The Topless Tulip Caper

Three

IT MUST HAVE been around three in the afternoon when Tulip Willing rang the doorbell. It was close to five when Haig was finished asking questions. He went over everything and enabled me to fill a great many pages in my notebook with facts that would probably turn out to be unimportant. It’s his theory that there is no such thing as an absolutely inconsequential fact. (The first time he told me this I replied that in 1938 the state of Wyoming produced one-third of a pound of dry edible beans for every man, woman, and child in the nation. He agreed that it was certainly hard to see how that could turn out to be consequential, but he wasn’t going to rule out the possibility entirely.)

I’m taking matters into my own hands and leaving out some items that never did seem to have any more bearing on the case than the fascinating fact about dry edible beans. That still leaves plenty of bits and pieces to report from Haig’s questioning of Tulip.

Item: The fish had died four days ago, on a Saturday. Tulip had come home at four Saturday morning after a long night at the Treasure Chest, where she had been working for five months, having been previously employed in a similar capacity at similar nightspots, among them Tippler’s Cove and Shake It Or Leave It (I am not making any of this up.) She came home, exhausted and ready for bed, and she went over to say goodnight to the fish, and they were all floating on the top, which is never a sign of radiant good health. When she was done being hysterical she did something intelligent. She removed the two parent fish and preserved them in jars of rubbing alcohol in case an autopsy should ultimately be indicated, and she took a sample of the water in the tank and another sample of water from another aquarium as a control. These she took to a chemical laboratory on Varick Street for scientific analysis, and Monday the laboratory called her and informed her that the sample from the tank of scats contained strychnine, which is no better for fish than it is for people. There was enough strychnine present to kill any human being who drank a glass of the water, but then not that many people go around drinking out of aquariums, and I’d venture to say that those who do are asking for it.

Item: She assumed that the murder of the scats was motivated not by a specific hatred of the fish themselves but by hatred of their owner. Someone was trying to upset her or punish her or terrify her by killing her pets. This was, as far as she could determine, the first instance of hostile behavior to be directed at her, aside from the usual obscene telephone calls she received intermittently. The phone calls had not increased in frequency lately, and in fact she hadn’t heard from one of the callers in a long time and was a little concerned that something might have happened to him. She said that he had a very unusual approach, but she didn’t go into detail.

Item: The scats had been in fine fettle when she left the apartment Friday afternoon at two o’clock. The strychnine would presumably have worked instantly upon its introduction into the aquarium, but she had been unable to determine just how long the fish had been dead. So somewhere between two Friday afternoon and four Saturday morning the villain had entered her apartment and had done the dirty deed.

Item: While I don’t guess there was anybody who could properly be labeled a suspect at this stage of the game, the following people were sufficiently a part of Tulip’s life to find their way into my notebook:

Cherry Bounce. I know, I know, but if you can accept a name like Tulip Willing, why be put off by Cherry Bounce? Cherry and Tulip had been roommates for just about five months. They met when Tulip went to work at Treasure Chest, where Cherry had already been employed. Tulip had recently broken up with her boyfriend and needed a place to live, and Cherry had recently broken up with a boyfriend of her own and needed someone to share her rent. The two of them had been getting along well enough, although they didn’t have much in common outside of their profession. Tulip characterized her as flighty, flitting from one pursuit to another, health foods to astrology to bio-feedback. As far as the fish were concerned, Cherry thought they were cute. Cherry’s name off-stage was Mabel Abramowicz, so I guess she would have had to change it to something.

Glenn Flatt. Tulip’s ex-husband, whom she had met and married four years ago when she was picking up a doctorate in marine biology at the University of Miami, and whom she had divorced two years later. I could understand why she had divorced him—she wanted her own name back. No one built like Tulip could be happy with Flatt for a surname. (According to her, she left her husband because he was a compulsive gambler. If you said Good Morning to him he’d lay odds that it wasn’t. This would have been all right if he won, but he evidently didn’t.) Flatt lived on Long Island where he was employed as a research biochemist by a pharmaceutical manufacturer. This fact prompted Haig and me to glance meaningfully at each other—Flatt’s job would undoubtedly give him access to strychnine. On the other hand, it would probably give him just as good access to any number of non-detectable vehicles for ichthyicide. Flatt and Tulip were “very good friends now,” she said, and they occasionally had dinner or drinks together, and now and then he turned up at the club to catch her act. Flatt had never remarried.

