“Gone!” the Chief exclaimed. “Where’d they go?”
“Who knows where Gypsies go?” The old woman cackled. “They drove away bag and baggage in some old cars early this morning. Didn’t say a word to anybody. Just cleared out.”
“Thunder!” Chief Reynolds growled. “There goes our only lead. They’ve flown the coop!”
“The meeting will come to order,” Jupiter said.
Bob Andrews and Pete Crenshaw settled themselves in their chairs. Jupiter rapped a pencil on the wooden desk in front of him in the tiny office in Headquarters.
“The Three Investigators will now discuss future projects,” he said. “The meeting is now open for anyone to make suggestions.” When neither Bob nor Pete said anything, he added, “We all have a day off today. How shall we spend it?”
Two days had passed since the visit from Chief Reynolds. They had been quiet days, in which the three boys had put in a good many hours repairing and rebuilding second-hand items in the salvage yard. No one had come in with a mystery to be solved, rather to Bob and Pete’s relief. They were glad to have things quiet for a change. They were especially glad to have the curious problem of the talking skull and the mystery trunk off their hands.
“I move we go scuba diving today,” Pete said. “It’s a swell day for it and we haven’t done any diving lately. We’ll get rusty.”
“I second the motion,” Bob chimed in. “It’s a hot day and the water will feel good.”
At that moment the telephone rang.
They all jumped slightly and looked at it. The telephone, which they paid for out of their earnings in the salvage yard, was listed in Jupiter’s name. Only a few people knew that it was The Three Investigators’ official phone. It did not ring often, but when it did the call was usually important.
The phone rang again, and Jupiter picked it up.
“Hello,” he said. “The Three Investigators, Jupiter Jones speaking.”
“Hello. Jupiter,” answered Police Chief Reynolds. They could all hear him over the loudspeaker arrangement Jupiter had rigged up. “I called your house and your aunt told me to try this number.”
“Yes, Chief?” Jupiter answered alertly.
“I told you I was going to start some inquiries,” the Chief said. “You know, about that letter you photographed, and Spike Neely and The Great Gulliver. Well, I’ve had some answers. I’m not sure what it all means, but I’d like to talk to you some more. Can you come down to my office?”
“Yes, sir!” Jupiter said with a trace of excitement “Right now, Chief Reynolds?”
“As good a time as any,” the Chief replied. “I’m not busy this morning.”
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Jupiter told him and hung up. “Well,” he said to the other two, “that takes care of our plans for this morning, anyway. Chief Reynolds has some new information.”
“Oh, no!” Pete groaned. “We told him everything we knew. Anyway, you did. As far as I’m concerned, that whole business of the trunk and the skull is closed. Finished. Washed up. Out of our hands. Done with.”
“Well, of course, if you don’t want to come with me, I can probably handle it by myself,” Jupiter said.
Bob grinned. Pete’s face was a study in conflicting emotions. He didn’t want to be left out of anything, no matter how much he protested.
“Oh, we’ll come with you,” Pete said. “The Three Investigators stick together. Maybe it won’t take long and we can still go scuba diving.”
“In that case, the meeting is adjourned,” Jupiter stated. “Let’s go.”
Leaving word with Titus Jones that they would be gone for a while, they bicycled into Rocky Beach. The Jones Salvage Yard was situated on the outskirts of the small city, but it did not take long to reach the centre of town where Police Headquarters was located.
They parked their bikes and entered, to be greeted by the officer in charge behind the big desk.
“Go right in,” they were told. “The Chief is waiting for you.”
They went down a short hall to a door marked Chief of Police, knocked, and entered. Chief Reynolds was seated behind his desk, puffing thoughtfully on a cigar. He waved them to chairs.
“Sit down, boys,” he said. They sat and waited expectantly. The Chief took another puff on the cigar before he spoke.
“Well, boys,” he said then, “I’ve had some interesting answers to my questions about that fellow Spike Neely. He was Gulliver’s cellmate in prison for a time, as you know. It seems that Spike was a bank robber.”
