The Mystery of the Rogues' Reunion - Marc Brandel [1]
“Oh, pleath,” the small, plump child said in a surprisingly deep voice. “Pleath, thtop, pleath. I don’t wanna have meathles.”
“Turn it off,” the First Investigator pleaded again, “I can’t stand any more of it.”
“But I want to see the end,” Pete objected. “I want to see how it turnth out. I mean, turns out.”
“Come on, Baby Fatso,” one of the children on the screen was saying. He was a sturdily-built black boy, about twelve years old, with straight spiky hair that stood out around his head like a porcupine’s quills. He was grinning as hard as the others, but there was a gentleness in his smile that made you feel he would never do anything to hurt the fat little boy.
“If your mom and pop think you’ve got measles,” he went on in a singsong voice, “then everyone’ll be scared we’ll get it too. And we’ll all have to stay home from school.”
“Yeah,” a boy with enormous feet chimed in. “They’ll think we’re ‘fectious.”
The boy with the shaved skull, who was known as Bone—head, had finished mixing the liquid in the china bowl and was going into his special comedy routine.
Jupe raised his hand and covered his eyes. He remembered that comedy routine with a particular loathing. Bonehead could wiggle his ears. He could wiggle them so that their huge, pink lobes trembled like blobs of jelly.
It was his only talent as an actor, Jupe thought fiercely as Bob and Pete broke into laughter.
Still wiggling his ears, Bonehead picked up a small pointed paintbrush and, dipping it into the bowl, began dabbing red spots on Baby Fatso’s plump face. Baby Fatso squirmed and struggled, but he didn’t cry. His face remained as cheerful as a spotted cherub’s.
Jupe’s face didn’t. He had opened his fingers so that he could peer between them, and he was watching the screen now with appalled disbelief.
Was that really him? Could that round-faced tot in his cute Farmer Brown overalls, letting Bonehead paint measle spots on his nose and cheeks, really be Jupiter Jones? Jupiter Jones, the First Investigator, solver of mysteries that had sometimes baffled even his friend Chief Reynolds and the local police?
It not only could be. He knew it was. Jupiter had once been Baby Fatso, one of the leading child actors in a series of half-hour comedies featuring the Wee Rogues.
It was a time Jupe tried hard to forget. But when he did occasionally think about it, at odd moments when he had stubbed his toe on a rock or had a cinder in his eye, at least he could comfort himself with the thought that Baby Fatso was not a role he had chosen for himself.
When he first became a Wee Rogue at the age of three, Jupiter had been too young to make his own decisions. Not that Jupe blamed his parents for getting him the job. To them it must have seemed like the chance of a show-business lifetime. Until they were killed in an car accident when Jupe was four, his parents had been professional ballroom dancers, competing in contests all over California. When they weren’t waltzing and tangoing for prize money in glittering ballrooms, they were gracefully dipping and whirling in the background on glittering movie sets. They had appeared together in dozens of musicals at all the big studios.
At one of these studios they had become close friends of the casting director. He occasionally visited them at their home. On one of his visits, a never-to-be-forgotten Sunday afternoon, the casting director had been introduced to their small son, Jupiter.
“You going to be a dancer, too, when you grow up, kid?” the casting director had asked.
“No,” Jupe had told him firmly in his precociously deep voice. “My interests are entirely different. I would rather use my mind than my body. I’m afraid my physical