The Topless Tulip Caper

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 weren’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.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “You came at a wonderful time. I mean you can come anytime you want to. I mean. Uh.”

“Is this Leo Haig’s residence?”

“Yes.”

“Leo Haig the detective?”

He’s Leo Haig the detective all right, but that’s not a phrase that rolls off most people’s tongues. As a matter of fact he’s pretty close to being an unknown, which is not the way he wants it, and one of the main reasons he hired me as his assistant. A chief function of mine is to write up his cases—at least the ones that turn out triumphant—so that the world will know about him. If it weren’t for Dr. Watson, he says, who would have heard of Sherlock Holmes? If Archie Goodwin never sat down at a typewriter, who would be aware of Nero Wolfe? Anyway, that’s why he hired me, to make Leo Haig The Detective a household phrase, and that’s how come you get to read all this.

“Leo Haig the detective,” I agreed.

“Then I came to the right place,” she said.

“Oh, definitely. No question about it. You came to the right place.”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, sure. I’m terrific.”

“May I come in?”

“Oh, sure. Right. Great idea.”

She gave me an odd look, which I certainly deserved, and I stood aside and she came in and I closed the door. I led her into the office which Haig and I share. There’s a huge old partner’s desk, which we also share, although I don’t really have much use for my side of it. I pointed to a chair for her, and when she sat down I swiveled my desk chair around and sat in it and looked at her some more. She was a little less intimidating when she was sitting down. There was still just as much of her but the overall effect was not quite so awesome.

“Is Mr. Haig in?”

“He’s upstairs,” I said. “He’s playing with his fish.”

“Playing with them?”

“Sort of. I’m his assistant. My name is Harrison. Chip Harrison.”

“Mine is Tulip.”

“Oh.”

“Tulip Willing.”

“It certainly is,” I said.

“Pardon me?”

I was really having a difficult time getting my brain in gear. I took a deep breath and tried again. I said, “You wanted to see Mr. Haig?”

“That’s right. I want to hire him.”

“I see.”

“There’s a matter that I want him to investigate.”

“I see,” I said again. “Could you tell me something about the matter?”

“Well—”

Tm his assistant,” I said. “His confidential assistant.”

“Aren’t you young to be a detective?”

I’m not exactly a detective. I mean I don’t have a license or anything. But I didn’t see any point in telling her that. What I wanted to say was that you don’t have to be all that old to spoon brine shrimp into a fish tank, but I didn’t say that either. I said, “If you could give me some idea—”

“Of course.” She leaned forward and I took another quick look at Beethoven’s eyebrows. Her breasts had fantastic stage presence. It was hard not to stare at them, and you sort of got the feeling they were staring back.

“It’s a murder case,” she said.

I don’t know if my heartbeat actually quickened, because it had been operating faster than normal ever since I opened the door and took my first look at her. But I certainly did get excited. I mean, people don’t generally turn up on our doorstep wanting us to investigate a murder. But it happens all the time in books, and that’s the kind of detective Haig wants to be, the kind you read about in mystery novels.

I said, “A homicide.”

“Not exactly.”

“I thought you said a murder.”

She nodded. “But homicide means that a person has been killed, doesn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Well, this is murder. But it’s not homicide.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

She put her hand to her mouth and nibbled thoughtfully at a cuticle. If she ever ran out of cuticles to nibble I decided I’d gladly lend her one of mine. Or any other part of me that interested her. “It’s hard to say this,” she said.

I waited her out.

“I had to come to Leo Haig,” she said eventually. “I couldn’t go to the police. I never even considered going to the police. Even if they didn’t actually laugh at me there’s no way they would bother investigating. So I had to go to a private detective, and I couldn’t go to an ordinary private detective. It has to be Leo Haig.”

That’s the kind of thing you want every client to say, but Tulip Willing was the first one ever to say it.

“I guess the only way to say it is to come right out with it,” she said. “Someone murdered my tropical fish. I want Leo Haig to catch the killer.”

