Somehow I doubt it.
I drove back over the George Washington Bridge and down the West Side Drive. I got off at 72nd Start and drove down to Tulip’s building. Of course that was no place to park. I circled a few blocks a few times and then stuck it in a lot. The attendant was very impressed by the car and flipped completely when he saw he was going to have to shift it. “A Cad with a stick shift,” he said. “Where’d you ever find it?”
“South Carolina.”
“There a lot of ’em down there?”
“Thousands,” I said.
On the way to Tulip’s building I spent a dime on a telephone and made my report. It took some time and I had to feed the phone extra change. I left out the part about going to bed with Althea. Verbatim only goes so far is the way I figure it.
Haig told me it was satisfactory. I was glad to hear it. He said, “After you see Miss Tattersall, you’ll go to Tulip’s apartment and feed her fish. You haw the key?”
“Yes, sir. She gave it to me a couple of hours ago. You told her to, remember?”
“The Ctenapoma receive brine shrimp. There’s some in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. I believe that’s all they receive. One moment.”
He asked Tulip if this was so, and she said there were also some bloodworms and mealworms in jars in the refrigerator, and I should give them that if it was no trouble. “They’re strictly carnivores,” I heard him say. “Unless—I wonder if that’s what’s keeping them from spawning! I used to give the scats a lot of wheat genii and it put them in great breeding condition.”
Haig said, “Chip.”
“Yes.”
He covered the mouth piece with his hand and I couldn’t make out what he and Tulip were saying to each other. Then he said, “There is a jar of Kretchmer wheat germ in the cupboard to the right of the sink. On the second or third shelf, Miss Wolinski doesn’t recall precisely where.”
“IH manage to find it. You want me to give some to the Ctenapoma?”
“No! Absolutely not.”
“Fine. Hold your horses. Then what difference does it make what shelf it’s on?”
“Bring the wheat germ back here with you. Do not open the jar. Be very careful of the jar. Wrap it so that it won’t break should you happen to drop it. Do you understand?”
“Oh.”
“Do you understand, Chip?”
“I think so,” I said. “I think I do.”
Fifteen
HAIG MAKES ME read a lot of mysteries. Since we don’t get all that many cases, and since you can only spend so much time feeding fish and cleaning out filters, that leaves me with plenty of time to humor him. It’s his theory that you can learn anything and solve any puzzle if you just read enough mystery novels. Maybe he’s right. It certainly seems to work for him, but he’s a genius and I feel that constitutes special circumstances.
Well, if you’ve read as many of them as I have—not even as many as Haig has, because nobody has read that many—then you know what happened when I finally got around to seeing Helen Tattersall. I mean, her name came up early on, and I kept ducking opportunities to see her, so naturally one of two things had to happen. Either she turned out to be the killer or she supplied the one missing piece of information that tied the whole mess together. Right?
Wrong. Absolutely wrong.
I got in to see her by posing as someone investigating her complaint about her neighbors. Even then I had a hard time because she really didn’t like the idea of opening her door, but I explained that I couldn’t act on the complaint unless I interviewed her face-to-face. Much as she didn’t want to open her door, she decided to risk it if it would facilitate her making trouble for somebody.
When she opened the door I decided on my own that she hadn’t gone to Treasure Chest and planted a poisoned dart in Cherry Bounce’s breast. Because Helen Tattersall was in a wheelchair with her leg in a cast, and the first thing she did was inform me that she’d been in the cast for two months and expected to be in it for another four months, and she didn’t sound very happy about it.
The next thing she said was, “Now which complaint have you come about? The upstairs neighbors? Those prostitutes? Or the man next door who plays the flute all day and all night? Or the married couple on the other side of me with that dreadful squalling baby? Or the man across the hall who gives me dirty looks? Or the evil man down by the elevator who puts poison gas in everybody’s air-conditioners? Or could it be my complaints about the building employees? The superintendent is a Soviet agent, you know—”
So she didn’t even have a personal vendetta against Tulip and Cherry. Instead she had just one enemy: mankind. And she complained about and tried to make trouble for every member of the human race who called himself to her attention.
Well, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I began wishing I were Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death so that I could push the old bitch down a staircase, wheelchair and all. I’m not saying I would have done it but I might have given it serious consideration.
I suppose there should have been one little thing she said that got my mind working in the right direction, one little thread she might unwittingly supply, but I’m sorry, there just wasn’t anything like that. It was a waste of time. I had sort of thought it would be a waste of time, and that’s why I’d postponed seeing Helen Tattersall as long as I did, in addition to having suspected that meeting her wouldn’t be one of my all-time favorite experiences. I was right on all counts, and it was a pleasure to get out of her apartment, believe me.
I found a staircase and climbed a flight to Tulip’s apartment and used her key to open her door. I got a rush when I walked in, remembering how I had let myself into Andrew Mallard’s apartment the previous evening, and half-expecting to find another corpse or two now. I don’t guess I really thought that would happen, but I have to admit I went around touching things with the heel of my hand to avoid leaving fingerprints.
No corpses, thank God. Not in the fish tank, either. The two Ctenapoma fasciolatum swam around on either side of their glass divider. They were doing a great job of ignoring each other, and the male had done absolutely nothing about building a bubble nest.
I sat on the edge of the bed and watched them for a while. “C’mon,” I said at one point “Clover Swann wants plenty of sex in this book, gang. You can’t expect me to supply all of it myself, can you?”
I don’t think they cared.
So I gave up on them and went into the kitchen. I found brine shrimp in the freezer and broke off a chunk, and I found containers of bloodworms and mealworms in the fridge. I went back to the bedroom and fed them until they wouldn’t eat any more, then returned the food to the kitchen I opened a couple of cupboards until I spotted the jar of wheat germ. I reached for it, and then I stopped with my hand halfway to it, and I told myself not to be silly, fingerprints never solved anything anyway and all that, and then I got a paper towel and used it to take the jar from the shelf and set it on the counter top. There wouldn’t be any useful prints and I knew it, but if Haig did check the jar for prints and found mine all over it I would never hear the end of it.
I wrapped the jar in several thicknesses of paper towels and found a paper bag in another cupboard and put the jar in that. Then I left it in the kitchen and took a careful look around the apartment without knowing what I was looking for.