The Topless Tulip Caper

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.

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 reaction 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.