Марк Брендел - The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale

“Sure. I suppose so. I share that office with some of the other trainers so it’s hardly ever kept locked.”

“So almost anyone who had seen us go into your office could have waited until you left and just walked in and seen the card on your desk.”

“I guess they could. I didn’t really look at the card until you three had gone, then I —”

“Then you got worried about Fluke and you drove straight over to Oscar Slater’s house to make sure he was okay.”

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“We were in the parking lot when you drove by.”

“So you were. I almost ran over you, didn’t I?” Constance paused. “What’s the other question, Jupe?”

“It’s about your father. When he was taking Slater down to Baja California to sell those pocket calculators —”

“Yes.”

“How long had he been gone before he ran into that storm and lost his boat?”

There was quite a long silence. Constance seemed to be trying to remember.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “You see, when I’m working, it’s too far to commute to San Pedro, so I stay with a girlfriend in Santa Monica. I usually went home to San Pedro to see Dad every Monday on my day off. But I had to go to San Diego about that time. So I hadn’t seen Dad for two weeks when the hospital called and told me —”

Her voice broke off. She was obviously recalling the shock of that terrible call.

Jupe waited sympathetically until she spoke again.

“I see what you’re getting at,” Constance said in her usual brisk voice. “Dad and Slater could have been out at sea all that time and I wouldn’t have known.”

“It’s possible, isn’t it?” the First Investigator agreed.

“You think it’s important?”

Jupe did. After Constance had hung up, he sat for several minutes thinking how important it could be. Had Captain Carmel and Oscar Slater actually reached Baja? Were they on the way back when they ran into the storm? He had to find out.

How?

He looked at Pete. “How about a quick trip to Malibu?” he asked.

“Sure.” Pete was on his feet at once. “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said —”

“How about you, Bob?”

“Okay.”

Bob had an idea what Jupe was suggesting and he thought it was a good plan. But his mind was still busy with what the First Investigator had said earlier.

“There are three possible suspects,” Jupe had announced.

He had mentioned two of them.

Oscar Slater.

And Paul Donner.

“Wait a second, Jupe,” Bob said. “Who’s the third suspect you were talking about?”

But the First Investigator had already opened the trap door.

He disappeared into the tunnel without answering Bob’s question.

“Brown rice,” proudly announced Hoang Van Don, the Vietnamese houseman who worked for Hector Sebastian.

He set a huge steaming bowl on the patio table and smiled broadly at the Three Investigators.

“Very healthy,” Don said. “Has all natural vitamins. No chemicals. No preservatives.”

And no taste either, I’ll bet, Pete thought, leaning forward and sniffing it.

He almost missed the days when Don had taken all his recipes from the late-night television commercials. At least fish fingers and frozen pizzas were better than the goo he was serving now that he had started watching the afternoon shows. On afternoon TV, Don had discovered a health-food guru who gave lectures on organic turnips and natural carrot juice.

“Natural brown rice, anyone?” Hector Sebastian asked. No one answered as he spooned it out onto their plates.

They were all sitting in Mr. Sebastian’s enormous living room, with its long row of windows overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The house in Malibu had once been a restaurant called Charlie’s Place. Hector Sebastian had bought it after his mystery novels had started to sell to the movies. He was gradually converting the building into what he called a stately home.

“Notice anything new?” he asked Jupe now. “See how much progress I’ve made since the last time you were here?”

Jupe looked around the almost empty barn of a room, which had once been the restaurant’s main dining room.

“You’ve had the floor refinished, Mr. Sebastian,” he said. “And you’ve — you’ve bought a rocking chair.”

Hector Sebastian nodded proudly. “I didn’t exactly buy it,” he admitted.

“The studio gave it to me. That was the rocking chair they used in my last movie, Chill Factors . You remember the scene where the old lady gets strangled with a wire clothes hanger?”

Jupe remembered it vividly. She had been sitting in that rocking chair when the strangler crept up behind her.

He wondered why anyone would want a memento like that in his stately home. But he had learned to accept Hector Sebastian’s mild eccentricities.

In fact, Jupe admired and was grateful to the writer for them. Because one of the eccentricities was that he was always willing to put aside his own work to listen to the Three Investigators tell him about their latest case, and to help them if he could.

For years Mr. Sebastian had been a private detective in New York. He had started writing mystery novels while he was recuperating from a leg injury. His books had been so successful that he had given up his career as a private eye. He was well-known now as a novelist and screenwriter and often appeared on talk shows.

But he was still interested in anything to do with detective work. Perhaps he missed the days when he had tailed suspects himself, had stood for hours on street corners watching for a single face in the crowd, had known the excitement of trapping an embezzler or a blackmailer.

He had been delighted to see the Three Investigators when they arrived at his house late in the afternoon. He had listened attentively while they filled him in with a general outline of their latest case.

Then, without Jupe even having to suggest it, Mr. Sebastian had gone to the phone in his study and made several calls. The Three Investigators were waiting anxiously for the reply to those calls now, information they hoped Mr. Sebastian could get for them because they couldn’t easily get it themselves.

Pete dug into the mound of brown rice on his plate.

He lifted a forkful to his mouth and chewed it.

“Well?” Don demanded. “How you like, Mr. Crenshaw?”

“It’s —” Pete didn’t know how to describe it. “Well, it’s certainly interesting,” he admitted.

“Is not supposed to be interesting.” The Vietnamese was indignant. “Interesting food is bad for stomach. That is what guru say on television.”

“But if food isn’t interesting,” Bob protested, “people won’t want to eat it. Then they’ll starve to death.”

“You say that because you think wrong thoughts,” Don told him sternly. “Wrong thoughts start wrong digestive juices. Then you get ulcers.”

“I guess you’re right,” Bob agreed meekly, chewing his way through a mouthful of brown rice and trying hard to think the right thoughts about it.

“How’s your new book coming, Mr. Sebastian?” Jupe asked to change the subject. It was bad enough eating this glup without talking about it.

“It seems to be coming along fine,” Hector Sebastian told him. “Now that I’ve got that new word processor, I can almost see what I’m thinking before I write it down. It’s like —”

He broke off. The phone was ringing.

Mr. Sebastian took the cane that was hanging from the back of his chair and leaned on it as he got to his feet. His leg injury still bothered him. He limped slightly as he made his way across the huge room, past a projecting bank of bookshelves. At the far end of the room, behind the bookshelves, was his study with its big desk and a typewriter stand. On the desk, dwarfed by the word processor, was the phone.