Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

I asked if her boss was around. She said he’d dropped in earlier but had left about an hour and a half ago.

“The other waitress,” I said. “Is that Rita Cubbage?

The girl who was working last night?” Maeve nodded. I’d like to talk with her,” I said. “Ask her to stop by for a minute.”

Rita Cubbage turned out to be a black girl wearing a blond wig. I hoped she took it off when she left the club; most of the Times Square hookers wear wigs like that, and if Rita walked down the street with it on she probably got a lot of offers.

I said, “Hello. My name’s Chip Harrison and I work for Leo Haig.”

“The detective,” she said. “Maeve told me. You were here last night, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but were you? Not with that wig.”

“No, I left it off last night. Do you like it?”

“It’s striking,” I said.

“You don’t like it.” She grinned. “That’s all right. Neither do I. But it boosts the tips, if you can dig it. My hair’s normally in an Afro and it puts the dudes uptight because they figure I must be terribly militant. This way they figure I put out.”

I asked her about what she had seen last night, and what she knew about Cherry and Tulip and the other people involved in the case. She didn’t seem to know very much. There wasn’t much point to it, as far as I could see, but I invited her to come to Haig’s house at three-thirty. If he wanted a party, the least I could do was provide a full list of guests. She copied down the street address and put the tip of the pencil between her lips, a sudden frown of concentration on her face.

“Something,” she said.

“You can’t make it?”

“Oh, I guess I can. Something just on the tip of my tongue and now I can’t get hold of it. You know how that’ll happen?”

“Something about last night?”

“No, goes back a few days. Damn.”

“Maybe it’ll come to you.”

“I just know it will,” she said. “What I’ll do, I’ll sleep on it. Then in the middle of the night it’ll come to me.”

“Keep paper and pencil on the table next to your bed so you can write it down.”

“Oh, that’s what I always do. I’ll be sleeping, and all of a sudden something’ll pop into my head, and I’ll write it down. Only thing is half the time the next morning I won’t know what it means. Like one time I woke up and there was the pad of paper on the bedside table, and what it said on it was, ‘Every silver lining has a cloud.’ ”

“That’s really far out.”

“Yeah, but what did I have in mind? Never did figure that one out.” She winked. “See you tomorrow, Chip.”

I went back to my beer. When Maeve came to pick up an order of drinks I gave her the same invitation. “And tell your boss it would be a good idea for him to show up, too. Three-thirty at Haig’s place.”

A few minutes later I got to extend the invitation to Jan Remo. I waited until she was pouring me a second beer and then I told her the time and place. If her hand shook any, I didn’t notice it.

“Three-thirty,” she said. “I suppose I can make it. I’m having my hair done earlier but I should be through in plenty of time. But what’s it all about?”

“Mr. Haig doesn’t tell me everything,” I said. “If I had to guess, I’d say he intends to trap a murderer.”

“I thought the police solve murders.”

“They do, occasionally. So does Leo Haig.”

“And you’re his assistant.”

“That’s right.”

“Does Mr. Haig know who killed Cherry?”

“I told you he doesn’t tell me everything. That’s one of the things he hasn’t told me.”

She broke off the conversation to fill a drink order, then got Maeve’s attention and asked her to handle the bar while she took a break. “You won’t have to do much,” she said. “If you don’t push drinks at them they don’t order much. Just cover for me while I go to the head.”

I chatted with Maeve for a few minutes. Not about murder or other nasty things but about her career in show business and how she had a driving need to make a success of herself. I was pleased to hear this. Ifs a theory of mine that women with one driving need have other driving needs as well, which tends to make them more interesting company than other women. I don’t know how valid this is, but I guess it’ll do until a better theory comes along.

We didn’t have all that much time to talk before Jan was back. They stood side by side for a moment, both of them rather spectacular to look at and both of them redheads, and a part of my mind started thinking idly in troilistic terms, which I gather is a fairly standard male fantasy. I suppose it’s something I’ll have to try sooner or later, but I have the feeling it wouldn’t be as terrific in actuality as it is in fantasy, because it would be hard to concentrate and you wouldn’t know which way to turn. At any rate, I was fairly certain I wouldn’t get to try it with Maeve and Jan. I had the feeling they were less than crazy about one another.

Then Maeve went back to her tables and Jan said, “I guess I’ll be there tomorrow, Chip. But there’s really nothing I know. Nothing that would help.”

“You were right here when she got killed,” I said “Didn’t you see anything at all?”

“The police asked me all that.”

“Well, maybe you saw something and didn’t know you saw it. I mean, you know, it didn’t seem important at the time.”

“I didn’t even see it,” she said. “I was pouring a drink. The first I knew something was wrong was when everybody took a deep breath all at once. Then I turned around and Cherry was lying on the stage and that was the first I saw of it.”

“Well, I think you should come tomorrow anyway.”

“I will.”

I finished most of my beer and decided I could live without the rest of it. I left some change on the bar for Jan, decided it was a puny tip and added a dollar bill. I nodded a sort of collective goodnight on the chance that someone was looking my way and I walked to the door and out onto Seventh Avenue.

I thought about a cab and decided I would take the subway instead. The AA train stops at Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth, so I started uptown, and I walked about ten steps and felt a pair of hands take hold of my right arm. I was just getting ready to find out who owned them when two more hands took hold of my left arm and a voice said, “Easy does it, kid.”

I said, “Oh, come on. It’s the middle of Times Square and there are cops all over the place.”

“Oh, yeah? I don’t see no cops around, kid. Where are all the cops?”

Collecting graft, I decided. Sleeping in their cars. Because I couldn’t see a single cop anywhere. I heard a calypso verse once that maintained that policemen, women, and taxi cabs are never there when you want them. It’s the God’s honest truth.

“We’re just gonna take a nice ride,” the voice said. They were walking me along and they had my arms in a disturbingly effective grip.

“Suppose I don’t want to go?”

“That would be silly.”

“Getting in a car would be sillier.”

“Now what you got to do is use your head,” said another voice, the one on my left. “A man wants to talk to you. That’s all there is to it. He says not to hurt you long as you cooperate. What the hell, you’re cooperating, aren’t you? There’s the car right around the comer, and you’re walking to it like a nice reasonable kid. So what’s the problem?”

“Who’s the boss?”

“The guy we’re going to see.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. We walked up to the car, a long low Lincoln with a black man behind the wheel. He was wearing sunglasses, his head was shaved, there was a gold earring in his ear, and he had a little gold spoon on a gold chain around his neck. That’s either a sign that you use cocaine or that you want people to think you do.