Cat in a Neon Nightmare Read online

  “Costly scents only confirm that the call girl was high dollar.”

  Louise wrinkles her shiny black nose. She could use some powdering, but far be it from me to tell her. Right now she is wrinkling it as she squints up into the light-spangled actual ceiling high above.

  “Star-gazing?” I ask.

  “I am wondering who might be accustomed to hanging out up there and have seen something.”

  “Nobody who would talk to us,” I point out.

  “Maybe not.” She begins to sniff the area inside the crime-scene tape, which I think is a rather silly gesture.

  “It must have irritated the cops to have a body found in thin air,” I say. “None of the normal procedure would quite work.”

  She is still sniffing and I confess I feel a certain embarrassment, as it is such a doggish occupation. I have always relied on using my noggin, as opposed to my nose. But I cannot deny that an occasional whiff has helped me figure out a modus operandi now and again.

  “Leather,” Miss Louise pronounces, lifting her petite nose as if to wrinkle it like an elephant’s gross proboscis.

  “Shoes, belt, or handbag, no doubt.”

  Since she is vacuuming the area I feel obliged to put my face to the transparent floor as well. Well, well. I spot some spider-web shatters in the clear Plexiglas and point them out to Louise.

  She gets excited and runs around like the Maltese proboscis, Nose E, the drug- and bomb-sniffing dog I have worked with, reluctantly, before. “Good work! The shattering matches the exact position of the body. The police may not have left any convenient tape to outline the corpse’s location, but we have an impression, no matter how cloudy.”

  I take the long view Miss Louise suggests and observe that it indeed etches a ghostlike swastika image of a human form into the transparent surface.

  “Wait, Louise! Stop that disgusting sniffing and do not move. This stuff would not shatter. This looks like a glass ceiling, a thick, industrial-strength glass ceiling, but it must be extra-strength plastic. But it is inset into panels and with all those flatfoots walking around up her, a weakened framework could give at any moment from a weight as dainty as a butterfly.”

  Louise’s eyes grow as big as the twenty-four-karat-gold charger plates they use in the upscale restaurants.

  “How are we going to get off of here?” she wonders quite logically.

  Luckily, I have had a close encounter with a bunch of neon before. These touchy gas-filled tubes need maintenance like flowers need rain. There has got to be an access tunnel somewhere.

  Besides. We are in Eye in the Sky territory. Despite the apparent transparency of the neon ceiling, surveillance cameras must be filming away somewhere.

  Surveillance cameras! That is who—or what, rather—would talk to us, if we can just find command central.

  First things first.

  “I suggest,” I tell Miss Louise, “that you crawl on your belly like a snake. Fast!”

  She melts into the supine position with gratifying speed. I only remember to assume it myself after a few seconds of smirking. The fact is I have already spotted our exit, which is disguised as a mirrored lozenge on the surrounding rim of wall.

  So we elbow-crawl like soldiers carrying rifles under an iron curtain to the perimeter. (That is how we talk in the army.)

  I run my shivs over the mirror frame until it snaps ajar.

  “Devious,” Louise comments.

  I cannot be sure if she is referring to the mechanism or me, but I will take the credit.

  I usher her through with a gentlemanly gesture and follow fast upon my own good manners.

  We are in a tunnel, but it is of ample size, at least for Miss Louise, who slithers through to the other side like a black feather boa animated by a Slinky. I have to do a little more grunt work to maneuver my masculine frame through, but we both tumble out into another world.

  “Awesome!” Louise comments in the patois of her unimaginative generation.

  I have seen it all before. The high-tech hardware, the Mondrian wallpaper of small TV screens showing bird’s-eye views of the gaming tables below. There is a guy in a dark uniform seated before this banquet of visual eye-dropping, his head jerking slightly from scanning screen after screen so he resembles a robot.

  “Ingenious,” I whisper in her pink-lined little ear. “The surveillance is done from a circular perimeter, in the round, so to speak.”

  “Then it should have captured the woman falling from above.”

