job for the ears, silicone for the tits, a little of this, a little of that. Changed her name from something nobody can pronounce to Cherry Bounce. Great little name. Usually I pick names for them because most of these girls, they aren’t too long in the imagination line. Cherry already had her name picked out when I got ahold of her.”
“Did you pick out Tulip’s name?”
He shook his head. “Nobody picks out anything for that one. She’s smart, you got to hand it to her. Smart, well-educated, the whole bit. I’ll tell you something, I think she’s too fucking smart for her own good. With the face and body she’s got she could have a future in this business. But she won’t put out.”
“I thought you didn’t really have to do that anymore.”
“Huh?”
“Put out.”
He waved the cigar impatiently. “I don’t mean sexual. I mean give out with everything you’ve got. Take the singing lessons, take the dancing lessons, make all the auditions, cultivate the right people. Cherry took the trouble. She put out. Tulip, she’s got so much going for her, and all she wants to do is coast on what she’s got. Pick up the easy bread showing her tits to the visiting firemen and waste all her time with those fucking fish.”
“Well, that’s her career.”
“Career?” He looked at me as though I was an ambulatory psychotic. “You call that a career? Siphoning shit out of fish tanks? What’s she gonna make, fifteen K a year running some fucking museum? You call that a career? There’s chicks clearing that much a week in Vegas that haven’t got half the equipment that girl has.”
“But that’s not what she wants.”
“This year it’s not what she wants. Five years from now she’ll be Assistant Fish Librarian in East Jesus, Kansas, and that’s when she’ll realize what she wanted all along was a career in show business. And by then it’ll be too late.”
I turned the conversation back to Cherry and tried to learn more about her personal life. Barckover turned out to be a less than perfect source. At one point he said that an agent was always in the middle, he was the one with the shoulders that everybody cried on, but Cherry evidently either didn’t cry or found other shoulders. He didn’t know much of anything about the men in her life, and in his opinion she had been murdered by some sort of weird pervert who got a thrill out of killing strange girls. “You watch it,” he said. “There’s gonna be a string of hits like this, a Jack the Ripper type killing topless dancers. Probably a religious fanatic.” Evidently he didn’t know that Tulip’s fish had been poisoned, which poked a few holes in the Ripper theory.
An admirable thing about Cherry, according to Barckover, was that she never got seriously involved with any individual male. “Her career always came first,” he said. “You get chicks who get hung up on one guy, and I get ’em a week in the mountains and they don’t want to leave the guy, so either they pass up a gig or they take it and then they’re lousy because they spend all their time pissing and moaning about being lonely. Not Cherry. She knows the priorities. If she’s playing house and I get her two weeks in Monticello she goes without a second thought. There’s always some dude around to go to bed with, but there aren’t always jobs growing on trees.”
(He would have been proud of a girl I know named Kim Trelawney. For a while we were almost living together, and she got signed for the ingnue part in a road company version of
I asked him about some of the people on our suspects list, and others who had been around Treasure Chest when Cherry was murdered. He had never heard of Haskell Henderson. He’d met Andrew Mallard while Mallard and Tulip were living together, and he said that in his book Mallard was a total feeb. His word, not mine. He’d been delighted when Tulip and Mallard split up.
He knew Leonard Danzig by sight and reputation and could not recall having seen him at the club. And he was surprised to know that Danzig had been keeping company with Cherry. “He’s no good,” he said. “He’s trouble.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“You hear lots of things,” he said.
“Would you happen to remember any of them?”
“A little of this, a little of that. He plays angles, he hangs with some heavies. I don’t know what he does but if it’s honest I’ll spread it on toast and eat it.” He hesitated for a moment. “If he had a beef with a chick, he wouldn’t get fancy with poison darts. I don’t even think he’d kill her. Maybe he’d beat her up. Or with a beautiful girl like Cherry he’d do something like throw acid on her or cut her so it would leave a scar. That’s more his style.”
I didn’t get a whole lot more than that. If Cherry was having trouble with Helen Tattersall, the downstairs neighbor, Barckover didn’t know about it. He had never met Glenn Flatt, Tulip’s ex-husband, and didn’t know anything about him. He was on nodding terms with Buddy Lippa, Leemy’s bouncer and gate-tender, and said only that Lippa was a former boxer, a good club fighter who did a decent job of keeping order in the joint. He got evasive when I asked about Leemy, and when I probed to find out who really owned the nightclub he made it obvious that he didn’t want to carry that particular ball any further. I asked if either Leemy or Lippa made a practice of making passes at the hired help. He assured me they were both happily married men, which didn’t strike me as an answer to the question I had asked, but I let it go.
He didn’t know the other waitress or the barmaid, and I didn’t ask him about his own secretary because I figured it would be more fun to ask her myself. I wound up the session with Barckover and went into the outer office and perched on the corner of her desk, notebook in hand. “I’m playing detective,” I said “Mind if I ask a couple of questions?”
She grinned. “You mean you’re going to grill me? I already told you everything I know.”
I told her we’d just go over a couple of things, and we did. I didn’t learn much. I found out that the other waitress was named Rita and that was all she knew about her. Jan the barmaid was a regular at Treasure Chest, but my green-eyed friend hadn’t had much contact with her except to order drinks and get change. She hadn’t seen anything suspicious, hadn’t recognized anybody except for Barckover and the people who worked at the club, and she knew nothing about Cherry’s private life.
“There’s something else,” I said. “How am I going to catch you at the Persian Room if I don’t know your name?”
She smiled. She didn’t show me as many teeth as Haskell Henderson, but they looked better on her. “It’s Maeve O’Connor,” she said. I made her spell her first name and she did. She also told me it was Irish, but I could have figured that part out by myself. Then she pointed out that she didn’t know my first name, so I supplied it, and then I told her I’d better take down her phone number.
“Is that what detectives always do?”
“Not always,” I said.
“You could reach me through the office.”
“But what if a case starts to break in the middle of the night and I need to check something with you? Mr. Haig would give me hell if I didn’t have your number.”
She gave it to me and I wrote it down. Then we looked at each other for a minute or two, and I could feel myself beginning to fall in love, which is something I probably do more readily than I should. I would have enjoyed perching on her desk for the rest of the afternoon, but Haig had given me a million things to do and there wasn’t all that much time to do them in. I said I guessed I’d better be going, and she said “Goodbye, Chip,” and I said, “I’ll see you, Maeve,” and that was that.
I called the advertising agency where Andrew Mallard worked and got a secretary who said that he was away from his desk. I asked when he would be likely to return to his desk and she said she didn’t know. I pressed a little, and it turned out that he hadn’t been at his desk all day, that he in fact had evidently taken the day off. I don’t know why she couldn’t come right out and tell me this straight out, but I guess when you work in advertising you get in the habit of doing things obliquely.
I tried Mallard at his home number and the line was busy. I looked at my watch and saw that it was almost three and remembered that I hadn’t had anything to eat all day except for a sip of dandelion coffee substitute. I realized that I had to be hungry. I don’t know if this would have occurred to me if I hadn’t happened to look at my watch, but once I did I was starving. I found a luncheonette down the block and had a hamburger and three glasses
