The Mystery of the Rogues' Reunion - Marc Brandel [23]
“Right.”
A big burst of applause. And five points for Jupe. Bonehead was scowling as the points were rung up on the scoreboard.
Footsie’s turn.
The question was an easy one. “What was the extra ingredient in Pretty Peggy’s cake?”
“Gunpowder.”
“Right.”
Five points and polite clapping for Footsie.
Milton Glass turned his smile on Jupiter Jones.
“How many knots did Pretty Peggy have to untie to release Baby Fatso from the tree?”
Jupe saw Peggy’s hand go up before he even had time to pretend to be puzzled. He was almost tempted to get the answer wrong so she could win another five points, but he couldn’t afford to let Bonehead get ahead of him on Bonehead’s next turn.
“Four kn—n—nots?” Jupe said, making it sound like a lucky guess.
“Right.”
Another round of applause marked the end of the first segment. Milton Glass laboriously read out the scores, although everyone could see them as clearly as he could. He obviously enjoyed being on camera.
Jupe looked out over the audience to the control room at the back, where Luther Lomax was watching his monitoring screens. The elderly director looked as tense as a pilot trying to land a plane in a heavy fog.
Shifting his gaze, the First Investigator spotted Bob and Pete in the fifth row of the audience. They were sitting beside Gordon Harker. The chauffeur had a clipboard on his lap and was jotting on it with a pen.
Pete raised his clasped hands in a prizefighter’s signal of victory when he saw Jupe looking at him.
Bob was sitting next to Harker. He couldn’t help glancing at the clipboard the chauffeur was holding. Harker smiled and showed him what he had written on it.
Ordinary bicycle.
Green.
No three-speed gear.
Gunpowder.
Four.
“I was just trying to guess the answers before the contestants,” he explained. “I’m doing pretty well so far. Got every one right.” He pointed to the check marks he had made beside each line.
The next round of questions began. Peggy and Bonehead came up with the right answers. Bloodhound goofed again and Bonehead volunteered a split second ahead of Jupe and gave the right answer. Footsie muffed it too this time and Jupe had his hand up before Bonehead or Peggy and won himself another five points.
Milton Glass went into his score-reading routine after each round, hogging the attention of the cameras with his brilliant smile and charming the audience with a few more jokes.
By the beginning of the fifth and final round, Jupe was still five points ahead of Bonehead and ten points ahead of Peggy. Bloodhound and Footsie were both well out of the race.
The last round of questions began.
“What was suspicious about the stranger’s car?” Milton Glass asked Peggy.
“It was full of stolen radios.”
“Right. Five points for Pretty Peggy.”
Applause from the audience.
Bonehead won himself another five points too by identifying the make of the car and even coming up with the right year. It was an antique. A Fierce-Arrow ‘29.
This time Bloodhound got an easy one.
“How much money did the stranger give the Wee Rogues to keep an eye on his car?”
“A dollar.”
“Right.”
More applause.
Even Footsie won on his round. He remembered the nickname the Wee Rogues had given to the stranger. They had called him Mr. Trouble.
It was Jupe’s turn, the last question of the first quiz show. “What was the name of the actor who played Mr. Trouble?” It wasn’t strictly fair of the quiz master to ask Jupe that. It had nothing to do with the film they had been shown, so it wasn’t an eyewitness question. Unless Jupe could remember the name of an actor he had met only a few times when he was three years old, he would lose five points. Bonehead and Peggy were both frantically waving their hands.
Jupe scratched his head in a puzzled way. He was only pretending not to know, still playing it dumb to confuse Bonehead. He had happened to run into the ageing character actor some time before when the Three Investigators were working on a museum robbery, and had recognized him at once and remembered his