Jupe flipped the lights back on.
“Hi, Jupe!” Kelly said with an awful lot of energy. “Well. like. you know, Juliet Coop took me out to lunch today. ” she began.
Jupe could picture Kelly twisting one long brown piece of hair, and he knew this was going to be a long story. He put the call on the speaker phone so he could walk around while he listened.
“. but she doesn’t remember where she was or where her briefcase might be,” Kelly was saying. “But she remembers something about a car behind her that night. but it’s still fuzzy. Anyway, after lunch she gave me a ride home, and it was great. Big Barney just gave her a new Mustang convertible.”
“You know the one,” Pete interrupted in the background. “The baby with the five-liter V-8 engine and the — ”
“Pete, please,” Kelly said. “Jupe wants to hear this story. So anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. So before she got in the car, she opened the trunk and threw in her purse. Hey, I said to myself, that was weird. So I asked her, ‘What’d you do that for?’ ‘Habit,’ she said. She was riding with the top down once in her old Mustang and someone reached in and grabbed her purse. So do you get the picture, Jupe?”
Jupe’s eyes lit up. The trunk! Juliet’s briefcase might be in her trunk!
“Yes! A brilliant observation, Kelly. You’re learning a lot from me,” Jupe said.
Kelly sort of snorted a laugh.
“Let me talk to Pete,” Jupe said. “Pete, first thing Monday morning, we’re going to the auto salvage yard to check out the trunk of Juliet’s car.”
“Knew you’d say that,” said Pete. “Okay, see ya.”
At 9:00 Monday morning, Pete and Bob showed up in the VW. But Jupe wasn’t quite ready. He picked up the phone and dialed the number of police headquarters. When Chief Reynolds got on the line, Jupe announced he was calling about Juliet Coop’s briefcase.
“A briefcase is news to me,” said the chief.
“Of course, you searched the scene of the accident thoroughly for all personal property,” Jupe said.
“Of course,” the chief answered patiently.
“And the car?” asked Jupe.
“Jupiter, I have uniforms that are older than you are,” said Chief Reynolds. “I know how to do my job. My guys said the car was empty.”
“I was just checking loose ends,” Jupe said.
“Grasping at straws, you mean. You wouldn’t want to put a little wager on this case, would you, Jupiter?” asked Chief Reynolds with a laugh. “Loser buys the winner a Big Barney dinner?”
“Chief, if I lose this one, Big Barney’s chicken may be the last thing you’d want to eat,” Jupe said. “Talk to you later.”
Then Jupe joined his friends and the Three Investigators drove over to the Miller Auto Wreckage Yard. It was the size of two city blocks and surrounded by a tall wooden fence. The far side of the yard was piled high with newly wrecked cars just waiting to be stripped. Scattered elsewhere throughout the lot were piles of various sorts: tires, fenders, cars that were too damaged to be used for parts, and so on. In the left rear corner of the lot there was a huge compactor machine and a 200-foot crane.
Almost as if it had been planned by a television action-adventure show writer, they arrived at the exact moment when Juliet’s little blue Mustang was being lifted into the air by the enormous electromagnet on the end of the crane.
“He’s going to drop it in the masher!” Pete shouted. “It’ll squeeze the metal into a solid block!”
“We’ll never get anything out of the trunk then,” Bob said, breaking into a run.
They ran as fast as they could to the crane, shouting and waving at the crane operator. When they got there, they saw it was Dick Miller, the owner’s son, who had just graduated from Rocky Beach High School a year ago.
He shut down the motor and stepped out on the big yellow painted platform around the operator’s cage. “What’s your problem?” he shouted down to them.
“If that’s Juliet Coop’s car, we’ve got to see it,” Jupe shouted back.
“That’s it, all right,” Dick Miller said. “But it’s past it for spare parts, guys.”
“We only need to inspect it for a minute,” Jupe said.
“Okay, I’ll set it down over there,” Dick Miller said, pointing to a space in the middle of the yard beside a huge pile of trucks.
The Three Investigators nodded and headed for the area where Dick Miller had pointed. As they walked the crane’s engine started up again and the wrecked car, dangling at the end of the flat, round magnet, started moving after them. Jupe looked over his shoulder and saw the car swinging gently back and forth. But then it began to pick up speed, swinging in wider arcs.
“That thing’s gonna really hit hard when it hits the ground,” Pete said. “He’s crazy.”
They moved back out of the way but the car above them followed, swinging dangerously near.
“What’s the joke?” Pete shouted above the roar of the crane’s engine.
“It’s no joke! Look!” Bob shouted.
On the ground at the foot of the crane lay Dick Miller. He was holding his stomach, doubled over in pain. Someone else had climbed up into the crane operator’s booth and was now working the controls. The crane swung the car ten feet above their heads.
“Who’s operating the crane?” Jupe asked.
But there wasn’t time for an answer. Suddenly the crane swung the car toward them, and then the electromagnet let go of Juliet’s car. All 3,000 pounds of mangled metal came falling to the ground.
The car hit the ground with a shattering crash. Fortunately the Three Investigators had dodged just in time. They crouched behind a stack of wrecked cars, watching the empty electromagnet swing freely in space. All by itself, the magnet was big enough and heavy enough to knock a person dead. And it was obvious that whoever was in the operator’s booth wouldn’t mind that kind of “accident” one bit.
When the giant magnet stopped swinging, Pete peeked out from his hiding place to see who was in the crane’s cab.
“I should have known,” he whispered to his buddies. “It’s Mr. Sweetness.”
All three Investigators came out from behind the stack of cars. They saw a tall man in army camouflage fatigues climbing out of the cab of the crane. He jumped down and gave Dick Miller a chop to the back of the neck to keep him from getting up.
