Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10

Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time, and contradictory source material, will allow), fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones—all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.

“I think it’s too bad when aviation movies depend for their excitement on plane wrecks and lost fliers and all that sort of thing. Perhaps that’s good drama but it certainly isn’t modern aviation.”

—Amelia Earhart

The press called her “Lady Lindy,” but her family called her Mill. Schoolgirl pals preferred Meelie, certain friends Mary (Fred Noonan among them), she was Paul Mantz’s “angel,” and her husband used “A. E.” To the world she was Amelia Earhart, but to me, and only me, she was Amy.

I hadn’t thought of her in a long time, at least a week, when that damned Texan came around, stirring memories. For all the mentions of her in the media, even after so many years—some screwball was always mounting an expedition to “find her”—I’d managed to keep her real in my mind, not just a famous name, not just a “historical enigma” (as Leonard Nimoy called her on some silly TV show), always a person, a friend, someone I missed, with that bittersweet kind of longing you feel more and more, the older you get.

Old age is a combination, after all, of hard and soft, a senile sundae of cynicism and sentimentality, with much of your time spent reading, both aloud and silently, from a laundry list of bastards and sweethearts you spent a lifetime compiling. And not all of the sweethearts were women, and not all of the bastards were men.

My wife—my second wife, the marriage that took—and I had not given up our home in suburban Chicago, yet; I was telling people I was “semi-retired” from the A-1 Detective Agency, lying to myself that I was still in charge. I was still in charge like a brain-dead billionaire on life support is still in charge of his finances.

But at age sixty-four (with sixty-five a few months away), I didn’t need to work. My one-room agency in Barney Ross’s old building on the corner of Van Buren and Plymouth, established in 1932, had turned into suites of offices in six cities now, not to mention two floors of the Monadnock Building. I wasn’t the President of the A-1 anymore, but Chairman of the Board. We no longer did divorce work; our specialties were “anti-industrial espionage” and “security consultation.” I had become so successful, I didn’t recognize my own business.

So when the Texan came calling, I was still kidding myself that I was only “wintering” in Florida. We had a nice little rambling three-bedroom ranch-style on a waterway where we could sit and watch boats glide by, first in one direction, then the other, sometimes chased by water skiers, some of whom were pretty young girls. We could have had an oceanfront place, giving my tired old randy eyes even more ready access to sweet young things in skimpy bathing suits, but the “villa” available shared a wall with a next-door neighbor. Maybe that was a villa in Florida; in Chicago, we called it a goddamn duplex.

Our life in Boca Raton was fairly simple. I rarely played golf, though we had country club privileges (our house was part of a “neighborhood association”), because golf was a social pastime I had put up with for business purposes. I’ve always had better things to do than hit a little ball with a stick and chase the ball and then hit it with a stick again. Nor did I go fishing; I’d caught plenty of big fish in my time, but not the aquatic kind—fishing, it seemed to me, existed solely to provide the world with a more boring pastime than golf. My wife loved to garden, and I loved to watch her bending over in ours; she had a green thumb, and a great ass for an old gal. I told you I was a randy old bastard. Or is that sweetheart?

Anyway, my days were spent in a lawn chair, watching the boats go by, sipping rum and Coke, reading, occasionally accompanying my wife shopping, just as she would more than occasionally accompany me to the track. Evenings it was often cards, bridge club with my wife, poker with my buddies, retired cops, mostly. Since I’d only smoked during the war and was a mild drinker, my health was excellent, save for the sporadic aches and pains, never quite escalating into arthritis or bursitis, that a son of a bitch with as many healed-over bullet and knife wounds (even a machete scar) as I have ought to expect after a lifetime of merriment.

I had also started to write the memoirs of which this is the latest installment; but I had not yet come to the realization that writing those memoirs would become my salvation. That a man who had lived a life as eventful as mine, who was no longer of an age where that eventful life could be further pursued, could find, if not meaning, relief from the malaise of old age, in reliving that life. Besides, I had a fat advance from a publisher.

So I was noodling on a yellow pad, when the Texan strolled up, blotting out the sun like an eclipse with a pot belly.

“You’re Nate Heller, aren’t you?” With that drawl, only the word “pardner” was missing.

