The Topless Tulip Caper Page 2

  “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.

  She was a tremendous contrast to Tulip. Tulip was about six feet tall, give or take an inch, and Cherry was maybe five-two in platform shoes. Tulip’s hair was long and blond, Cherry’s short and jet black. Tulip was built on a grand scale, reminding you that you can’t have too much of a good thing, and Cherry was slim, pointing out that good things come in small packages. The one thing that both of them made you dramatically aware of was that human beings are mammals.

  She started to dance. She was naked, incidentally. I guess I didn’t mention that. I understand that some of the topless-bottomless clubs start out with the girls wearing something, but Treasure Chest kept it simple. She was naked, and she started dancing, and as grubby as the club was and as much as I disliked the music and atmosphere, I decided there were places I would be less happy to be.

  The thing is, she was a pretty good dancer. Tulip had moved around nicely and all, but what she was there for was to show you her body and the dancing was more or less incidental. With Cherry, the whole performance was enhanced by the fact that she could really dance. I don’t know if this made any difference to the rest of the crowd but I noticed it and I suppose in some way it heightened my reaction to her.

  “That’s my roommate,” a voice said.

  A hand touched my arm. I turned to see Tulip standing beside me. She was wearing clothes, but not the jeans and Beethoven tee-shirt I had seen her in earlier.

  Now she wore a loose-fitting navy dress. You still got a fair idea of what was lurking beneath the dress, but it was a good deal less obvious.

  “Oh, hi,” I said.

  “HI yourself. I gather you like my roommate.”

  “Uh.”

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

  “Uh, yeah. She’s, uh, pretty.”

  I had been wondering what it would be like when Tulip joined me at the bar. I more or less expected some aggravation from the other males, which was why I had been moved to do the number on the creep with the thin moustache. But evidently men who get off on staring at naked girls are unsettled to be in the company of those very girls, naked or otherwise, and nobody tried to sit in on our conversation. As a matter of fact, the fat man on Tulip’s right actually moved a stool away.

  “Cherry dances better than I do,” she said.

  “I thought you danced very well.”

  “Oh, come on, Chip. You’re sweet, but I’m not a dancer. I’m just up there to wiggle my tits and ass at the customers. That’s really all it is.”

  “Well, uh—”

  “Cherry’s a real dancer. Look how graceful she is.” I looked. “The trouble with Cherry is she thinks this is going to lead her to a career in dance. At least I have a realistic attitude. This is an easy way to make a dollar and not much more. Cherry thinks she can make the easy dollar and still use the place as a stepping stone. But she’s generally naive, you know. I take a harder line on reality.”

  I didn’t take any kind of line on reality at that point. What I took was a sip of beer. I did this carefully. I don’t know if I’m Mr. Ultra Cool generally, but we had established earlier that whatever cool I normally possessed tended to get lost when Tulip was in the immediate vicinity. So I sipped the beer carefully to avoid gagging on it if she said something disarming.

  “Did you like my act, Chip?”

  “Yes. Very much.”

  “Did it turn you on?”

  When I didn’t answer she said, “I’m not asking because I’m trying to embarrass you. It’s just that I’m trying to understand the particular head of the men who come here. You know, like I don’t think I would get off watching a man dance around naked. I can’t say for certain because I never watched that, although I was reading where a bar at one of the big mid-western colleges has one night a week with male nude dancers, and the college girls go there and really get off on the whole thing. So maybe it would get me excited, but I don’t think so. In fact I don’t think those college girls would get off after the first few times. Like they would be getting off on the idea of it, you know, but after it became a frequent thing it would be boring for them.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “But men really get off looking at naked women, don’t they?”

  I glanced briefly at the absorbed men on either side of us. “Evidently,” I said.

  “So I wasn’t asking to put you on the spot. But you seem like a sane, healthy guy, and I was wondering how you reacted, because sometimes I’m inclined to think of the general audience here as a batch of perverts, which may or may not be fair of me, and I was wondering how someone like you would react.”

