"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 shivs 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 fashion 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 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."

"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 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 gla.s.s, 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 embarra.s.sing revelations."

"I do not know what is embarra.s.sing 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 b.u.t.ton, 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 c.o.c.ktails, 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 quarrymight 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 your self, 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 eye. ing 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 m.u.f.fled but shrill tone.

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