Lawrence Block: The Topless Tulip Caper

“Jesus Christ,” he said. He may or may not have been talking to me. He wasn’t looking at me, but I don’t think he’d have bothered looking at me if I had had a live chicken perched on my shoulder. Nothing was going to make him take his eyes off Tulip.

“Jesus,” he said again, reverently. “Never saw anything like that. Longest legs I ever seen in my life. Biggest tits I ever seen in my life. Jesus Christ on wheels.”

The barmaid came over. A record ended and another began without interruption and Tulip went on doing creative things with her body. The barmaid wasn’t a beast herself, a slim redhead wearing black fishnet tights and a black body stocking. She had a heart-shaped face and almond eyes, and I got the feeling that she’d spent her last incarnation as a cat. I started to think of all the different ways I could rub her to make her purr, but she was shifting her feet impatiently, and I decided that my heart (among other parts of me) already belonged to Tulip. I didn’t want to spread myself too thin.

“Bottle of beer,” I said.

I probably would have preferred something like whiskey and water but Tulip had warned me against it. “They make all the whiskey in New Jersey,” she had said, “and it all comes out tasting like something you use to take the old finish off furniture, and then they water it, and then they serve it in shot glasses with false bottoms, and then they charge two dollars a drink for it.” So I ordered beer, which came straight from the brewery in a nice hygienic bottle. It also cost two dollars a copy, which is a little high for beer, but it was a business expense if there ever was one so I didn’t mind.

“Just look at that bush,” my companion said. “Soft and blond and gorgeous. I wonder is she gonna do a spread.”

I was rather hoping she wasn’t. I was feeling rather weird, if you want to know. On the one hand Tulip was turning me on with her dancing and all, and on the other hand I was a little upset about the fact that this was someone whom I knew personally and professionally, and whom I sort of wanted to know a lot better in the future, and here she was not only turning me on but also turning on a whole roomful of creeps, including this particular creep next to me.

“Some clubs they come right up on the bar,” the creep said. He must have been about forty-five, and he had a pencil-line moustache that was really pretty offensive. I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring. “Right up on the bar,” he went on, and I still didn’t know if he was talking to himself or to me or to the man on the other side of him. “Right up on the bar,” he said again, “and you give ’em a tip, you slip ’em a buck, and they squat down so you can eat ’em. Go right down the line and everybody who wants to slip ’em a buck and goes ahead and has theirselves a taste.”

I thought seriously about hitting him. Half-seriously, anyway. I’m not particularly good at hitting people, and also he couldn’t possibly know that he was talking about the girl I fully intended to be in love with.

“Love to eat this one,” he said. “Start at her toes and go clear to her nose. Then go back down again.”

He went on like this. He got into some rather clinical anatomical detail and I gave some further thought to hitting him. Or I could do something less extreme. I could tip my beer into his lap, for example.

It was about that time that Tulip noticed I was there. You might have thought she would have spotted me right off, but you have to remember that she was up on an elevated platform with a bright spotlight in her eyes, and that the rest of the room was dark. Also she was off to the side so that I was not standing directly in front of her. But she did notice me now, and for a second I thought she was going to blush a little, but I guess when you do this sort of thing five nights out of seven you lose the capacity to blush, because instead she just flashed me a little half-smile and tipped me a wink and went on dancing.

This time the creep did turn to me. “See that?” he said. “I’ll be a son of a bitch. The cunt is crazy about me.”

“Huh?”

“She winked at me,” he said. “She smiled at me. Some of these broads, they wink at everybody, but that’s the first since she came on and she was smiling straight at me. What do you bet she comes over here after her number’s done? Man, I’m gonna get lucky tonight. I can feel it.”

The thing is, I happened to know that she would come over after her number. This wasn’t standard; one of the good things about the Treasure Chest, from the dancers’ point of view, was that you didn’t have to work the bar hustling drinks between numbers. A lot of the clubs worked that way but not Treasure Chest, which was one of the reasons Tulip and her roommate Cherry were willing to work there. But Tulip would come over to meet me because we had arranged it that way, and the last thing I wanted was for her to be confronted by this idiot who was convinced she was crazy about him.

I said, “It was me she smiled at.”

His mouth spread in an unpleasant grin. “You? You gotta be kidding.”

“She was smiling at me.”

“A young punk like you? Don’t make me laugh.”

“She’s my sister,” I said.

The grin went away, reversing itself in slow motion.

“My sister,” I said again, “and I don’t much care for the way you were talking about her.”

“Listen,” he said, “don’t get me wrong. A person, you know, a person’ll make remarks—”

“What I was thinking,” I said, “is this. I was thinking about taking my knife out of my pocket and cutting you a little. Just a little bit.”

“Listen,” he said. He got off his stool and edged away from the bar. “Listen,” he said, “the last thing I want is trouble.”

“Maybe you ought to go home,” I said.

“Jesus,” he said. He headed for the door but he went most of the way walking backward so that he could keep his eyes on me and make sure my hand didn’t come out of my pocket. It’s awkward walking like that, and he kept stumbling but not quite falling down, and at the door he turned and fled.

I let out my breath and took my hand out of my pocket. I had been holding a knife in it, as a matter of fact. The knife is attached to my key chain. It’s an inch long, and it has a half-inch blade. It takes about a minute to get the thing open, and I usually break my fingernails in the attempt. Haig gave it to me once. I’ve never figured out a use for it, but you never know when something will come in handy. I doubt that it would be the greatest thing in the world for cutting someone open with. You’d be better stabbing him with one of the keys on the chain.

A few seconds later the barmaid turned up. She pointed to the creep’s half-finished drink and the pile of bills next to it. There was a ten in the pile and five or six singles.

“He coming back?”

“Not without a gun.”

“Pardon me?”

“He had to leave in a hurry,” I said. “He remembered a previous engagement.”

“He forgot his change.”

“It’s for you,” I said.

“It is now,” she said, scooping up the bills and change. “What do you know.”

“No, he meant it for you,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“That’s what he said.”

“What do you know,” she said. “I pegged him for El Cheapo. You never know, do you?”

“I guess not,” I said.

I sipped at my beer and turned my eyes to Tulip again. Or they turned that way of their own accord, without my having much to do with it. The music was moving toward a climax, and so was half the audience. There was a little rumble of encouragement from my fellow patrons at the bar. You could make out little encouraging show biz phrases like “Show me that pretty pussy, baby,” and other tasteful bons mots. Tulip had her head back, her long blond hair swaying from side to side behind her, her large breasts pointing at the ceiling in a way that would have forced Newton to reappraise the Law of Gravity. Her whole body shuddered, and the record hit its final grooves, and she put her hands on her thighs and opened herself to the band of dirty old men, and I told myself to close my eyes, and didn’t, and I’m sure it was my imagination but I thought I could see all the way to her throat.