Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

“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.

Afterward she sat back on her haunches, grinned, wiped one elusive drop from the tip of her chin with the tip of her forefinger, and told me she was glad I had come. She wasn’t the only one. “I like it when you drop by,” she said. “It gets lonely here.”

“You should get out more.”

“I guess. The shrink says we’re making progress.”

“Well, that’s good, I guess.”

“I guess.”

“Well, I’ll, uh, see you.”

“Take care, Chip.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Okay.

I feel I owe you an explanation. You’re probably wondering why the hell that episode was dragged in out of the blue and thrust in front of your eyes. Of course it took place during the time we were working on this case, but lots of things take place that I don’t plague you with. I don’t mention every time I go to the toilet for instance. Which is not to say that seeing Ruthellen is like going to the toilet. Except, come to think of it, it is, sort of.

Okay.

When I wrote this book, the Ruthellen bit wasn’t in it. And then I got a call from Joe Elder, who is my editor at Gold Medal.

“Like the book,” he said. “But there’s a problem.”

“Oh.”

“Not enough sex.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sure you can think of something.”

I argued a lot, but I didn’t get anyplace. “We’re not in business to sell books,” he said. “We’re selling hard-ons. Hard-ons sell books. You need a sex scene fairly early on in the book to hook the reader’s attention and rivet his eye to the page.”

Well, that’s why the Ruthellen bit is in. I mean, it did happen, so I suppose it’s legitimate. But I’m not really happy with it, and I’d be much happier if Mr. Elder would change his mind and cut it out after all, and—

Oh, the hell with it. Let’s get back to the story.

Eight

SIMON BARCKOVER’S OFFICE was in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway. I went into the lobby and found his name on the board while half the musicians and performers in America walked past me. I rode up to the seventh floor in an elevator I shared with two men carrying saxophones and one swarthy woman toting a caged parrot. I got off and found a door with a frosted glass window labeled Simon BarckoverArtists Representative . There was a buzzer. I pressed it, and a female voice told me to come in.

A girl with red hair and freckles smiled at me from behind a green metal desk that almost matched her eyes. She asked if she could help me. “My name is Harrison,” I said, “and I work for Leo Haig. I believe Mr. Barckover is expecting me.”

“Oh, yes. You called earlier.”

“That’s right.”

She glanced at the phone on her desk. One of its four buttons was glowing. “He’s on a call right now. Won’t you have a seat?”

“Thanks but I’ll stand.”

She took a cigarette from a pack on her desk. “I guess you want to see him about Cherry,” she said. “That was a shock. It was really terrible.”

“Did you know her? I guess you must have, working in this office.”

“I’ve only been here a couple months.”

I looked at her for a moment. “I’ve seen you before,” I said. “You were there last night.”

“I was working there. Sometimes if I have a free night I do substitute waitress work in some of the clubs that book a lot of acts through Mr. Barckover. Mostly as a favor, but the extra money helps. Some places you get really decent tips.”

“Do they tip well at Treasure Chest?”

“They didn’t last night. I’ve only worked there a couple times and actually they never tip well there. They figure they’re being taken, you know, paying such high prices for such rotten drinks, and then there’s a cover charge at the tables, so they take it out on the poor waitress by leaving her next to nothing. Last night most of the people didn’t even pay their checks in the confusion and everything. But I don’t like clubs like Treasure Chest. I just did it last night as a favor to Mr. Barckover.”

“Is he a good man to work for?”

Her hesitation answered the question for me. “Well, the pay isn’t great,” she said. “He’s a nice man. He loses his temper a lot but that’s because he’s in such a high-pressure business. And he’s very tolerant. He doesn’t get uptight if I smoke dope or like that, and we have an agreement that I can take off whenever there’s an audition I want to check out.”

“You’re in show business?”

“Let’s say I’m going to be in show business. I’m a singer. So far nobody’s in a rush to pay me money to sing, but I’ll make it. Someday you can hear me at the Persian Room of the Plaza.”

“I’ll take a ringside table.”

“You’d better make your reservations now. My opening’s going to be sold out months in advance.” The green eyes twinkled. “That’s why I’m working for Mr. Barckover. He may not be the best agent in the business, but you get a real inside view of things working in an office like this. It’s not just making contacts, although that doesn’t hurt. It’s learning how the business works and how to make your own openings.”

I considered telling her that if her voice was as pretty as the rest of her she had nothing to worry about. But in a job like that she’d probably heard every line in the world, and mine was neither all that original nor all that terrific. While I hunted for a way to revise it, the little light on the phone went off.

“I’ll tell him you’re here,” she said, and did. “He’ll see you now,” she said. “Right through that door.”

I went right through that door. Barckover took a bite out of a sandwich and motioned me toward a seat, chewing furiously. He washed it down with a swig of coffee from a styrofoam container, bit a chunk out of a jelly doughnut, swallowed some more coffee, then lit a half-smoked cigar and leaned back in his chair. It was one hell of a change from Haskell Henderson and the alfalfa sprouts.

So was the conversation. Barckover didn’t have to try hiding his presence at Treasure Chest from me because the police already knew about it, and he had a bonafide business reason for being there. The police had already pumped him dry. He’d agreed to see me because he couldn’t very well refuse to, since Tulip was his client, but this didn’t make him enthusiastic about it. He figured it was a waste of time. Actually more of my time than his got wasted, because he went ahead taking calls during the course of our interview, telling clients that he didn’t have anything for them, telling club owners how sensational his clients were. The interruptions were a nuisance but there wasn’t much I could do about it.