The Topless Tulip Caper

“You missed the police dragnet.”

“I went out the back. I didn’t know it was murder but I gathered she was dead and I didn’t want to be found on the premises in an official investigation.”

“Are you the owner of Treasure Chest?”

“Let’s say I’m a good friend of Gus Leemy’s. Will that do for the moment?”

“Sure. Do you have any idea who might want to kill Cherry?”

“No one now. She’s already dead.”

“I mean—”

He crossed one leg over the other. “Just a small joke,” he said. “No, frankly, I have no suspects. I rather like the idea of Andrew Mallard, but that’s simply because it would be so convenient that way. And he seemed to be a disturbed person. Would a sane man choose that way to kill a woman?”

I wanted to say that a sane man wouldn’t kill anybody for any reason but I didn’t know how well this would go down, because I had the feeling that Danzig had killed people now and then, or had had them killed, and this would mean calling him a lunatic by implication.

“And you saw nothing suspicious?”

“Nothing. I was in no position to see anything at the time the incident occurred. I was in the office in the rear with Gus.”

“Was anyone else with you at the time? I don’t mean that you and Gus can’t alibi each other, that’s all right. But if other people were with you we could also rule them out.”

“I’m afraid we were alone together.”

I drank the last of my scotch. It was really great scotch. I said I guessed that was about it. “Mr. Haig wants you at his office at three-thirty tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “You might as well bring the other half of the two thousand. Plus another two thousand.”

He got to his feet and we began the long walk to the door. “Three-thirty,” he said. “I’ll be there. I wouldn’t want to miss it. He really thinks he can come through in that short a time?”

“Evidently. He wants to earn the bonus.”

But the bonus wasn’t the big consideration, I knew. What Haig really wanted was the applause.

Thirteen

THE CAB DROPPED me at West 20th Street around two- thirty. I used one key to let myself into the courtyard, climbed two flights of stairs, and used another key to let me into Haig’s half of the house. There was a light on in the office and I guessed that he hadn’t been to sleep after all, but when I went in ready to hit him with some smartass remark or other his chair was empty and Tulip was sitting on the couch reading a Fredric Brown novel. Mrs. Murphy’s Underpants, one of the late ones.

“This is pretty good,” she said. “Have you read it?”

“Sure. Mr. Haig made me read everything of Fredric Brown’s. That’s not supposed to be one of his best.”

“I’m enjoying it anyway. I like the way the two detectives play against each other. An uncle and a nephew.”

“Ed and Am Hunter, right.”

“Do you and Mr. Haig interact the same way?”

“Not exactly. Of course we’re not related, which helps. Or hinders. I’m never entirely sure which. Also Ambrose Hunter is supposed to be reasonably sane.”

“Well, Mr. Haig—”

“Is crazy,” I said.

“But—”

“That doesn’t mean he isn’t a genius. Maybe all geniuses are crazy. I couldn’t honestly say. For instance, thirteen hours from now he’s going to trap a murderer. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know. Don’t ask him, either, because I’m not convinced he knows, and even if he does he’s not telling. But he’s going to have the whole crowd here, all sitting on chairs with their hands folded, and if he doesn’t deliver he’s going to look like Babe Ruth would have looked if he pointed to the fence and then struck out. The one thing he doesn’t want is to look ridiculous, and with his shape and mannerisms he has a good head start in that direction, so he really has to deliver. And he probably will, but don’t ask me how.”

“It’s kind of exciting,” she said.

I agreed that it was. I said I thought I’d have a beer and asked her if she wanted anything. She didn’t. I uncapped the beer in the kitchen and brought the bottle into the office with me. I asked her when Haig had gone to sleep.

“Right after he got your call. He said he was very tired. I guess he didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Nobody did,” I said, and yawned. “I’m completely shot myself. As soon as I finish this beer and unwind a little I’m going to stretch out on the couch and make Z’s.”

“Oh! I’m sorry, this is where you’re going to be sleeping, isn’t it? I’ll go upstairs now.”

I waved her back to the couch. “I have to unwind first,” I said. “And you’re the one who ought to be exhausted. Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Not really. They kept moving me around from one stationhouse to another.”

“Yeah, the old cop shuffle. The hell of it is that they knew damned well you didn’t kill Cherry. They just wanted to give you a hard time because you were Haig’s client.” I yawned. “Ed and Am Hunter. That’s funny. Am Hunter was in a carnival for years. Can you see Leo Haig as a pitchman? I can’t.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She considered, then giggled. I liked her wide-open laugh better.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well, Ed Hunter certainly goes over well with the girls in this book.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No, I meant it as a compliment.”

“You did?”

“Well, yeah. You probably do pretty well yourself. And the two of you do play off each other the same way, even if you’re not related.”

“We were almost related,” I said. “A couple of months ago the cops picked me up and held me for seventy- two hours. They were just making a nuisance of themselves. As usual.”

(It was an interesting case, incidentally. I never wrote it up because there wasn’t enough to it to make a book out of it, and there was no sex in it, and Joe Elder at Gold Medal insists it’s impossible to sell a book without sex in it. Maybe I’ll try to write it up as a magazine story one of these days.)

Tulip frowned. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I mean, it’s terrible that they locked you up and all, but how does that make you and Haig almost related?”

“It doesn’t make us almost related. What it did was almost make us related. See, they wouldn’t let him visit me in jail because he was neither a relative nor an attorney. He decided this might come up in the future so what he wanted to do was adopt me. He said it made perfect sense considering that my parents are dead. I told him it was ridiculous because I might someday become a partner in the firm.”

“So?”

“So Haig & Harrison is possible,” I said. “But Haig & Haig is ridiculous, unless you happen to be producing scotch whiskey. That wasn’t the reason I wanted to avoid being adopted but it was a reason that made perfect sense to him, and—”

She began to laugh, and I joined in, and we really did quite a bit of hard-core laughing. Then we stopped as suddenly as we started and Tulip looked at me with her upper lip trembling slightly and I thought she was going to cry. I sat on the couch next to her and took hold of her hand.

“Everything’s so funny,” she said, “and then I remember that Cherry’s dead and Andy’s dead and I don’t know how I can laugh at anything. And the murderer must be someone I know. That’s the most frightening thing in the world. Somebody I know committed murder.”