The Topless Tulip Caper

by Lawrence Block

  While he talked I looked at him. I didn’t see anything marvelous, but the fact that he was Tulip’s current boyfriend probably prejudiced me against him. He was maybe thirty-five, and he had his hair combed to hide the fact that his hairline was ebbing, and he had a scraggly little goatee to hide the fact that he didn’t have much of a chin. He was wearing white jeans and a tee-shirt with “Doctor Ecology” in white letters on a blue background. All the employees wore tee-shirts like that.

  He finished his conversation, told the person at the other end of the line to stay healthy, and scuttled out from behind the desk. He thrust out his hand, which I shook, and he gave me a smile designed to show me what great shape his teeth were in.

  “Well now,” he said. “Haskell Henderson. What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Harrison,” I said, “and I work for Leo Haig.”

  “Leo Haig. Leo Haig. Let me see. Dew-Bright Farms? Over in Jersey? I’ve heard good things about your vegetables.”

  “Leo Haig the detective,” I said.

  “Detective?”

  I nodded. “Mr. Haig is working for Tulip Willing. Or Thelma Wolinski.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Why would Tulip need a detective? She’s not jealous. Wait a minute. Just wait a minute now. You’re not working for Tulip.”

  “Mr. Henderson—”

  “You’re working for my wife,” he said, pointing his finger at me. At least it didn’t come as close to my me as Gus Leemy’s finger. “You’re working for my wife,” he said again. “Well, get this straight, fella. I don’t know any Tulip Willing, or whatever you said ta name was, whoever she may be, and—”

  “Shut up.”

  I don’t know why I said that. As far as that goes, I don’t know why it worked. Maybe nobody had ever told Haskell Henderson to shut up before, and maybe he didn’t know how to relate to it. He opened his mouth, and he closed it, and he stared at me.

  I said, “Cherry Bounce was murdered last night.”

  “Oh, Christ. Yeah, I heard about that. Somebody killed her in the middle of her act. They get the guy yet?”

  “They made an arrest. But they didn’t get the killer and the person they got isn’t a guy. It’s Tulip.”

  “They arrested Tulip? Jesus, that’s ridiculous. I don’t get it.”

  “Well, that’s why Tulip hired a detective,” I said “She doesn’t get it either, and she’s not crazy about it. I want to ask you some questions.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re Tulip’s boyfriend, and because—”

  “Whoa!” He displayed his teeth again and the light glinted on them. “Tulip’s boyfriend? You gotta be kidding, fella. I’m a happily married man. Oh, I see Tulip from time to time, no question about that. When a man keeps himself in good physical shape he’s got all this energy, he has to find an outlet for it. But Tulip’s just one of the girls I see from time to time. It’s nothing heavy, you understand? Just a friend, that’s all. A casual friend with whom I have an enjoyable physical relationship. You don’t want to make a whole big deal out of it.”

  What I wanted to do was play a tape of this speech for Tulip. Why was she wasting her time on this playboy when I was available? I said, “Look, your wife didn’t send me. Honest.”

  “So?”

  “So don’t make speeches about how you relate to Tulip like a sister. That’s not the point. You’re her friend, and you were at the Treasure Chest last night, and—”

  “The hell I was!”

  I did my best to look confused. I even scratched my head, mainly because I’ve seen so many people do it when they’re confused, especially in movies. The only time I normally scratch my head is when it itches. That’s funny,” I said. “According to the information we have, you were at Treasure Chest until just before fee time of the murder.”

  “Well, that’s bullshit,” he said. He reached into a jar on his desk and stuffed a handful of things into his mouth. They looked like newly hatched fish, little spherical bodies and long stringy tails. (I found out later that they were alfalfa sprouts.) He munched them and said, “I don’t know where the hell you heard that. Where did you hear it, anyway?”

  “You got me. Mr. Haig said that was his information, but I don’t know who told him. Where were you last night, then? Because when I tell Mr. Haig his information was wrong, he’ll want to know where you were.”