I climbed a flight of stairs to the fourth floor, where Haig was playing with his fish. There are tanks in all the rooms on the third floor, but on the fourth floor there are nothing but tanks, rows and rows of them. I found Haig glowering at a school of cichlids from Lake Tanganyika. They had set him back about fifty bucks a fish, which is a lot, and no one had yet induced them to spawn in captivity. Haig intended to be the first, and thus far the fish had shown no sign of preparing to cooperate.

“There’s an element missing,” he said. “Maybe the rockwork should be extended. Maybe they’re accustomed to spawning in caves. Maybe they want less light.”

“Maybe they’re all boys,” I suggested.

“Phooey. There are eight of them. With six fish one is mathematically certain of having a pair. That is to say that the certainty is in excess of ninety-five percent. With eight the certainty is that much greater.”

“Unless the cunning Africans only ship one sex.”

He looked at me. “You have a devious mind,” he said. “It will be an asset professionally.”

“I have a devious mind,” I agreed. “You have a client.”

“Oh?”

“A beautiful young woman,” I said.

“Trust you to notice that.”

“I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t notice. Her name is Tulip Willing.”

“Indeed.”

“She wants you to investigate a murder and trap a killer.”

He bounced to his feet, and the African cichlids no longer meant a thing to him. He’s about five feet tall and built like a beachball, with a neatly trimmed little black goatee and head of wiry black hair. He likes to touch the beard, and he started doing it now.

“A homicide,” he said.

I didn’t make the distinction between murder and homicide. “She says only Leo Haig can help her,” I went on. “She hasn’t been to the police. She needs a private detective, and you’re the only man on earth who can possibly do the job for her.”

“She honestly said that?”

“Her very words.”

“Remarkable.”

“She’s in the office. I told her I was sure you would want to talk to her yourself.”

“Of course I want to talk to her.” He was on his way to the stairs and even though his legs are about half the length of mine I had to hustle to catch up with him.

“One thing you ought to know before you talk to her,” I said.

“Oh?”

“About the victims.”

He was positively beaming. “Victims? Plural? More than one victim?”

“Over a hundred of them.”

He stared, and his face showed a struggle between delight and disbelief. He really wanted it to be a murder case with a hundred victims, and at the same time he was beginning to read the whole number as a put-on.

“One thing you ought to know,” I said. “The victims aren’t people. They’re fish.”

He said, “Miss Willing? I’m Leo Haig. I believe you’ve already met my assistant, Mr. Harrison.”

“Yes, I have.”

“I understand some fishes of yours were murdered. Could you give me some specific information on the crime?”

I had to hand it to him. I don’t know what kind of reaction I’d been hoping for but it wasn’t what I got. I had sent him up in a pretty rotten way, when you stop to think of it, and he was returning the favor by treating Tulip Willing and her massacred fish like the crime of the century. Instead of telling me to get rid of her, either by showing her the door or calling the men in the white coats, he was going to take his time getting her whole story, and I was going to have to write it all down in my notebook. I made it game, set and match to him.

So I sat there with my notebook on my side of the desk, and Haig sat on his side of the desk and played with a pipe, and Tulip Willing sat in the chair I’d put her in originally. I sensed that the three of us were going to waste an hour or so of each other’s time. I didn’t really mind. I hadn’t been doing anything that sensational with my time in the first place, and I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather waste it with. (Than Tulip, I mean. Wasting time with Haig is something I do almost every day of my life. It’s enjoyable, but there’s nothing all that exotic about it.)

“There are many ways an entire tank of fishes can be destroyed at once,” he was saying. He has this professorial air that he likes to use. “Certain diseases strike with the rapidity and force of the Black Death, wiping out a whole fish population overnight. Air pollution, paint fumes, these can cause annihilation on an extraordinary scale.”

“Mr. Haig—”

“Occasionally equipment malfunctions. A thermostat may go haywire, boiling the inhabitants of an aquarium. On the other hand, a heater may burn out and the resulting drop in temperature may prove fatal, although this is more likely to be a gradual matter. In other situations—”

“Mr. Haig, I’m not an idiot.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that you were.”

