“Chief Reynolds.” The First Investigator was pinching his lower lip. “I don’t want to interfere. But do you mind if I make just one small suggestion?”
“What is it, Jupe?” Chief Reynolds was handing the key to Slater so he could lock the box before he took it away with him.
“If you’d just look at the serial numbers on those bills.”
“The serial numbers, Jupe?”
“I think you’ll find a lot of them are the same.”
Jupe let go of his lip and, opening the box, took out two stacks of the crisp new ten-dollar bills.
“And if you call in a Treasury expert, Chief,” he went on, “I think you’ll find that all of this money is counterfeit!”
“The police soon picked up Paul Donner,” Jupe said. “He was trying to get away to Mexico in that battered old limousine of his and it broke down near San Diego. When the police took him in, he made a full confession.”
The Three Investigators were sitting around the patio table in Hector Sebastian’s enormous living room. They had come to give him a full report on the case of the kidnapped whale, as Bob called it in the notes he had made.
Mr. Sebastian was leaning back in his rocking chair while he listened attentively to their story and asked an occasional question.
“Paul Donner confessed he had printed the counterfeit money?” he inquired.
Bob nodded gloomily. Even though it was Paul Donner who had disconnected the brakes on Constance’s pickup truck, and had tried in every way he could to stop them from salvaging that metal case from the wreck, he felt a little sorry for the tall, thin man.
“Oscar Slater forced him to print it,” he explained. “He blackmailed him into it.”
“Blackmailed him? How?”
Hector Sebastian glanced in the direction of the kitchen, where Hoang Van Don was preparing lunch for them. He surreptitiously slipped a bag of candy from his pocket and offered it around to the Three Investigators.
“I know it’s weak-minded of me,” he admitted, popping a jelly bean into his mouth. “But I can’t help it. I get so hungry.”
“Is Don still feeding you brown rice, Mr. Sebastian?” Pete asked sympathetically.
“It’s worse than that now, Pete, I’m afraid,” the mystery writer told him. “It’s… well, you’ll see for yourself what it is. Sorry, Bob. Go on. Oscar Slater blackmailed Paul Donner into forging those ten-dollar bills. How?”
“They had worked together in Europe,” Bob went on. “Paul Donner was a highly skilled engraver and he did the forging and the printing. Slater handled the distribution end. He had an organized ring passing counterfeit bills all over the continent.”
“Until the police caught up with him?” Hector Sebastian asked.
“They never did catch up with Oscar Slater,” Jupe told him. “He slipped away without a trace and with most of the profits. But the French police did get after Paul Donner. They had a warrant for his arrest. They would have sent him to jail for years. But he just managed to evade them and escape to Mexico.”
“He had made up his mind to go straight,” Bob put in. “No more counterfeiting. And he was going straight, running a small printing business in La Paz until —” Bob shrugged. “Well, until Oscar Slater happened to run into him there.”
“And of course Slater knew Donner was wanted by the French police.” Hector Sebastian nodded understandingly. “He knew the French would extradite Donner if they could ever find him.”
He slipped another jelly bean into his mouth. “That gave Slater a lot of leverage. He could force Donner to go back into their old counterfeiting racket.”
He chewed thoughtfully for a moment.
“But how did you guess those bills were counterfeit, Jupe?” he asked.
“It was mostly that crease under Paul Donner’s eye,” Jupe said. “I tried to think of all the people who use a jeweler’s glass. Then it suddenly struck me that Donner might be an engraver.”
“Pretty smart, Jupe.” Sebastian smiled. “It must have seemed to Donner like the best and luckiest thing that had ever happened to him when that charter boat went down with all those, forged bills on board,” he said. “Is that the way you figured it out, Jupe?”
“More or less,” the First Investigator admitted, trying to look modest. “I kept wondering, why was Slater so anxious to recover that box? And why was someone else trying so desperately to stop him?”
He pinched his lip.
“And then I realized the forger was the one who was taking all the big risks. Because forging, well, it’s like painting in a way. A first-class engraver can’t help having his own style. It’s almost like a signature on his work.”
He accepted another piece of candy from Mr. Sebastian.
“As soon as those forged ten-dollar bills started showing up in banks,” he continued, “the Treasury agents would recognize them as Paul Donner’s work. Then they’d be after him, too, as well as the French police. And it wouldn’t be long before they traced him to La Paz.”
There was a chopping sound from the kitchen. Hector Sebastian hastily slipped the bag of candy back into his pocket.
“And after that you put two and two together, Jupe,” he suggested. “And saw Donner must be the one who didn’t want that box found?”
“For a long time”—Jupe really did look modest now —“for a long time I kept putting two and two together and getting three. Three suspects. Oscar Slater and Paul Donner and the man who called us and offered a hundred dollars’ reward to get Fluke back into the ocean.”
He glanced at Bob.
“It wasn’t until Bob took Donner’s mask off on the beach that I realized suspect two and suspect three were the same person.”
“When Paul Donner called and offered you that reward,” Hector Sebastian said. “When he spoke in that peculiar way, saying ‘way-ul’ and ‘cayus’ — do you think he was deliberately imitating Slater’s voice, trying to make you think it was Slater who was calling you?”
Jupe shook his head. “I don’t think he was, Mr. Sebastian. He was just trying to disguise his own voice. It’s like an actor —”
Jupe knew a lot about acting. He had once been a child actor himself, although it wasn’t a period of his life he enjoyed being reminded of. His professional name had been Baby Fatso.
“If you ask an actor to change his voice,” he went on, “the easiest way for him to do it is by imitating someone else. Using someone else’s accent. Paul Donner, with his European background, had a very distinctive way of speaking. The best way he could hide it was by using another distinctive voice. Talking the way Slater did.”
Sebastian reached for another candy in his pocket and then changed his mind.
“How did Donner first get on to you three boys?” he asked. “When he met you in San Pedro and told you he was Captain Carmel, he knew you were the Three Investigators, didn’t he?”
“Paul Donner was one of the two men on board Slater’s boat that first morning,” Jupe explained. “He saw us rescue the stranded whale. He was still pretending to be working with Slater then. When Slater told him about his plans to have Constance train Fluke to find the wreck, Donner decided to go to Ocean World himself the next day. I guess he was just trying to find some way to stop Slater. Then he saw us there. He recognized us as the three boys he had seen on the beach. He saw us go into Constance’s office. Then he found our card on the desk after Constance had left. So he called us and offered a hundred-dollar reward to get Fluke back in the ocean. To make sure Slater couldn’t use Fluke to find the wreck.”
Sebastian considered that for a moment. He nodded.
“But why did Donner go to Diego Carmel’s office in San Pedro?” he asked. “I can understand that with his skills it would be easy for him to make a key to the door. You say he was snooping around. What was he hoping to find?”
“I think he went there to inspect Constance’s scuba equipment,” Jupe said. “I think it had already occurred to him that that might be one way to stop the whole diving expedition, by tampering with the air tanks. Later, when Constance decided to use the equipment from Ocean World, Donner had to go aboard Slater’s boat to empty one of the tanks and fix the pressure gauge.”
“Then once you realized the —” Sebastian looked at Bob. “What did you call him in your notes, Bob?”