Haskell Henderson. Tulip’s current boyfriend and the owner of a half-dozen local health food stores. They had been seeing each other for almost three months. Henderson would spend two or three afternoons a week at Tulip’s apartment. I don’t guess he devoted much of this time to staring at the fish. When he wasn’t keeping company with Tulip or minding the stores he was in Closter, New Jersey, where he shared a cozy little house with . . .

Mrs. Haskell Henderson. Tulip had never met Mrs. H.H., and had no way of knowing whether or not the woman even knew of her existence, but anyone with that sound a reason for wanting unpleasant things to happen to Tulip certainly deserved an entry in my notebook. The entry was pretty much limited to her name because Henderson evidently didn’t talk about his wife very much.

Simon Barckover. Tulip’s agent, and Cherry’s agent too, for that matter. His relationship with both clients was strictly professional, but he got in the notebook because he was the only person around who might have a specific grudge against the fish. He thought Tulip was genuinely talented and that she had a future in show business if she applied herself. Tulip admitted that he might be right but she wasn’t interested. The topless dancing paid well and was generally undemanding, leaving her free to concentrate on her chief interest, which was ichthyology. Barckover had told her on several occasions that the damn fish were standing in the way of her career and that he would like to flush the lot of them down the toilet. She couldn’t believe he would actually do it, but then she couldn’t believe anybody would want to poison the scats, so he got in the notebook.

Leonard Danzig. Cherry’s boyfriend. She had been dating him for a month or so, although she continued to see other men as well. He got on the list because Tulip couldn’t stand him, describing him charitably as “a kind of a slimy character.” I gather she disliked him because he kept trying to get her into bed, either just with him or with Cherry along for threesies. Tulip was spectacularly uninterested in either prospect. No one seemed to know what Danzig did for a living, but Tulip guessed it was at least somewhat criminal. Cherry had met him at the club. He always seemed to have a lot of money, and if he worked at all he didn’t seem to have any set hours. His feelings toward the fish were unknown, except that he had once remarked that it would “take a hell of a lot of the bastards to make a decent meal.”

Helen Tattersall. All that Tulip knew about Mrs. Tattersall was that she lived in the apartment immediately below hers and was a pain in the ass, constantly complaining about noise, even when no noise whatsoever was emanating from the apartment. She had on one occasion reported Tulip and Cherry to the police, alleging that the two were running a bordello in their apartment. Tulip wasn’t sure whether the woman actually believed this or was just making a nuisance of herself. “She’s the sort of frustrated old bitch who might poison somebody’s pets just out of meanness,” Tulip said.

Andrew Mallard. Tulip’s former boyfriend, the one she was living with before she got together with Cherry. He was an advertising account executive, recently divorced, and evidently rather strange. He had moved in with Tulip; then, when they broke up, she had moved out and let him keep the apartment because the idea of actually going out and finding a place of his own gave him anxiety attacks. He still called her occasionally when he was drunk, generally at an hour when he should have known she was sleeping. Now and then he caught her act at Treasure Chest, always tipping heavily in order to get a ringside table, always attending by himself, always staring at her breasts as if hypnotized, and never speaking a word to her. Every once in a while she got flowers delivered backstage with no note enclosed—though never on nights when he was in the audience—and she sort of assumed he was the source. He had liked the fish very much while they lived together, but she figured he was a possible suspect because murdering fish was clearly an insane act, and Andrew Mallard was hardly playing with a full deck himself.

Gus Leemy. He owned the Treasure Chest. At least he was the owner of record, but Tulip had the impression that the club was a Mafia joint of one sort or another and that Leemy was fronting for the real owners. She wasn’t even sure he knew she had fish and couldn’t imagine why he would have anything against her or them. I think she brought his name up because she didn’t like him.

So I had those nine names in my notebook, and there was a fourteen-hour period of time during which any of them could have gone to Tulip’s apartment and done something fishy to her fish. Possibly any or all of them could account for their time, but Tulip didn’t know about it. And possibly one of the fourteen million other residents of the New York metropolitan area was the killer. I mean, if you’re going to do something as fundamentally insane as feeding strychnine to tropical fish, they wouldn’t have to be the fish of someone you know, would they? If you’re going to be a lunatic about it, one fish tank is as good as another.

