"The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Брендел Марк)

9 Help from Hector Sebastian

“Brown rice,” proudly announced Hoang Van Don, the Vietnamese houseman who worked for Hector Sebastian.

He set a huge steaming bowl on the patio table and smiled broadly at the Three Investigators.

“Very healthy,” Don said. “Has all natural vitamins. No chemicals. No preservatives.”

And no taste either, I’ll bet, Pete thought, leaning forward and sniffing it.

He almost missed the days when Don had taken all his recipes from the late-night television commercials. At least fish fingers and frozen pizzas were better than the goo he was serving now that he had started watching the afternoon shows. On afternoon TV, Don had discovered a health-food guru who gave lectures on organic turnips and natural carrot juice.

“Natural brown rice, anyone?” Hector Sebastian asked. No one answered as he spooned it out onto their plates.

They were all sitting in Mr. Sebastian’s enormous living room, with its long row of windows overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The house in Malibu had once been a restaurant called Charlie’s Place. Hector Sebastian had bought it after his mystery novels had started to sell to the movies. He was gradually converting the building into what he called a stately home.

“Notice anything new?” he asked Jupe now. “See how much progress I’ve made since the last time you were here?”

Jupe looked around the almost empty barn of a room, which had once been the restaurant’s main dining room.

“You’ve had the floor refinished, Mr. Sebastian,” he said. “And you’ve — you’ve bought a rocking chair.”

Hector Sebastian nodded proudly. “I didn’t exactly buy it,” he admitted.

“The studio gave it to me. That was the rocking chair they used in my last movie, Chill Factors. You remember the scene where the old lady gets strangled with a wire clothes hanger?”

Jupe remembered it vividly. She had been sitting in that rocking chair when the strangler crept up behind her.

He wondered why anyone would want a memento like that in his stately home. But he had learned to accept Hector Sebastian’s mild eccentricities.

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.”