The Riddle of the Wooden Parrakeet by Harry Stephen Keeler

Author:Harry Stephen Keeler [Keeler, Harry Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXVI

Riddles Three!

The lower lip of Melvin McNeff, managing editor of the New York Morning Times and the New York Evening Blade, always stuck out like a mountain ledge. This morning, as he sat at his desk in his commodious purple-carpeted office overlooking Broadway via three wide windows, and in but his pink-striped shirtsleeves, his lip stuck out more than ever. A smile from him would have been sour enough to have pickled a sugar beet.

“Is that van Alstyne bird in the jernt yet, Miss Morningstar?” he barked, toward a tea-blondish sort of a girl seated at a desklet in the corner—a girl so negative-looking that she was practically not there.

“I’ll see, Mr. McNeff,” she said hurriedly. Sprang up. Peered out of a glass-paned door that led straight into the City Room. “Yes, he’s there.”

“Highball him to snap out of whatever he’s doing—and to come in here.”

She caught Mr. Freddie van Alstyne’s gaze with her petite hand and flashed a sign that should, by rights, have constituted a danger signal—except that Freddie van Alstyne was a bit too far away to interpret nuances in wavings or face musculature. Sitting where he was, however, in his trig lavender-blue suit that seemed to match his thin blondish hair and his 24 years of age, he did grasp at least by the motion of the hand in that signal that he was wanted in the boss’s office. He rose promptly and threaded his way towards that glassed door past the roar of typewriters, phones and desk paraphernalia.

“Maybe,” he nodded satisfiedly, “I’m going to catch some words of approbation. Never tardy around here—never—”

He reached the door, opened it up, stepped in. The secretary was at her desk, looking anticipative.

“Shut the door behind you, will you?” snarled McNeff.

“Right, Boss,” replied Freddie, knowing now nothing commendatory was going to be said around here. “Was going to, anyway.” He had shut it as he spoke, and the Niagara of sound had magically disappeared.

He stood at watching, waiting attention. Miss Morningstar receded back into further negativity, so that she was now virtually the square root of minus zero.

“Listen here, you,” began McNeff, turned about to beam his words against the figure inside the door, “you’ve been cooling your heels about this shop long enough now—you haven’t given me even an inside to a society scandal. I’m fed up with keeping scions of rich men out of putting overalls on and going to work. You either bring me in a wow of a story by Saturday, tomorrow—or else—get out.”

“Get out? Why, Boss—that sounds exactly like the movies. No film ever, you know, without the inevitable ‘Get out’ in it. And besides—’bring me a story’?—why, that’s the standard movie plot obstacle.”

“Oh, ’tis, is it? Well, it’s the standard obstacle around this jernt too. Good godfrey, van Alstyne, I was afraid when I hired you, you wouldn’t be worth powder to blow you to hell—hell, I never saw a guy with ‘van’ attached to his name that was good for anything but cocktail hour in the Ritz.

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