  “Yes. But the police have taken those tapes by now. I believe they are recorded over every-so-many hours.”

  “Phooey,” says Louise. “You are probably right, for once in your life.”

  “Apparently I was right twice, or you would not be here,” I point out.

  It takes her a minute to realize that this is probably a compliment and maybe even a concession, although nothing one could take to the People’s Court.

  “There has got be someone else who saw something from one of the higher floors,” she hisses at me, “even if the police have hogged the surveillance tapes.”

  “I would not call it ‘hogging.’ It is their job, after all.”

  “Listen,” Miss Louise snarls as if I am the enemy when I am only an innocent, helpful dude who does not deserve snarls. “Mr. Matt was nice to me when I was new in town, as he was. He let me crash at his pad for a while. I am not about to let him swing for what has to be a frame-up.”

  “Uh, they do not hang people nowadays.”

  “Whatever! We need to figure out what floor the lady took a dive from, and find a witness who saw her go over.”

  I shrug. I am sure the police have moved heaven and earth and a bunch of neon to figure out the same thing. We might be better off eavesdropping on the conversations of our nearest and dearest, except that I doubt that Lieutenant Molina will ever again obligingly stomp into the Circle Ritz and reveal much about the case, now that she has got Miss Temple’s wind up.

  It is no big trick for us to reach the regular-size door, tease it open, and duck out. We are the same color as most of the decor in the surveillance chamber.

  After we dart down a nondescript hall or two and through a door, we are back in the hotel’s public areas, no one the wiser, including us.

  As we pause to catch up to our breaths, I note the obvious. “From the shape shattered into the glass, the victim did fall facedown onto the surface. That bespeaks a suicide as much as a homicide.”

  “You are saying that after a dalliance with Mr. Matt the lady in question would rather dive than live?”

  I regard Louise’s incredulous expression and realize that she is another female who has fallen under the influence of Miss Temple’s favorite path not taken.

  “He could have pushed her.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe he did not want any witnesses to his fall from grace.”

  “He was not the one who fell!”

  “Not literally. I am merely thinking like a human. So sue me.”

  “I never want to see your sorry hide on the People’s Court again.”

  “We did win, after all.”

  “After a lot of embarrassing revelations.”

  “I do not know what is embarrassing about being abducted by a Hollywood has-been starlet who sends me for unnecessary surgery because she erroneously believes I got her precious Persian princess, the Divine Yvette, in the family way.”

  “The name of the game nowadays is ‘blame the victim.’ Besides, it seems to me that you go out of your way even when not in court to deny paternity. Methinks thou dost protest too much.”

  “Do not quote Shakespeare at me, Louise. What does he know about it? He never had any kits, and may not have had any plays, to hear the scholars debate the, er, issue.”

  But Miss Louise is busy eyeing the elevators, already dismissing my notorious day in court. “There must be someone with an open eye on the upper levels. I am going up and will scout around.”

  Of course
I am obligated to accompany her. And of course my superior height and strength are called upon to summon the elevator.

  I bound up to press the call button, then groom the hairs between my toes, which are a continuing problem for an older guy. They grow like weeds, or Andy Rooney’s eyebrows!

  Luckily the car that whisks to answer our summons is empty. The hour is before dinner and after cocktails, so the people are either ensconced in the lounges or up in their rooms debating how to dine.

  We get off, arbitrarily (that is to say at Miss Louise’s suggestion) on floor twenty.

  It is a nice round number and I waft up to the railing to gaze down on the killing field below. Oops! It is a lot harder balancing like a window-washer on the twentieth floor railing than the fifth. Given my druthers, I would take the fifth.

  I feel a jerk on my extremity. Louise has taken a tiger by the tail under the guise of preventing a domestic accident. A domestic feline accident.

  “Do not be dumb, Popster! At your age you could lose your balance and fall.”

  I am not interested in demeaning speculations on the part of my upstart partner. I have spotted a witness, dead ahead about 350 feet, its claws clutching the opposite railing about as desperately as mine own. And this bird speaks!

