Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

“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 … 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.”