Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

“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.