The Prime-Time Crime

by Franklin W. Dixon

  “How about locked in the basement?” Frank said.

  Joe snapped his fingers. “Right, the basement. Where we found Steve and Debbie yesterday. But we’ve already looked there.”

  “It’s a big basement,” Frank said. “And it was pretty dark down there. We didn’t really get the chance to search it thoroughly.”

  “We also got sidetracked by Steve and Debbie and the smoke,” Joe added. “Do you think the kidnapper will try to stop us again if we start snooping around the basement a second time?”

  “That’s a chance we’ll have to take,” Frank said grimly.

  Marcy reappeared in the newsroom. “I don’t know if this will help, but one of the engineers tells me that there used to be a switchboard for the P. A. system in the basement. He didn’t know if it was still working or not, and he wasn’t even sure where it was, but it might still be there.”

  Joe’s face lit up. “This is beginning to fall into place.”

  Frank nodded. “Everything’s pointing toward the basement. Let’s get back down there.”

  “Thanks, Marcy,” Joe said as the brothers left the newsroom. “We’ll let you know how things go.”

  “I hope you’ve still got that key to the basement,” Frank said, as they headed down the hall. “I don’t want to get locked in there again. And we might need it to get inside.”

  Joe patted the pocket of his jeans. “It’s right here,” he said with a grin. “I had a feeling we might need it.”

  When they reached the basement door, it was already open. And as they started down the stairs, they met Fred Dunlap coming up from below, a big cardboard box in his arms.

  “Hi, guys,” Fred said, edging past the Hardys on the stairs. He flashed them a big smile. “Glad to see you’re still hard at work.”

  “Hi, Mr. Dunlap,” Frank said. “What’s in the box?”

  “Oh, just merchandise for our show,” Fred replied. “We keep all our stuff downstairs so we don’t clutter up the studio.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know if there’s an old microphone or switchboard downstairs someplace, would you?” Joe asked.

  “Something that might be part of the P. A. system in this building,” Frank added.

  “Does this have something to do with Clarence’s voice coming over the intercom?” Fred asked excitedly. “I heard that. Really weird. Do you think Clarence is still around here?”

  “He must be,” Joe said. “How else could he have been talking over the P.A.?”

  “You’re right,” Fred said. “Yeah, I think I remember seeing some electronic stuff in the northwest corner downstairs. You might want to take a look.”

  “We will,” Joe said. “Thanks a lot.”

  As Fred Dunlap disappeared through the door at the top of the stairs, Frank looked after him for a moment. “I wonder why he carries his own stuff up the stairs. He’s a producer, and a host, after all. You’d think he’d have somebody to do that for him.”

  “Maybe it’s one of Ted Whalen’s cost-cutting measures,” Joe said. “Let the producers and hosts do all the work.”

  “I guess so,” Frank said. “Come on. Let’s find that intercom.”

  The Hardys were pleased to see that lights were on in the basement. Fluorescent lamps hanging close to the ceiling provided lighting throughout the room. The boxes at the foot of the stairs had been rearranged to reveal a light switch that the Hardys had not noticed before.

  “So that’s where the light switch is,” Joe said.

  “Somebody must have gone to a lot of trouble to hide it from us the last time we were down here,” Frank said.

  In one corner of the room the Hardys found boxes piled up in front of the wall. Joe pulled one of the boxes off the pile and peered into the space behind it.

  “There’s something set into the wall back here,” he reported. “But I can’t make out what it is.”

  “Then we’ll have to move these boxes,” Frank said.

  One by one, the Hardys moved the boxes away from the wall. Soon, the Hardys had revealed the structure that was set into the wall.

  “It’s the switchboard,” Joe said, pulling the last box out of the way. “And here’s the microphone!”

  He bent over and picked the microphone up off the floor. It was attached to the switchboard at the end of a coiled wire.

  Frank took the microphone and tapped it gently against one of the boxes. In the distance, he heard the sound of his soft tap magnified by the P.A. system.

