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.
The Three Investigators heard Mr. Sebastian answer it. For what seemed an agonizingly long time they could hear him speak into the receiver occasionally. It was agonizing because they couldn’t hear what he said.
Pete was so busy straining his ears that he was surprised to find he had finished his whole heaped plate of brown rice without noticing he was eating it.
“More?” Don smiled encouragingly as he lifted Pete’s plate.
“No!” Pete snatched it back before the Vietnamese could fill it up again. “No, thank you,” he added politely. “It’s deli —”
He caught himself just in time. He had been about to say it was delicious before he remembered it wasn’t supposed to be delicious. Delicious food was bad for you. It made you think the wrong thoughts.
“It’s so healthy and nourishing,” he corrected himself, “that I just couldn’t eat another mouthful.”
He turned quickly, looking toward the far end of the room. Hector Sebastian was limping back toward the table. He was holding a sheet of paper in his hand.
“Well,” he said, glancing at the paper as he addressed the Three Investigators. “I’ve got something all right. But I don’t know how it’ll fit in with your case.”
“What?” Jupe asked eagerly. “What did you get?”
“That was the Mexican immigration authorities in La Paz, in Baja California. Captain Diego Carmel and Oscar Slater put into La Paz on Captain Carmel’s charter boat, the Lucky Constance, on February tenth. They were in port for two days and left again on February twelfth.”
Jupe nodded, frowning.
“Thank you, Mr. Sebastian,” he said. “Captain Carmel’s boat sank on February seventeenth. That means they were definitely on their way back from Baja, heading for San Pedro, when they ran into that storm.”
He looked at Bob and then at Pete.
“And that means,” he went on, “at least I think it means, that if they had a cargo of pocket calculators they were going to smuggle into Mexico somewhere along the coast —”
He turned back to Hector Sebastian.
“Well, either something went wrong and they couldn’t get them ashore. Or Oscar Slater was lying when he told Constance all that stuff was still on board when the boat sank. What do you think, Mr. Sebastian?”
“I think you’re thinking the right thoughts, Jupe.”
Hector Sebastian smiled.
“In fact, as one of my favorite characters, Alice in Wonderland, would say, your new case seems to be getting curiouser and curiouser.”
“Think you can fix it, Jupe?” Aunt Mathilda asked.
Jupiter looked at the old washing machine standing in his workshop in the salvage yard.
Uncle Titus had brought it home the night before. Its yellowing enamel surface was so cracked and crumpled it reminded Jupe of a sheet of paper that had been all scrunched up and then only half straightened out again. He hated to think what kind of shape the motor must be in.
“I’ll give it a try, Aunt Mathilda,” he promised. “I’ll work on it all day.”
Aunt Mathilda smiled. Here was a boy, her nephew Jupiter Jones, and there was the broken washing machine, a job of work to do. Put the two together and you had the perfect combination, the way Aunt Mathilda saw it. Work and a boy. A boy at work.
“You do that, Jupe,” she said contentedly. “And I’ll fix you a nice lunch.”
Jupiter didn’t really mind putting in the whole day at the salvage yard. He would be earning some money and, more important, he would be earning time off.
The other two Investigators were earning time off too. Bob was at the library and Pete was home mowing the lawn. Tomorrow they would all be entitled to a whole free day.
Early tomorrow morning they would meet Constance at the rocky cove she had picked out. Her Mexican friends would bring Fluke there in their tow truck. Then Constance and the boys would begin to search for the sunken boat.
Within an hour Jupiter had taken all the old, rusted screws out and had disconnected the washing machine’s motor. He hoisted it onto his workbench. It wasn’t in as bad a shape as he had feared. It must be one of the early postwar models, he thought, at least thirty years old. They had certainly built things to last in those days.
The first thing it needed was a new driving belt. He would have to make one. He started to rummage around the workshop for a length of tough rubber.
Jupe suddenly stopped dead. His mind was so busy figuring out how to fix the washing machine that for a second he didn’t realize what it was that had halted him. A red light was blinking over his workbench. That meant the phone was ringing in Headquarters.
Jupiter was not normally fast on his feet. But in less than half a minute he had pulled the old grating aside, squeezed his tubby body through the pipe of Tunnel Two, pushed open the trap door, bobbed up through it like a cork, and snatched up the phone.