“A bank robber!” Jupiter exclaimed.
“Exactly.” Chief Reynolds nodded. “In fact, he was sent to prison for robbing a bank in San Francisco six years ago. He got away with about fifty thousand dollars in bills of large denominations. He was eventually caught, about a month later, in Chicago. An alert teller in the bank had noticed when he demanded the money that he had a slight speech defect — had trouble pronouncing the letter L. This tripped him up when a policeman in Chicago questioned him.
“However, and this seems to be the big point, the money was never recovered. He hid it and hid it well. Nobody could even get him to admit he had stolen it. Undoubtedly he planned to leave it hidden until he got out of prison and then recover it.
“Now let’s take this whole thing step by step. Six years ago, Spike was captured in Chicago, about a month after the bank robbery. He probably hid the money in Chicago, but he could have hidden it right here in the Los Angeles area.
“You see, the police learned that before he went to Chicago he spent a week hiding in the home of his sister in Los Angeles. Her name is — Mrs. Miller — Mrs. Mary Miller. She was questioned at the time, but she couldn’t tell the police anything helpful. She’s a very respectable woman. Until the police came, she never even knew her brother was a bank robber.
“Thinking that Spike might have hidden the money in her house before he went to Chicago, the police searched it thoroughly. They didn’t find anything. As he arrived there the same day he pulled the robbery up in San Francisco, he must have had the money with him. So the official theory is that Spike hid the money in Chicago.”
“In the letter he wrote to Gulliver a year ago, he mentions a cousin, Danny Street, in Chicago,” Jupiter put in. “Could he have left the money with him?”
“The prison authorities thought of that, Jupiter. As you suspected, they read the letter to Gulliver very carefully before they mailed it. In fact, they wired Chicago to investigate Danny Street. But the Chicago police couldn’t find anyone named Street who had the slightest connection with Spike Neely.
“They finally decided the letter was harmless, so they mailed it. First, they analysed it in every way for a secret message, but they couldn’t find any.”
“Neither could I,” Jupiter admitted. He was pinching his lips to put his mental machinery in high gear. “Just the same, I deduce that some other criminals, learning of the letter, suspected it actually did tell where the money is, somehow. So they took to shadowing The Great Gulliver. That’s when he got frightened and disappeared.”
“Or was killed,” Chief Reynolds said gravely. “I think it’s plain that Gulliver never found the money. But someone may have tried to make him tell where it was, and got angry when he wouldn’t—because he couldn’t. On the other hand, he may have just taken alarm and gone into hiding, leaving his trunk behind.”
“He must have suspected Spike Neely was trying to tell him something.” Jupiter was thinking hard. “Otherwise why would he hide the letter? Let’s suppose he just disappeared. Then these other criminals, who are still around, read in the paper of my buying Gulliver’s trunk. They believed that there might be a clue to the stolen money in the trunk.
“That first night, they tried to steal it but were foiled because Uncle Titus had hidden it. Then they took to following me around. They were watching the salvage yard, figuring how to get their hands on the trunk, when they saw us sell it to Maximilian the Mystic. So they followed Mr. Maximilian, forced his car off the road, and stole the trunk.”
“They sure wanted that trunk badly!” Pete exclaimed. “I’m glad we got rid of it in time.”
“You really should have brought the trunk to me,” the Chief pointed out.
“We suggested that, sir, to Mr. Maximilian,” Jupiter answered. “He wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted the trunk. And of course we didn’t know anyone would actually injure him to get it. Besides, we couldn’t find any clue in it.”
“Well, what’s done is done,” Chief Reynolds said. “But all this talk has been leading up to a very important point. We’re agreed, aren’t we, that these criminals think there’s a clue to the missing money in that trunk?”
The boys all nodded.
“Well,” the Chief continued, “now the crooks have the trunk. They’ve searched it carefully. They haven’t found any clue. So what do you suppose they think now?”