Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

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.

“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.