A little before five Haig leaned back in his chair and put his feet on top of his desk. I’ve tried to break him of this habit but it’s impossible. Tulip and I sat there respectfully and studied the soles of his shoes while the great man searched for meaning in the ceiling.

Without opening his eyes he said, “Chip.”

“Sir.”

“I need your eyes and ears and legs. The scene of the crime must be examined. You will go with Miss Wolinski to her apartment. Miss Wolinski? I assume that will be convenient?”

Tulip agreed that it would be. She had a dinner date at eight-thirty and a performance at ten o’clock but she was free until then.

“Satisfactory,” Haig said. He swung his feet down from the desk. “You will visit Miss Wolinski’s apartment. You will be guided by your intelligence and intuition and experience. You will then return here to report.”

“If that’s all—’“ Tulip said.

Haig had turned to look at the Rasboras. They’re little pinkish fish with dark triangles on their sides, and Haig has a ten-gallon tank of them directly behind his desk chair at eye level. He’s apt to turn around and study them in the middle of a conversation. This time, though, his attention to the Rasboras was a sign that the conversation was over.

The hell it was. I said, “I’ll make out a receipt for Miss Wolinski for her retainer.”

Haig said, “Retainer?”

Tulip said, “Oh, of course. You’ll be wanting a retainer, won’t you?”

I don’t know what he’d do without me. I swear I don’t. The trouble is, Haig keeps forgetting that if you’re going to be a detective for a living you ought to do your best to make a living out of it. For most of his life he lived in two ratty rooms in the Bronx, breeding tropical fish and trucking plastic bags around to pet shops, peddling his little babies for a nickel here and a dime there. All the while he read every mystery and detective story ever published, and then his uncle died and left him a fortune, and he bought this house and let Madam Juana keep the lower two floors and set up shop as a detective, which is terrific, no question about it. But his capital isn’t really enough to keep us together, so when we get a case it’s a good idea for us to get money out of it, and here he was going to let Tulip hire us without paying anything.

“Of course,” Tulip said again, digging in her bag for a checkbook. When she came up with it I uncapped a pen and handed it to her. She started to make out the check, then looked up to ask the amount.

“Five hundred is standard,” I said.

Haig almost fainted. I think he would have asked her for fifty bucks and let her talk him down. But the five hundred didn’t phase our client for a second. I guess all she had to be told was that it was standard. She finished making out the check and passed it to me, and I wrote out a receipt on a sheet from my notebook and gave it to Haig for him to sign. He wrote his name with a flourish, as usual. Imagine what he could do if he had more than seven letters to work with.

“I intend to earn this,” he said, holding the check in his pudgy little hand. “You’ll receive full value for your money, Miss Wolinski. In a sense, you might say your troubles are over.”

And ours are just beginning, I thought. But then Tulip got to her feet, sort of uncoiling from her chair like a trained cobra responding to a flute, and I decided that any case that forced me to go to her apartment with her couldn’t possibly be all bad.

“He’s quite a man,” Tulip said. “It must be very inspiring to work for someone like Leo Haig.”

“It’s all of that,” I agreed. “And do I call you Miss Wolinski or Miss Willing?”

“Call me Tulip. And may I call you Chip?”

Call me darling, I thought. “Sure,” I said. “Call me Chip.”

“What’s that a nickname for?”

“It’s the only name I’ve got,” I said, which is certainly true now. I had started life as Leigh Harvey Harrison, both Leigh and Harvey being proper names in my less-than-proper family, but in the fall of ’63 my parents decided that wouldn’t do at all, and I’ve been Chip ever since. I understand there are a lot of Jews named Arthur who were known to the world as Adolph until sometime in the ’30s.

We talked a little more about Haig, and then the cab dropped us at her building, a high-rise on the corner of 54th and Eighth. The lobby reminded you a little of an airline terminal. “It’s not exactly overflowing with warmth and charm,” Tulip said. “It’s sort of sterile, isn’t it? Before I moved here I lived in a brownstone in the Village. I really liked that apartment and I would have kept it except it would have meant keeping Andrew, too. This place has all the character of an office building, but on the other hand the elevators are fast and there’s plenty of closet space and there aren’t any cockroaches. My other place was crawling with them, and of course I couldn’t spray because of the fish.”

