5 : A Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup
THEIR STOCKY PARTNER looked at them as if they knew
what he was talking about. But Pete and Bob didn’t have
the foggiest idea what he meant.
“What’s a Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup?” they asked at the
same time.
“It is a method of contacting thousands of boys for
information without speaking to them directly.”
“Where do the ghosts come in?” Bob asked.
“There are no actual ghosts involved,” Jupiter said.
“However, the boys we contact won’t know us, most of
them, and we won’t know them. To us they will be just
voices on the telephone. If we call them ‘ghosts’, it will be
quite appropriate. Also, it will be a name that has flavour
and colour.”
“It sure does have flavour and colour,” Bob agreed.
“In addition”—Jupiter was just getting well wound up
—“when we refer to these unknown informants as
‘ghosts’, no one who hears us will have any idea of what
we are talking about It will be our secret.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Pete agreed.
“And a last consideration,” Jupiter told them. “My
scheme could be used for contacting boys all the way from
here to the Atlantic Ocean, if necessary. That would make
it a Coast-to-Coast Hookup. But such a phrase has been
used in the past by the radio and television networks. I
prefer to be distinctive. So we will call ours a Ghost-to-
Ghost Hookup.”
“If you invented it I guess you can call it anything you
want,” Pete said.
“Sure,” Bob agreed. “But how does it work?”
“It works very simply. How many friends do you have
living round here, Bob?”
“Oh, ten or twelve, I guess,” Bob told him. “Why?”
“You’ll see in a moment. Pete, how many friends do
you have that are different from Bob’s friends?”
“Six or seven,” Pete said. “What are you getting at?”
“You will see in a moment. I have four or five friends
who are different from the friends of you both. Now, Pete,
will you describe Mr. Claudius’s car again? And Bob, you
write the description down.”
“Two-door, sports model Ranger, colour—black,” Pete
said. “Red leather upholstery. Practically new. It has a
California licence plate with a number ending in 13.”
Bob wrote this down. Jupiter said, “And the driver,
who calls himself Mr. Claudius, is quite fat and wears
extremely strong glasses. I think that is enough descrip-
tion. Now we must start the hookup working.
“This is our method of procedure. First I will call five
friends and ask them if they have seen the black Ranger.
Assuming they haven’t, I will ask them to call five friends,
pass along the description, and ask those five each to call
five more. They in turn will call five more, and so on until
we get results. Each individual called will be given this
telephone number. Anyone who can give us information
about the car is to call us back here to-morrow morning at
ten o’clock and relay the information to us.
“Now, is the procedure clear?”
“Whiskers!” Bob said. “Jupe, that’s terrific!”
“Wow!” Pete broke in. “By morning every boy in
Southern California will be looking for that black
Ranger.”
“If necessary,” Jupiter said. “Do either of you see any
flaws in the scheme before we begin?”
“Shouldn’t we offer a reward?” Pete asked. “It’s custo-
mary to offer a reward for information.”
“That’s right” Bob said. “It’ll keep everybody more
interested.”
“An excellent point.” Jupiter was thinking hard. “But
what can we offer? We haven’t any money to speak of.”
“How about offering a ride in the Rolls-Royce?” Pete
suggested. “Any boy in town who likes cars would enjoy
a ride in a gold-plated Rolls-Royce, And we could let him
phone some of his friends from the car telephone to tell
them about it.“
“I believe you have a good point there.” Jupiter
agreed, “Bob, you had a suggestion?”
“I was going to say,” Bob put in, “that we could let the
first one to give us information have his choice of some-
thing from the junk yard. Why, the average kid could find
a dozen things he wanted in this yard!”
“That’s right,” Pete agreed. “I don’t know anybody
who wouldn’t enjoy having a chance to pick out some-
thing from all the wonderful kinds of junk your Uncle
Titus brings back, Jupe.”
“But we don’t own the junk,” Jupiter said, frowning.
“We can’t give away something that we don’t own.”
For a minute that had them all bothered. Then Pete
remembered that Mr. Jones owed them something for
work they had done helping repair items that he could
resell. They added it up, and together the three of them
had $25.13 coming. So they agreed that as a reward for
information they would offer a ride in the gold-plated
Rolls-Royce and anything in the junk yard valued at not
more than $25.13.
With that settled, they started phoning. Jupiter phoned
his five friends. None of them had seen the black car, but
they all agreed to phone five more friends and pass the
message along.
After Jupiter had called, he hurried out through Tun-
nel Two, their main entrance and exit, to wash windows
for his Aunt Mathilda. Pete phoned next, and then Bob.
It didn’t take much explanation. Every boy they talked to
caught on quickly, and was tickled to be in on an impor-
tant investigation.
Even as they finished phoning, Bob and Pete knew the
first ones they had talked to were spreading the message.
Bob stayed at Headquarters, typing up his notes about
the case so far. When he got home an hour later, his
mother was just hanging up the telephone with a puzzled
look on her face.
“I can’t understand it,” she said. “I just can’t under-
stand it.”
“What’s wrong, Mom?” Bob asked.
“I’ve been trying to telephone the women who are go-
ing to help me at the church supper. I’ve called twelve
so far and would you believe it, every single line is busy.”
Bob gulped. He had an idea of the reason.
“Do they all have boys about my age?” he asked.
“Yes, so I wouldn’t be surprised if three or four lines
were busy. But goodness, twelve in a row. Well, I’ll try
Mrs. Garrett.”
“I think you’ll have better luck if you wait a little
while,” Bob said. “I mean, something might be out of
order.”
