Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

“What was it? A heart attack?”

“It was murder.”

“But—”

“There’s no time,” I said. “This must be tied in with the scats and it proves Leo Haig is a lot smarter than I’ll ever be but I already knew that. Listen to me. Are you listening?”

She nodded.

“All right. You and I don’t know each other. No, the barmaid knows we do. Shit. All right.”

“Chip?”

“You don’t know anything about Haig. You don’t mention anything about fish. You don’t even know Cherry was murdered except that’s what people have been saying. Are you a good liar?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Well, do the best you can. Now all I have to do is figure out a way to get the hell out of here.” I looked at the door, and my friend the gorilla was still in place; now that I had taught him not to let anybody out, it was a cinch he wasn’t going to let me out. I tried to figure out something, and while I was standing there like an idiot a man in a tuxedo came along and supplied the one powerful argument that would have whisked me past the gorilla in nothing flat.

“You!”

He was looking at me, and he was pointing at me, but the expression of absolute fury and indignation on the face of a man I had never seen before in my life convinced me that he had someone else in mind. I figured maybe he was a little cockeyed, and I looked over my shoulder to see who it was that he was furious with, but there was nobody there. Then he was standing right in front of me and his finger would have been touching my nose if either the finger or the nose had been half an inch longer.

“You!”

Tulip said, “Mr. Leemy—”

“Shut up,” Leemy said, and my trained memory remembered that one Gus Leemy was the owner of record of Treasure Chest, and it stood to reason, Leemy being in another class entirely from Smith and Jones, that the Leemy with his finger in my face was Gus himself. Tulip said his name again, and he told her brusquely to shut up again, and that inspired exchange gave me a couple of seconds to look him over.

I decided that what he looked like was a bald penguin. The tuxedo, of course, and an absolutely hairless dome atop a long narrow head. He moved like a penguin, too; little jerky motions like old silent movies before they learned how to get the timing right.

“You’re not twenty-one,” Leemy said.

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Somehow I didn’t think another portrait of Alexander Hamilton was going to cut much ice with the man.

“My fucking dancer drops dead on the fucking stage and the place is going to crawl with fucking cops and I need you like a fucking hole in my head. Out!”

“But—”

“Out!” He grabbed me by the arm, tugged me toward the door. He wasn’t all that big or strong and at first I stood my ground, and then I remembered that he and I agreed that I should get out of there. At which point I stopped resisting.

He said, “Joint crawling with cops and all I need is trouble with the fucking S.L.A. about my fucking liquor license, all I fucking need, out, you little prick, and don’t come back, and—”

I couldn’t have agreed with him more, and I could have walked faster if he’d just let go of my arm. But he didn’t, and I couldn’t have walked fast enough anyway, because we were still maybe a dozen steps from the door when three or four gentlemen in blue uniforms filled the doorway.

“Oh, shit,” Gus Leemy said.

The patrolmen mostly stood around and made sure that nobody entered or left the premises. One of them went up on the stage to confirm that Cherry was dead. When he came back down somebody asked if the girl was dead and he refused to commit himself. “We’ll let the medical examiner settle that question,” he said. I guess Dylan was wrong; some people really do need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

I did manage one feat while the patrolmen stood around waiting for the heavyweights to reach the scene. I found the phone booth and looked in my pocket for a dime. I only had a quarter, and my ingenuity and experience told me not to waste time getting change. I dropped the quarter and dialed my favorite telephone number, and when Wong Fat answered I told him to wake Haig, and he said he couldn’t because Haig hadn’t gone to sleep yet. He put the great man on the phone and I talked a little and listened a little and was off the phone by the time the detectives from Homicide, flanked by a couple of other detectives from Midtown West, came plainclothesing their way through the door.

The phone booth was not far from the door they entered. I saw them before they saw me, but not very much before. Just long enough for my heart to sink a little. I recognized them right away, but they needed two looks at me to make the connection. They worked in perfect unison, those two homicide cops in the middle, looking simultaneously at me, looking away, then doing a beautifully synchronized double-take.

“You!” they said. Much as Gus Leemy had said it. And I figured if we were going to stand their trading Gus Leemy lines, I had mine all picked out.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

The one on the left was Detective Vincent Gregorio, a tall and dark and handsome number with one of those twenty-dollar haircuts and a suit you’d never find at Robert Hall. The one on the right was Detective Wallace Seidenwall, and I’d decided some time ago that Gregorio liked having him for a partner for the same reason pretty girls like having ugly girlfriends. Seidenwall’s suits always looked as though someone else had bought them at Robert Hall, then wore them day and night for a year before passing them on to Seidenwall. I never had trouble remembering his name because he was built like the side of a wall.

The first time I met the two of them was when I discovered the body of a girl named Melanie Trevelyan. The second time I met them was when somebody bombed Madam Juana’s whorehouse. That was the memorable day when Haig called them witlings, which was accurate if not diplomatic. The third meeting was in Haig’s office, when he unmasked a murderer and presented him to them on a Sheffield platter. You’d think they might be grateful, but you’d be wrong.

If there were two things Seidenwall and Gregorio hated, I was one of them. Haig was the other.

Five

“IT WAS A Mexican standoff,” I told Leo Haig. “Gregorio wanted to arrest me and Seidenwall wanted to arrest your client. I was hoping they would arrest us both and lock us up in the same cell, but then I figured you’d have Addison Shivers down there with a writ just when Tulip began to realize that it’s hip to be involved with younger men.”

Haig grunted. “There are other things in life beside sex,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “That’s the whole trouble. One of the things there is beside sex is coffee. At the moment I’ll settle for second best. Is there any?”

Haig picked up a little bell and rang it, and before the vibrations quit Wong entered with a couple of mugs full of hot black coffee. He’s extraordinary that way. You hardly ever have to tell him what it is you want.

In this case maybe it wasn’t all that extraordinary. It was six-thirty in the morning and I had been up all night, and while Haig had dozed on the couch waiting for me to turn up he hadn’t had anything you’d be likely to call real sleep. Of course we wanted coffee.

By the time I had finished my cup and rung for a refill, I had brought Haig up to date to the point where the cops walked in. I gave him everything reasonably verbatim and he took me back over various points until he was satisfied.

Then I went through my own interrogation. I had gotten off some good lines and I was careful to repeat them all, but since then I’ve reevaluated them, and while they were nice enough at the time, I don’t think I’m going to inflict them on you. I’m not really all that inclined to play smartass with New York’s Finest, but those two bring out the wiseacre in me and I have trouble controlling myself. To give you an example of the level of repartee, at one point Gregorio tried a trap question, asking me why I’d been jealous of the girl in the first place, and I said Haig had selected her to crossbreed with one of his fish in the hope that half the offspring would be mermaids and the other half would be Esther Williams. And that was one of my better lines, so now you know why you’ll never hear the others.