How can I set a pipe to O_NONBLOCK perl

Question

This works fine:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# 

#pipe2 - use pipe and fork so child can send to parent

use IO::Handle;

pipe(READER, WRITER);
WRITER->autoflush(1);

if ($pid = fork) {
    close WRITER;


    chomp($line = <READER>);
    print "Parent Pid $$ just read this: `$line'\n";
    close READER;
    waitpid($pid,0);
} else {
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
    close READER;
    print WRITER "Child Pid $$ is sending this\n";
    close WRITER;  # this will happen anyway
    exit;
}

But when I try to make the reader not block with fcntl as this:

use IO::Handle;
use Fcntl;

pipe(READER, WRITER);
WRITER->autoflush(1);

if ($pid = fork) {
    close WRITER;
    fcntl(fileno(READER),F_GETFL,$flags)
        or die "Couldn't get flags for READER : $!\n";
    $flags |= O_NONBLOCK;
    fcntl(fileno(READER), F_SETFL, $flags)
        or die "Couldn't set flags for READER $!\n";
    chomp($line = <READER>);
    print "Parent Pid $$ just read this: `$line'\n";
    close READER;
    waitpid($pid,0);
} else {
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
    close READER;
    print WRITER "Child Pid $$ is sending this\n";
    close WRITER;  # this will happen anyway
    exit;
}

I get:

fcntl() on unopened filehandle 3 at pip2.pl line 14.
Couldn't get flags for READER : Bad file descriptor

I need to "watch" the child and do something if it doesn't respond properly within a specific time. I need async communications with the child.