  I jump down, nearly flattening my solicitous partner, and race around the soft angles that make up this central atrium.

  “What?” she cries. “Have you gone nuts? What?”

  I have no time to answer foolish questions; my quarry might fly the coop, which it shows evidence of having done already.

  In about four minutes of mad rush, I reach the opposite position and—Oh say can you see!—find my witness still there.

  It is not quite a flag of red, white, and blue, but it is white and blue, with a touch of orange.

  “Pretty boy,” it greets me warmly.

  “You getting inappropriately personal, or referring to yourself, I hope?” I ask.

  “Pretty boy,” it repeats.

  Louise eyes the stripes of black and blue on my discovery’s back. “Daddy Dimmest, this is a jailbird. You cannot trust a word he croaks out.”

  “Pretty boy,” my new friend produces promptly after eyeing Louise.

  Obviously, he has indeed been in stir too long.

  Still, I am encouraged by the encounter. He is a small chap, more white than blue and easily overlooked in the Goliath’s gaudy multistory atrium, which is crammed with luxurious greenery on the upper floors.

  One cannot blame the fellow for thinking the place was freewheeling.

  He is so naive it has not yet occurred to him that, were Louise and I not trained investigators, we would as soon eat him as listen to him.

  “So how long have you been on the lam?” I inquire casually.

  He tilts his head and gazes far below. “The night sky below has dimmed and blazed six times.”

  I nod significantly at Louise. “Three moons ago.”

  “Moons? You mean suns. ‘Days’ would make it even clearer, Hiawatha.”

  “What are you doing up here all alone, son?” I say.

  Midnight Louise tries not to gag when she hears my avuncular “son.”

  The little fellow tries to tuck his head under his wing. “Lost,” he mutters in a muffled but shrill tone.

  “Aw, what shame. My partner and I specialize in missing persons.”

  “I just wanted a glide around the Big Space.”

  “Who can blame you? I myself have a yen for the open road.”

  “What is a road?”

  “A…Big Space, only low, flat and narrow.”

  “That does not make sense.” He wrinkles the down on his pale forehead.

  I notice he has a yap on him that is horny and curved like a lobster claw. One would not wish to be this guy’s chew toy. And the claws on his unnatural two feet look pretty ragged too. Though he is small, he is no pushover.

  “What is your name?” Louise is asking, grimacing to show her sharp front teeth.

  He hides his head under his navy-blue vest again. “Blues Brother, tweetheart, and I do not want to hear any titters about that. My owner is a big film fan.”

  “So how did you get out here in the Big Space, BB?” she asks.

  “Broke out. Thought I’d tool around the neighborhood. Only it is bigger than I thought, and I can’t find a thing to eat except some crumbs the people leave. Also it is hard ducking below that bright, glowing ceiling.”

  “So how did you end up on an upper floor of the Goliath in the first place?” I ask. The seasoned operative likes to start at the beginning.

  “I was imported.”

  “Obviously,” Miss Louise notes. “Your kind of bird is not native to the US. You are an exotic pet.”

  BB fluffs his feathers modestly. “I like to think so too. It is the usual story: raised in captivity, sold to the first bidder, caged and asked to do stupid pet tricks, not even on Letterman, which might be worth it.”

  “No mystery why you flew the coop, but I still would like to know why the Goliath? Why not take a spin around the home neighborhood?”

  “And why this floor,” Louise puts in, getting my drift at last.

  He cocks his small, cagy head. For such a little thing he is a pretty good stool pigeon. “I thought everybody knew. Floor twenty is reserved for pet owners, and therefore pets. The place is crawling with cats, dogs, iguanas, and exotic birds.”

  “So how long have you been freewheeling?” I ask casually.

  “Couple of days, as far as I can tell by the unnatural light in this place. I haven’t seen an outside window since I took off.”

  Louise and I exchange glances that play the same unspoken melody, “Blue Bird of Happiness.”