  I didn’t know exactly what to say, because I didn’t know what my reaction was, exactly. It had been a turn-on watching her on stage, but then it had been at least as exciting in many ways being with her that afternoon, and it was hard to decide whether I would have reacted to her the same way on stage if she had been a total stranger instead of someone who had already Put Ideas In My Head. In some ways it might have been more of a turn-on if I hadn’t known her, especially at the end when she did the spread number. That might have been a turn-off in any context—it was sort of humiliating and demeaning and like that—but how could I tell? If it was a total stranger up there I might have gone ape like all the other card-carrying sex maniacs in the audience.

  I tried to judge some of this on the basis of my react
ion to Cherry, but that didn’t really work either. Because even though I hadn’t met her she was already someone I knew by proxy. I had stood in her messy bedroom, I had pictured her in my mind, so it wasn’t the same thing.

  I was trying to decide how all this worked, and how much of it I wanted to mention to Tulip, when the barmaid turned up and asked if I was ready for another beer. I still had a half-filled glass and there was some left in the bottle, so what she meant was that I was drinking too slowly and the joint wasn’t in business for its health.

  “Chip’s with me,” Tulip said. “You can let up on the salesmanship number, Jan.”

  “Sorry about that,” Jan said, and winked. “Didn’t know.”

  I smiled back, and we sort of carried on a conversation without getting back to the subject Tulip had raised. She said that Cherry would join us after the show. It was her last number, and we could all get the hell out and go someplace quiet for coffee, and I could ask Cherry various questions and we could see if we learned anything.

  “It should be fascinating,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see how a detective works.”

  “Well, you know the questions Haig and I asked you this afternoon.”

  “Oh, this is different. I mean, I was the one you were asking questions. I’ll be watching you ask questions of somebody else and that should make a big difference.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you know what questions you’re going to ask her?” I was looking for an answer to that one when Cherry’s first number ended. There was a round of applause approximately equal in volume to what Tulip got, and then another record was cued and Cherry went into her second and last number.

  “Do you know what questions you’re going to ask her, Chip?”

  I knew what questions I wanted to ask her. I wanted to ask her where she’d been all my life. She was putting a little more sex into her routine on this number, letting her hands glide upward from the sides of her thighs to her genuinely impressive breasts, and giving little ooohs and ahhhs to indicate that she was turning herself on. I don’t know if she was really turning herself on, but I can swear to you that she was turning me on, and I don’t think I was the only person in the audience who was having that reaction. “Chip?”

  “Er,” I said. “Uh, with questions and all that. You sort of have to play it by ear.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s best not to have everything all scheduled in advance like a presidential press conference or something. You sort of see how one question leads to another.”

  “It sounds fascinating.”

  I was glad she thought it was fascinating, because what I thought it was was bullshit. The fact of the matter was that I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was going to ask Cherry, or even why. The more I thought about this case of ours, the more I found myself leaning toward the conclusion that Leo Haig had finally done it. He’d finally slipped over that thin line between genius and insanity, because we never should have taken this absurd case in the first place, because—no matter who Tulip Willing happened to be in her spare time—there was absolutely no excuse for investigating a case involving—

  “Chip?”

  I broke off my reverie and looked at her. “What?”

  “Is Cherry a suspect?”

  “Everybody’s a suspect.”

  “Because it’s hard to believe she could commit murder.”

  I looked at her, and I decided it wasn’t at all hard to believe that she could commit murder. Not directly, but I could see where she could hand out coronaries to half her audience every night just by doing what she was doing.

  I said, “There’s one thing you have to realize. Everybody’s a suspect until proven otherwise.”

  “I thought everyone’s innocent until proved guilty “

  “Absolutely. And everybody’s suspicious until proved innocent. That’s how it works. Cherry’s a suspect, Glenn Flatt’s a suspect. Haskell Henderson’s a suspect. So’s his wife. That Danzig is a suspect. Simon What’s-his-name—”

  “Barckover.”

