Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 9

"I just wanted a glide around the Big s.p.a.ce."

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

"What is a road?"

"A . . Big s.p.a.ce, 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 h.o.r.n.y 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 t.i.tters about that. My owner is a big film fan."

"So how did you get out here in the Big s.p.a.ce, 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 c.o.c.ks 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 repet.i.tive 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 b.u.t.ton to the twenty-fourth floor. At least the b.u.t.tons 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 . . . 0000h, a long, long way. We spot the tiny yellow-and-black signage of crime-scene tape, sittinglike 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 l.u.s.t after.

So I nod him down to perch on my shoulder-Miss Louise is shocked to see me playing the diplomat between the species-and whisper a few sweet nothings in his feathered skullcap.

He nods and takes off.

"We might want to ask some follow-up questions," she complains as his feathers disappear over the railing into the Great Beyond.

"Do not worry. I got his room number. And he is not about to fly this berg, as his owner is in residence."

"So what do you make of it? A bird did it? A pretty bird?"

"Well, a few other twentieth-floor pets than Blues Brother might take an illegal romp. What if a bigger Blues Brother, say a parrot, got loose? Say it landed on our victim's shoulder, or even the railing nearby. Scared her right off her feet."

"You would call an Amazon parrot a 'pretty bird'?"

"I would call a vulture a pretty bird if it was big enough, and close enough. That is just a theory, given we know that Mr. Matt did not lay a hand on that lady's, er, feathers."

"Get real, Gramps. I am convinced he could never kill her, or anyone, but I am not about to take odds that he did not give her feathers a real good ruffling earlier. I mean, the idea of the get-together was to get together."

"Gramps? Are you trying to tell me something, Louise?"

"Nothing either of us would want to hear. So what have we got?"

"A little bird who heard the dead woman talking to someone just before her fatal flight."

"'Fatal flight.' You should write for the tabloids, Pop. Who do you think we have here, Amelia Earheart?"

"We have a room number where Mr. Matt met the call girl. We have a death the cops can't get a handle on, because it took place in flight. We have a witness who could not stand up in a court of law. And we may have a few more witnesses among the errant pet population of the twentieth floor. I propose we stake out this most interesting level and see what, or who, we turn up."

"A zoo!" Miss Louise responds with a delicate feline snort. But she does not offer any better ideas.

Chapter 11.

Call Her Madam Alfonso and Barrett sat on Molina's visitors' chairs like the mountain and Mohammed finally come together in defiance of all laws of nature.

The mountainously overweight Alfonso overhung his chair in a pyramid of sagging Big and Tall seersucker suit. He could have been suspended in air for all one could see/ guess of a supporting underpinning.

Barrett, on the other hand, was so leanly ascetic that he seemed to float above the steel-legged chair he perched on, angular elbows braced on angular knees, his putty-colored jeans and sport coat blending into the bland plastic sh.e.l.l that supported him.

"We know whose stable she was in," Alfonso announced as direly as a funeral director.

"Not a 'stable.' " Barrett's pleasant tenor reminded one of "Mother MacCree" crooned in Irish pubs. "Too much like the fourth at Santa Anita. The deceased was working under Judith Rothenberg's, er, sponsorship."

"Judith Rothenberg," Molina repeated to buy time to hide her dismay. "She'll want to make a federal case of it."

"She does run to the dailies at every opportunity," Alfonso noted sorrowfully.

" 'Va.s.sar.' " Molina noted the dead woman's pretentious working name. "I should have realized. Rothenberg still keep an office out on Charleston?"

"Nope." Barrett rustled through the pages in his card-crammed reporter's notebook. "She's in a strip shopping center now, rather appropriately. Near that new club, Neon Nightmare."

"Low profile, as usual." Molina was being as humorous as she ever got at work. "Okay. I'll handle this. Anything new?"

"A bellman has narrowed the floors Va.s.sar worked that night down to twenty through twenty-four, north side of the atrium."

"Figures," said Molina. "Her head was facing the south side of the building. And how many hookers rotate through there a night that the bellman has caught such a solid case of Vague? Neon Nightmare, huh? Haven't heard about it. Any connection with Va.s.sar landing on a neon ceiling?"

"It's a semiprivate club," Barrett said. "Part museum, part dance hall, and part theater."

"Isn't 'Nightmare' a negative name for a business?"

"Nothing attracts the Goth crowd of hip youngsters these days like 'negative.' They offer a multimedia experience," Alfonso put in. "Kind of like Cirque du Soleil shows, only built around neon and hip hop and acrobatics and magic and music. Small-scale stuff compared to the major hotel shows, but it's got a market niche."

" 'A market niche.' " Molina couldn't resist mocking the eternal sell that drove Las Vegas. "So does death. Okay. I'll handle Rothenberg myself."

"Think she'll raise a stink?" Barrett wanted to know.

"Doesn't she always? I'd rather have heard our dead girl worked for Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter than Judith Rothenberg."

"I hear you, Lieutenant," Barrett said, snapping his notebook shut as if he wished it were crushing a bug. "Good luck."

Molina didn't believe in luck: good, bad, or middling.

Not even now that the one call girl in Las Vegas that ' Matt Devine happened to draw had turned up dead in a lethal endgame of stud poker.

She found the bland off-Strip intersection where Neon Nightmare squatted unimpressively. The building was blacked out for the daylight hours: it looked like a huge version of the Mirage Hotel's volcano surmounted by an elaborate neon image of a galloping horse, mane flying, that would blaze against the night sky when lit.

Neon was odd stuff. The tubes that housed the magical, mystery gas were the lackl.u.s.ter dead-white of tapeworms until electricity charged through them like stampeding elephants. Then the colorless gases inside glowed against the dark like lurid chalk marks on the velvet painting of a Las Vegas night.

Neon was mostly a historical display now, not part of the New Las Vegas, which was more about squeezing money out of tourists for theme park attractions rather than gambling. Fifteen bucks to ride an elevator fifty stories up in a half-size ersatz Eiffel Tower. Twelve bucks to ride a phony Venetian gondola through a hotel lobby. Fifteen bucks to view an art display you could see for eight bucks at an established museum.

Such high-ticket prices were paying down the development costs of the multibillion-dollar new hotels that ped dled culture instead of the cra.s.ser side of Las Vegas nowadays. It was still all about money, and so was a call girl operation, no matter what veneer of political correctness you slapped over it.