Part 8 (1/2)

”Hmmm,” Miss Louise observes, and she is not purring. ”I detect a certain reflective quality from below. I say it only looks like a fragile web of neon tubing. I say there's a solid surface down there. What else would they affix that crime scene tape to?”

With that she flips over the edge, digging her built-in pitons into the wooden rail-cap. Dangling, she winks. ”See you down below, Pop.” And the chit lets go.

I nearly swallow my canines.

And then I nearly barf them back up when I see she has made a perfect four-point landing on the wooden railing a floor below.

She repeats the maneuver and is yet another floor below me.

Well! I cannot allow a mere junior partner to out-acrobat me! Even if I outweigh her two times over.

Not for me those agile twists and turns. I shut my eyes and jump. Luckily, I land on the railing below. It is a perfect four-point landing: my set of two front s.h.i.+vs and my two front teeth. I am hanging by a pair of canines, so there is nothing to do but let go and repeat the trick a floor lower.

So we both get to the railing that overlooks the neon ceiling, only my teeth hurt and Louise's do not. At least I will not have to pay for braces for her. Ouch!

”Pretty awesome with the ivories,” Louise says, sounding sincere.

I grin knowingly, not being able to talk yet.

However, I do see from this nearer perch that something indeed covers the dreadful neon sky below: call it Plexiglas, or Lucite, or just plain plastic, it is tough, so low-profile it is virtually invisible, and highly supportive. Kind of like the way I am with my Miss Temple.

I take one last leap, on faith, and do a belly flop onto a floor of see-through plastic. Louise lands beside me and rolls away from any too-solid impact.

I grit what is left of my teeth.

But she is not concerned with how we got here. She is sniffing around like a prime-time news-show bloodhound. ”Mania by Armani,” she diagnoses.

'What is that? A rock group or a terrorist cadre?”

”Very expensive perfume. Very Rodeo Drive.”

I am not about to descend to a name-dropping contest with the likes of Midnight Louise, who hangs out at the Crystal Phoenix and is up on the latest fas.h.i.+on victim trends, so I rely on my sterling sense of deduction to get back in the game.

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

Louise wrinkles her s.h.i.+ny 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.”

”n.o.body 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 p.r.o.nounces, lifting her pet.i.te 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 gla.s.s ceiling, a thick, industrial-strength gla.s.s ceiling, but it must be extra-strength plastic. It is inset into panels and with all those flatfoots walking around up here, a weakened framework could give at any moment from a weight as dainty as a b.u.t.terfly.”

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 a.s.sume 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 s.h.i.+vs 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.”