“Couldn’t you try trapping them and feeding them to the fish?”

“Is that what Leo Haig does?”

“No, it just occurred to me. What we do, Wong Fat puts some kind of crystals in the corners of the kitchen, and the roaches eat it and die. They come from miles around to do themselves in. I don’t know what Wong does with them. I suppose he throws them out.” I thought for a moment. “I hope he throws them out.”

On the elevator she told me another bad feature of the building. “There are prostitutes living here,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind if they just lived here. They also work here, and you can’t imagine what that’s like.”

I could imagine.

“There are these men coming and going all the time,” she said, which was probably true in more ways than she meant. “And they see a girl in the building, any girl, and they take it for granted that you’re in the business yourself. It’s very unpleasant.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“As if I didn’t get enough of that aggravation at the dub. Just because a girl displays her body men tend to assume that it’s for sale. I mean, I don’t kid myself, Chip. Cherry thinks she’s an artist, she takes singing lessons and dancing lessons, the whole bit. She’s waiting to be discovered. I think she’s a little bit whacky. Men don’t come to watch me because I’m such a sensational dancer. I’m a pretty rotten dancer, as a matter of fact. They come to see me and they pay two dollars a drink for watered rotgut because they enjoy looking at my tits.”

“Oh.”

“That’s all it is, really. Tits.”

“Uh.”

“If it weren’t for my tits,” she said, “I’d be teaching high school biology.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that one, but as it turned out I didn’t have to because we had reached her door and she was fishing in her purse for the key. She got it out, then rang the bell. “In case Cherry’s home,” she explained. We stood around for a while, long enough for her to conclude that Cherry wasn’t home, and then she opened the door and walked inside. I didn’t follow her, and she asked me what I was waiting out in the hall for.

“Just a minute,” I said. I dropped to one knee and examined the lock. There were two cylinders but one was just a blind to confuse burglars. The other was a Rabson, a good one, and I couldn’t find any scratches on the cylinder or on the bolt. That didn’t necessarily mean the killer had had a key; if he had a good set of picks and knew how to use them he could open the lock without leaving evidence behind. “Of the nine people you mentioned before,” I said, “how many have keys?”

“Oh. He got in with a key?”

“It’s possible.”

“So you want to know who has keys?”

I got out my notebook and went through the nine of them. Cherry had a key, of course, it being her apartment. Glenn Flatt, the ex-husband, had been to the apartment a few times but had never been given a key. Haskell Henderson, the current boyfriend, had a key. Mrs. Haskell Henderson hadn’t been given one, but she could have swiped or duplicated her husband’s, assuming she knew anything about it. Leonard Danzig had a key, as did any number of past and present boyfriends of Cherry’s. Helen Tattersall, the neighbor, didn’t, but there was always the possibility that she had access to the building’s master key. There was a chainbolt on the inside of the door, but when nobody was home it wasn’t locked and the master key would open the other lock.

Andrew Mallard did not have a key and had never been to the apartment. Maybe Tulip was afraid that if she ever let him in she would have to move again. Simon Barckover might well have a key, since Cheny gave them out rather indiscriminately, but Tulip wasn’t sure one way or the other. And Gus Leemy probably didn’t have a key.

“But anybody could have one easily enough,” Tulip said. “The thing about Cherry, she tends to misplace things. Especially keys. I think she’s borrowed my key four times in the past five months to have duplicates made, and she always has several made at a time. Anyone could have borrowed her key to have a duplicate made, and if he didn’t put it back when he was done she would just assume she lost it again. It’s sort of a nuisance.”

“It must be.”

“And then sometimes she sets the latch and doesn’t bother taking a key, and it’s even possible that she came back here Friday night to change or something and left the door unlocked, and then came back again and locked it. So anybody at all could have walked in. Just some ordinary prowler, trying doors and finding this one unlocked.”

“Just some ordinary prowler looking to find an open apartment with a fish tank he could pour strychnine into?”

“Oh.”

“I think we can rule out the Ordinary Prowler theory.”

“I guess you’re right. I’m not thinking very clearly.” She dropped into a chair, then bounced back up again. And bounced is precisely the word to fit the act. She bounced, and her breasts bounced, and I’d just about reached the point where I was able to look at her without being very close to drooling, and that little bounce she did put me right back at square one again.