“I suppose so,” she said, but she was still staring at the
telephone as he went up to his room.
In his room, Bob sat down and did a little figuring.
Three times five, which was the number of calls they per-
sonally had made, was fifteen. If each of the fifteen called
five more friends, that made seventy-five. Five times
seventy-five was three hundred and seventy-five, and five
times that was one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-
five, and five times that——
Bob stared at his calculations and whistled. No wonder
the telephones were giving out a busy signal. Jupiter didn’t
know his own strength when it came to ideas. The Ghost-
to-Ghost Hookup was pure dynamite!
However, it was a short message, so it wouldn’t take
long to get spread round. He knew everything would be
normal soon, so he began to study the notes he had made
on The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, as he called it.
Something bothered him. It was probably something
very simple, but he couldn’t place it. It wasn’t the ques-
tion of why the fat man wanted to steal parrots—they had
all agreed that was a mystery that would have to wait for
further facts. But there was the mystery of why anyone
should teach a parrot to stutter. Because obviously, as
Jupiter had pointed out, Billy Shakespeare had been
taught to say “To-to-to be or not to-to-to be,” since a par-
rot couldn’t possibly stutter by accident. And then——
But at that point, having got into bed, he drifted off to
sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, though, he
woke up and in the silence almost seemed to hear a voice
chanting in his ear, “Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep and
doesn’t know where to find it. Call on Sherlock Holmes.”
That was what Bo-Peep said, as reported by Miss Wag-
goner.
However—forgetting the mysterious suggestion to call
on Sherlock Holmes—the line was wrong. The real Mother
Goose line, as Bob remembered it, went, “Little Bo-Peep
has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them.”
But the parrot named Bo-Peep didn’t say them, it said
it.
Somehow, Bob had a feeling Jupe was going to find that
important.
“Mmm.” Jupiter twisted his round face into a mask of
thoughtful concentration. “You’re right, Bob. Miss Wag-
goner definitely reported that her parrot said, ‘. . . doesn’t
know where to find it.’ Now of course, the sheep is both
singular and plural, so either it or them is correct. How-
ever——”
“Never mind all the educated talk!” Pete groaned.
“What does it mean?”
The three boys were gathered in Headquarters, the fol-
lowing morning. It was a few minutes before ten o’clock,
at which time they hoped for some results from the Ghost-
to-Ghost Hookup they had put into effect the night before.
Meanwhile, they were discussing Bob’s discovery.
“Of course,” Bob put in now, “it could just be a mis-
take. The Englishman who taught the parrots didn’t re-
member the line correctly.”
“Correction,” Jupiter said. “Billy Shakespeare stut-
tered. That could be called a mistake. Little Bo-Peep
speaks her line from Mother Goose incorrectly. That
makes two mistakes.”
“How many is two?” Pete asked impatiently. “I make a
lot more than two mistakes every time I turn in a theme at
school.”
“Quite true,” Jupiter agreed. “But in this case we feel
sure the two parrots were taught by a well-educated Eng-
lishman. One mistake could be an accident. Two mistakes
suggest purpose.”
“Purpose?” Pete’s face looked blank, and Bob didn’t
blame him. It wasn’t always easy to follow Jupiter Jones’s
thinking. Sometimes his brain seemed to take short cuts.
“You mean it’s just as easy to teach a parrot to say
something correctly as it is to teach him to say something
incorrectly?” Bob suggested. “So there’s some special
reason why Billy Shakespeare stutters and Little Bo-Peep
says, it not them?”
“Exactly,” Jupiter said. “First we have the peculiar
mystery of why Mr. Claudius should go round stealing
parrots. Then we have the new mystery of why the parrots
were taught their strange speeches incorrectly to begin
with.”
“It beats me.” Bob shook his head. “Why teach these
parrots such lines anyway? Most people are satisfied if a
parrot just says, ‘Polly wants a cracker.’”
“The mystery deepens as we explore it,” Jupiter said.
His face had that look of real satisfaction which only
came when he knew he had a good, tough puzzle—some-
thing he could sink his teeth into.
“Teaching the parrots took a great deal of patience,”
he went on. “Whoever did it had some purpose in mind.
We don’t know what that purpose was. However, I sus-
pect that Mr. Claudius does know, and that’s the reason
he stole the two parrots.”
“WhiskersI” Bob said. “Maybe there are a lot more
parrots in this than just Billy and Bo-Peep. Remember the
one named Blackbeard the pedlar hadn’t sold, and how
excited Mr. Claudius became when he heard about it?”
“Oh, no!” Pete groaned. “If two parrots can make us
feel so bird-brained, think what a lot more would do to
us!”
Ordinarily they would have laughed. But just at that
moment the phone rang. Jupiter grabbed it as if it might
have been planning to fly away.
“Hello, Jupiter Jones speaking,” he said. “Yes, that’s
right. I’m the one seeking information about . . . You
did? First tell me, did it have a licence plate that ended in
thirteen? . . . Oh, it didn’t? . . . I’m very sorry, but it
wasn’t the car we are trying to trace. Thank you just the
same, though.”
He hung up, looking disappointed.
“A boy in Hollywood,” he said. “But it was the wrong
licence plate.”
The phone rang again. This time he remembered to
hold it near the loudspeaker he’d made so the others
could hear the conversation. It was a boy in Santa Monica,
who had seen a black Ranger parked outside a restaurant
the night before. But a young couple had driven off in it,
and it was several years old. Wrong car again.
In all, there were eight more calls. Jupiter expertly ques-
tioned everyone who called, but it was obviously the wrong
car every time.
The Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup had been a dud! They
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