  “It’s live,” Joe said. “This must be the microphone Clarence used to send his message.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Frank replied. “Marcy said that there might be microphones all over the building.”

  “But why would this one still be on?” Joe asked, indicating a switch on the switchboard next to the microphone cable that was toggled to the ON position.

  “That is strange,” Frank agreed. “But if Clarence used this microphone, where is he now?”

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “Hey, Clarence! Are you around here someplace?”

  “I don’t hear anybody answering,” Frank said. “Which doesn’t mean—”

  Suddenly the brothers heard a thin, weak voice. It sounded as if it was coming from inside one of the boxes. And it was identical to the voice they had heard on the loudspeaker.

  “I’m right here. Help me before it’s too late,” the voice called.

  “Clarence!” Joe shouted. He and Frank darted around through the piles of boxes stacked on the floor, looking in every nook they came across.

  Then, as Joe reached another stack of boxes, he saw a man in a tailored blue suit. He grabbed him by the wrist and shouted to his brother, “Frank! I’ve got him. It’s Clarence!”

  12 Going Astray

  * * *

  Frank ran to his brother’s side just as the blue-suited figure turned around.

  “I’m not Clarence,” said the man with the familiar brown mustache.

  “No,” Frank said. “You’re Fred Dunlap.”

  “Have been all my life.” Fred chuckled.

  Joe’s shoulders sagged in disappointment. “And I thought I’d found Clarence! Sorry, Fred.”

  “I’m sorry I’m not Clarence,” Fred said. “What made you think I was?”

  “We heard Clarence’s voice coming from somewhere near these boxes,” Frank said. “Didn’t you hear it, too?”

  “No,” Fred said. “I just came back down here to get some more merchandise.”

  “Maybe you can help us find Clarence,” Joe said. “He’s got to be in these boxes somewhere. That’s where we heard his voice coming from.”

  “Sure, I’ll be happy to give you a hand,” Fred offered. “Where do you want to start looking?”

  “Anywhere,” Frank said. “There are tons of boxes and props down here where Clarence could be stuck. I don’t even know where to begin looking.”

  “I’ll start over here.” Fred walked over to the far corner of the room.

  While Fred Dunlap was working his way through the boxes and props in one corner of the room, Frank and Joe began looking in another. At first they searched the boxes and props systematically, but when no clues to Clarence’s whereabouts surfaced, they became more and more frantic. Joe started to toss items around wildly.

  “Take it easy,” Frank cautioned. “We’re more likely to find him if we do this carefully. If you start throwing things around like that, you might end up burying Clarence instead of unburying him.”

  Joe took a deep breath. “All right, I’ll slow down. But we’re so close.”

  “It’s about time we were close,” Frank said. “Until now, all of our clues to Clarence have seemed to lead to dead ends.”

  “Do you have any idea where that voice came from?” Joe asked. “If we can pin down the source, we’ll have Clarence.”

  “I’m stumped,” Frank said, shaking his head. “There are too many echoes down here. It could have come from anywhere.”

  The Hardys
continued to search through boxes and old trunks. But after working for an hour, they came up empty.

  “I’m afraid I’m ready to give up, boys,” Fred announced. “I don’t see any sign of Clarence, and I’ve got a show to put on.”

  “Oh, right,” Joe said. “Thanks for the help, anyway.”

  “I’m just going to grab my stuff and head back upstairs.”

  “By the way,” Frank said, “where do you keep this merchandise of yours, anyway?”

  Fred smiled. “Over there,” he said with a vague wave of his hand. “Where it won’t get in anybody’s way.”

  “Maybe we can take a look at it later,” Joe said with a laugh. “The thought of all that gold in one place makes my heart beat faster.”

  “You don’t really want to see it,” Fred said. “Just a lot of dull boxes. Like the rest of this basement.”

  “Sounds pretty boring, all right,” Frank said.

  Fred Dunlap said goodbye to the Hardys, grabbed a box, and headed up the stairs.