  He told me what I could tell Haig to do. It was something I’ve often wanted to tell Haig to do, as a matter of fact. “I don’t have to account for my movements to Leo Haig,” he said. “That’s for damn sure.”

  “You don’t have to,” I agreed. “But, see, the police don’t really know anything about you, and if Mr. Haig doesn’t have any other way of finding out where you were, he’ll let them know about you and let them ask you the same question. If Haig is satisfied, he wouldn’t have any reason to mention your name to the police. After all, they’re not his clients. Tulip is his client.”

  I watched his eyes while I delivered this little set piece. There was a moment when he contemplated a show of righteous indignation, but then his eyes shifted and I could tell he knew it wouldn’t wash. “Oh, the hell with it,” he said. “I have nothing to hide. As a matter of fact, I was home last night. I was watching television. Do you want to know what programs I saw?”

  “Not particularly, but maybe the Neilson people would be interested. Well, that’s no problem, then. You were home watching television so that lets you off the hook.”

  “What hook? You don’t suspect me of killing Cherry, do you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “How could you? You were home watching television.”

  “Right.”

  I started toward the door, then turned around. “While I’m here,” I said, “could you tell me a little about Tulip and Cherry? There’s a lot I don’t know, and since I know you’re not a suspect I would be able to rely on what you tell me. It won’t take too much of your time.”

  He wasn’t tickled with the idea but he liked the notion of not being a suspect. I asked him a lot of questions and he answered them and I made some notes in my notebook. His chief slant on both of the girls was nutritional. Tulip ate a lot of garbage, he said. Nature had given her a spectacular physique and she was taking a chance of ruining it because she actually ate meat and fruit that had been sprayed and a lot of other no-nos. He had tried to interest her in nutrition but so far it hadn’t taken. Cherry, on the other hand, was far more open to new ideas. The impression I got was that he liked Cherry more than he liked Tulip, probably because she was dumb enough to pay attention to him, but he didn’t like having Cherry around that much because when he stole over there for an afternoon all he really wanted to do was crawl into the feathers with Tulip, who turned him on something wonderful.

  No, he didn’t know anyone who would want to kill Cherry. No, he didn’t know anyone who had anything against Tulip, either. I slipped in an oblique reference to Tulip’s fish and he didn’t seem to have strong feelings about them one way or the other. Instead he turned them into nutritional propaganda.

  “She knows nutrition is the secret of conditioning,” he said. “That’s how she gets the breeding results she does. Plenty of live foods. Everything raw. Nothing cooked. She even knows to mix kelp and wheat germ into their formula. My God, they eat a better diet than she does! If she ate what she gives the fish, she’d be in fantastic shape.”

  If she were in any better shape, I thought, she’d be capable of turning on statues. I was beginning to understand why Tulip had offered me a bourbon and yogurt. It was probably Haskell Henderson’s favorite cocktail.

  “I guess that’s it,” I said finally. “Thanks very much for your cooperation, and I’m glad to know you were home watching television last night. That’s one name off the list.”

  “Well, it’s not the kind of list I’d want to be on.”

  “I don’t blame you.” I gave him my no. 3 warm smile. “Mr. Haig will just ring up your wife an
d confirm your story, and then we’ll be all set.”

  I would probably respect myself a lot more if I didn’t get such a kick out of doing things like that. I mean, I couldn’t feature old Haskell as the killer. If he wanted to do somebody in he’d probably poison them with refined sugar and synthetic vitamins, not strychnine or curare. But we still had to know what he was doing last night, and anybody who’d believe the television story has probably already bought the Brooklyn Bridge several times over.

  It was fun to watch him. He made the kind of noise in his throat that you make when you get a shirt back from the laundry and button the collar and find out it wasn’t Sanforized. Then he took six deep breaths and said, very very quietly, “You can’t call my wife.”

