The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale - Marc Brandel [11]
“Okay,” Pete agreed. “Maybe Diego is her father. Maybe not. But I still don’t see what he has to do with anything.”
“That’s what I meant about the blank wall,” Jupe explained. “Constance Carmel and Slater won’t talk to us. At least, she’s lying to us and he may be. So if we can’t find out anything from them, perhaps we can find out something about them instead. That means we run down to San Pedro and talk to Diego Carmel – assuming he’s connected somehow.”
“And what if he’s out fishing?” Pete asked.
“Then we’ll talk to his neighbors and some of the other fishermen. We’ll find out what they know about Constance, and if Diego happens to have a friend named Slater, and if the two of them might be the men we saw in that boat last Monday when we rescued Fluke.”
“Okay.” Pete stood up. “It’s a pretty long chance, but I vote it’s worth trying. San Pedro, here we come. How do we get there? It’s over thirty miles away. Do we call Worthington?”
Pete was referring to their friend who worked at the Rocky Beach Rent ‘n Ride Auto Rental Company and often gave the boys a ride. But Jupiter reported that Worthington was on vacation.
“Then what?” said Pete. “You know Hans and his brother are much too busy this time of day to –”
“Pancho,” Jupe said. He looked at his watch. “He should be here any minute.”
Pancho was a young Mexican the Three Investigators had helped out of trouble when the police suspected him of stealing spare parts from the garage where he was then working.
He was crazy about cars. He made a living now buying up old wrecks and cannibalizing them, taking the engine from one and the body from another and the wheels from a third,
and putting them all together. The automobiles he assembled in this way looked like something out of the Smithsonian Institution. But Pancho was such a good mechanic and his homemade cars ran so well that college students would come all the way from Santa Barbara or even Berkeley to buy one from him.
He was grateful to the Three Investigators for proving his innocence – if it hadn’t been for them he might be in prison now – and he was usually glad to drive them when asked.
The three boys waited for him in the yard. In a few minutes Pancho drove up in his latest Ford–Chevrolet–VW. It was an even stranger-looking contraption than most of his cars. The back wheels were much larger than the front ones, so that the whole car sloped forward in a way that reminded Pete of a bull with its head lowered, ready to charge.
The car was as powerful as a bull too. As soon as they were on the freeway to San Pedro, Pancho pushed it up to sixty and it loped along as though it still had plenty of speed to spare.
Pancho soon found St. Peter’s Street, the address given in the phone book for Diego Carmel. He let the three boys off there – he wanted to look at several used-car lots in the area – and arranged to pick them up at three o’clock.
St. Peter’s Street was near the docks. Most of it was taken up with battered frame houses and stores selling fishing tackle and live bait or candy and groceries. Diego Carmel’s house was halfway down the block. It was better kept than most of the others, a three-story building with an office on the ground level.
CHARTER BOAT, FISHING, it said on the office window. Through the window Jupe could just see a desk with a phone on it, a few wooden chairs, and, hanging from a rack, a row of wet suits and scuba gear.
The boys were starting toward the door of the office when it opened and a man came out, locking the door behind him. He looked at Jupe in a slightly startled way and hastily put the key in his pocket.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
He was very tall and thin with narrow, sloping shoulders and a lined, studious face, and he was wearing a worn blue suit with a white shirt and a dark tie.
Jupiter had made a habit of observing people’s clothes and appearance and deducing what he could from them. If anyone had asked him what this man did for a living, he would have guessed he was a bookkeeper or a clerk in a small