  “I guess maybe we should call it quits, too,” Frank said with a sigh. “Searching this basement may be too much work for the two of us. We need help.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Joe said. “Maybe we can get some of the building guards to pitch in.”

  “Come on,” Frank said, walking Joe back to the stairs. “Let’s tell Marcy what’s happened and let her find some people who can search the basement.”

  On the way out, Joe noticed the locked wire cage his brother had stumbled into on their first trip into the basement. In the brighter light, he could now see what was on the other side: stacks of boxes mostly covered with thick tarpaulin. The boxes had the initials HSE printed on the side.

  “This must be where Fred and Al keep the merchandise for the ‘Home-Shopping Extravaganza,’ ” Joe said. “That would explain the initials.” He gazed at the boxes. “Sure is a lot of stuff,” he commented. “I wonder where they get it all.”

  “Must buy it wholesale,” Frank said, “in large quantities. This looks like enough merchandise to keep them going for months at a time.”

  “Probably the cheapest way to do it,” Joe said.

  “I wonder why they keep it locked away in this cage?”

  “Probably afraid it’ll get stolen,” Joe said. “All those gold chains must be pretty valuable.”

  Frank grinned. “At nineteen ninety-five apiece, I’m surprised they don’t have an armed guard around them.”

  The brothers laughed. Then they started back up the stairs.

  “I don’t believe any of this,” Joe said, as they reached the top of the stairs and stepped into the hallway. “We were in the same room with Clarence—he even talked to us—and we still couldn’t find him. Are we losing our detective touch or what?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Frank said. “Has it occurred to you that somebody might be leading us on a false trail?”

  “What do you mean?” Joe asked.

  “Maybe Clarence isn’t in the basement at all,” Frank said. “Maybe somebody just wants us to think that Clarence is in the basement so that we’ll stay away from the place where Clarence really is.”

  “But you heard his voice yourself,” Joe protested. “We weren’t imagining that. And when Clarence spoke over the loudspeaker, he said that he was trapped in the ‘ba—,’ which sounds like he’s in the basement to me.”

  “What if that wasn’t Clarence?”

  “Not Clarence?” Joe said in a puzzled tone. “It was Clarence’s voice. I’ve been listening to Clarence for years on TV, and I’d know his voice anywhere. Clarence has the kind of voice that’s easy to recognize.”

  “Clarence has a pretty distinctive voice, all right,” Frank said. “It’s so distinctive—”

  “Yoo hoo,” called a female voice from down the hall. “It’s me again.”

  Frank turned in the direction of the voice. “Oh, hello, Debbie,” he said.

  Joe noticed his brother’s lack of enthusiasm. “What are you and Steve up to now?” he asked suspiciously.

  Debbie smiled slyly. “Well, we got hold of this small TV camera that nobody was using—”

  “As though we weren’t already in enough hot water,” Joe interrupted.

  “And we put it in Ted Whalen’s office,” Debbie finished.

  “You did what?” Frank roared. “Are you out of your minds? Do you know what will happen if Ted Whalen finds out you’re spying on him?”

  “Oh, he’ll never know,” Debbie said, trying to reassure the Hardys. “We stuck the camera in with all of those televisions he keeps on the wall of his room. With all that electronic equipment there, he’ll never notice another piece.”

  “What are you going to do with this camera?” Joe asked. “Make home videos of your close friend Ted?”

  “That’s the great part,” Debbie said excitedly. “Steve has figured out a way to patch the camera into the closed circuit TV system here at the station and watch it on one of the monitors. I have to admit that Steve actually does have a talent or two.”

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” Frank said. “You guys are actually tampering with the TV system here at the station?”

  “Don’t worry,” Debbie said cheerfully. “We know what we’re doing. Now we’ll be able to watch every move that Ted Whalen makes. When he reveals where Clarence is hidden away, we’ll be listening to every word.”

  “Where’s Steve now?” Joe asked. “Has he already finished doing all of this?”