  “Why not?” I grinned. “Oh, sure. You don’t want her to know anything about Tulip, right?”

  “That’s right. She probably suspects I...uh . . . see other women. But to have it thrown in her face, and the fact that a girl I know is peripherally involved in a murder case—”

  “You don’t have a thing to worry about.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Not a thing. Mr. Haig is very discreet. The way we’ll do it, see, is we’ll call up and pretend we’re a television survey. Ask her what programs she was watching last night. Then we’ll ask if anyone else in her family was also watching television, and she’ll say you were, and—”

  “She won’t say that.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wasn’t actually watching television. I was in the other room, you see, so she’ll say she was the only one watching the set, and—”

  “We’ll ask if other family members were home but weren’t watching. Mr. Haig knows all the angles, Mr. Henderson.”

  “Uh.”

  I put a little steel into my voice. Or maybe it was brass. “All the angles,” I said. “Uh—”

  “Where does your wife think you were last night?”

  He went for the alfalfa sprouts like a drunk for a drink. He munched and shuddered. “Meeting with the owner of a rival store to discuss a possible merger.”

  “That’s a pretty good line. I don’t suppose you can use it too often but it has a nice ring to it. What time did you get to Treasure Chest and what time did you leave?”

  “I wasn’t there!”

  “Where were you? And don’t tell me you were with one of the other girls with whom you have a warm physical relationship and you can’t drag her name into it because she’s respectable. Don’t even try that one on.”

  He met my eyes. “Jesus,” he said. “You’re just a kid.”

  “I’ve had a hard life. What did you do last night?”

  “I went to a movie.”

  “All by yourself, of course.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  I had the notebook open. “What movie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I don’t know the name of it. It was a pornographic movie, one of those, you know, one of those X-rated pictures. I don’t remember the title and I can’t tell you the plot because it didn’t have one. They never have a plot. And of course I went to it alone because who goes to those things with somebody? Shit. I thought you believed me about watching television.” He got another hit from the jar of sprouts. “I guess I don’t have much of an alibi,” he said miserably. “Do I?”

  Now the next thing that happened is something I never bothered to recount to Haig. I hadn’t planned to recount it to you, either, and if you want to skip right on ahead to the beginning of the next chapter, I wouldn’t blame you a bit. The following sequence has nothing whatsoever to do with the annihilation of Tulip’s fish or the murder of Tulip’s roommate, not so far as I can see. Of course if you’re into cosmic tides and karmic things and like that, and if you can grok the concept that all things are intimately bound up in one another, then maybe you can justify including the following in this book. I can’t, but I don’t have much choice in the matter.

  What happened was this: I left Haskell Henderson at Doctor Ecology at Lexington and 38th, and I decided to head over to Simon Barckover’s office in the Brill Building. But in the meantime I remembered that a friend of mine lived on 37th Street between Third and Second, which wasn’t all that far out of my way, and I remembered that I hadn’t seen her in a long time, and I remembered what it had been like the last time I had seen her.

  So I went over there.

  On the way I stopped at a florist’s and bought a dollar’s worth of flowers. I don’t know what kind of flowers they were. (I don’t think it matters.) I carried them for a block and remembered that I was going to see Ruthellen, and there was just no way I could walk in there carrying flowers. I didn’t really know what to do with them. I mean, you have to be pretty much of a callous clod to stuff a fresh bouquet of flowers into a trash can. I stood there feeling slightly stupid, and then I saw one of the oldest ladies in the world walking one of the oldest dachshunds in the world, and I gave her the flowers. (The lady, not the dachshund.) I walked quickly on while she was still instructing God to bless me.

