Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

“Well, Mr. Haig—”

“Is crazy,” I said.

“But—”

“That doesn’t mean he isn’t a genius. Maybe all geniuses are crazy. I couldn’t honestly say. For instance, thirteen hours from now he’s going to trap a murderer. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know. Don’t ask him, either, because I’m not convinced he knows, and even if he does he’s not telling. But he’s going to have the whole crowd here, all sitting on chairs with their hands folded, and if he doesn’t deliver he’s going to look like Babe Ruth would have looked if he pointed to the fence and then struck out. The one thing he doesn’t want is to look ridiculous, and with his shape and mannerisms he has a good head start in that direction, so he really has to deliver. And he probably will, but don’t ask me how.”

“It’s kind of exciting,” she said.

I agreed that it was. I said I thought I’d have a beer and asked her if she wanted anything. She didn’t. I uncapped the beer in the kitchen and brought the bottle into the office with me. I asked her when Haig had gone to sleep.

“Right after he got your call. He said he was very tired. I guess he didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Nobody did,” I said, and yawned. “I’m completely shot myself. As soon as I finish this beer and unwind a little I’m going to stretch out on the couch and make Z’s.”

“Oh! I’m sorry, this is where you’re going to be sleeping, isn’t it? I’ll go upstairs now.”

I waved her back to the couch. “I have to unwind first,” I said. “And you’re the one who ought to be exhausted. Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Not really. They kept moving me around from one stationhouse to another.”

“Yeah, the old cop shuffle. The hell of it is that they knew damned well you didn’t kill Cherry. They just wanted to give you a hard time because you were Haig’s client.” I yawned. “Ed and Am Hunter. That’s funny. Am Hunter was in a carnival for years. Can you see Leo Haig as a pitchman? I can’t.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She considered, then giggled. I liked her wide-open laugh better.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well, Ed Hunter certainly goes over well with the girls in this book.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No, I meant it as a compliment.”

“You did?”

“Well, yeah. You probably do pretty well yourself. And the two of you do play off each other the same way, even if you’re not related.”

“We were almost related,” I said. “A couple of months ago the cops picked me up and held me for seventy-two hours. They were just making a nuisance of themselves. As usual.”

(It was an interesting case, incidentally. I never wrote it up because there wasn’t enough to it to make a book out of it, and there was no sex in it, and Joe Elder at Gold Medal insists it’s impossible to sell a book without sex in it. Maybe I’ll try to write it up as a magazine story one of these days.)

Tulip frowned. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I mean, it’s terrible that they locked you up and all, but how does that make you and Haig almost related?”

“It doesn’t make us almost related. What it did was almost make us related. See, they wouldn’t let him visit me in jail because he was neither a relative nor an attorney. He decided this might come up in the future so what he wanted to do was adopt me. He said it made perfect sense considering that my parents are dead. I told him it was ridiculous because I might someday become a partner in the firm.”

“So?”

“So Haig & Harrison is possible,” I said. “But Haig & Haig is ridiculous, unless you happen to be producing scotch whiskey. That wasn’t the reason I wanted to avoid being adopted but it was a reason that made perfect sense to him, and—”

She began to laugh, and I joined in, and we really did quite a bit of hard-core laughing. Then we stopped as suddenly as we started and Tulip looked at me with her upper lip trembling slightly and I thought she was going to cry. I sat on the couch next to her and took hold of her hand.

“Everything’s so funny,” she said, “and then I remember that Cherry’s dead and Andy’s dead and I don’t know how I can laugh at anything. And the murderer must be someone I know. That’s the most frightening thing in the world. Somebody I know committed murder.”

I put an arm around her and she sort of settled in against my shoulder. I gave her shoulder a squeeze and took her hand with my other hand.

“Who do you think did it, Chip?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it have been Andy?”

“I suppose it could have been anybody. How did he get on with Cherry?”

“I’m not even sure they ever met. Where would he get hold of poison? Where would he get a key to my apartment? I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.”

“I’m just so confused.”

She snuggled closer and I got a healthy lungful of her perfume. It was all I needed. I mean, the whole scene was beginning to get a little strange. I was playing a kind of comforting Big Brother role, which was weird in that she was not only older than me but bigger. And at the same time she was turning me on something terrible, and it shouldn’t have been that way because the scene itself wasn’t fundamentally sexual, but go tell yourself that when you’re turned on. I looked down at her body and remembered what it looked like with no clothes on it, dancing merrily away on the stage at Treasure Chest, and then I closed my eyes because the sight of her was doing things to me, and having my eyes shut didn’t really help at all because I could see her just as well with them shut.

“It’s all so rotten,” she said.

I took a breath. “Look,” I said, “I think you’d better go to sleep, Tulip. It’s late and you’re exhausted, we’re both exhausted. Things will look better in the morning.”

“That’s what people always say, isn’t it?”

“Well, I didn’t claim to originate the line.”

“Maybe things will look better in the morning. But will they be any better?”

“Uh.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said. She got to her feet. “Could you show me where my room is?”

I walked her to her room. “Come in for a minute,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

We went into the room. She flicked on a light. Her bed had been opened and Wong had changed the sheets. I hadn’t really had enough time to dirty them.

“It looks comfortable,” she said.

“I’m not sure whether it is or not. I spent a couple hours on it this morning, but I was too tired to notice whether the bed was any good. It probably beats the couch. I slept on that one night before Haig bought the bed and it was like spending a night on the rack. I woke up with my spine in the shape of the letters.”

“Oh, and now you have to sleep on it again because of me! I’m sorry, Chip.”

I used both hands to get my foot out of my mouth. It was a struggle. “Oh, I was exaggerating,” I said, not too convincingly, I think. “It’s not really all that bad. Anyway as tired as I am it won’t make any difference.” I made myself yawn. “See? Can’t keep my eyes open. Well, goodnight, Tulip. Guess I’ll see you in the morning, and in the meantime—”

“Chip?”

“What?”

“Look, we don’t really know each other, and maybe this is silly, and of course I’m probably too old for you and you couldn’t possibly be interested, but—”

“Tulip?”

“Don’t go, Chip.”

It started off being basically closeness and warmth and comfort, and we were both deliriously exhausted, and we drifted gradually into a beautiful lazy kind of lovemaking. Then it stopped being lazy and we stopped being aware that we were all that exhausted, and then we stopped being aware of much of anything, actually, and then, well, it became too good to talk about.