CH04 - The Topless Tulip Caper Read online

  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.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. He may or may not have been talking to me. He wasn’t looking at me, but I don’t think he’d have bothered looking at me if I had had a live chicken perched on my shoulder. Nothing was going to make him take his eyes off Tulip.

  “Jesus,” he said again, reverently. “Never saw anything like that. Longest legs I ever seen in my life. Biggest tits I ever seen in my life. Jesus Christ on wheels.”

  The barmaid came over. A record ended and another began without interruption and Tulip went on doing creative things with her body. The barmaid wasn’t a beast herself, a slim redhead wearing black fishnet tights and a black body stocking. She had a heart-shaped face and almond eyes, and I got the feeling that she’d spent her last incarnation as a cat. I started to think of all the different ways I could rub her to make her purr, but she was shifting her feet impatiently, and I decided that my heart (among other parts of me) already belonged to Tulip. I didn’t want to spread myself too thin.

  “Bottle of beer,” I said.

  I probably would have preferred something like whiskey and water but Tulip had warned me against it. “They make all the whiskey in New Jersey,” she had said, “and it all comes out tasting like something you use to take the old finish off furniture, and then they water it, and then they serve it in shot glasses with false bottoms, and then they charge two dollars a drink for it.” So I ordered beer, which came straight from the brewery in a nice hygienic bottle. It also cost two dollars a copy, which is a little high for beer, but it was a business expense if there ever was one so I didn’t mind.

  “Just look at that bush,” my companion said. “Soft and blond and gorgeous. I wonder is she gonna do a spread.”

  I was rather hoping she wasn’t. I was feeling rather weird, if you want to know. On the one hand Tulip was turning me on with her dancing and all, and on the other hand I was a little upset about the fact that this was someone whom I knew personally and professionally, and whom I sort of wanted to know a lot better in the future, and here she was not only turning me on but also turning on a whole roomful of creeps, including this particular creep next to me.

  “Some clubs they come right up on the bar,” the creep said. He must have been about forty-five, and he had a pencil-line moustache that was really pretty offensive. I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring. “Right up on the bar,” he went on, and I still didn’t know if he was talking to himself or to me or to the man on the other side of him. “Right up on the bar,” he said again, “and you give ’em a tip, you slip ’em a buck, and they squat down so you can eat ’em. Go right down the line and everybody who wants to slip ’em a buck and goes ahead and has theirselves a taste.”

  I thought seriously about hitting him. Half-seriously, anyway. I’m not particularly good at hitting people, and also he couldn’t possibly know that he was talking about the girl I fully intended to be in love with.

  “Love to eat this one,” he said. “Start at her toes and go clear to her nose. Then go back down again.”

  He went on like this. He got into some rather clinical anatomical detail and I gave some further thought to hitting him. Or I could do something less extreme. I could tip my beer into his lap, for example.

  It was about that time that Tulip noticed I was there. You might have thought she would have spotted me right off, but you have to remember that she was up on an elevated platform with a bright spotlight in her eyes, and that the rest of the room was dark. Also she was off to the side so that I was not standing directly in front of her. But she did notice me now, and for a second I thought she was going to blush a little, but I guess when you do this sort of thing five nights out of seven you lose the capacity to blush, because instead she just flashed me a little half-smile and tipped me a wink and went on dancing.

  This time the creep did turn to me. “See that?” he said. “I’ll be a son of a bitch. The cunt is crazy about me.”

  “Huh?”

  “She winked at me,” he said. “She smiled at me. Some of these broads, they wink at everybody, but that’s the first since she came on and she was smiling straight at me. What do you bet she comes over here after her number’s done? Man, I’m gonna get lucky tonight. I can feel it.”

  The thing is, I happened to know that she would come over after her number. This wasn’t standard; one of the good things about the Treasure Chest, from the dancers’ point of view, was that you didn’t have to work the bar hustling drinks between numbers. A lot of the clubs worked that way but not Treasure Chest, which was one of the reasons Tulip and her roommate Cherry were willing to work there. But Tulip would come over to meet me because we had arranged it that way, and the last thing I wanted was for her to be confronted by this idiot who was convinced she was crazy about him.