  “He’s in the engineering room next to Studio A,” Debbie said. “He’s adjusting one of the monitors in there while the engineers aren’t looking. Any minute now, we’ll be able to get a look into Ted’s office.”

  “Come on,” Frank said, running toward the studio. “It might not be too late to stop him.”

  “Nothing’s blown up yet,” Joe said, hurrying after his brother.

  “I don’t understand,” Debbie said. “Why do you want to stop Steve? I thought you were interested in finding Clarence.”

  The Hardys didn’t stop to answer Debbie as they raced toward the studio. But before Frank and Joe could reach their destination, they saw Marcy Simons pull open the door to the engineering room from the inside and stagger out into the hallway. A puff of black smoke followed her out. She was coughing loudly.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” she gasped when she saw the Hardys racing toward her. “You’ve got to do something, quick. The engineering room’s about to explode!”

  13 Hidden Camera

  * * *

  “What do you mean, explode?” Frank asked. “Is something on fire?”

  “The wires are burning . . . melting. . . . Everything could catch,” Marcy said. “Get the fire extinguisher. Quick!”

  Frank ran to the glass case on the wall, reached through the remains of the glass that he had shattered the day before, and grabbed the fire extinguisher. He shook it to reassure himself that it was full, then ran to the door of the engineering room and pushed his way inside.

  The smoke was pouring out of a bank of TV monitors on one wall. Frank sprayed the fire extinguisher at the source of the fire, and after a few moments the smoke began to clear.

  “Uh, hi, Frank,” the older Hardy heard a nervous voice say below him. He looked down and saw Steve sitting on the floor in front of the monitors, several tools at his side.

  “Guess it really wasn’t much of a fire,” Steve said, getting up off the floor. “Thanks for putting it out, though.”

  “Let me guess,” Frank said coolly. “Did you have something to do with this, Steve?”

  “Well, I must have put two wrong wires together,” Steve said uneasily. “There were a few sparks and then suddenly all this smoke. Everything’s okay now, though.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Joe said, coming up behind Frank. “You could have burned the whole building down.”

  On the opposite side of the room, a pair of engineers watched the three teens closely. One was the young brown-
haired engineer Frank and Joe had seen the day before. The other was a middle-aged man with thinning gray hair.

  “What’s going on, anyway?” the man asked. “Were you the ones who caused that fire? What are you doing in here?”

  “Our friend Steve will be doing the explaining,” Joe said. “Right, Steve?”

  Suddenly the brown-haired engineer looked up at the bank of TV screens in front of her and cried out, “Hey, what is this? That’s not supposed to be on the air. Don’t we have a game show scheduled for this half hour?”

  The older engineer turned to look at the screen, too, as did Frank, Joe, and Steve. Debbie Hertzberg, who had just entered the room, peered over their shoulders.

  On each of the seven televisions was the same image: the inside of Ted Whalen’s office, with Whalen sitting behind his spacious desk, leaning back comfortably in his padded chair.

  “Well, if it isn’t Ted the Tyrant,” said the brown-haired engineer. “What’s he doing on there? We don’t have a feed from his office, do we?”

  “Not that I know of,” the other engineer replied.

  “Isn’t that the picture from the camera we put in Ted’s room?” Debbie whispered to Steve.

  “Uh, yeah,” Steve said. “I think it is.” He leaned forward and talked to the two engineers. “That’s not actually on the air, is it?”

  “You bet it is,” said the brown-haired engineer, staring at the image in astonishment. “Somehow this picture has been patched directly into the broadcast signal. Television viewers throughout the Bayport broadcasting area are watching this right along with us.”

  “We’d all better run for our lives when Ted figures out what’s happened,” the second engineer said.

  “So that’s what that red cable did,” Steve said. “I’ll have to remember that next time.”

  As the people in the engineering room watched Ted on the monitor, the station manager picked up a sandwich from the desk in front of him, started to take a bite from it, and spilled lettuce and mayonnaise down his shirt and tie. Several of the workers in the engineering room laughed and clapped, and someone let out a loud whistle.