The pool stakeout and Sonny Elmquist’s recovery of the Hound

The pool stakeout and Sonny Elmquist’s recovery of the Hound turns Jupiter Jones’s solution to the sculpture’s disappearance into a carefully staged test. By recognizing how a transparent object could vanish against its surroundings, Jupiter finds the Carpathian Hound at the bottom of the pool. He then puts it back, expecting the burglar to return for it—and discovers instead that Sonny Elmquist has been drawn to the hiding place through a dream, without knowing about the ransom.

Background and Inference

Jupiter’s deduction grows from the dangers surrounding access to the pool. He asks Fenton Prentice whether anyone might want to poison Gwen Chalmers because she swam there each night. He then connects the threat to Mrs Bortz: although she had been snooping, no one had targeted her until she announced that the pool would be drained and cleaned. The common point is not simply that both women had attracted attention, but that the pool’s contents were about to be disturbed.

The explanation comes through a comparison with another invisible object. Jupiter recalls a murder in which a glass knife, wiped on a woman’s skirt and then placed in a water pitcher, could not be seen in the water. In the same way, he reasons, the crystal Hound could be invisible because it was in plain sight, submerged in the pool. Bob Andrews immediately identifies the pool as the hiding place. Jupiter’s theory makes the water both concealment and evidence: draining it would expose the sculpture, and the prospect of cleaning it helps explain why someone might try to prevent that from happening.

Recovery and the Bait

Jupiter chooses to recover the Hound before the scheduled ransom the following day. He proposes acting while no one else is in the building, while Bob takes the back gate and Pete Crenshaw watches the street from the front gate. Prentice and Charles Niedland accompany Jupiter to the pool. Jupiter removes his clothes but his shorts and enters the shallow end, then searches the tiled bottom as he wades toward the deep end.

When the water reaches his chin, he ducks beneath the surface and sinks. Kicking forward just above the pool floor, he reaches for an object and comes back up holding it, a string dangling from it. Prentice recognizes the recovered sculpture as the Hound. Its details make the concealment all the more striking: the figure is a heavily muscled dog with a square head, gold-rimmed round eyes, and gold froth on its crystal jowls. It stands about six inches tall, with a human skull between its feet and a long gilt cord tied around its middle.

Jupiter explains that the burglar did not need to enter the pool. The Hound could be lowered by its cord until it touched bottom, then released; against the pool’s random blue-and-gold tile pattern, the gilt cord was difficult to see. The method depends on an ordinary visual misdirection rather than a complicated hiding place. Once the sculpture is in hand, however, Jupiter does not treat its recovery as the end of the investigation. He asks Prentice to let him put it back, reasoning that the burglar still expects the ransom to be delivered the next day and may come for the object that night. The Three Investigators will watch the television monitor and try to identify whoever retrieves it.

The Midnight Stakeout

The plan becomes a test of the hiding-place theory. At midnight, the gate clicks open and Sonny appears, his figure described as slim and slouching, before going into his apartment. A light shines briefly from his windows and then goes out. The watchers wait on the balcony. Later, a shadowy figure moves to the shallow end of the pool and enters the water quietly, making barely any ripples.

The person takes an audible breath, dives, and uses a waterproof flashlight. Its beam sweeps across the bottom until a hand reaches into the light and closes around the transparent Carpathian Hound. The swimmer surfaces, climbs out, and soon a door opens and closes. These actions confirm that someone has found and removed the sculpture, but the underwater light and careful approach do not yet establish who the person is or why he came.

Confrontation and Discovery

Pete knocks softly at Prentice’s door, which opens immediately, and the group goes to Sonny’s apartment. Jupiter switches on a lamp. Sonny’s black hair is wet and plastered against his head; when Jupiter accuses him of having been in the pool, Sonny first denies it and says he has just taken a shower. Jupiter points to the wet footprints leading to his door. The physical traces contradict the explanation, and Sonny steps back into the room.

Sonny says the Hound is in the oven and claims he had meant to give it back to Prentice. When Prentice asks whether that meant after collecting ten thousand dollars, Sonny looks bewildered and asks what ten thousand dollars. He had expected that Prentice might offer a reward for recovering the sculpture, not that a ransom was involved. Prentice goes into the kitchen and finds the Hound in the oven with the gilt string still wrapped around it. Its recovery confirms Sonny’s account of where he put it, while his surprise over the money separates him from the ransom plan.

Dreams and the Limits of the Trap

Jupiter concludes that Sonny is not the burglar but a wanderer who saw something in his sleep. Sonny turns pale when asked what he saw. He explains that he dreams things and describes a dream of a glass dog: someone came in the dark late at night and put it into the water, though Sonny could not see who the person was. Jupiter believes him. The stakeout therefore solves the immediate problem of who removed the Hound from the pool without identifying the person who first hid it there.

The sequence ends with two discoveries held apart. The sculpture’s apparent invisibility has a practical explanation: its transparency and the gilt cord made it blend into a tiled pool floor. Sonny’s recovery of it, by contrast, is linked to a dream that supplied the hiding place but not the identity of the original visitor. The Hound is found again, yet the planned ransom and the burglar’s identity remain unresolved in this encounter. The trap catches a person at the pool, but the distinction between retrieving the object and stealing it is what allows Jupiter to recognize that he has caught the wrong culprit.