“I’m a terrible hostess,” she said. “I didn’t offer you a drink. You’ll have a drink, won’t you?”

“If you’re having one.”

“I am, but what does that have to do with it? What would you like?”

I tried not to look at the front of her tee-shirt “I’ll have a glass of milk,” I said.

“Gee, I don’t think we’ve got any.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I don’t even like milk.”

“Then why did you ask for it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The words just came out that way. I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

“Great. I’m having bourbon and yogurt. Do you want yours on the rocks or straight up?”

“I guess on the rocks. What’s so funny?”

But she didn’t answer. She was too busy laughing. Most women tend to giggle, which can be pleasant enough, but Tulip put her head back and gave out with a full-scale belly laugh, and it really sounded great. While she stood there laughing her head off I rewound some mental recording tape and played back the conversation, and I said, “Oh.”

“Bourbon and yogurt!”

“Very funny,” I said.

“On the rocks!”

She actually slapped her thigh. You hear about people I doing that but I didn’t think anybody really did. She laughed her head off and slapped her thigh.

“I guess I got distracted,” I said.

“A glass of milk!”

“Look, Miss Wolinski—”

“Oh, Chip, I’m sorry.” She came to me and put her hand on my arm. I didn’t want to react because I wasn’t feeling sexy, I was feeling mad, but what I wanted didn’t have very much to do with it. She put her hand on my arm, and it was as if I’d stuck my big toe into an electrical outlet.

“I was just teasing you a little,” she said.

“I hope you never tease me a lot. I don’t think I could handle it.”

“How about a beer?”

“Great.”

I told her I’d like to look around the apartment while she poured the beer. She said that was fine. There was the living room, fairly good sized, and there were two small bedrooms, each furnished with a platform bed and a night table and a chest of drawers. The first bedroom I entered looked like an ad for disaster insurance. The bed was unmade, assuming it had ever been made to begin with, and there was so much underwear scattered around that it was hard to find the floor. I sort of hoped that was Cherry’s bedroom because I didn’t want to learn that our client was that much of a slob. When I looked in the other bedroom I established that it was Tulip’s. It was immaculate, and there was a fish tank in it.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked in the tank. There was a glass divider in the middle and an African Gourami on each side of it.

“Here’s your beer,” she said from the doorway. “Hey, did anything happen to those guys?”

There was real alarm in her voice. “They’re fine,” I said. “What species are they? I mean I know they’re Ctenapoma but I don’t recognize the species.”

Ctenapoma fasciolatum. I don’t suppose he’s started building a bubble nest, has he?” She came over and looked over my shoulder. “He hasn’t, darn it. That’s the third female I’ve had in there with him. He killed the other two. I used the divider when I put the second female in, and I waited until he had a nest built, and I figured that was a clear signal that he was madly and passionately in love, so I lifted out the divider and I the little bastard charged right at her and killed her.” She sat down on the bed next to me and gave me a glass of beer. I took a long drink of it. “So I don’t really I know what to do,” she went on. “This time he’s not even building a nest. He just ignores the poor old girl completely. And you can see she’s ready to spawn, I She’s positively bursting with eggs, the little angel must be doing something wrong.”

“Mr. Haig might be able to tell you.”

“Has he bred fasciolatum?”

“No, but he’s had results with some of the other Ctenapoma species. He has some secrets.”

“Do you think he’d tell me?”

“If you told him how you managed the scats.”

She grinned, then suddenly lost the grin when she remembered what had happened to the scats. “I didn’t even show you that tank,” she said. “Or did you find it yourself? It’s in the living room.”

I hadn’t noticed it on my way through, so the two of us went back to look at it. There wasn’t really a hell of a lot to look at. When you’ve seen one aquarium you’ve seen them all, when all they contain is water. This particular water may have had enough strychnine in it to kill a lot of people, but it certainly looked innocuous enough.

“I siphoned out the dead fry,” she said. “Then I was going to get rid of the rest of the water, but is it safe to pour it down the sink? There’s poison in it, after all, and I don’t want to wipe out half of Manhattan.”

“It would just go in the sewers,” I said. “It would probably get completely diluted. But if you don’t want to risk it I guess you can let the water evaporate and then throw out the tank.”

“Throw out the tank?”

“Well, I don’t know much about strychnine. Would it evaporate along with the water? And meanwhile there’s the chance someone would drink out of the aquarium. I admit it’s not much of a chance, but why take it?”

