“Good evening, Mr. Slater.”
Pete didn’t dare raise his head, but he tilted it a little so that his eyes were clear of the grass.
The man was standing beside Constance Carmel at the far end of the pool. He was rather short, at least six inches shorter than she was. His face was in the shadows and it was hard to make out his features. But there was one thing about him that stood out like a light. Although he looked quite young — in his mid-thirties, Pete guessed — he was completely bald. Even in the half-darkness his round head gleamed, pale and smooth and as hairless as a cue ball.
“How’s it coming?” the man asked. “When are you going to be ready to go?” He had a curious way of talking. There was a slowness in his speech that reminded Pete of something.
“Now listen, Mr. Slater.” Constance was looking down at the man. Pete could hear the cold anger in her voice. “I agreed to help you because of my father. But I’m going to do this my own way. In my own time. Any interference from you, and Fluke goes back in the ocean and you can find yourself another whale and train him yourself.”
She paused for a moment, glancing at Fluke.
“Understand, Mr. Slater?”
She was looking down at him again, her hands clenched on her hips in a threatening way.
“Ah under-stay-and,” Mr. Slater said.
“You sure?” Jupiter Jones asked. “You sure it was the same voice, Pete?”
It had taken Pete twenty minutes, jogging down the hill, before he found a gas station where he could call Headquarters. After that it had taken Hans almost as long to drive there from Rocky Beach and pick him up. The Three Investigators were now sitting in the back of the van on their way home.
Pete had told the other two everything that had happened since he left Ocean World. He was resting, lying on his back, his hands folded under his head.
“Pretty sure,” he said sleepily. “Of course, I can’t sway-er to it. But it sure sounded like the same voy-us.”
Jupiter nodded, pinching his lower lip. His mind was racing like a squirrel on a wheel. Round and round. It didn’t make any sense. Why should a man call and offer them a hundred dollars to find a lost whale when all the time it was in his own swimming pool?
Jupe didn’t ask the question out loud. He thought it was something he could figure out better if he slept on it.
They dropped Pete off at his house first. Then Bob. Then Hans drove Jupe back to the Jones house, across the street from the salvage yard. The Three Investigators had agreed to meet at Headquarters the next morning as soon as they could get away.
Bob was the last to arrive in the morning. Just as he was leaving his house, his mother had called him back to help wash the breakfast dishes.
He left his bicycle in Jupe’s outdoor workshop in a front corner of the yard. Next to the workbench, an old metal grating just seemed to be leaning against a wall of junk. Bob moved the grating aside. Beyond it was the entrance to a large corrugated pipe. This was Tunnel Two. It ran under piles of junk and soon brought him directly below the mobile home trailer, which was Headquarters.
Bob pushed up the trap door above his head and climbed out into the office, where his two friends were waiting, for him.
Jupe was sitting behind the desk. Pete was sprawled in an old rocking chair with his feet up on a drawer of the filing cabinet. Neither of them said anything. Bob sat down on a stool and leaned back against the wall.
It was Jupe, as usual, who opened the discussion.
“When you’re trying to solve a problem and your mind comes up against a blank wall,” he said in what Bob recognized as his special thinking-aloud voice, “you are faced with two possible alternatives. You can either bang your head against the wall. Or you can take a detour and try to find your way around it.”
“Meaning what?” Pete asked. “I mean, meaning what in English?”
“Meaning Diego Carmel,” Jupe explained. “Diego Carmel, Charter Boat Fishing.”
“Okay. Call him,” Bob suggested. “I don’t see what he’s got to do with it, but there’s no harm in trying.”
“I’ve been calling him since breakfast,” Jupe admitted. “There’s still no answer.”
“Maybe he’s gone fishing,” Pete suggested. “Sometimes people don’t answer their phone because they’re not there.”
“As to what he has to do with it,” Jupe said, ignoring Pete’s interruption, “we know that someone called Constance Carmel on Monday. They told her about the stranded gray whale, or pilot whale, or whatever —”
“Fluke,” Pete put in. “Let’s just call him Fluke.”
“About Fluke,” Jupe agreed. “They didn’t call her at Ocean World because she wasn’t there. And they didn’t call her at Arturo Carmel’s because his phone’s been disconnected.”
“And they didn’t call her at Brother Benedict’s monastery,” Bob said helpfully.
“So that leaves only one other Carmel in the phone book. Diego Carmel, who lives in San Pedro and does charter-boat fishing. It’s possible he’s a relative and that someone called Constance there.”
“And Constance Carmel told that Slater guy she was helping him because of her father, right?” said Bob.
“Okay,” Pete agreed. “Maybe Diego is her father. Maybe not. But I still don’t see what he has to do with anything.”
“That’s what I meant about the blank wall,” Jupe explained. “Constance Carmel and Slater won’t talk to us. At least, she’s lying to us and he may be. So if we can’t find out anything from them, perhaps we can find out something about them instead. That means we run down to San Pedro and talk to Diego Carmel — assuming he’s connected somehow.”
“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.