Lawrence Block - The Topless Tulip Caper

He stared at me. He looked as though he had had his next line of dialogue prepared days in advance and I had blown his timing with an ad lib. I told him to come in, closed the door; and led him to the office. Wong and I had set up a double row of chairs on my side of the partner’s desk, facing Haig’s chair. I showed Flatt which chair was his and he sat, then popped up again as if there had been a tack on the seat.

“Just a minute,” he said. “I don’t understand any of this. I came here because I wanted to help Mr. Haig. He said he was working on my ex-wife’s behalf and I wanted to help him. Where is he?”

“He’s busy,” I said. “He’ll be along in a while. That’s your chair but you don’t have to sit in it if you don’t want to. You can look at the fish if you’d rather.”

“Fish,” he said.

I was waiting for him to ask me who I was, but he didn’t I guess he didn’t care. Nor did he look at the fish. He sat down again, opened his briefcase, and took out a copy of the Post . He opened it to Jack Anderson’s column and checked out the current entry in the corruption sweepstakes. I sat in my chair for a minute or two but it got to be sort of heavy, just the two of us in a roomful of empty chairs, so I went into the kitchen and watched Wong sharpen his cleaver.

The next two customers showed up together, and neither of them was Haskell Henderson, so I lost the place and show money too. They were Simon Barckover and Maeve O’Connor. Maeve looked bubbly and radiant and beautiful and Barckover looked pissed off.

“What’s this all about?” he demanded. “I’m a busy man. I’ve got things to do. Who does this Leo Haig think he is? Where does he get off ordering me to come here?”

There were just too many questions so I didn’t answer any of them. I told him he was absolutely right which gave him pause, and I led the two of them into the office and showed them to their seats. They looked at Glenn Flatt and he looked at them, and then he went back to his newspaper and Barckover sat staring straight ahead while Maeve went and looked at some fish.

After that they all started to show up, and I kept scurrying back and forth from the door to the office, ignoring questions and mumbling inane replies and getting everybody in the right seats. First Haskell Henderson showed up, looking about the same as yesterday but twice as nervous. He’d changed from white jeans to dove-gray jeans, but the goatee was still scraggly and he was wearing either the same Doctor Ecology tee-shirt or one just like it. I no sooner got him parked than Gus Leemy came along with Buddy Lippa in tow. Neither of them said a word, and when I brought them into the office they acted as if they were entering an empty room. They took their seats without acknowledging the presence of any of the others in any way whatsoever.

As far as that goes, there was a lot of mutual ignoring going on in the office. A lot of these people had I met before, but evidently they had managed to piece out the fact that Haig intended to expose a murderer, which meant that one of them was due to be the exposé, and I guess they didn’t quite know how to relate to that. It was fine with me, just so they stayed in their chairs and didn’t make waves.

Jan Remo came next asking if she was late. I told her she was right on time, and as I was leading her to the office the bell rang again. I hurried her in and came back to admit Rita Cubbage. She wasn’t wearing the wig this time and her tight Afro cap was a significant improvement. “Much better,” I told her, taking a long look. “You ought to give that wig to the boss. Your boss, not mine. He’s bald as an egg and it might be an improvement. Did you remember what it was that you couldn’t quite remember last night?”

“I dreamed something,” she said. She opened her purse and took out a slip of paper. “And when I woke up this was on the bedside table, but I don’t recall writing it down.”

I took the slip of paper from her. On it, in a very precise handwriting that no one would be capable of managing in the middle of the night, she had written: “Some white boys can be fun to sleep with.”

“I do wish I recalled that dream,” she said. “It must have been a good one.”

“I wish I’d been there.”

“Just might be that you were,” she said.

I opened my mouth, and then I closed my mouth, and then I seated her and came back in time to open the door for Leonard Danzig. There was a man on either side of him, and they were the very same men who had taken hold of my arms the night before. I was trying to decide how to tell them they couldn’t come in when he turned to them and told them to wait outside, which made things a whole lot simpler for me.

“Well,” he said. “Everything proceeding on schedule?”

“So far.”

“And your boss is going to make it all come together, is that right?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Well, if he makes it work, I’ll pay off on the spot.” He tapped the breast pocket of his suit, indicating that he’d brought the money along. “If I owe somebody something, I see to it that the debt is paid.”

A sort of chill grabbed me when he said that. He was talking about money, about paying money if he owed it, but I had the feeling that I never wanted him to owe me something else. Like a bullet in the head, for example. Because I was sure he’d pay that debt just as promptly, and with the same kind of satisfaction.

I took him into the office and parked him, and there were two seats left, one on either side of the second row. I went into the kitchen, picked up the phone and buzzed the fourth floor.

“All but two,” I said.

“Who hasn’t arrived?”

“The twins. New York’s Finest.”

“They’ll be here within five minutes. Buzz me when they arrive.”

They were on hand within three minutes, and they were not happy to see me. “I don’t like any of this,” Gregorio informed me. “If Haig has something he should tell us. If he’s got nothing he should stop wasting our time. If he wants to put on a performance let him hire a hall.”

“Sure,” I said. That’s his plan, actually. He’s going to play the title role in Tiny Alice . Let’s face it, you’re here because this case has you up a tree and you figure Haig’s going to hold the ladder for you. Either hell get your murderer or he won’t, and either way is fine with you. You wind up with a case solved or you get to see Haig fall on his face.”

“I’d like that,” Seidenwall said.

“You probably would but I don’t think he’s going to oblige you. Now you know the rules. You take your seats and you let Leo Haig run the show. This is his house and you’re here by invitation. Understood?”

I swear the best part of my job is getting to talk to cops that way now and then. It makes it all worthwhile. They didn’t like to put up with it, but they knew they didn’t have any choice. I showed them their chairs, putting Gregorio on the far side of the room and Seidenwall nearest to the door. That way anyone who tried to leave in a hurry would have to go through Seidenwall, and I wouldn’t want to try that myself unless I was driving a tank.

Let me go over the seating for you, in case you care. I don’t, but it’s one of the things Haig insists on.

The desk was where it always was, with Haig’s chair behind it and mine in front of it and an armchair alongside of it, presently empty.

Then two rows of chairs feeing the desk. In the first row, from the far side, were Leonard Danzig, Rita Cubbage, Glenn Flatt, Maeve O’Connor, and Simon Barckover. In the back row we had Detective Vincent Gregorio, Haskell Henderson, Gus Leemy, Buddy Lippa, Jan Remo, and Detective Wallace Seidenwall. I looked at them and decided they were a reasonably attractive group, well-mannered and neatly groomed. Leemy was wearing a business suit instead of a tuxedo so he didn’t look like a penguin today, and Buddy wasn’t wearing a sport jacket at all so he had nothing to clash with his slacks and shirt, but otherwise they looked about the same as always. I wished they would fold their hands on the tops of their desks and wait for the teacher to come and write something adorable on the blackboard.