four times in the past five months to have duplicates made, and she always has several made at a time. Anyone could have borrowed her key to have a duplicate made, and if he didn’t put it back when he was done she would just assume she lost it again. It’s sort of a nuisance.”

  “It must be.”

  “And then sometimes she sets the latch and doesn’t bother taking a key, and it’s even possible that she came back here Friday night to change or something and left the door unlocked, and then came back again and locked it. So anybody at all could have walked in. Just some ordinary prowler, trying doors and finding this one unlocked.”

  “Just some ordinary prowler looking to find an open apartment with a fish tank he could pour strychnine into?”

  “Oh.”

  “I think we can rule out the Ordinary Prowler theory.”

  “I guess you’re right. I’m not thinking very clearly.” She dropped into a chair, then bounced back up again. And bounced is precisely the word to fit the act. She bounced, and her breasts bounced, and I’d just about reached the point where I was able to look at her without being very close to drooling, and that little bounce she did put me right back at square one again.

  “I’m a terrible hostess,” she said. “I didn’t offer you a drink. You’ll have a drink, won’t you?”

  “If you’re having one.”

  “I am, but what does that have to do with it? What would you like?”

  I tried not to look at the front of her tee-shirt “I’ll have a glass of milk,” I said.

  “Gee, I don’t think we’ve got any.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I don’t even like milk.”

  “Then why did you ask for it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The words just came out that way. I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

  “Great. I’m having bourbon and yogurt. Do you want yours on the rocks or straight up?”

  “I guess on the rocks. What’s so funny?”

  But she didn’t answer. She was too busy laughing. Most women tend to giggle, which can be pleasant enough, but Tulip put her head back and gave out with a full-scale belly laugh, and it really sounded great. While she stood there laughing her head off I rewound some mental recording tape and played back the conversation, and I said, “Oh.”

  “Bourbon and yogurt!”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “On the rocks!”

  She actually slapped her thigh. You hear about people I doing that but I didn’t think anybody really did. She laughed her head off and slapped her thigh.

  “I guess I got distracted,” I said.

  “A glass of milk!”

  “Look, Miss Wolinski—”

  “Oh, Chip, I’m sorry.” She came to me and put her hand on my arm. I didn’t want to react because I wasn’t feeling sexy, I was feeling mad, but what I wanted didn’t have very much to do with it. She put her hand on my arm, and it was as if I’d stuck my big toe into an electrical outlet.

  “I was just teasing you a little,” she said.

  “I hope you never tease me a lot. I don’t think I could handle it.”

  “How about a beer?”

  “Great.”

  I told her I’d like to look around the apartment while she poured the beer. She said that was fine. There was the living room, fairly good sized, and there were two small bedrooms, each furnished with a platform bed and a night table and a chest of drawers. The first bedroom I entered looked like an ad for disaster insurance. The bed was unmade, assuming it had ever been made to begin with, and there was so much underwear scattered around that it was hard to find the floor. I sort of hoped that was Cherry’s bedroom because I didn’t want to learn that our client was that much of a slob. When I looked in the other bedroom I established that it was Tulip’s. It was immaculate, and there was a fish tank in it.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and looked in the tank. There was a glass divider in the middle and an African Gourami
on each side of it.

  “Here’s your beer,” she said from the doorway. “Hey, did anything happen to those guys?”

  There was real alarm in her voice. “They’re fine,” I said. “What species are they? I mean I know they’re Ctenapoma but I don’t recognize the species.”

  Ctenapoma fasciolatum. I don’t suppose he’s started building a bubble nest, has he?” She came over and looked over my shoulder. “He hasn’t, darn it. That’s the third female I’ve had in there with him. He killed the other two. I used the divider when I put the second female in, and I waited until he had a nest built, and I figured that was a clear signal that he was madly and passionately in love, so I lifted out the divider and I the little bastard charged right at her and killed her.” She sat down on the bed next to me and gave me a glass of beer. I took a long drink of it. “So I don’t really I know what to do,” she went on. “This time he’s not even building a nest. He just ignores the poor old girl completely. And you can see she’s ready to spawn, I She’s positively bursting with eggs, the little angel must be doing something wrong.”

  “Mr. Haig might be able to tell you.”

  “Has he bred fasciolatum?”

  “No, but he’s had results with some of the other Ctenapoma species. He has some secrets.”

  “Do you think he’d tell me?”

  “If you told him how you managed the scats.”

  She grinned, then suddenly lost the grin when she remembered what had happened to the scats. “I didn’t even show you that tank,” she said. “Or did you find it yourself? It’s in the living room.”

  I hadn’t noticed it on my way through, so the two of us went back to look at it. There wasn’t really a hell of a lot to look at. When you’ve seen one aquarium you’ve seen them all, when all they contain is water. This particular water may have had enough strychnine in it to kill a lot of people, but it certainly looked innocuous enough.