All-Story Detective, October 1949 — page 112: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

1112 birds indeed,” said Barnaby. “I think you might be interested.” He gave me an address in the Thirties, near Lexington, and I said I’d be on over. I took a cab. It was a wild and gusty March night, with occasional splatters of rain riding the wind, and I remember thinking that somebody had certainly picked a fine night for a murder. It was ‘murder, of course, or Barnaby Jones of | Homicide wouldn’t be mixed up in it. ' The address turned out to be an old | brownstone, looking rather more solid than some of them do, possibly because it had escaped being cut up into apartments or turned into a rooming house. An ambulance and a couple of squad cars were parked in front, and a uniformed cop was parked in the doorway. I said Lieutenant Jones was expecting me, and he led me in. Voices were coming through a door to the right of the hall, and the cop poked his head inside and mumbled something. Barnaby’s voice called out, “Come on in, Charlie.” I walked through the door and stopped dead. The damned room-was a bird cage. It was full of assorted cops, fingerprint ‘men, photographers, medics and so on, ‘but it was still the inside of a huge bird ‘cage. Gilded, too. Big gilt bars curved ‘down from the top of the domed ceiling ito the floor. The background, behind the bars, was a remote-looking sky blue. Directly opposite the door was a box- like object, built, I vaguely surmised, to ‘resemble one of those porcelain trays that hold bird seed or water. Directly above it, perched on a gilded bar, was a life-sized eagle, carved out of some kind of slate- gray stone. He had a dispirited and droopy look, he also had the most baleful eye you ever saw on bird or, beast. There was a lot of other weird junk scattered around, but I didn’t bother with it then; I looked at Barnaby Jones. He was sitting on a low platform kind of arrangement, holding a big leather-bound All-Story Detective book on his lap. His hat, which just missed being something off the Texas border, was shoved on the back of his head, and he looked more like a happy oilman sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Dallas than a New York detective sitting in the middle of a screwball homicide. He nodded his head towards the center of the room and said, ““There’s the Eagle.” I had been so taken with all the gilt I hadn’t noticed the body. He was lying on his back, staring straight up at the top of the cage. He looked to be tall, but with his arms and legs outflung the way they were, you couldn’t be sure. He looked about fifty years old. Maybe it was just suggestion, but his features did seem to have an eagle-like cast to them; his beak of a nose would have looked good on any man’s silver dollar. Even the dinner jacket he was wearing gave him the right air of austerity. I said, “A spread-eagle, I take it?” “Spread—and dead,” amended Barnaby. He unfolded his long legs, stood up, and said to the medical examiner, “Let me know when you have something.” Then he looked at me and grinned. “Come fly away with me.” He pulled on a section of the bars behind the platform, and a door swung open. We walked on through. This room wasn’t quite so daffy. It was a peaceful room, and it was just an ordinary rectangle, with no domes and curves. The walls were done in murals, soft blues, grays and greens, a kind of misty seascape. Sure enough, there were a few birds browsing around here and there in the scene, but they weren’t aponized like the stone eagle in the other room: they looked like well-adjusted and happy birds. Barnaby put the big leather- covered book on a big desk, and sank into a chair behind it. I relaxed in another chair and waited for him to give. “This Eagle, as he called himself,” he said, “was named Francis MacGregor, and I guess he was a pretty high flyer. COMmiclooe S (©