Роберт Артур - The Mystery of the Screaming Clock

It was torn across the middle. Jupiter only had half of it. The other half was still back in Carlos’s hand.

“Oh, oh!” Pete said. “That’s bad. We’ve lost half the message.”

“Maybe we ought to go back,” Jupiter said thoughtfully.

“And tackle those guys again?” Pete protested.

“No,” Jupiter agreed after another moment of thought. “By now Carlos would have the other half of the message hidden and would deny everything.”

“Where to now, sirs?” Worthington asked from up front. “Or do you wish to return to Headquarters?”

“No,” Jupiter answered. “We still have one more message to find. Gerald Cramer was the wrong Gerald, obviously. We’ll try Gerald Watson next.” He gave Worthington the address, and he and Pete settled back.

“Listen, First,” Pete said, “I’ve been thinking. That little guy, Gerald Cramer, didn’t have any message from Mr. Clock. Just the same he and Carlos were awfully interested as soon as they learned about the messages. What do you make of that?”

“I’m not sure,” Jupiter answered. “It suggests to me they know something about Mr. Clock that we don’t, and consider the messages important. We’ll just have to try to find out why. Maybe the messages themselves will tell us when we solve them.”

“When we solve them!” Pete laughed hollowly. “By then we’ll be old men with long white beards, if that message you’ve got is any sample. Besides, you only have half of it.”

“I’m aware of that,” Jupiter snapped. “We’ll just have to do the best we can. Worthington, is this the address?”

“It appears to be, sir,” the English chauffeur said as he brought the car to a stop. “Do you anticipate any danger this time?”

“I don’t think so,” Jupiter replied. “If we need you, we’ll shout. Come on, Second”

Pete followed him up the walk to a nice little Spanish-style house surrounded by gardens. An elderly man was pottering with some roses in front, and he looked up.

“Mr. Gerald Watson?” Jupiter asked.

The man nodded. “That’s me,” he said, taking off his gardening gloves. “What can I do for you? I don’t suppose you want my autograph?” He chuckled. “It’s been years since anyone wanted my autograph. But when I starred as the detective in A Scream at Midnight , a lot of people used to want it. I don’t suppose you ever heard it, though, did you?”

“No, sir,” Jupiter agreed. “It was a spooky radio show, wasn’t it?”

“The spookiest,” Gerald Watson said. “Used to open with a scream — Bert Clock did the screaming — and then went on to all kinds of weird mysteries. Bert and Rex King wrote it. I believe Bert suggested the plots and Rex wrote them. He was very good at puzzles and clues and so on. Well, well, that’s ancient history.

“What are you here for, anyway, boys? Not selling magazine subscriptions, I hope?”

“We’ve come for a message that Mr. Clock sent you,” Jupiter said. “He left another message saying to ask you for it.”

“Oh, the message!” Mr. Watson quickly brightened up. “Yes, yes, of course. Out of the blue it came — haven’t heard from Bert Clock in years, except for Christmas cards. Come in, come in. I’m sure I can dig up that message for you.”

He led them into the house, into a neat and tidy room whose main feature was a big tape recorder and a shelf that held box after box of recorded tapes. From a desk drawer he drew an envelope. It had been opened. “Here you are,” Mr. Gerald Watson said. “I opened it — curiosity got too strong for me. But I couldn’t understand a word of it.”

Jupiter took out the message and he and Pete examined it. It said:

Take one lily; kill my friend Eli. Positively number one. Take abroom and swat a bee. What you do with clothes, almost. NotMother, not Sister, not Brother; but perhaps Father. Hymns?Hams? Homes? Almost, not quite.

“Isn’t that a dandy message?” Mr. Watson asked as they read it. “I tried to figure out what it means, but I didn’t get anywhere. That first line — I never knew any friend of Bert’s named Eli. Sounds as if he meant to kill Eli and put a lily on his chest, doesn’t it?” He chuckled. “ ‘Give it to anyone who comes asking for a message,’ he said, and you did, and I have, so there it is. By the way, I don’t think I know who you are.”

“Oh, excuse me, here’s our card.” Jupiter gave him a Three Investigators business card. Mr. Watson studied it gravely, then shook their hands.

“Delighted to meet you,” he said. “If you’re interested in Bert Clock, perhaps you’d like to hear some of the old radio shows we did together — the ones that started with him screaming. They were jim-dandies! Every time he screamed differently. And the plots! They don’t write shows like that for television these days. All those boxes of tape you see — they hold every show I did with Bert Clock.”

Pete and Jupiter were tempted. They knew that some of the old radio shows had been much spookier than anything on television now. But they really couldn’t spare the time. So they said good-bye and went out to the waiting car, still puzzling over the message. Jupiter asked Worthington to take them back to The Jones Salvage Yard, and said to Pete, “I hope Bob and Harry will be there when we get back. If they managed to get a message, too, we’ll put them all together and see if we can puzzle them out.”

Bob and Harry, however, were not at Headquarters — at least not Headquarters for The Three Investigators. They were at the Rocky Beach police headquarters, being led into Chief Reynolds’s office by the policeman who had arrested Harry for speeding.

“The chief says he knows you,” the officer said to Bob. “But don’t think you’ll get away with anything. You speed-happy kids are a menace to decent citizens!”

He led them into an office where Chief Reynolds, a heavy-set man, sat behind a big desk covered with papers. The chief looked up.

“Well, Bob,” he said, “I’m sorry to see you here. What Officer Zebert tells me sounds rather serious. Driving recklessly over the mountains, could have killed both of you and maybe other people, too.”

“Excuse me, Chief,” Bob said. “We weren’t driving recklessly. We were being chased by another car. It had just caught us when Officer Zebert came up, and the other driver got away.”

“Being chased, eh?” The officer smiled knowingly.

“You should have seen them going round those curves, Chief! Then they were racing side by side down Mountain Road. If anyone else had come along then, they would have all been killed.”

“Now why should another car chase you?” Chief Reynolds asked. “Anyone could guess you wouldn’t be carrying much money with you.”

“We’re on a case,” Bob said. “We’re investigating a mysterious clock.”

“A mysterious clock!” It was Officer Zebert who spoke. “Did you ever hear such a crazy story, Chief?”

“It’s true,” Bob insisted doggedly. “We investigated a green ghost [1] once, Chief. You remember that time. You even asked us — that is, Jupiter Jones and Pete Crenshaw and me — to help you find out what it was.”

He was referring to a mystery which Chief Reynolds at the time had frankly admitted had him totally baffled. Now the chief nodded.

“That’s true,” he said. “Where is this clock and what’s so mysterious about it?”

“It’s in the car out back,” Bob said. “If we could bring it in, we could show you why it’s so queer.”

“Right!” the chief said. “Zebert, go bring the clock here.”