Марк Брендел - The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale

“And he couldn’t be your father, could he?” Jupe pointed out. “Because your father lost his boat in the storm last week and he’s in the hospital.”

Constance Carmel hesitated. She seemed to be thinking it all over, making up her mind. Then she smiled.

“Well,” she said. “You really are investigators, aren’t you?”

“Like it says on our card.” Pete smiled back at her.

“Okay.” Constance Carmel felt in the pocket of her robe and found her car keys. “Why don’t we take a ride and talk it all over?”

“Thank you, Miss Carmel,” Jupe agreed. “That’s very kind of you.”

“Constance,” she told him, unlocking the door. “Just call me Constance, and I’ll call you Jupiter.”

“Jupe.”

“Okay. Jupe.” She looked at Pete. “And you’re Bob?”

“Pete.”

“I’m Bob,” Bob explained.

“Jupe and Pete and Bob. Got it.” Constance smiled at each of them in turn. “Okay. Let’s go.”

There was only room for three of them in the front of the truck. “I’ll ride in back,” Pete volunteered. “You tell me all about it later, Jupe.”

Jupe sat next to Constance with Bob beside him. She was silent and thoughtful as she turned toward the Coast Highway.

“That man you saw coming out of my father’s office?” she asked, stopping for a red light. “What did he look like?”

Jupe described the tall, thin man with the crease under his eye. He told Constance everything the man had said to them.

Constance shook her head. “It doesn’t sound like anyone I know,” she said. “Maybe a friend of Dad’s. Or… ” She paused. “Or someone trying to make trouble for him.”

The light changed. Constance drove on. “Okay,” she said. “What do you want me to tell you?”

“Suppose we start at the beginning,” Jupe suggested. “On Monday morning, when Mr. Slater called you in San Pedro and told you about the stranded whale he’d spotted through his binoculars while he was out in his boat.”

“I had just come back from the hospital, visiting my father,” Constance said. “The phone was ringing in his office and I answered it. It was Oscar Slater. He comes from down South somewhere, Alabama, I think. I’d met him two or three times because Dad had taken him out charter fishing before. Before the last time, I mean, when Dad lost his boat. Slater said he’d found a stranded whale on the beach.”

She went on to tell them how she had helped rescue the whale. The first thing she did was round up two Mexican friends who owned a tow truck. They rigged a big canvas sling to the crane and drove down to the cove, where Oscar Slater was waiting for her.

Once they had hoisted the whale into the truck, Constance packed wet foam rubber around it and they took it up to Slater’s house and set it free in the swimming pool. The Mexican friends left in the tow truck and Constance swam around with Fluke, as she had decided to call him, making friends with him and getting him used to the pool.

Oscar Slater drove off to buy some live fish at a storehouse Constance knew about, and everything went fine until he got back. Fluke was already responding to Constance’s friendliness and seemed quite happy in his new surroundings.

“Of course, all whales are intelligent,” Constance explained, starting up the ramp to Santa Monica. “More intelligent than human beings in some ways because they have a larger brain. But I could tell at once that Fluke was exceptional. I’ve been training and working with all kinds of whales for years, but Fluke was the fastest learner I’ve ever met. He’s only about two years old, which would make him around five in human terms, because most whales are fully grown by the time they’re six or seven. But he’s much brighter than any ten-year-old child I’ve ever known.”

Constance went back to describing that first day at Oscar Slater’s house. She had fed Fluke the fish that Slater had brought back. Then she decided to return to San Pedro and stop by the hospital for news of her father. She asked Slater to drive her. He was standing by the pool with the sun gleaming on his bald head, and he was looking at her in a calculating way.

“I’ll get Ocean World to send some people over tomorrow,” she told him. “They’ll probably return Fluke to the ocean, or they may decide to keep him for a day or two. In any case, he’ll be fine now.”

She started away from the pool toward the driveway. Oscar Slater stopped her.

“Just a moment, Constance. I think there’s something you ought to know. Something about your father.”

She had never exactly liked Oscar Slater. Until then she had never thought about him much. Now she felt she was really seeing him for the first time. She realized she didn’t like him at all.

“What about my father?” she asked.

“He’s a professional smuggler. He’s been taking tape recorders and pocket radios and all kinds of electronic equipment into Mexico for years and selling it there for three or four times what he paid for it.”

Constance waited. She didn’t want to believe what Slater was telling her. But she had heard her father drop an unguarded word now and then. And, well, she loved him and he had been a wonderful father to her; he had taken good care of her since her mother died. But no one could pretend he was exactly a solid citizen.

“He had a particularly big load on the last trip,” Slater went on. “Mostly pocket calculators, which fetch a high price in Mexico. And when the boat sank, they went down with it.”

Constance waited for Slater to get to the point.

“There must be twenty or thirty thousand dollars’ worth of them in that wreck,” Slater told her. “And half of the money tied up in them was mine. Your old man and I were partners on the deal. Those calculators are sitting safely down there in a waterproof container. And I don’t intend to lose my investment. I’m going to salvage that wreck and recover those things. And you’re going to help me.”

His slow southern voice was threatening now.

“You and that whale, Fluke, or whatever you call him. You are going to help me, aren’t you, Constance?”

She thought it over carefully before she gave Slater her answer.

She was sure that from the American government’s point of view, her father had done nothing criminal. There was no law against taking pocket calculators or tape recorders out of the United States once you’d paid for them. If Slater was trying to blackmail her by threatening to make trouble for her father with the American police, he was wasting his time. And there was nothing the Mexican authorities could do unless they actually caught her father smuggling things into Mexico.

But the problem was that her father, in his happy-go-lucky way, had let the insurance on his boat lapse. He had no medical insurance either, and his intensive care at the hospital was costing hundreds of dollars a day. If she helped Slater recover those things from the wreck, her father was entitled to his share of them. Ten thousand dollars would go a long way to help pay the hospital bills.

And she wouldn’t be doing anything illegal either. She didn’t like Slater. She liked him less and less every minute she spent with him. But what harm could there be in doing a salvage job for him?

“So I agreed,” Constance finished as she drove up into the hills. “And that’s the way things are now. I’m trying to train Fluke to find that wreck for us.”

Jupe hadn’t said a word since they had turned onto the Coast Highway. He was silent for another minute.

“So that’s what the straps were for,” he said thoughtfully. “That harness you were fitting on Fluke’s head. You’re going to attach a television camera to him. And a whale can dive much deeper and swim much faster than any scuba diver possibly could. So Fluke will be able to cover much more of the ocean floor much more quickly, and there’s a far better chance that the camera on his head will pick up a sight of your father’s boat on the bottom of the ocean.”