Lawrence Block: The Topless Tulip Caper

Anyway, the doorbell rang. I gave the unblack unsharks a last spoonful of brine shrimp and went to the door and opened it, and it was good I had left the spoon and the saucer of shrimp in the other room, because otherwise I would have dropped them.

Instead I dropped my jaw. I stood there with my mouth open and stared at her.

There was a whole lot of her to stare at. I’m reasonably tall, although no one would mistake me for a professional basketball player, and she was just about my height. There the resemblance ended. She had long golden hair framing a face with absolutely nothing wrong with it. High cheekbones, wide-set blue eyes the color of a New York sky at sunset, a complexion out of an advertisement for sun-tan lotion, a mouth out of an advertisement for fellatio.

The part below the face was no disappointment, either. She was wearing jeans and a Beethoven-for-President tee-shirt, and she wasn’t wearing anything under the tee-shirt, and I really couldn’t find anything about her body to object to. I suppose a purist might argue that her legs were a little too long and her breasts were a little too large. Somehow this didn’t bother me a bit.

For a while she watched me stare at her. She gave a sort of half-smile, which suggested that she was used to this reaction but liked it all the same, and then she said, “Mr. Haig?”

“No.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m not him. I mean, I’m me. Uh.”

“Perhaps I came at a bad time.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “You came at a wonderful time. I mean you can come anytime you want to. I mean. Uh.”

“Is this Leo Haig’s residence?”

“Yes.”

“Leo Haig the detective?”

He’s Leo Haig the detective all right, but that’s not a phrase that rolls off most people’s tongues. As a matter of fact he’s pretty close to being an unknown, which is not the way he wants it, and one of the main reasons he hired me as his assistant. A chief function of mine is to write up his cases—at least the ones that turn out triumphant—so that the world will know about him. If it weren’t for Dr. Watson, he says, who would have heard of Sherlock Holmes? If Archie Goodwin never sat down at a typewriter, who would be aware of Nero Wolfe? Anyway, that’s why he hired me, to make Leo Haig The Detective a household phrase, and that’s how come you get to read all this.

“Leo Haig the detective,” I agreed.

“Then I came to the right place,” she said.

“Oh, definitely. No question about it. You came to the right place.”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, sure. I’m terrific.”

“May I come in?”

“Oh, sure. Right. Great idea.”

She gave me an odd look, which I certainly deserved, and I stood aside and she came in and I closed the door. I led her into the office which Haig and I share. There’s a huge old partner’s desk, which we also share, although I don’t really have much use for my side of it. I pointed to a chair for her, and when she sat down I swiveled my desk chair around and sat in it and looked at her some more. She was a little less intimidating when she was sitting down. There was still just as much of her but the overall effect was not quite so awesome.

“Is Mr. Haig in?”

“He’s upstairs,” I said. “He’s playing with his fish.”

“Playing with them?”

“Sort of. I’m his assistant. My name is Harrison. Chip Harrison.”

“Mine is Tulip.”

“Oh.”

“Tulip Willing.”

“It certainly is,” I said.

“Pardon me?”

I was really having a difficult time getting my brain in gear. I took a deep breath and tried again. I said, “You wanted to see Mr. Haig?”

“That’s right. I want to hire him.”

“I see.”

“There’s a matter that I want him to investigate.”

“I see,” I said again. “Could you tell me something about the matter?”

“Well—”

Tm his assistant,” I said. “His confidential assistant.”

“Aren’t you young to be a detective?”

I’m not exactly a detective. I mean I don’t have a license or anything. But I didn’t see any point in telling her that. What I wanted to say was that you don’t have to be all that old to spoon brine shrimp into a fish tank, but I didn’t say that either. I said, “If you could give me some idea—”

“Of course.” She leaned forward and I took another quick look at Beethoven’s eyebrows. Her breasts had fantastic stage presence. It was hard not to stare at them, and you sort of got the feeling they were staring back.

“It’s a murder case,” she said.

I don’t know if my heartbeat actually quickened, because it had been operating faster than normal ever since I opened the door and took my first look at her. But I certainly did get excited. I mean, people don’t generally turn up on our doorstep wanting us to investigate a murder. But it happens all the time in books, and that’s the kind of detective Haig wants to be, the kind you read about in mystery novels.

I said, “A homicide.”

“Not exactly.”

“I thought you said a murder.”

She nodded. “But homicide means that a person has been killed, doesn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Well, this is murder. But it’s not homicide.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

She put her hand to her mouth and nibbled thoughtfully at a cuticle. If she ever ran out of cuticles to nibble I decided I’d gladly lend her one of mine. Or any other part of me that interested her. “It’s hard to say this,” she said.

I waited her out.

“I had to come to Leo Haig,” she said eventually. “I couldn’t go to the police. I never even considered going to the police. Even if they didn’t actually laugh at me there’s no way they would bother investigating. So I had to go to a private detective, and I couldn’t go to an ordinary private detective. It has to be Leo Haig.”

That’s the kind of thing you want every client to say, but Tulip Willing was the first one ever to say it.

“I guess the only way to say it is to come right out with it,” she said. “Someone murdered my tropical fish. I want Leo Haig to catch the killer.”

I climbed a flight of stairs to the fourth floor, where Haig was playing with his fish. There are tanks in all the rooms on the third floor, but on the fourth floor there are nothing but tanks, rows and rows of them. I found Haig glowering at a school of cichlids from Lake Tanganyika. They had set him back about fifty bucks a fish, which is a lot, and no one had yet induced them to spawn in captivity. Haig intended to be the first, and thus far the fish had shown no sign of preparing to cooperate.

“There’s an element missing,” he said. “Maybe the rockwork should be extended. Maybe they’re accustomed to spawning in caves. Maybe they want less light.”

“Maybe they’re all boys,” I suggested.

“Phooey. There are eight of them. With six fish one is mathematically certain of having a pair. That is to say that the certainty is in excess of ninety-five percent. With eight the certainty is that much greater.”

“Unless the cunning Africans only ship one sex.”

He looked at me. “You have a devious mind,” he said. “It will be an asset professionally.”

“I have a devious mind,” I agreed. “You have a client.”

“Oh?”

“A beautiful young woman,” I said.

“Trust you to notice that.”

“I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t notice. Her name is Tulip Willing.”

“Indeed.”

“She wants you to investigate a murder and trap a killer.”

He bounced to his feet, and the African cichlids no longer meant a thing to him. He’s about five feet tall and built like a beachball, with a neatly trimmed little black goatee and head of wiry black hair. He likes to touch the beard, and he started doing it now.