“Maybe we’d better flush it down the toilet,” she said. “I can find out later how to clean the tank so that it’s usable again. It won’t be destroying the evidence will it? I have the lab report and everything.”

I assured her that it wouldn’t be destroying evidence, and the two of us lugged the tank into the bathroom and emptied it down the toilet. And yet, it did take two of us, and if she hadn’t been a big strong lady it would have taken three of us, because water is a lot heavier than you might think. After it was empty Tulip sloshed water into it from a bucket and rinsed it out a few times, and then she put it in the closet where it could rest until she found out how to cleanse it thoroughly.

I couldn’t see how we had destroyed any evidence, but what I didn’t bother to tell her was that evidence didn’t make much difference. Granted that she wanted to know who had killed her fish, but with all the evidence in the world we weren’t going to take whoever it was to court and prosecute him. I didn’t mention this because it might lead her to wonder why she was spending good money to track the villain down, and didn’t want this thought to cross her mind until her check cleared.

When the tank was tucked away in the closet, Tulip heaved a sigh. “That’s a lot of exercise,” she said. “Not like dancing all night, but all that lifting and toting. I used muscles I don’t normally have any call for. Look! I’m all sweated up.”

She didn’t have to tell me to look. I was already looking. Her tee-shirt was damp now and Beethoven was plastered all over her. I’ve been apt to envy a lot of people in the course of my young life, but this was the first time I had ever been jealous of a dead composer.

“Just look at me,” she said, lifting her arms to show the circles of perspiration beneath them, and then she saw that I was indeed looking at her, and she managed to read the expression on my face, which I guess you didn’t have to be a genius to read anyhow, and then she laughed again. “Bourbon and yogurt! On the rocks!”

I told her to stop it.

And that was about that. She had a dinner date, and she was going to have to shower and change, but we had time to sit around and talk for a while. She told me a little about some of the names in my notebook but nothing worth recording, or even worth training my memory to retain. She also told me a great deal about herself—how someone had given her a couple of baby guppies when she was eleven years old, and how she had really gotten into fish in a big way until her parents’ house was hip-deep in fish tanks, and how in high school she had grown profoundly interested in biology and genetics, and how someday she hoped to make an important contribution to ichthyological knowledge. In the meantime she was dancing naked, making decent money, saving as much of it as she could, and not at all certain where her career should go from here.

“I suppose I could get some sort of institutional job,” she said. “At a public aquarium, or preparing specimens for museum collections. I have good qualifications. But I haven’t found an opening that turns me on at all, and I’d rather prefer to live in New York, and I can’t see myself clerking in some place like Aquarium Stock Company for two-fifty an hour.”

There was a lot of conversation which I didn’t bother reporting to Haig and won’t bother reporting I to you because it was trivial. But trivial or not, it was also pleasant, and I was sorry when it got to be time to go.

“Come to the club tonight,” she said. “Come around one and you can catch my last set, and you’ll get to see Cherry too. You’ll want to talk to her, won’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. “But she might have plans, and—”

“So at least you’ll get to see my number, Chip.” She grinned hugely. “You wouldn’t mind watching me do I my dance, would you?”

I took the subway to 23rd and Eighth and walked the few blocks to Leo Haig’s house. Wong had waited dinner until my return. He doesn’t say much, but he cooks really fantastic Chinese things, and he never seems to dish up the same thing twice. Which is a shame, because there are plenty of dishes I’d like to return to.

I hope he throws out the roaches—

We talked business throughout our dinner. Haig has this tendency to imitate Nero Wolfe, and he attempts to avoid it by not making Wolfean rules for himself, like no business at meals and set hours with the orchids—which is to say fish in his case. So we talked, or rather I talked and he gave the appearance of listening, pausing periodically in his eating to ask a question or wipe some hoisin sauce from his beard. When the meal was finished we went back into the office and Wong brought the coffee. There was no dessert. There never is at Haig’s house. He thinks if he never has dessert he will get thin. So we skipped dessert, as usual, and he opened his desk drawer, the second from the top on the left, and took out a Mars bar and two Mallo Cups. I passed, and he ate all three of them. If he keeps up like this he’ll be nothing but skin and bones before you know it.

