The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale - Marc Brandel [10]
She paused for a moment, glancing at Fluke.
“Understand, Mr. Slater?”
She was looking down at him again, her hands clenched on her hips in a threatening way.
“Ah under–stay–and,” Mr. Slater said.
Chapter 4
The Man with the Odd Right Eye
“YOU SURE?” Jupiter Jones asked. “You sure it was the same voice, Pete?”
It had taken Pete twenty minutes, jogging down the hill, before he found a gas station where he could call Headquarters. After that it had taken Hans almost as long to drive there from Rocky Beach and pick him up. The Three Investigators were now sitting in the back of the van on their way home.
Pete had told the other two everything that had happened since he left Ocean World. He was resting, lying on his back, his hands folded under his head.
“Pretty sure,” he said sleepily. “Of course, I can’t sway–er to it. But it sure sounded like the same voy–us.”
Jupiter nodded, pinching his lower lip. His mind was racing like a squirrel on a wheel. Round and round. It didn’t make any sense. Why should a man call and offer them a hundred dollars to find a lost whale when all the time it was in his own swimming pool?
Jupe didn’t ask the question out loud. He thought it was something he could figure out better if he slept on it.
They dropped Pete off at his house first. Then Bob. Then Hans drove Jupe back to the Jones house, across the street from the salvage yard. The Three Investigators had agreed to meet at Headquarters the next morning as soon as they could get away.
Bob was the last to arrive in the morning. Just as he was leaving his house, his mother had called him back to help wash the breakfast dishes.
He left his bicycle in Jupe’s outdoor workshop in a front corner of the yard. Next to the workbench, an old metal grating just seemed to be leaning against a wall of junk. Bob moved the grating aside. Beyond it was the entrance to a large corrugated pipe. This was Tunnel Two. It ran under piles of junk and soon brought him directly below the mobile home trailer, which was Headquarters.
Bob pushed up the trap door above his head and climbed out into the office, where his two friends were waiting, for him.
Jupe was sitting behind the desk. Pete was sprawled in an old rocking chair with his feet up on a drawer of the filing cabinet. Neither of them said anything. Bob sat down on a stool and leaned back against the wall.
It was Jupe, as usual, who opened the discussion.
“When you’re trying to solve a problem and your mind comes up against a blank wall,” he said in what Bob recognized as his special thinking-aloud voice, “you are faced with two possible alternatives. You can either bang your head against the wall. Or you can take a detour and try to find your way around it.”
“Meaning what?” Pete asked. “I mean, meaning what in English?”
“Meaning Diego Carmel,” Jupe explained. “Diego Carmel, Charter Boat Fishing.”
“Okay. Call him,” Bob suggested. “I don’t see what he’s got to do with it, but there’s no harm in trying.”
“I’ve been calling him since breakfast,” Jupe admitted. “There’s still no answer.”
“Maybe he’s gone fishing,” Pete suggested. “Sometimes people don’t answer their phone because they’re not there.”
“As to what he has to do with it,” Jupe said, ignoring Pete’s interruption, “we know that someone called Constance Carmel on Monday. They told her about the stranded gray whale, or pilot whale, or whatever –”
“Fluke,” Pete put in. “Let’s just call him Fluke.”
“About Fluke,” Jupe agreed. “They didn’t call her at Ocean World because she wasn’t there. And they didn’t call her at Arturo Carmel’s because his phone’s been disconnected.”
“And they didn’t call her at Brother Benedict’s monastery,” Bob said helpfully.
“So that leaves only one other Carmel in the phone book. Diego Carmel, who lives in San Pedro and does charter-boat fishing. It’s possible he’s a relative and that someone called Constance there.”
“And Constance Carmel told that Slater guy she was