Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

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 doesn’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.