Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

“I been over this with the police five or six times already,” he said. “I was off in the back with this spastic prick from New Jersey. Like I only looked at the stage every ten minutes or so to make sure somebody was on it. You don’t know what this business is like, man. After a few years you get so sick of tits and asses that the only way you can get a hard-on is if your woman wears clothes to bed. I never even saw Cherry take her fall. I heard the commotion and I looked up and I couldn’t see anything by then because she was lying down and out of sight. I didn’t see anybody do anything suspicious. I didn’t even think to look for anything suspicious. I figure she fainted from popping too many pills or else she had a bad heart or something. What was it, something pygmies put on darts?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Did Cherry take a lot of drugs?”

“For all I know she never even dropped an aspirin. Just going on generalities. Most of the go-go dancers and the topless-bottomless chicks do uppers. All that moving around and all those geeks gaping at them and it gets to them, and a little dexie straightens everything out and they can prevail, they can maintain, if you dig it. Like Lennie Bruce, baby, you got to be on top of it in order to get it out.”

I had already been thinking of Lennie Bruce. One line of his in particular. He said there’s nothing sadder than an old hipster.

I asked what Cherry was like.

“A comer,” he said. “That kid started with nothing. She showed me some pictures of herself taken four, five years ago. Nothing. Big nose, flat in the chest. Not a pig but you’d never look at her twice.”

“Cherry?”

He flicked the ash from his cigar. “Plastic surgery” he said. “Her old lady died and left her a couple of K’s, no fortune, just of couple of K’s, and she went and spent the whole bundle putting herself together. New nose, a trim job for the ears, silicone for the tits, a little of this, a little of that. Changed her name from something nobody can pronounce to Cherry Bounce. Great little name. Usually I pick names for them because most of these girls, they aren’t too long in the imagination line. Cherry already had her name picked out when I got ahold of her.”

“Did you pick out Tulip’s name?”

He shook his head. “Nobody picks out anything for that one. She’s smart, you got to hand it to her. Smart, well-educated, the whole bit. I’ll tell you something, I think she’s too fucking smart for her own good. With the face and body she’s got she could have a future in this business. But she won’t put out.”

“I thought you didn’t really have to do that anymore.”

“Huh?”

“Put out.”

He waved the cigar impatiently. “I don’t mean sexual. I mean give out with everything you’ve got. Take the singing lessons, take the dancing lessons, make all the auditions, cultivate the right people. Cherry took the trouble. She put out. Tulip, she’s got so much going for her, and all she wants to do is coast on what she’s got. Pick up the easy bread showing her tits to the visiting firemen and waste all her time with those fucking fish.”

“Well, that’s her career.”

“Career?” He looked at me as though I was an ambulatory psychotic. “You call that a career? Siphoning shit out of fish tanks? What’s she gonna make, fifteen K a year running some fucking museum? You call that a career? There’s chicks clearing that much a week in Vegas that haven’t got half the equipment that girl has.”

“But that’s not what she wants.”

“This year it’s not what she wants. Five years from now she’ll be Assistant Fish Librarian in East Jesus, Kansas, and that’s when she’ll realize what she wanted all along was a career in show business. And by then it’ll be too late.”

I turned the conversation back to Cherry and tried to learn more about her personal life. Barckover turned out to be a less than perfect source. At one point he said that an agent was always in the middle, he was the one with the shoulders that everybody cried on, but Cherry evidently either didn’t cry or found other shoulders. He didn’t know much of anything about the men in her life, and in his opinion she had been murdered by some sort of weird pervert who got a thrill out of killing strange girls. “You watch it,” he said. “There’s gonna be a string of hits like this, a Jack the Ripper type killing topless dancers. Probably a religious fanatic.” Evidently he didn’t know that Tulip’s fish had been poisoned, which poked a few holes in the Ripper theory.

An admirable thing about Cherry, according to Barckover, was that she never got seriously involved with any individual male. “Her career always came first,” he said. “You get chicks who get hung up on one guy, and I get ’em a week in the mountains and they don’t want to leave the guy, so either they pass up a gig or they take it and then they’re lousy because they spend all their time pissing and moaning about being lonely. Not Cherry. She knows the priorities. If she’s playing house and I get her two weeks in Monticello she goes without a second thought. There’s always some dude around to go to bed with, but there aren’t always jobs growing on trees.”

(He would have been proud of a girl I know named Kim Trelawney. For a while we were almost living together, and she got signed for the ingnue part in a road company version of The Estimable Sailor , and although she may have shed a tear or two, off she went. That had been three months ago, and she was still treading the boards in places like Memphis, and we didn’t bother writing to each other, and by the time she came back I had the feeling we wouldn’t have much to say to each other. It had been a long three months, let me tell you, and maybe that was a contributing factor to the way I reacted to Tulip, but I have to say I’d have probably gone just as bananas over her anyway, to be perfectly honest.)

I asked him about some of the people on our suspects list, and others who had been around Treasure Chest when Cherry was murdered. He had never heard of Haskell Henderson. He’d met Andrew Mallard while Mallard and Tulip were living together, and he said that in his book Mallard was a total feeb. His word, not mine. He’d been delighted when Tulip and Mallard split up.

He knew Leonard Danzig by sight and reputation and could not recall having seen him at the club. And he was surprised to know that Danzig had been keeping company with Cherry. “He’s no good,” he said. “He’s trouble.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“You hear lots of things,” he said.

“Would you happen to remember any of them?”

“A little of this, a little of that. He plays angles, he hangs with some heavies. I don’t know what he does but if it’s honest I’ll spread it on toast and eat it.” He hesitated for a moment. “If he had a beef with a chick, he wouldn’t get fancy with poison darts. I don’t even think he’d kill her. Maybe he’d beat her up. Or with a beautiful girl like Cherry he’d do something like throw acid on her or cut her so it would leave a scar. That’s more his style.”

I didn’t get a whole lot more than that. If Cherry was having trouble with Helen Tattersall, the downstairs neighbor, Barckover didn’t know about it. He had never met Glenn Flatt, Tulip’s ex-husband, and didn’t know anything about him. He was on nodding terms with Buddy Lippa, Leemy’s bouncer and gate-tender, and said only that Lippa was a former boxer, a good club fighter who did a decent job of keeping order in the joint. He got evasive when I asked about Leemy, and when I probed to find out who really owned the nightclub he made it obvious that he didn’t want to carry that particular ball any further. I asked if either Leemy or Lippa made a practice of making passes at the hired help. He assured me they were both happily married men, which didn’t strike me as an answer to the question I had asked, but I let it go.