The Topless Tulip Caper

Fifteen

HAIG MAKES ME read a lot of mysteries. Since we don’t get all that many cases, and since you can only spend so much time feeding fish and cleaning out filters, that leaves me with plenty of time to humor him. It’s his theory that you can learn anything and solve any puzzle if you just read enough mystery novels. Maybe he’s right. It certainly seems to work for him, but he’s a genius and I feel that constitutes special circumstances.

Well, if you’ve read as many of them as I have—not even as many as Haig has, because nobody has read that many—then you know what happened when I finally got around to seeing Helen Tattersall. I mean, her name came up early on, and I kept ducking opportunities to see her, so naturally one of two things had to happen. Either she turned out to be the killer or she supplied the one missing piece of information that tied the whole mess together. Right?

Wrong. Absolutely wrong.

I got in to see her by posing as someone investigating her complaint about her neighbors. Even then I had a hard time because she really didn’t like the idea of opening her door, but I explained that I couldn’t act on the complaint unless I interviewed her face-to-face. Much as she didn’t want to open her door, she decided to risk it if it would facilitate her making trouble for somebody.

When she opened the door I decided on my own that she hadn’t gone to Treasure Chest and planted a poisoned dart in Cherry Bounce’s breast. Because Helen Tattersall was in a wheelchair with her leg in a cast, and the first thing she did was inform me that she’d been in the cast for two months and expected to be in it for another four months, and she didn’t sound very happy about it.

The next thing she said was, “Now which complaint have you come about? The upstairs neighbors? Those prostitutes? Or the man next door who plays the flute all day and all night? Or the married couple on the other side of me with that dreadful squalling baby? Or the man across the hall who gives me dirty looks? Or the evil man down by the elevator who puts poison gas in everybody’s air-conditioners? Or could it be my complaints about the building employees? The superintendent is a Soviet agent, you know—”

So she didn’t even have a personal vendetta against Tulip and Cherry. Instead she had just one enemy: mankind. And she complained about and tried to make trouble for every member of the human race who called himself to her attention.

Well, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I began wishing I were Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death so that I could push the old bitch down a staircase, wheelchair and all. I’m not saying I would have done it but I might have given it serious consideration.

I suppose there should have been one little thing she said that got my mind working in the right direction, one little thread she might unwittingly supply, but I’m sorry, there just wasn’t anything like that. It was a waste of time. I had sort of thought it would be a waste of time, and that’s why I’d postponed seeing Helen Tattersall as long as I did, in addition to having suspected that meeting her wouldn’t be one of my all-time favorite experiences. I was right on all counts, and it was a pleasure to get out of her apartment, believe me.

I found a staircase and climbed a flight to Tulip’s apartment and used her key to open her door. I got a rush when I walked in, remembering how I had let myself into Andrew Mallard’s apartment the previous evening, and half-expecting to find another corpse or two now. I don’t guess I really thought that would happen, but I have to admit I went around touching things with the heel of my hand to avoid leaving fingerprints.

No corpses, thank God. Not in the fish tank, either. The two Ctenapoma fasciolatum swam around on either side of their glass divider. They were doing a great job of ignoring each other, and the male had done absolutely nothing about building a bubble nest.

I sat on the edge of the bed and watched them for a while. “C’mon,” I said at one point “Clover Swann wants plenty of sex in this book, gang. You can’t expect me to supply all of it myself, can you?”

I don’t think they cared.

So I gave up on them and went into the kitchen. I found brine shrimp in the freezer and broke off a chunk, and I found containers of bloodworms and mealworms in the fridge. I went back to the bedroom and fed them until they wouldn’t eat any more, then returned the food to the kitchen I opened a couple of cupboards until I spotted the jar of wheat germ. I reached for it, and then I stopped with my hand halfway to it, and I told myself not to be silly, fingerprints never solved anything anyway and all that, and then I got a paper towel and used it to take the jar from the shelf and set it on the counter top. There wouldn’t be any useful prints and I knew it, but if Haig did check the jar for prints and found mine all over it I would never hear the end of it.

I wrapped the jar in several thicknesses of paper towels and found a paper bag in another cupboard and put the jar in that. Then I left it in the kitchen and took a careful look around the apartment without knowing what I was looking for.

I suppose the police must have tossed the place fairly thoroughly the night of the murder, but I had to credit them with doing a neat job of it. As far as I could tell nothing was out of place.

I went into Cherry’s room, and of course it was impossible to tell whether anything was out of place there or not, because nothing had been in place to begin with. I remember standing there just two days ago when the only victims had been scats, remembered thinking that Cherry was evidently something of a slob, and now I found myself muttering an apology to her. I guess a girl can throw her underwear around the room if she wants to. I guess it’s her own business.

We’ll get him, I promised her. I don’t know who he is, and I don’t know if Haig knows who he is, but we’ll get the bastard.

I tucked the jar of wheat germ under my arm and got out of there. The guy at the parking lot ground the Caddy’s gears a little but it didn’t sound as though he’d done any permanent damage. I gave him a quarter and drove back to our garage and turned the car over to Emilio, who never grinds the gears, and who occasionally polishes it when he has nothing else to do. We don’t pay him to polish the Cadillac. He does it because he likes to.

Then I tucked the jar of wheat germ under my arm again and walked back to Haig’s house.