  I couldn’t take flowers to Ruthellen because that wasn’t the kind of relationship we had. Her problem, which she had laid out for me early on, is that she can’t respond at all to people who are nice to her. She’s not into whips and chains or anything, but she suffers from what her shrink calls “low estimate of self,” and thus she’s only turned on by people who despise her. I don’t despise her, but I’m willing to pretend to, and it’s not hard for me to be aloof and never call her and just drop in on her now and then because, to tell you the truth, she doesn’t do all that terribly much for me and I really don’t want to get very heavily involved with anybody quite as sick as she is. So maybe I do despise her, come to think of it, and maybe that’s why she enjoys seeing me.

  (Not that it matters. None of this matters at all. That’s the whole point.)

  I rang her bell. Her voice over the intercom asked who it was. “Chip,” I snapped. She asked again. “Chip Harrison,” I snarled. She buzzed and I opened the door and climbed two flights of stairs.

  She was waiting in the doorway of her apartment. She’s about twenty-five, maybe a little older, with a surprisingly good complexion considering that she hardly ever leaves her apartment during daylight hours except for her weekly visit to the shrink. She keeps her shades drawn day and night. She has this thing about daylight. She and the shrink are working on it, she’s told me. I don’t think they’re making much progress, either of them.

  “Haven’t seen you in ages,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Been busy.”

  “Come on in. Can I get you something? A drink?”

  “Haven’t got time,” I said. I sort of swaggered into her apartment and sat down in the comfortable chair. (There’s only one.) Ruthellen sat on the couch in a nest of pillows and lit a cigarette.

  “Put it out,” I said.

  “The cigarette?”

  “I don’t like the smell.”

  “All right,” she said, and put it out. One of the reasons I see her as infrequently as I do is that I don’t really like to be a total bastard with a woman. And what I especially don’t like is that I can occasionally get into it, and that’s a little scary, if you stop to think about it.

  (Not that any of this has anything to do with Tulip and her fish and her roommate.)

  “Well,” she said. “So what’s new?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “You don’t feel like talking?”

  “No.”

  “That’s cool. We’ll just sort of sit around and relax. Sure I can’t get you anything?”

  I grunted. It was a grunt Haig would have been proud of. I sat back and looked at Ruthellen, who, while not the best-looking woman in the world, was by no means the worst. She’s tall, about five-eight or so, and very thin, but not so much so that you’d mistake her for Twiggy. Her hair is a dirty blond. Literally, I’m afraid; she doesn’t wash it too often. She does
n’t do much of anything, really, which is another of the things she and the shrink are supposed to be working on. What she does is sit in her apartment, live on things like Rice Krispies and candy bars—you wouldn’t believe how little she and Haskell Henderson would have in common—and cash the monthly check from her father in Grosse Pointe. The check pays for the rent and the Rice Krispies and the candy bars and the shrink, and since that’s about all she has to do in life, that’s about all she does.

  “Chip?”

  I looked at her.

  “Would you like me to do anything?”

  “Take your clothes off.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I could have said Take your robe off because a robe was all she was wearing. She took it off and put it on the couch. Then she turned to face me, her hands at her sides, and stood still as if offering her body to me for inspection. Her small breasts were flushed, the nipples erect. She was excited already. So was I, in an undemanding sort of a way, but I didn’t let it show. I had to go on being Mr. Casual because that was what was turning her on. “Chip—”

  “You could go down on me,” I suggested.

  “Okay. Do you want to come to bed?”

  “Right here’s good. You could like kneel on the floor.”

  “Okay.”

  And she did. I sat there, Mr. Cool, while she knelt in front of me and unzipped my zipper and, like Jack Horner, put in her hand and pulled out a gland. “Oh, he’s so strong and beautiful,” she said, talking to it. “Oh, I love him so. Oh, I want to eat him up.”

  And she did.

  It’s all we ever do. And it’s all according to the same ritual—she always invites me to bed and I always tell her to kneel in front of me like a servant girl, and she always does, and I’ll tell you something. Maybe the repertoire is limited, but she certainly plays that one piece perfectly. She doesn’t do all that much, Ruthellen, but what she does she does just fine.