  “Barckover, right.” I was supposed to remember things like Barckover’s last name, Haig had told me, just as I was supposed to be able to repeat all conversations verbatim. If Archie Goodwin can do something, I’m supposed to train myself to do it, too. (Sometimes, let me tell you, Archie Goodwin gives me a stiff pain.) “Barckover,” I said again, carefully training my memory. “And Andrew Merganser—”

  “You mean Mallard.”

  “Well, I knew it was some kind of a duck. The hell with Archie Goodwin.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Forget it,” I said, a little more savagely than I’d intended. “Mallard and Helen Tattersall and Gus Leemy and whoever the hell else you mentioned. Everybody—”

  “Don’t say Gus’s name so loud. He’s probably in the dub tonight.”

  “Well, they’re all suspects,” I said, not so loud, this time around. “And so are other people we haven’t even thought of yet, and one of them’s a killer.”

  “It’s still hard to believe.”

  I let the conversation die there. If she thought that was hard to believe, she didn’t know the half of it. What I found hard to believe was that Haig and I were involved. True, Haig was only really happy when he had a murder case to bother his brain with. And true, this case involved murder, and not just one murder, not just another murder, but—

  Tulip’s fingers closed on my elbow. “Watch now, Chip. She’s coming to the end and she really makes a production out of it. She shows a lot more than I do. Watch!”

  So I watched. I mean, maybe you would have looked up at the ceiling or something. Anything’s possible. But what I did, see, was I watched.

  Watched as she lowered herself first to her knees, then lay almost full-length, her perfect breasts suspended over the apron of the stage. Watched her straighten up and swing that body around, shaking those breasts from side to side, always perfectly in time to that awful music. Watched as she displayed herself, giving everybody a much longer look than everybody needed. Watched as she put one little hand to her mouth, miming shock at what she had done, straightening up now, drawing herself primly together, her shoulders held back to bring her breasts into the sharpest possible relief.

  And heard her sudden gasp.

  And saw the bead of blood on her left breast just an inch above the nipple. And watched her hands, moving in awful slow motion, struggling to touch the bead of blood.

  And watched her fall, still in slow motion, falling backwards and to her left, falling as only dead things fall, landing at last on the floorboards of the stage with the impact of a gunshot.

  I guess my reaction time was pretty good. It didn’t seem to be at the time, but the fact remains that I was the first person to vault the bar and leap onto the stage and have a look at Cherry Bounce.

  On the other hand, fast or slow, my reaction was wrong. What I should have done was forget the stage entirely and go straight to the door to keep anybody else from going through it. Because I had seen the way Cherry tried to reach her breast and couldn’t, and I had seen her fall, and I really didn’t have to go up onto the stage to examine her in order to know there was nothing I could do for her.

  Haig has always said it’s nothing to berate myself for. He says anybody’s natural and proper reaction is to establish first of all that the victim is beyond assistance. Well, that was my reaction, all right, and that was what I established.

  Our murderer had just claimed his one hundred twenty-fourth victim, and he had done it right in front of my eyes.

  Two

  WHEN THE DOORBELL rang that afternoon I was spooning brine shrimp into a tank of Labeo chrysophekadion. They were cute little rascals, about half an inch long, and most people who keep tropical fish call them black sharks. Which is sort of weird, because they are not sharks at all and in no sense sharklike, being peaceful types who function as scavengers in an aquarium, picking up on food that other fish have missed. Ours we
ren’t black, either, but white and pink-eyed like Easter bunnies. Leo Haig had come up with a couple of albinos in an earlier spawning, and now he had bred them to each other, and the two hundred or so fish I was presently feeding were the result.

  Haig couldn’t have been prouder if he had sired them himself. I was kind of pleased with them too, but I couldn’t see what they had to do with Being a Resourceful Private Detective, which was what I was supposed to be. When I would bring up the subject Haig would tell me that the aquarium was the universe in microcosm, and the lessons it taught me would ultimately find application in life itself. He says things like that a lot.

  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.”