The Mystery of the Talking Skull - Arthur Robert. Страница 22

“Wow!” he said. “We did it, Jupe! We found the missing money!”

“With some help from Zelda,” Jupiter said. “I’m certainly looking forward to seeing her again. I have a hunch she can give me some very interesting answers!”

18

Alfred Hitchcock Asks Questions

Alfred Hitchcock, the noted motion-picture producer, sat behind the desk in his office and leafed through the many pages of notes regarding the mystery of the talking skull, which had been prepared by Bob Andrews. Then he glanced across to where The Three Investigators, in their best clothes, sat in a row and waited for him to speak.

“Excellently done, lads,” Alfred Hitchcock rumbled. “Jupiter, my boy, you did well to locate the missing money, after the authorities failed for so long.”

But Jupiter’s round features looked glum.

“No, sir,” he sighed. “I should have solved the secret sooner. First, I thought that one stamp being under the other meant the money was pasted under some wallpaper. I should have known better and looked for the other meaning. Then, if it hadn’t been for some luck —”

“Luck helps those who are alert,” Mr. Hitchcock said. “As I have reminded you before. You can’t expect to get the right answer the very first thing every time — no investigator manages that. In my opinion you did very well.”

“Thank you, sir.” Jupiter brightened. “Anyway, we did find the missing money.”

“And none too soon, either,” the director remarked. “Two days later the house would have been bulldozed to the ground and the money might easily have been lost forever in the wreckage. Tell me, did you collect the reward?”

Jupiter sighed. Pete sighed. Bob sighed.

“No, sir,” Bob said. “There wasn’t really any reward — that was just a story Smooth Simpson made up, along with all the rest he told us. But we did get a very nice letter from the bank president, and Chief Reynolds said he wished we were old enough to be on his force as detectives.”

“Ah, well, money is not the only reward for a job well done,” commented Mr. Hitchcock. “Now, I have a question or two. I believe these notes make clear how Spike Neely hid the money in the first place, and how he managed to get a very secret message out of the prison hospital to his friend, Gulliver— so secret, of course, that no one could solve it until it fell into your hands.

“But my first question, and one your notes do not answer, is what became of Gulliver. What was his fate?”

The boys grinned. They had been expecting Mr. Hitchcock to ask, and Jupiter was prepared with the answer.

“When he got the letter from Spike Neely,” Jupiter said, “Gulliver suspected Spike was trying to send him a message, because in prison Spike had said he would tell the secret to Gulliver if anything ever happened to him. However, Gulliver couldn’t solve the message. So he hid the letter in his trunk.

“Then one day as he was coming back to his hotel, the clerk told him some men had been asking for him. He recognised the description of Three-Finger Munger and he became very frightened. He knew that Three-Finger might easily kidnap him and torture him to find out where the money was and of course Gulliver didn’t know. If he had known, he’d have directed the authorities to it. In any case, he wasn’t sure whether the police would believe his story.

“So without even going up to his room, Gulliver just vanished. He left everything. His trunk was put into storage when he didn’t return, and eventually sold at public auction. To me.”

“Then Gulliver didn’t die?” Mr. Hitchcock asked sharply. “But the Gypsy, Zelda, told you that he had vanished from the world of men.”

“Which is what he did,” Jupiter said, his grin becoming broader. “He wanted to be sure Three-Finger Munger and his pals couldn’t possibly find him. So he dressed up as a woman and put on a wig. He became a woman in appearance and that way vanished from the world of men.”

“Of course!” Mr. Hitchcock exclaimed. “I should have guessed that’s what the words meant. Now — a thought is coming to me. Let me see if I, too, can deduce correctly. I deduce that the Gypsy woman, Zelda, was really The Great Gulliver!” Pete chuckled. So did Bob. Jupiter nodded his head. “That’s right, sir,” he said. “The Gypsies were old friends of Gulliver’s. In fact, his mother had been a Gypsy. They let him come and live with them. And of course, Gypsies, are very clannish, so they never betrayed his secret.” Now Alfred Hitchcock, too, chuckled. “Well,” he said. “One mystery solved. Obviously Gulliver, who used to be plump, dieted himself thin and knew that no one would ever dream that a thin Gypsy woman was really a missing fat magician. What are his plans now?”

“He’ll stop being Zelda soon and become himself again,” Jupiter said. “As soon as Three-Finger Munger and his friends are safely in prison. But he’s not going to become a magician again. The Gypsies have come to depend on him to handle their business affairs and he’s going to stay with them.”

“I see.” Alfred Hitchcock went back through Bob’s notes to the beginning. “Ah hah!” he said. “I see that when you bought the trunk at auction, Jupiter, a little old lady came rushing in, very excited, and wanted to buy it, but was too late. By any chance, was that —?”

“Yes, sir. That was Gulliver, wearing a different wig and dressed as an elderly lady. He kept track of such sales and managed to learn that his trunk was going up for sale. But he had the time wrong and was too late.

“He would have tried harder to buy it from us, but that reporter appeared with a camera, and Gulliver was afraid of attracting attention. The story in the newspaper, though, told him who we were and how to find us.”

“It also told Three-Finger Munger and his pals,” Pete put in darkly.

“Yes,” Jupiter agreed. “First Three-Finger Munger’s men tried to steal the trunk. Later on they did steal it, by following Maximilian the Mystic and running his car off the road. But they didn’t keep it long.

“You see, Mr. Hitchcock, as Zelda said, the Gypsies were keeping an eye on us. When she — I mean Gulliver — learned we had actually solved some difficult mysteries, he got the idea that we might solve the secret of where the money was hidden. We would lead the police to it, and then he could reappear.

“That’s why he had me come down to meet him, as Zelda, and talked in a mysterious way to get me interested. Then the Gypsies spotted Three- Finger and his pals, and when they stole the trunk from Maximilian, an earful of Gypsies was right behind them. The Gypsies followed the thieves to their hideout, jumped on them, and got the trunk away before the crooks knew what hit them.

“Then Zelda — that is, Gulliver — sent the trunk back to me, still hoping I’d manage to solve the mystery. In fact, he knew I almost had to in order to get rid of Three-Finger and the others. So he had the Gypsies keep a close eye on us, so they could help us if we needed them.

“That Saturday night when Smooth Simpson tricked us into helping him find Mrs. Miller’s lost house, the Gypsies were watching Three-Finger. They didn’t know about Smooth Simpson. When Three-Finger and his gang started out, they followed. When Three-Finger made us prisoners, they sent for reinforcements and were in time to rescue us and grab the Three-Finger mob.

“Then — well, you know how we finally found the money.”

Mr. Hitchcock nodded. He made a steeple of his fingers and looked across it at the boys.

“Now then,” he said. “For the final question. Did Socrates, the talking skull, really talk? And if he did, how? What was the secret? And I will not accept any supernatural explanations.”

“No, sir,” Jupiter said. “I mean the explanation isn’t supernatural. Everything a magician does is really a trick, of course, and Socrates was a trick, too. Gulliver is a good ventriloquist. In the beginning he used ventriloquism to make Socrates talk.