“I’m Nate Heller,” I said, and I was, even if I was Nate Heller in sunglasses, a Hawaiian-print shirt, chino shorts, and sandals. No trench coat or fedora, despite the goofy pictures I’d posed for, for
Life
magazine, a hundred years ago. “Private Eye to the Stars,” they called me. We’d opened up our Los Angeles office, by then.

Anyway, the Texan. He was as big as…a Texan. He wore a multicolor Hawaiian shirt that looked like a paint factory drop cloth, unlike my own tasteful purple and white affair. A young guy—maybe fifty-five—he wore new blue jeans and wrap-around black sunglasses, and his hair was white at the temples and suspiciously black everywhere else and curly and dripping with more Vitalis than a Sam Giancana bodyguard. He had a bucket head and a shovel jaw, and the hand he extended was smaller than a frying pan.

I just looked at it.

He took no offense, just reeled in his paw and sat on the edge of the deck chair next to mine, sort of balancing precariously there, asking, after the fact, “Mind if I sit myself down?”

“Who else is gonna do it for you?”

He grinned—his teeth were as white as well-polished porcelain bathroom tiles; caps or dentures. “You’re a hard man to find, Mr. Heller.”

“Maybe you should’ve hired a detective.”

An eyebrow arched above a sunglass lens. “That’s partly why I’m here.”

“I’m retired.” That was the first time I didn’t use “semi”; dropping the prefix was either an admission to myself, or maybe just a lie to cool this Texan’s interest.

“You never answered my letters,” he said. He pronounced “my” like “mah.” Like a lot of Southern men, he managed to sound simultaneously good-natured and menacing.

“No,” I said, “I never did.”

“Least you’re not pretendin’ you never got ’em. Did you read ‘em?”

“About half of the first one.”

A motorboat purred by, pulling a shapely blonde whose hair was made even more golden by the sun; the blue water rippled, and so did the muscles on her tummy.

“The rest you just pitched,” he said.

I nodded.

“Left messages at your office. You never answered them, neither.”

“Nope,” I said, speaking his language.

“Thought when I come up with your home number, there in, where is it? Forest Park? Thought we’d finally connect. But you got one of them tape machines. Pretty fancy hardware.”

I gestured with my rum and Coke. “That guy James Bond, in the movies? He was based on me.”

He chuckled. “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised. Your name turns up in the damnedest places.”

Peering over my own sunglasses, I said, “I know you’ve come a long way, Tex. So I’m going to do you the courtesy of lettin’ ya speak your piece.”

“And then you’re gonna tell me to haul my fat Texas ass out of here.”

“I would never insult a man’s home state.”

“You knew her, didn’t you?”

“Who?” But I knew who he meant.

He stared at my sunglasses with his sunglasses. “Anybody but me ever track you down, on this subject?”

“…No.”

“I mean, you been talked to enough. I dug back through the files. There was a time you gave plenty of interviews, droppin’ all them famous names.”

“Stirring up business.” I shrugged.

He made a click in his cheek, and his words made me sound like a pecan pie he liked the taste of. “Crony of Frank Nitti and Eliot Ness alike. At the Biograph when Dillinger got his. Pal of Bugsy Siegel’s.” He shifted his body from side to side, like he was really settling into this one-way conversation. “Were you really one of Huey Long’s bodyguards, night they plugged him?”

I sipped my drink. “Another proud moment.”

He filled his chest with air; it was like a dirigible inflating. Then he breathed it out, saying, “’Course, there are those people that say you got a line of bullshit a mile wide and two miles long.”

“Question is, how deep?”

“People that say you took all sorts of credit, for all sorts of famous cases, made yourself ten kinds of important, just to build up your business. That none of this wild shit you talk about ever really happened to ya. You really have an affair with Marilyn Monroe?”

I took my sunglasses off, tossed them on the grass. “I think you’re about there.”

The bathroom tile grin flashed again. “Out the door, you mean? Or knocked on my tail?…I figure your connection with Lindbergh’s how you and A. E. hooked up. You worked that kidnapping, a while, didn’t you? Only weren’t you still on the Chicago police, at the time?”

I sat up, swiveled and faced him. “Is there something you want? Or are you just another mosquito, buzzing around a while? Before you draw blood.”

“And get swatted? Can I just show you somethin’, ’fore I head out? I mean, I come a long way…from Dallas?”

