Lawrence Block: The Topless Tulip Caper

Helen Tattersall . All that Tulip knew about Mrs. Tattersall was that she lived in the apartment immediately below hers and was a pain in the ass, constantly complaining about noise, even when no noise whatsoever was emanating from the apartment. She had on one occasion reported Tulip and Cherry to the police, alleging that the two were running a bordello in their apartment. Tulip wasn’t sure whether the woman actually believed this or was just making a nuisance of herself. “She’s the sort of frustrated old bitch who might poison somebody’s pets just out of meanness,” Tulip said.

Andrew Mallard . Tulip’s former boyfriend, the one she was living with before she got together with Cherry. He was an advertising account executive, recently divorced, and evidently rather strange. He had moved in with Tulip; then, when they broke up, she had moved out and let him keep the apartment because the idea of actually going out and finding a place of his own gave him anxiety attacks. He still called her occasionally when he was drunk, generally at an hour when he should have known she was sleeping. Now and then he caught her act at Treasure Chest, always tipping heavily in order to get a ringside table, always attending by himself, always staring at her breasts as if hypnotized, and never speaking a word to her. Every once in a while she got flowers delivered backstage with no note enclosed—though never on nights when he was in the audience—and she sort of assumed he was the source. He had liked the fish very much while they lived together, but she figured he was a possible suspect because murdering fish was clearly an insane act, and Andrew Mallard was hardly playing with a full deck himself.

Gus Leemy . He owned the Treasure Chest. At least he was the owner of record, but Tulip had the impression that the club was a Mafia joint of one sort or another and that Leemy was fronting for the real owners. She wasn’t even sure he knew she had fish and couldn’t imagine why he would have anything against her or them. I think she brought his name up because she didn’t like him.

So I had those nine names in my notebook, and there was a fourteen-hour period of time during which any of them could have gone to Tulip’s apartment and done something fishy to her fish. Possibly any or all of them could account for their time, but Tulip didn’t know about it. And possibly one of the fourteen million other residents of the New York metropolitan area was the killer. I mean, if you’re going to do something as fundamentally insane as feeding strychnine to tropical fish, they wouldn’t have to be the fish of someone you know, would they? If you’re going to be a lunatic about it, one fish tank is as good as another.

A little before five Haig leaned back in his chair and put his feet on top of his desk. I’ve tried to break him of this habit but it’s impossible. Tulip and I sat there respectfully and studied the soles of his shoes while the great man searched for meaning in the ceiling.

Without opening his eyes he said, “Chip.”

“Sir.”

“I need your eyes and ears and legs. The scene of the crime must be examined. You will go with Miss Wolinski to her apartment. Miss Wolinski? I assume that will be convenient?”

Tulip agreed that it would be. She had a dinner date at eight-thirty and a performance at ten o’clock but she was free until then.

“Satisfactory,” Haig said. He swung his feet down from the desk. “You will visit Miss Wolinski’s apartment. You will be guided by your intelligence and intuition and experience. You will then return here to report.”

“If that’s all—’“ Tulip said.

Haig had turned to look at the Rasboras. They’re little pinkish fish with dark triangles on their sides, and Haig has a ten-gallon tank of them directly behind his desk chair at eye level. He’s apt to turn around and study them in the middle of a conversation. This time, though, his attention to the Rasboras was a sign that the conversation was over.

The hell it was. I said, “I’ll make out a receipt for Miss Wolinski for her retainer.”

Haig said, “Retainer?”

Tulip said, “Oh, of course. You’ll be wanting a retainer, won’t you?”

I don’t know what he’d do without me. I swear I don’t. The trouble is, Haig keeps forgetting that if you’re going to be a detective for a living you ought to do your best to make a living out of it. For most of his life he lived in two ratty rooms in the Bronx, breeding tropical fish and trucking plastic bags around to pet shops, peddling his little babies for a nickel here and a dime there. All the while he read every mystery and detective story ever published, and then his uncle died and left him a fortune, and he bought this house and let Madam Juana keep the lower two floors and set up shop as a detective, which is terrific, no question about it. But his capital isn’t really enough to keep us together, so when we get a case it’s a good idea for us to get money out of it, and here he was going to let Tulip hire us without paying anything.

“Of course,” Tulip said again, digging in her bag for a checkbook. When she came up with it I uncapped a pen and handed it to her. She started to make out the check, then looked up to ask the amount.

“Five hundred is standard,” I said.

Haig almost fainted. I think he would have asked her for fifty bucks and let her talk him down. But the five hundred didn’t phase our client for a second. I guess all she had to be told was that it was standard. She finished making out the check and passed it to me, and I wrote out a receipt on a sheet from my notebook and gave it to Haig for him to sign. He wrote his name with a flourish, as usual. Imagine what he could do if he had more than seven letters to work with.

“I intend to earn this,” he said, holding the check in his pudgy little hand. “You’ll receive full value for your money, Miss Wolinski. In a sense, you might say your troubles are over.”

And ours are just beginning, I thought. But then Tulip got to her feet, sort of uncoiling from her chair like a trained cobra responding to a flute, and I decided that any case that forced me to go to her apartment with her couldn’t possibly be all bad.

“He’s quite a man,” Tulip said. “It must be very inspiring to work for someone like Leo Haig.”

“It’s all of that,” I agreed. “And do I call you Miss Wolinski or Miss Willing?”

“Call me Tulip. And may I call you Chip?”

Call me darling, I thought. “Sure,” I said. “Call me Chip.”

“What’s that a nickname for?”

“It’s the only name I’ve got,” I said, which is certainly true now. I had started life as Leigh Harvey Harrison, both Leigh and Harvey being proper names in my less-than-proper family, but in the fall of ’63 my parents decided that wouldn’t do at all, and I’ve been Chip ever since. I understand there are a lot of Jews named Arthur who were known to the world as Adolph until sometime in the ’30s.

We talked a little more about Haig, and then the cab dropped us at her building, a high-rise on the corner of 54th and Eighth. The lobby reminded you a little of an airline terminal. “It’s not exactly overflowing with warmth and charm,” Tulip said. “It’s sort of sterile, isn’t it? Before I moved here I lived in a brownstone in the Village. I really liked that apartment and I would have kept it except it would have meant keeping Andrew, too. This place has all the character of an office building, but on the other hand the elevators are fast and there’s plenty of closet space and there aren’t any cockroaches. My other place was crawling with them, and of course I couldn’t spray because of the fish.”

“Couldn’t you try trapping them and feeding them to the fish?”