“I’m familiar with the ways fishes can die. Naturally you would assume that the death was accidental. I made the same assumption myself. I ruled out the possibilities of natural and accidental death.”

“Indeed.”

“The fish were poisoned.”

He took his pipe apart. He’s given up smoking them because they burn his tongue, but he likes to fiddle with them. He bought the pipes originally because he thought they might be a good character tag and he knows that great detectives have to have charming idiosyncracies. He keeps trying on idiosyncracies looking for one that will fit. I’ve wanted to tell him that he’s odd enough all by himself, but I can’t think of an acceptable way to phrase it.

I waited for him to ask how she knew the fish were poisoned. Instead he said, “What sort of fish? A community tank, I suppose? Mollies and swordtails and the like?”

“No. I don’t have a community tank. These were Scats.”

“Ah. Scatophagus argus.”

“These were Scatophagus tetracanthus, actually.”

“Indeed.” He seemed impressed. He thinks everybody should know the Latin name of everything, and I get a lecture to that effect on the average of once every three days. “The tetracanthus are imported less often. And most retailers sell them as argus because few hobbyists know the difference. These were definitely tetracanthus, you say?”

“Yes.”

“How many did you have?”

“One hundred twenty-three.”

“Indeed. You must be rather fond of the species. You must also have had an extremely large tank.”

“It’s a twenty-nine gallon tank.”

He frowned. “Good heavens!’ he said. “You must have stacked them like cordwood.”

“All but two were fry. They had plenty of room.”

“Fry?” His eyebrows went up, first at the word she used, then at the implications. Most people who keep fish, and certainly most people who look anything like Tulip Willing, call baby fish baby fish. She called them fry. Then, when the whole idea sank in, he leaned forward and waggled a finger at her. “Impossible,” he said.

“What’s impossible?”

“Neither of the Scatophagus species has ever spawned in captivity.”

“I spawned them. And it’s been done before.”

“By Rachow, yes. But he had an accident and lost the lot, and he was never able to repeat the procedure. Nor has anyone else had any success.”

“I had success,” she said.

“Impossible,” he said again. “No one but Rachow ever induced the little devils to spawn. And he was working with argus, not tetracanthus.” He paused abruptly and his eyes crawled upward and examined the ceiling. “Wait just one moment,” he said. “Just one moment.”

I looked at Tulip and watched her wait one moment. There was the hint of a private smile on her lips.

“There was a spawning,” he said finally. “Not of argus. Of tetracanthus. It was reported in Copeia a year ago. The fish spawned but a fungus destroyed the spawn before they hatched. The author was—let me think. Wolinski. T. J. Wolinski. He’s done other articles for aquarist publications.”

“Not he,” Tulip said.

“Pardon me?”

She was really smiling now. “Not he,” she repeated. “She. Me, actually. They spawned a second time and I used a fungicide and it worked. I got a seventy percent hatch. One hundred twenty-one fry, and they were doing beautifully. I left the parent fish with them.”

“Your name is Willing. Tulip Willing.”

“That’s a stage name.”

“And your real name is—”

“Thelma Wolinski.”

Haig was on his feet, his jaw set firmly beneath the neat little beard. “T. J. Wolinski,” he said, with something verging on reverence. “T. J. Wolinski. Extraordinary. And some creature poisoned your scats? Good heavens. You’ll pardon me, I hope, for treating you like a witling. I never would have guessed—well, that’s by the way. Some villain poisoned your fishes, did he? Well, we shall get to the bottom of this. And I shall have his head, madam. Rest assured of that. I shall have his head.”

So the whole thing was out of control. It was my fault, and although there was a certain amount of thrill in the idea of being on a case, I can’t say I was anywhere near as thrilled as Haig was.

Well, I’d asked for it. I’d been baiting him, never figuring he’d bite, and now he was hooked right through the gills.