“Five hundred dollars,” he said at one point, between bites, “is a rather large retainer for a case involving the murder of fish.”

“It’s standard,” I said.

“Phooey.”

“All right, it’s large. It works out to almost five dollars a fish, which is about the going rate for scats, although I don’t suppose fry would bring that much, would they? On the other hand she lost a breeding pair, and since they’re the only known breeding pair of Scatophagus Tetracanthus they might be worth the full five hundred all by themselves. On the other hand—”

“You already said that.”

“On the third hand, if you prefer, we’re not going to bring the fish back to life even if you are a genius, so maybe that’s the wrong way to approach it. Look at it this way—”

“Chip.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I assume you had a reason for setting so high a price.”

“Yes. A few of them. First of all, the rent Madam Juana pays you isn’t enough to cover our overhead, and I have a vested interest in that overhead since I’m part of it. We can use the money. That’s one. Two is I wanted to see if she could write a check for five hundred dollars without batting an eyelash. I watched her closely and she didn’t bat a single one of them.”

“You were not looking at her eyelashes.”

“I’ll let that go. The third reason is I thought that a high retainer might shame you into telling her to go swim upstream and spawn. How the hell are we going to find out who wiped out her scats? And where’s the glory in it for you if we do? I know you didn’t take the case for the money or you would have remembered to ask for the money, so you’ve got to be doing it for the glory, and if you think this is going to make your name a household word like stove and refrigerator and carpet—”

“Chip.”

I stopped in midsentence. When he uses that particular tone of voice I stop. I stopped, and he spun around and regarded the Rasboras, and I waited for something to happen.

He spoke without turning from his fish. “I suppose it must be as it is,” he said. “The Watson character is expected to lack subtlety. Thus the detective sparkles in comparison to his less nimble-witted assistant.”

“You always pick the nicest ways to tell me how stupid I am.”

“Indeed. You’re quite useful to me, you know, and yet it’s remarkable how you can simultaneously ignore subtleties while overlooking the obvious.”

“I can also walk down the street while chewing gum.”

“I’ll accept your word on that.” He turned around again and put his feet up, dammit. “Of course you’ll go see our client perform tonight.”

“All right. If you’re determined that she’s still our client—”

“I am.”

“Then I’ll go.”

“And you’ll interview Miss Bounce after the performance.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. With whom is Miss Wolinski dining tonight?”

“I don’t know. Someone who’s luckier than I am.

“Why?”

“You didn’t ask?”

“Sure I asked. She said it wasn’t one of the names in the notebook, so I—”

“But she didn’t give the name.”

“No.”

He closed his eyes. I was still there when he opened them, and I don’t think the fact delighted him. “You may leave,” he said. “I want to read. Could you get me that new Bill Pronzini mystery?” He pointed and I fetched. I asked politely if the book was part of Pronzini’s series in which the detective does not have a name.

“He has a name,” Haig said. “The name is not revealed to the reader, but clearly the man has a name.”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“What Pronzini’s detective does not have,” he said, “is an assistant.” He glared at me, then lowered his eyes to the book. I thought about wishing him goodnight and decided against it.

I went out and killed time. I had a beer at Dominick’s and watched the Mets. They were playing the Padres and they lost anyhow. It took some doing. They went into the ninth two runs ahead. Then Sadecki struck out the first two batters and it looked hard to lose. He hit the next batter, and this rattled him so that he walked the next two, at which point Berra yanked him and sent in Harry Parker, who got the batter to hit a slow grounder to Garrett. Garrett fielded it cleanly but didn’t throw to first because he couldn’t find the ball. It was lost somewhere in his glove. That loaded the bases and upset Parker, who threw the next pitch six feet over Grote’s head, cutting the lead to one. That was it for Parker. Berra brought in somebody just up from Tidewater, who made his major league debut by promptly hanging a curve for Nate Colbert. I think the ball’s still in the air somewhere over Queens. That made it 5 to 3, and we went down in order in our half of the ninth, and that, to coin a phrase, was the ballgame.

“Jeez, they stink,” Dominick said.

I couldn’t argue with that. I walked around for a while, and then I went to Treasure Chest, and I guess that brings you up to date, because there I was on the stage and there was a beautiful girl named Cherry Bounce on the stage next to me and she was a hundred percent dead and this was something my ingenuity and intelligence and experience had not prepared me for.