  I said, “It was me she smiled at.”

  His mouth spread in an unpleasant grin. “You? You gotta be kidding.”

  “She was smiling at me.”

  “A young punk like you? Don’t make me laugh.”

  “She’s my sister,” I said.

  The grin went away, reversing itself in slow motion.

  “My sister,” I said again, “and I don’t much care for the way you were talking about her.”

  “Listen,” he said, “don’t get me wrong. A person, you know, a person’ll make remarks—”

  “What I was thinking,” I said, “is this. I was thinking about taking my knife out of my pocket and cutting you a little. Just a little bit.”

  “Listen,” he said. He got off his stool and edged away from the bar. “Listen,” he said, “the last thing I want is trouble.”

  “Maybe you ought to go home,” I said.

  “Jesus,” he said. He headed for the door but he went most of the way walking backward so that he could keep his eyes on me and make sure my hand didn’t come out of my pocket. It’s awkward walking like that, and he kept stumbling but not quite falling down, and at the door he turned and fled.

  I let out my breath and took my hand out of my pocket. I had been holding a knife in it, as a matter of fact. The knife is attached to my key chain. It’s an inch long, and it has a half-inch blade. It takes about a minute to get the thing open, and I usually break my fingernails in the attempt. Haig gave it to me once. I’ve never figured out a use for it, but you never know when something will come in handy. I doubt that it would be the greatest thing in the world for cutting someone open with. You’d be better stabbing him with one of the keys on the chain.

  A few seconds later the barmaid turned up. She pointed to the creep’s half-finished drink and the pile of bills next to it. There was a ten in the pile and five or six singles.

  “He coming back?”

  “Not without a gun.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “He had to leave in a hurry,” I said. “He remembered a previous engagement.”

  “He forgot his change.”

  “It’s for you,” I said.

  “It is now,” she said, scooping up the bills and change. “What do you know.”

  “No, he meant it for you,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “What do you know,” she said. “I pegged him for El Cheapo. You never know, do you?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  I sipped at my beer and turned my eyes to Tulip again. Or they turned that way of their own accord, without my having much to do with it. The music was moving toward a climax, and so was half the audience. There was a little rumble of encouragement from my fellow patrons at the bar. You could make out little encouraging show biz phrases like “Show me that pretty pussy, baby,”
and other tasteful bons mots. Tulip had her head back, her long blond hair swaying from side to side behind her, her large breasts pointing at the ceiling in a way that would have forced Newton to reappraise the Law of Gravity. Her whole body shuddered, and the record hit its final grooves, and she put her hands on her thighs and opened herself to the band of dirty old men, and I told myself to close my eyes, and didn’t, and I’m sure it was my imagination but I thought I could see all the way to her throat.

  Then the lights went out.

  There was quite a bit of applause. Not a roar or anything, but more than a polite ovation. A few of my fellow voyeurs scooped change from the bar and headed for the exit. Most of us stayed where we were. The lights had only stayed off for a second, and another record had already been cued and started up, more of the same monotonous rock. If that’s the music of my generation, then I guess I’m a throwback or something.

  There was no emcee. I had been sort of afraid of some Neanderthal in a checkered sport coat coming up and telling dirty jokes, but Treasure Chest stuck with the basics; when one girl went off, another one came on. A male voice came over the loudspeaker and said, “That was Miss Tulip Willing, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s have a big hand for her now. Tulip Willing.” I looked around the club for the ladies he’d been talking about and didn’t see a one. I suppose there might have been some at the tables but there certainly weren’t any at the bar. Nor, for that matter, did I see anybody I would be inclined to label a gentleman. The audience gave Tulip another weaker round of applause in response to his request, and as it died out he said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure here at the one and only Treasure Chest, a girl with a chestful of pleasure, a pint-sized lady with queen-sized attributes, the one and only Cherry Bounce.”

  A pair of curtains parted and Tulip’s roommate stepped into the spotlight. I knew she was Tulip’s roommate because Tulip had told me so. I was seeing her for the first time and my immediate reaction was to wish that she was my roommate.