Марк Брендел - The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale

“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-Chevro-let-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 store. Or maybe a watchmaker, Jupe thought, looking at the man’s right eye.

Below that eye, but not below the left one, was a curious fold of puckered skin. It was almost like a scar. Either the man was used to wearing a monocle, Jupe guessed, or, more likely, he spent hours every day with a jeweler’s glass screwed into place over his eye.

“We were looking for Mr. Diego Carmel,” the First Investigator said politely.

“Yes?”

“You’re Mr. Carmel?”

“Captain Carmel. Yes.”

The man half turned in the doorway. Jupe could hear the phone ringing in the office behind him. For a moment Captain Carmel looked as though he was going to open the door and answer it, then he shrugged his narrow shoulders in a hopeless way.

“What’s the use?” he asked. “I lost my boat last week. In the big storm. People call, they want to go fishing, and I have no boat.”

“I’m sorry,” Bob said. “We didn’t know.”

“Do you three boys want to go fishing?”

Captain Carmel spoke perfect English. You couldn’t say he had any foreign accent. But there was something in the way he picked his words that made you realize English wasn’t his native language.

Maybe he was from Mexico, Bob thought, and had spent most of his life in the United States.

“No. No, we just wanted to talk to you, Captain Carmel,” Jupe said. “We have a message for you from your daughter.”

“From my daughter?” He seemed a little surprised. “Ah, you mean from Constance?”

“Yes.” Jupe was trying to hide his satisfaction. His hunch had paid off. Captain Carmel was Constance Carmel’s father.

“And what was the message?”

“Oh, it wasn’t anything very important. We just happened to see her at Ocean World this morning and she asked us to tell you she may be working late tonight.”

“Ah.” He looked at Jupiter and then at Bob and Pete. “And you?” he asked. “Would you be by way of being The Three Investigators?”

Pete nodded. He wondered how Captain Carmel had recognized them. Then he remembered that Jupe had given Constance one of their Investigators’ cards. She must have told her father about them. The three of them — and especially Jupe, with his round face and his stocky build — were easy enough to describe.

“I am very pleased to know you.” Captain Carmel held out his hand and they all shook it. He smiled.

“Now, what do you say? Don’t you think we could all do with a hamburger? There is a place down the street here.”

Pete thanked him, accepting the invitation. There were very few times when Pete Crenshaw couldn’t do with a hamburger.

They found the place, a lunchroom, and settled into a booth. The hamburgers were very good. While the boys ate, Captain Diego Carmel told them about the storm and the loss of his boat.

He had been bringing a man named Oscar Slater back from a fishing trip to Baja California. The storm caught them without warning some miles off the coast. He did everything he could to get into port but the seas were too heavy. The charter boat swamped and sank. He and Oscar Slater had been lucky to come out of it alive. They had swum for hours, supported by their life jackets, until a coastguard cutter picked them up.

Pete and Bob told him how sorry they were. Bob was going to ask if the boat was insured, but Jupe interrupted him.

“Your daughter’s a wonderful swimmer, Captain Carmel,” he said. “It’s great the way she trains those whales.”

“Ah. Yes. At Ocean World.”

“Has she been doing it long?” Bob asked. He could see that Jupe wanted to get Captain Carmel to talk about Constance.

“Several years.”

“It must be a long trip for her, going to Ocean World every day,” Jupe said. “All the way from here.”

“From here?”

“I’m sorry. I guess I thought — Doesn’t she live with you here in San Pedro?” Jupe persisted.

Captain Carmel nodded absently. He seemed to be thinking about something else. He finished his coffee.

“As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, with a curious emphasis as though he wanted to make sure the Three Investigators heard and remembered every word he was saying, “it just so happens that Mr. Slater is very interested in training whales too. Most interested. He has a house in the hills above Santa Monica.” He gave them Slater’s address, which they already knew. “And he has a big swimming pool in the back. A very big swimming pool.”