  “Where were you when the dame took a dive?”

  “Minding my own business,” BB says indignantly. “Sleeping on the twenty-fourth-floor railing.”

  “So you did not see a thing,” Louise finishes sourly.

  “I did not say that. I heard something.”

  My ears perk up. This is the perfect witness of the animal sort. It can hear and talk. If Dr. Dolittle talked to the animals, this bird listens to the humans.

  Miss Louise cannot wait to finesse a confession from the blue bird. “What did you hear?”

  “Someone chattering away near the circular perch.”

  “You mean this railing we are all hanging onto with our best shivs?”

  He gives me the half-shut eye. “I can sleep up here. What is your problem?”

  I try not to teeter, but it is difficult. “What floor were they on?”

  “The free air has no number.”

  Oh, Mother Macaw! The fellow has a New Age streak.

  “The ascending cages have numbers written above them on every level,” I point out. “Surely you can read numbers. Or maybe you cannot.”

  “Hey! I know my numbers. My ABCs too.” By now his tiny wings are flapping and rustling up quite the breeze. “It was floor twenty and four.”

  I swallow a grin. Some types would send their own mothers up the Amazon to cages in Kalamazoo just to prove they knew what they were talking about.

  “Which door?” I press.

  “They are all alike.”

  “No, they are not. They have numbers too, but no doubt your eyes are not good enough to read them at such a distance.”

  “My eyes are as good as my ABCs.” Feathers much ruffled, he takes off from the “perch,” leaving Louise and me clinging for dear life with no witness to interrogate.

  “You did it,” she charges with a snarl. “You annoyed one of the few species of talking birds into shutting up. This must be a record even for you.”

  Before I can talk myself into defending myself, I note that our source has landed.

  On the “perch” in front of the door to room 2488.

  Louise and I bound down to the carpeted hall in sync and hasten around the endless circling hall to the elevators. Once again I bound up to call an “Up” car. (You notice
that it is the senior partner of the firm who has to do all the repetitive bounding to call an elevator.)

  It is empty and we dash in before the doors decide to do any truncating of our fifth (in my case, sixth) member.

  Again I leap up, even higher this time, almost elbow-height on the Mystifying Max by my reckoning, to punch the button to the twenty-fourth floor. At least the buttons respond to punching which does not require that pesky opposable thumb common to monkeys and other higher forms of lowlife to operate.

  Finally we race down the hall to vault up beside Blues Brother, who has puffed up his chest feathers in a futile attempt at approximating pecs and hair.

  Down we look…ooooh, a long, long way. We spot the tiny yellow-and-black signage of crime-scene tape, sitting like a bee on the huge, elaborate flower of pulsing neon below.

  “Think the cops have figured this out yet?” Miss Louise asks me.

  I shrug, a mistake. I almost lose it. My balance. I decide to fall backward onto the hall carpet and throw another question up at Blues Brother.

  “You said you heard something before you saw the dame fall. What was it you heard?”

  “Something odd.”

  “Which was?”

  “Pretty bird.”

  “Will you cut out the chorus? You must hear that tired old line as often as I am forced to listen to renditions of ‘Here, kitty, kitty’ from every street corner, but that is no excuse for resorting to it every time you cannot think of anything new and interesting to say.”

  “You do not understand,” BB chirps.

  Miss Midnight Louise gives a Cheshire cheesy smile you find in illustrated books by Englishmen. She loves to think that I do not understand anything.

  “She did not see me, the woman who flew,” BB goes on. “She was speaking to the air, and then the next thing I saw she was fluttering down, down, down, like she thought she was me. Like she thought she was a bird.” One onyx-shiny dark eye quirks at the pulsing neon ocean below. “She did not land like a pretty bird, though. Pretty bird,” he finishes up on a wistful note. “I wish I could go home where it is safe.”

  Well, call me the Wizard of Oz, but I have an idea on that score and it is not a big balloon or some shiny red pumps like my nonfur person Miss Temple would lust after.