Lawrence Block: The Topless Tulip Caper

“Sorry about that,” Jan said, and winked. “Didn’t know.”

I smiled back, and we sort of carried on a conversation without getting back to the subject Tulip had raised. She said that Cherry would join us after the show. It was her last number, and we could all get the hell out and go someplace quiet for coffee, and I could ask Cherry various questions and we could see if we learned anything.

“It should be fascinating,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see how a detective works.”

“Well, you know the questions Haig and I asked you this afternoon.”

“Oh, this is different. I mean, I was the one you were asking questions. I’ll be watching you ask questions of somebody else and that should make a big difference.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you know what questions you’re going to ask her?” I was looking for an answer to that one when Cherry’s first number ended. There was a round of applause approximately equal in volume to what Tulip got, and then another record was cued and Cherry went into her second and last number.

“Do you know what questions you’re going to ask her, Chip?”

I knew what questions I wanted to ask her. I wanted to ask her where she’d been all my life. She was putting a little more sex into her routine on this number, letting her hands glide upward from the sides of her thighs to her genuinely impressive breasts, and giving little ooohs and ahhhs to indicate that she was turning herself on. I don’t know if she was really turning herself on, but I can swear to you that she was turning me on, and I don’t think I was the only person in the audience who was having that reaction. “Chip?”

“Er,” I said. “Uh, with questions and all that. You sort of have to play it by ear.”

“I see.”

“It’s best not to have everything all scheduled in advance like a presidential press conference or something. You sort of see how one question leads to another.”

“It sounds fascinating.”

I was glad she thought it was fascinating, because what I thought it was was bullshit. The fact of the matter was that I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was going to ask Cherry, or even why. The more I thought about this case of ours, the more I found myself leaning toward the conclusion that Leo Haig had finally done it. He’d finally slipped over that thin line between genius and insanity, because we never should have taken this absurd case in the first place, because—no matter who Tulip Willing happened to be in her spare time—there was absolutely no excuse for investigating a case involving—

“Chip?”

I broke off my reverie and looked at her. “What?”

“Is Cherry a suspect?”

“Everybody’s a suspect.”

“Because it’s hard to believe she could commit murder.”

I looked at her, and I decided it wasn’t at all hard to believe that she could commit murder. Not directly, but I could see where she could hand out coronaries to half her audience every night just by doing what she was doing.

I said, “There’s one thing you have to realize. Everybody’s a suspect until proven otherwise.”

“I thought everyone’s innocent until proved guilty “

“Absolutely. And everybody’s suspicious until proved innocent. That’s how it works. Cherry’s a suspect, Glenn Flatt’s a suspect. Haskell Henderson’s a suspect. So’s his wife. That Danzig is a suspect. Simon What’s-his-name—”

“Barckover.”

“Barckover, right.” I was supposed to remember things like Barckover’s last name, Haig had told me, just as I was supposed to be able to repeat all conversations verbatim. If Archie Goodwin can do something, I’m supposed to train myself to do it, too. (Sometimes, let me tell you, Archie Goodwin gives me a stiff pain.) “Barckover,” I said again, carefully training my memory. “And Andrew Merganser—”

“You mean Mallard.”

“Well, I knew it was some kind of a duck. The hell with Archie Goodwin.”

“Pardon me?”

“Forget it,” I said, a little more savagely than I’d intended. “Mallard and Helen Tattersall and Gus Leemy and whoever the hell else you mentioned. Everybody—”

“Don’t say Gus’s name so loud. He’s probably in the dub tonight.”

“Well, they’re all suspects,” I said, not so loud, this time around. “And so are other people we haven’t even thought of yet, and one of them’s a killer.”

“It’s still hard to believe.”

I let the conversation die there. If she thought that was hard to believe, she didn’t know the half of it. What I found hard to believe was that Haig and I were involved. True, Haig was only really happy when he had a murder case to bother his brain with. And true, this case involved murder, and not just one murder, not just another murder, but—

Tulip’s fingers closed on my elbow. “Watch now, Chip. She’s coming to the end and she really makes a production out of it. She shows a lot more than I do. Watch!”

So I watched. I mean, maybe you would have looked up at the ceiling or something. Anything’s possible. But what I did, see, was I watched.

Watched as she lowered herself first to her knees, then lay almost full-length, her perfect breasts suspended over the apron of the stage. Watched her straighten up and swing that body around, shaking those breasts from side to side, always perfectly in time to that awful music. Watched as she displayed herself, giving everybody a much longer look than everybody needed. Watched as she put one little hand to her mouth, miming shock at what she had done, straightening up now, drawing herself primly together, her shoulders held back to bring her breasts into the sharpest possible relief.

And heard her sudden gasp.

And saw the bead of blood on her left breast just an inch above the nipple. And watched her hands, moving in awful slow motion, struggling to touch the bead of blood.

And watched her fall, still in slow motion, falling backwards and to her left, falling as only dead things fall, landing at last on the floorboards of the stage with the impact of a gunshot.

I guess my reaction time was pretty good. It didn’t seem to be at the time, but the fact remains that I was the first person to vault the bar and leap onto the stage and have a look at Cherry Bounce.

On the other hand, fast or slow, my reaction was wrong. What I should have done was forget the stage entirely and go straight to the door to keep anybody else from going through it. Because I had seen the way Cherry tried to reach her breast and couldn’t, and I had seen her fall, and I really didn’t have to go up onto the stage to examine her in order to know there was nothing I could do for her.

Haig has always said it’s nothing to berate myself for. He says anybody’s natural and proper reaction is to establish first of all that the victim is beyond assistance. Well, that was my reaction, all right, and that was what I established.

Our murderer had just claimed his one hundred twenty-fourth victim, and he had done it right in front of my eyes.

Two

WHEN THE DOORBELL rang that afternoon I was spooning brine shrimp into a tank of Labeo chrysophekadion . They were cute little rascals, about half an inch long, and most people who keep tropical fish call them black sharks. Which is sort of weird, because they are not sharks at all and in no sense sharklike, being peaceful types who function as scavengers in an aquarium, picking up on food that other fish have missed. Ours weren’t black, either, but white and pink-eyed like Easter bunnies. Leo Haig had come up with a couple of albinos in an earlier spawning, and now he had bred them to each other, and the two hundred or so fish I was presently feeding were the result.

Haig couldn’t have been prouder if he had sired them himself. I was kind of pleased with them too, but I couldn’t see what they had to do with Being a Resourceful Private Detective, which was what I was supposed to be. When I would bring up the subject Haig would tell me that the aquarium was the universe in microcosm, and the lessons it taught me would ultimately find application in life itself. He says things like that a lot.