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 … 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 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.
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 shell 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.
“ ‘Vassar.’ ” 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 Vassar 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 Vassar 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.”