Lawrence Block: The Topless Tulip Caper

The Topless Tulip Caper

When a stripper is murdered onstage, Chip Harrison must put his sexual frustration aside to seek out the mobster responsible

One hundred and twenty-three murders. That’s the statistic that gets Chip Harrison’s attention—that and the girl who reports it: a statuesque stripper and amateur ichthyologist who has come to him for help catching the killer of her 123 rare fish. But it’s the 124th victim—this time a human—who draws Chip and his mentor, porcine super-sleuth Leo Haig, into a world of dressing rooms and easy death, where the poison kills quickly and the best clues are found between the sheets.

Catching the killer is tough, but Chip’s real challenge is staying alive long enough to get the stripper to take off her clothes.

One

I STARTED through the door a man stepped in front of me and stood there like the front four of the Miami Dolphins. I was about six inches taller than him, and he was about forty pounds heavier than I was, and I figured that gave him quite an edge. He was wearing plaid pants and a striped jacket over a sky-blue silk shirt. He had the face of an ex-boxer who had put on a lot of weight without going to fat. His nose had been broken more than once, and his eyes said he was just waiting for someone to try breaking it again. Someone very well might, sooner or later, because people usually get what they want, but I wasn’t going to oblige him.

He said, “Read the sign, kid.”

There were a lot of signs, so I started reading them aloud. “‘Treasure Chest,” I said. “ ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!

‘Topless Stopless Dancing!’ ‘Come in and see what Fun City is all about!’

“You read nice,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“What you call reading with expression,” he said. He took a step closer to me. “That particular sign,” he said, pointing. “Let’s see you read that one.”

“ ‘You must be twenty-one and prove it,’ ” I intoned.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Nice phrasing,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of here,” he said.

“I’m twenty-one,” I lied.

“Sure you are, kid.”

“Twenty-two, actually,” I embroidered.

“Sure. You wanna try proving it?”

I took my wallet from the inside breast pocket of the sport jacket it was too damned hot to be wearing, and from the wallet I took a green rectangle with Alexander Hamilton’s picture on it. I folded the piece of paper in half and put it carefully into his paw.

“My I.D.,” I said.

His eyes grew very thoughtful. Actually, you don’t have to be twenty-one to drink in New York. You have to be eighteen, which is something I can be with no problem whatsoever. But you have to be twenty-one to go into a place where ladies flash various portions of their anatomy at you. This is rarely a problem for me since I don’t generally bother with that kind of place. Not because it does nothing for me to look at ladies with no clothes on, but because it does. I mean, I also don’t go browsing in French restaurants when I don’t have the price of a meal in my pocket. Why torture yourself, for Pete’s sake?

But this was business. Leo Haig had a case and a client, and his client was performing at the Treasure Chest, and since Leo Haig was no more likely to hire himself off to a topless club than I was to enter a monastery, I, Chip Harrison, was elected to serve as Haig’s eyes, ears, nose, and throat.

Which explains why I had just tucked a ten-dollar bill into a very large and callused hand.

“Ten bucks?” said the owner of the hand. “For ten bucks you could go to a massage parlor and get a fancy hand job.”

“I’m allergic to hand lotion.”

“Huh?”

“I get this horrible rash.”

He frowned at me, evidently suspecting I was joking with him. He had a ready wit, all right. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, I guess you just proved your age to the satisfaction of the management. One-drink minimum at the bar. Enjoy yourself, tell your friends what a good time you had.”

He stepped aside and I moved past him. At least it was cooler inside. The Treasure Chest was located on Seventh Avenue between Forty-Eight and Forty-Ninth, a block which is basically devoted to porno movies and dirty bookstores and peep shows, but they didn’t account for the temperature outside all by themselves. What accounted for it was that it was August and it hadn’t rained in weeks and some perverse deity had taken a huge vacuum cleaner and sucked all the air out of Manhattan, leaving nothing behind but soot and sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide and all the other goodies that only rats and pigeons and cockroaches can breathe with impunity. The sun was out there every day, having a fine old time, and when night finally came it didn’t do much good because the buildings just grabbed onto the heat and held it in place until the sun could come up again and start the whole process over. It had been a sensational couple of weeks, let me tell you. Haig’s place was air-conditioned, which was nice during the day, but my furnished room two blocks away was not. This made the nights terrible, and it also made it increasingly difficult for me to resist Haig’s suggestion that I give up my room and move into his quarters.

“Archie Goodwin lives with Nero Wolfe,” Haig said, more than once. “He is a ladies’ man in every sense of the word. His cohabitation with Wolfe does not seem to inhibit his pursuit of the fair sex.”

There were a lot of answers to this one. Such as mentioning that Wolfe had a brownstone to himself, while Haig had the top two floors of a carriage house in Chelsea, and you can’t very well bring home an innocent young thing to the top two floors of a place the bottom two floors of which are occupied by Madam Juana’s Puerto Rican cathouse. But what it came down to was that I liked having my own room in my own building, and that I could be very stubborn on the subject, almost as stubborn as Leo Haig himself.

But this is all beside the point, the point being that it was cooler inside the Treasure Chest. There wasn’t much more to be said for the place, however. It was dimly lit, which worked to its advantage; what I could see of the furnishings suggested that they were better off the less you could make them out. There was a long bar on the left side as you entered, and behind the bar there was a stage, and on the stage, dancing in the glare of a baby spotlight, was our client, the one and probably only Tulip Willing.

She didn’t have any clothes on.

I wasn’t prepared for this. I mean, I should have been, and everything, but I somehow wasn’t. I had seen Tulip that afternoon and what she’d been wearing then had made her figure overwhelmingly obvious to me. Tight jeans and a tight tee-shirt, both worn over nothing but skin, don’t leave you very much up in the air as to what’s going on underneath them. And also when you go into a topless-bottomless place you ought to be prepared to be confronted by some skin. That’s what people go there for, for Pete’s sake. Not because the drinks are terrific.

If it had been somebody else up there I think I could have handled it better. But I’d spent a few hours with Tulip, first at Haig’s place and then at her apartment, and I had gotten to know her as a human being, and at the same time I had become enormously turned on by her personally, and there she was up there, twisting her unbelievable body around to a barrage of loud recorded hard rock, swinging her breasts and bumping her behind and strutting around on those long legs that seemed to go all the way up to her neck, and—

Well, you get the picture.

I took a deep breath of air that was probably just as polluted as all the other air but seemed better because it was several degrees cooler. I held the breath for a while, looking at Tulip, surveying the club, then looking at Tulip again. She looked a lot better than the club. I let the breath out and walked over to the bar. There were two empty stools and I took the closest one. I had the other empty stool on my right, and on my left I had a man wearing a dark three-button suit and an expression of rapt adoration. I wouldn’t say that his eyes were on stems exactly, but they weren’t as far back in his head as most people’s are, either. He looked as though he’d leaped out of a fairy tale, trapped forever halfway between prince and frog.