Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

Wong brought two cups. He must have sensed that I wasn’t having any. I would have liked another cup but I would have had to stay in that room to drink it and that was out of the question. And he’d had the nerve I to say phooey to my theory about Haskell Henderson and the health food conspiracy! I’d been babbling, for Pete’s sake, but I’d come as close to reality as that load of crap about he-didn’t-call-early-and-he-didn’t-not-call.

It had been a bluff, pure and simple. If Flatt just told him he was crazy he could roll with the punch, and if Flatt bought the whole pitch then he was home free. It was a bluff, and a fairly standard bluff, and not too far removed from what I’d pulled on Henderson. I had to give him credit, he’d read his lines beautifully, but all it was was a bluff and the explanation he thought up later was just that, something he thought up afterward to fit the facts and make him look like the genius he wanted to be.

Of all the goddamned cheap grandstand plays, and of course Tulip bought it all across the board. And I’d had to sit there and watch. Well, I didn’t have to put up with any more of it. I dialed Mallard’s number once more, just as a matter of form, and then I scooped the key off the desk and got away from Miss Willing and Mr. Wonderful.

Andrew Mallard’s apartment—by virtue of squatter’s rights it was his, anyway—was on Arbor Street near the corner of Bank. I had more time than I needed to get his story before I was due at Treasure Chest, and I wanted to walk off some of the irritation I felt toward Haig, so I hiked down Eighth until it turned into Hudson Street, and then I groped around until I found Bank, made a lucky guess, and located Arbor Street. I usually get lost in the West Village, and the farther west I go the loster I get. I can find almost any place, but only if I start out in the right place. (I’m not the only one who has that trouble. When you’ve got a geometrically sensible city with streets running east and west and avenues running north and south, and then you rig up a neighborhood in which everything goes in curves and diagonals and Fourth Street intersects with Eleventh Street, you’re just begging for trouble.)

I looked for a bell with Mallard on it and couldn’t find one. Then I went through the listings carefully and found one that said Wolinski. He really was an inert type, no question about it. I mean, he’d been there five months by himself, and for a certain amount of time before that he’d shared the place with her, and her name was still on the bell and his wasn’t.

I rang his bell and nothing happened. I rang it again and some more nothing happened, and I tried Tulip’s key in the downstairs door and of course it didn’t fit, it was the key to the apartment. I wondered why she hadn’t given me both keys and then I wondered why this hadn’t occurred to me earlier. I said a twelve-letter word that I don’t usually say aloud, and then I rang a couple of other bells, and somebody pushed a buzzer and I opened the door.

Mallard’s apartment was on the third floor. I knocked on his door for a while and nothing happened. I decided he was either out or asleep or catatonic and there was no point in persisting, but it had been a long walk and I had the damned key in my hand so I persisted. At 8:37 I let myself into his apartment.

Ten

AT 8:51 I let myself out.

Eleven

I WALKED INTO the first bar I saw, went straight up to the bar and ordered a double Irish whiskey. The bartender poured it and I drank it right down. Then I paid for it, and I scooped up a dime from my change and headed for the phone booth in the rear. I invested the dime and dialed seven numbers and Leo Haig answered on the fourth ring.

I said, “How clean is our phone? Do you suppose we’re all alone or do we have company?”

“Let us act as though we have company.”

“Probably a good idea. I’m at a pay phone and I understand they’re all tapped. But who has the time to monitor all of them? Of course if somebody was listening in I’d be a dead duck and that would make two tonight.”

“I see.”

“I was hoping you would.”

“You’re certain of the fact?”

“Positive.”

“Do you know how the condition was induced?”

I shook my head, then realized that wouldn’t work over the telephone. “No,” I said. “He could have done it himself, he could have had help, or it might be God’s will. No way I could tell.”

“Hmmmm.” I waited, and turned to glance through the fly-specked glass door of the phone booth. Several heads were turned in my direction. I turned away from them and Haig said, “I trust you have covered your traces.”

“No. I took my lipstick and wrote Catch me before I kill more on the bathroom mirror.”

“There is no need for sarcasm.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It shook me, I’ll admit it. Do I report this?”

“Yes, and right away. Use a different phone.”

“I know that.”

“You said you were shaken.”

“Not that shaken,” I said. “Hell.”

“Report the discovery and return here directly.”

“Is our friend still with you? Because she’s—”

“Yes,” he cut in. “Don’t waste time.” And he hung up on me, which was probably all to the good because I really was a little rattled and I might have found ways to prolong the conversation indefinitely.

I went back to the bar and ordered another shot, a single this time, and a man came over to me and said, “Oh, let me buy you this one, why don’t you. You seem terribly agitated. Nothing too alarming, I hope?”

I looked at him, and at some of the other customers, and I realized I was in a gay bar. “Oh,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

I couldn’t really resent it. You go drinking in a gay bar and people have the right to jump to conclusions. “Never mind,” I said. “I don’t want the drink anyway.” I pocketed my change and left, feeling very foolish.

Two blocks over I found a booth on the street. I dialed 911 and changed my voice and told whoever it was that answered that there was a dead man at 134 Arbor Street and gave the apartment number and hung up before any questions could be asked of me. I walked another block and got in a cab.

I had found Andrew Mallard in the bedroom. The whole apartment had reeked of whiskey and vomit, and I figured he’d passed out. He was lying on his bed with his shoes off but the rest of his clothes on, laying on his back, a trickle of puke running from the corner of his mouth down his cheek.

I very nearly turned around and left at that point, and if I’d done that I’d have been in trouble, because I wouldn’t have bothered wiping my fingerprints off the doorknob and a few other surfaces I’d touched. But something made me put my hand to his forehead. Maybe I sensed unconsciously that he wasn’t breathing. Maybe I was toying with the idea of shaking him awake, though why would I have wanted a wide-awake drunk on my hands? For whatever reason, I did touch him, and he was cold, the kind of cold that you’re not if you’re alive. Then I reached for his hand and it was also cold, and his fingers were stiff, and at that point there was no getting around the fact that Andrew Mallard was a dead duck.

“But I can’t tell you what killed him,” I told Haig. “I counted five empty scotch bottles around the apartment, and that was without a particularly intensive search. If he emptied them all since the police let him go this morning then I know what killed him. Alcohol poisoning.”

“He tended to leave garbage around,” Tulip said. “I went back once for some stuff and there were newspapers three weeks old, and lots of empty bottles.”

“Well, he emptied one of them today. The whole place smelled of booze and he reeked of it. I don’t know if he drank enough to kill him.”