He withdrew a piece of paper from the pocket of his paint-splotch shirt; unfolded, it was a photocopy of a fairly crude drawing, about on the level of a really poor police artist’s sketch.

“One of my associates has what you might call a modicum of art training,” he said, “and worked this up from a native’s description.”

The drawing, rough as it was, was clearly a portrait of a ruggedly handsome young man in a priest’s collar.

“Several natives we showed this to,” he said, “remembered this priest, though not his name. They say he had reddish-brown hair…kinda like yours must’ve been, ’fore the sides turned white. About your size…six foot…your build, ’fore you got that little paunch. No offense. Ain’t near the spare tire I’m carryin.’ “

“Natives where?”

Now his smile turned sly. “Little bitty slice of paradise in the Pacific, no more’n five miles long, fifteen wide. In the Mariana Islands?”

I said nothing.

“’Course the first time I seen it,” he said, “it was about the opposite of paradise, Saipan was. Never saw such a landscape of total fucking devastation. You see, I was there with the Second Division.”

“Marine, huh?”

“Twenty-fifth Regiment. I was there when Captain Sasaki and five hundred other Jap sons of bitches tried to break through at Nafutan Point.”

“So I’m supposed to warm up to you now, ’cause you were a jarhead, too?”

“You know what they say—
Semper Fi,
Mac. Guadalcanal, weren’t you?”

I thought about cold-cocking him, but only nodded.

“Got out on a Section Eight, I understand. Funny. You don’t look like a nutcase to me.”

“You might be surprised.”

“Of course, according to that
Look
magazine article, it was battle fatigue. They even made you sound like a kind of hero, holdin’ off the Japs in a foxhole with your boxer pal, Barney Ross. He was a drug addict, wasn’t he? What a life you’ve led.” He folded the photocopy back up and returned it to his pocket. “You want me to leave now?”

I didn’t say anything. Another boat was streaking by; no pretty girl tailing this one, though.

“Nobody ever connected you to Saipan before,” he asked cagily, “did they?”

“No,” I admitted.

“I mean, you been talked to about her. You mentioned her in passing, to this reporter and that one. More of your celebrity name-dropping, to feather your business nest. I know you were her bodyguard for a while, in what, ’thirty-five? Least they didn’t bump her off under your nose, like they done with Mayor Cermak and the Kingfish.”

My hands were turning into fists. “I’m sure there’s a point to this.”

“But nobody ever noticed your name come up in the Mantz divorce proceedings. I never saw that in print anywhere—did you?”

“You have been digging.”

He gave a shrug of the head. “So have a lot of people, for a lot of years. I’ve made three trips back to Saipan so far…and I got another one coming up. I want you to come with me.”

I just laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“You know, there’ve been lots of expeditions…”

“They haven’t found squat.”

His smile was small but knowing. “So…you paid attention. You followed the news stories. You read any of the books?”

“No,” I lied.

“Not even Goerner’s? CBS news correspondent, that’s hot shit. Then there’s Davidson, and Gervais—”

“And you. Speaking of which, who the hell are you?”

“I won’t tell ya unless you shake my hand,” he said, shambling to his feet. “I mean, I already put up with more indignity than any good Texan had ever ought to suffer. If you won’t shake a fellow jarhead’s hand, then fuck you and goodbye, Nathan Heller.”

“I don’t know whether to throw your ass out,” I said, “or invite you in.”

“Well, make up your mind, pard. Either way, I come prepared for a good time.”

And he stuck the paw out again.

I laughed once, and shook the goddamn thing.

“Let’s go inside,” I said. The sun had gone under and the afternoon was slipping away, cool dark shadows shimmering on the waterway; no more pretty girls today.

His name was J. T. “Buddy” Busch, and he was from Dallas; there was oil money in his family, but he’d made his fortune in real estate. In recent years, he’d been pursuing various exotic business ventures more for “the sheer fucking fun of it” than profit.

Amelia had fascinated him since childhood, from when she was first in the news for crossing the Atlantic in 1928; officially the “captain,” she’d been a passenger to a male pilot and male navigator, though that fact was sluffed over, in the press. But later—five years to the day after Charles Lindbergh—she became the first woman to make a solo Atlantic crossing. Lady Lindy had set many records in her Lockheed Vega monoplane, her feminine yet tomboy image sending mixed but intriguing signals to a public that included a little son of Texas named Buddy Busch.