Lawrence Block: The Topless Tulip Caper

Three

IT MUST HAVE been around three in the afternoon when Tulip Willing rang the doorbell. It was close to five when Haig was finished asking questions. He went over everything and enabled me to fill a great many pages in my notebook with facts that would probably turn out to be unimportant. It’s his theory that there is no such thing as an absolutely inconsequential fact. (The first time he told me this I replied that in 1938 the state of Wyoming produced one-third of a pound of dry edible beans for every man, woman, and child in the nation. He agreed that it was certainly hard to see how that could turn out to be consequential, but he wasn’t going to rule out the possibility entirely.)

I’m taking matters into my own hands and leaving out some items that never did seem to have any more bearing on the case than the fascinating fact about dry edible beans. That still leaves plenty of bits and pieces to report from Haig’s questioning of Tulip.

Item: The fish had died four days ago, on a Saturday. Tulip had come home at four Saturday morning after a long night at the Treasure Chest, where she had been working for five months, having been previously employed in a similar capacity at similar nightspots, among them Tippler’s Cove and Shake It Or Leave It (I am not making any of this up.) She came home, exhausted and ready for bed, and she went over to say goodnight to the fish, and they were all floating on the top, which is never a sign of radiant good health. When she was done being hysterical she did something intelligent. She removed the two parent fish and preserved them in jars of rubbing alcohol in case an autopsy should ultimately be indicated, and she took a sample of the water in the tank and another sample of water from another aquarium as a control. These she took to a chemical laboratory on Varick Street for scientific analysis, and Monday the laboratory called her and informed her that the sample from the tank of scats contained strychnine, which is no better for fish than it is for people. There was enough strychnine present to kill any human being who drank a glass of the water, but then not that many people go around drinking out of aquariums, and I’d venture to say that those who do are asking for it.

Item: She assumed that the murder of the scats was motivated not by a specific hatred of the fish themselves but by hatred of their owner. Someone was trying to upset her or punish her or terrify her by killing her pets. This was, as far as she could determine, the first instance of hostile behavior to be directed at her, aside from the usual obscene telephone calls she received intermittently. The phone calls had not increased in frequency lately, and in fact she hadn’t heard from one of the callers in a long time and was a little concerned that something might have happened to him. She said that he had a very unusual approach, but she didn’t go into detail.

Item: The scats had been in fine fettle when she left the apartment Friday afternoon at two o’clock. The strychnine would presumably have worked instantly upon its introduction into the aquarium, but she had been unable to determine just how long the fish had been dead. So somewhere between two Friday afternoon and four Saturday morning the villain had entered her apartment and had done the dirty deed.

Item: While I don’t guess there was anybody who could properly be labeled a suspect at this stage of the game, the following people were sufficiently a part of Tulip’s life to find their way into my notebook:

Cherry Bounce . I know, I know, but if you can accept a name like Tulip Willing, why be put off by Cherry Bounce? Cherry and Tulip had been roommates for just about five months. They met when Tulip went to work at Treasure Chest, where Cherry had already been employed. Tulip had recently broken up with her boyfriend and needed a place to live, and Cherry had recently broken up with a boyfriend of her own and needed someone to share her rent. The two of them had been getting along well enough, although they didn’t have much in common outside of their profession. Tulip characterized her as flighty, flitting from one pursuit to another, health foods to astrology to bio-feedback. As far as the fish were concerned, Cherry thought they were cute. Cherry’s name off-stage was Mabel Abramowicz, so I guess she would have had to change it to something.

Glenn Flatt . Tulip’s ex-husband, whom she had met and married four years ago when she was picking up a doctorate in marine biology at the University of Miami, and whom she had divorced two years later. I could understand why she had divorced him—she wanted her own name back. No one built like Tulip could be happy with Flatt for a surname. (According to her, she left her husband because he was a compulsive gambler. If you said Good Morning to him he’d lay odds that it wasn’t. This would have been all right if he won, but he evidently didn’t.) Flatt lived on Long Island where he was employed as a research biochemist by a pharmaceutical manufacturer. This fact prompted Haig and me to glance meaningfully at each other—Flatt’s job would undoubtedly give him access to strychnine. On the other hand, it would probably give him just as good access to any number of non-detectable vehicles for ichthyicide. Flatt and Tulip were “very good friends now,” she said, and they occasionally had dinner or drinks together, and now and then he turned up at the club to catch her act. Flatt had never remarried.

Haskell Henderson . Tulip’s current boyfriend and the owner of a half-dozen local health food stores. They had been seeing each other for almost three months. Henderson would spend two or three afternoons a week at Tulip’s apartment. I don’t guess he devoted much of this time to staring at the fish. When he wasn’t keeping company with Tulip or minding the stores he was in Closter, New Jersey, where he shared a cozy little house with . . .

Mrs. Haskell Henderson . Tulip had never met Mrs. H.H., and had no way of knowing whether or not the woman even knew of her existence, but anyone with that sound a reason for wanting unpleasant things to happen to Tulip certainly deserved an entry in my notebook. The entry was pretty much limited to her name because Henderson evidently didn’t talk about his wife very much.

Simon Barckover . Tulip’s agent, and Cherry’s agent too, for that matter. His relationship with both clients was strictly professional, but he got in the notebook because he was the only person around who might have a specific grudge against the fish. He thought Tulip was genuinely talented and that she had a future in show business if she applied herself. Tulip admitted that he might be right but she wasn’t interested. The topless dancing paid well and was generally undemanding, leaving her free to concentrate on her chief interest, which was ichthyology. Barckover had told her on several occasions that the damn fish were standing in the way of her career and that he would like to flush the lot of them down the toilet. She couldn’t believe he would actually do it, but then she couldn’t believe anybody would want to poison the scats, so he got in the notebook.

Leonard Danzig . Cherry’s boyfriend. She had been dating him for a month or so, although she continued to see other men as well. He got on the list because Tulip couldn’t stand him, describing him charitably as “a kind of a slimy character.” I gather she disliked him because he kept trying to get her into bed, either just with him or with Cherry along for threesies. Tulip was spectacularly uninterested in either prospect. No one seemed to know what Danzig did for a living, but Tulip guessed it was at least somewhat criminal. Cherry had met him at the club. He always seemed to have a lot of money, and if he worked at all he didn’t seem to have any set hours. His feelings toward the fish were unknown, except that he had once remarked that it would “take a hell of a lot of the bastards to make a decent meal.”