The ceiling fan turned slowly, as if a small, discouraged helicopter had turned upside-down and began to poke through from the apartment upstairs, but then accepted its fate and given up. The private detective’s office smelled like cheap tobacco, medium-priced whisky and expensive divorces and the afternoon light slicing through the dusty, half-open Venetian blinds gave everything a slicy, dusty look.
“So how’d you describe dem?” said the PI.
I glanced up from my phone, which I had briefly switched on to see if its recent vibration had been from an important notification or something ignorable like “you have achieved your stair-climbing goal” (I had exceeded it) but then fallen down a rabbit hole of short videos of animals that were normally sworn enemies interacting cutely, like a puppy riding around on a goose or a cat with a mouse on its head.
“He was covered with iridescent black feathers and had a slender head,” I said. “So I’m not sure if it was a he or a she or a young he or what.”
“Iridescent.”
“Yeah! It turns out the iridescence might be a way they tell each other apart, like an additional feature they notice. Which makes me wonder if we have an invisible iridescence, invisible to us, but that they can notice, because how do they recognize me otherwise, no matter what I’m wearing, even a hat or sunglasses, or a raincoat or carrying an umbrella? Once I was standing in the middle of about 25 of them and pulled a feather out of my inside suit pocket and showed it to them. No idea what I had expected, but not what I got. They all, like, startled, and took a couple steps back, and a few left altogether. Despite the treats I was giving them.”
“Treats? You sure they like them?”
“Well another one today came over with 2 peanuts in its beak and when it saw the treats it discarded the peanuts and took the treats.”
“This the first time you got mugged?”
“I’m not sure that’s what it was. I mean, ok. It felt… as if someone had hit me in the back of the head with a medium bird. Feathery, initially, but an instant later quite substantial, and moving at a good clip. Not just a flyby and whack you in the head with a wingtip thing.”
“Not.”
“No. Cause that happened too, months ago. Same street corner, in fact. Same perp too, most likely. At the time it felt like a ‘hello!’ or something, to get my attention, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Slender, iridescent etc etc,” said the PI.
“Yeah. I mean, he might’ve figured I was affiliated with the others invading his territory.”
“Mob thing?”
“For all I know I *was* affiliated with them. They did follow me around. Into his territory. I have no knowledge of corvid real estate law.”
“Yeah, makes sense, I see what you mean,” said the PI, and leaned back and put his feet on his desk. He put his hands, which I noticed were oddly-shaped, behind his head.
The back of my neck crawled. I felt a hunch coming on. Then a shoe fell off and a bird head stuck out of his pant leg and I was sure.
This was no human private eye, it was a bunch of crows in a “sexy private eye” costume you can order on the Internet.
My eyes scanned the room for a route of escape. I couldn’t egress via the fire escape, there would just be more out there.
I had to leave the way I had come, through the front door.
“So these treats,” the PI said.
I reached into the pocket of my overcoat and removed a handful. “These here,” I said.
The PI’s countenance took on a greedy aspect. I threw the treats to the floor and they rolled into a far corner of the room. Everything that happened after that is blurred in my memory. I lurched for the door while the detective dissolved into a swarming mass of iridescent black-feathered birds and attacked the still-rolling treats in a cacophony of caws and flapping wings.
To my shock and horror the door was locked. But luckily the key was in the keyhole and by turning it I was able to unlock the door and make my escape after all.
I slipped a few more treats through the mail slot in the door just to be nice before leaving.
“Never leave without treats,” I thought, “no matter where you are.”