Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (13 page)

Nonetheless, I’m the old-fashioned chivalrous type who doesn’t like to see guys belt gals even when they deserve it, and went in there and got between them with outspread hands like a referee.

“Save it for the lawyers, you two,” I said.

Myrtle curled her pretty mouth into a sneer, and snarled, “Who appointed you sheriff, big boy?”

Normally, a good-looking redhead calling me “big boy” would have perked me up; but I had little interest in even good-looking women who shot target practice in the bedroom.

“Get her the hell outta here!” Mantz was yelling. “Crazy greedy dame!”

I walked her out of his office—she was yelling back at him, but not flailing around or anything; I think she was glad to get out of there before Mantz actually struck her. On her way out, she did hurl a few epithets at Amy, who Putnam was helping down out of her little red trainer.

“Adultery’s a sin, you snooty bitch!” she shrieked. “I hope you crash! I hope you drown in the ocean!”

Though Putnam was getting an eye-and earful, Amy merely turned her back to Myrtle, as I kept walking the estranged Mrs. Mantz toward the door.

Ushering her outside the hangar to where the flashy Dusenberg was parked, I found she’d calmed down, some. “No-good lousy husband of mine canceled my charge accounts,” she explained.

“Steer clear of that guy,” I said. “You don’t want to lose any of your pretty teeth.”

Myrtle touched my cheek with a cool hand and, laying on the Southwestern accent, said, “You are a sweet one, aren’t you? Wish I’d run into you a long time ago.”

She ran into me in the bedroom at the Mantz bungalow; she just didn’t know it.

And when she’d driven off, I went back into Mantz’s office and said, “Hey, Paul, if you want to come out of that divorce with your shirt and maybe a pair of socks or two, I’d suggest not belting that broad.”

He didn’t say anything, but I had to wonder if the reason Myrtle resorted to a firearm was because he’d been smacking her around.

With the flight due to begin around ten that night, nobody came in the next day till around one in the afternoon, including the mechanics.

Shortly after I got to the United Air Services hangar, I stuck my head into Mantz’s office and asked if he had a moment, and he waved me in. He was in a tan shirt and black tie, seated behind his desk, going over the pile of charts and maps, looking a little frazzled.

I took the chair opposite him and asked, “Are you aware that Amelia’s talking seriously about makin’ her next flight a little around-the-world number?”

Mantz sighed, tossing a chart onto the stack. “Maybe she ought to survive this flight first…. Yeah, I know. She and Gippy have been after me to help ’em prepare—and work my connections at Lockheed to get ’em a good price on a twin-engine plane.”

“Will you?”

“Probably. I mean, if she’s got it in her head, then she’s going to do it, and if she’s going to do it, I want to see her tackle it as close to the right way as she’s capable of.”

“How capable is she?”

Mantz waggled a finger. “Never forget that Amelia Earhart won her reputation first, then set about earning the right to havin’ it…. She has zero experience in twin-engine piloting technique.”

“Can she learn it?”

“You’ve seen how impatient she can be, where training’s concerned.”

“She’s worked hard in that trainer of yours.”

“Hey, she’s a good pilot, but a woman’s pilot. These dames all jockey the throttles—”

“Paul!”
Ernie Tisor, his face pale and long with worry, had stuck his head in the door. The mechanic was wiping some grease off his right palm onto his coveralls. “Something nasty…. You gotta see this….”

I tagged along as Mantz followed Tisor to the Vega, where a small metal ladder up to the cockpit was in place. The other two mechanics, Jim and Tod, were standing around wearing spotless coveralls and dazed expressions.

“Take a look down by the rudder pedals,” Tisor was saying, gesturing to the ladder, which Mantz quickly scaled.

Mantz wasn’t up in the Vega cockpit long before his head popped out and his face was as white as powdered sugar, only his expression was anything but sweet.

“Who’s been around here?” he asked Tisor.

“Nobody,” Tisor said, shrugging. “I unlocked the place just a little before one…. Tod and Jim were waiting outside when I got here.”

Mantz was clambering down the ladder. “Nobody’s been around the Vega?”

“Not that I saw. Boys?”

The other two mechanics shook their heads, no.

“Shit,” Mantz said.

Tisor asked, “What do you make of it, Paul?”

“Drop or two of acid, maybe.” He placed a hand on Tisor’s shoulder. “God bless you, Ernie, for catching it. Can you repair those cables?”

“That shouldn’t be any big problem.”

“Fine. Get that done, then go over every rivet and nut and bolt on this baby. I want this patient to get a complete stem-to-stern physical, boys—look down her throat, and up her ass, understood?”

The three mechanics nodded, and quickly got to work.

Mantz turned to walk back to his office and I fell in step with him. “What’s going on, Paul?”

“Here’s Amelia and G. P.,” Mantz said, nodding to where Amy and her husband had just entered at the front of the hangar. “I’ll fill everybody in at the same time.”

They were walking toward us, Amy smiling, sporty in a plaid shirt and chinos, Putnam wearing his perpetual frown and an impeccably tailored blue twill suit.

Soon we were all seated in Mantz’s office with Mantz standing behind his desk. “I’m going to recommend we postpone,” he said, leaning his hands on the maps and charts before him.

“Why in hell would we do that?” Putnam demanded, seated but almost climbing out of his chair.

Next to him, between us, was Amy, who said quietly, “What’s happened?”

Mantz grimaced. “Your rudder cables—somebody left you a present, angel…a few well-placed drops of acid. The wires are almost eaten through.”

“What in God’s name…?” Putnam exploded.

“Acid?” Amy asked, as if she wasn’t sure of the meaning of the word.

“Probably nitric or sulfuric,” Mantz said. “You’d have flown a while, maybe a few hours, then they’d have given way…snapped like twigs.”

“Sending my plane out of control,” Amy said, hollowly.

Putnam thrust an accusatory finger in my direction. “This is just the kind of sabotage you were hired to prevent!”

“I wasn’t hired to sleep overnight in Paul’s hangar,” I said. “There’s nighttime security here at the airport, right, Paul?”

It was a question I knew the answer to, that having been one of the first things I asked Mantz about.

“Certainly,” Mantz said, “a full detail of highly competent night watchmen…but of course the airport is open well into the wee hours…and if someone who had a key to my hangar…”

“Like your wife Myrtle,” I said.

“Yes!” Putnam yelled. “We all saw her yesterday, yelling and screaming, and out of control!”

Mantz sighed and nodded. “Yeah. I’m afraid this may be Myrtle’s doing. She’d love to get back at me…and you, too, angel.”

I asked, “Is this something Myrtle would know how to do? I mean, I wouldn’t know a rubber cable from a bagpipe.”

“Myrtle was a student pilot of mine,” Mantz said. “She knows how to fly. She knows planes.”

I frowned. “You told me she hated flying.”

“She doesn’t like to fly unless she or I are at the controls…at least, that’s how it used to be. Kind of doubt I’m her favorite co-pilot, these days.”

“Paul,” Putnam said, suddenly calm and reasonable, “you may not be aware of this, but one of the main reasons Mr. Heller was hired was because Amelia had received threatening notes in the mail. They were postmarked California.”

Putnam had never mentioned the California postmarks before. Of course, I’d never actually seen any of the notes.

Putnam continued, asking Mantz, “Do you think your wife might have been capable of sending them?”

Mantz, who was after all the first to peg Putnam for sending those notes himself, said only, “Well, Myrtle’s been jealous of Amelia for a long, long time…and she knew this flight was coming up….”

“We should call the cops,” I said.

“No police,” Putnam said.

“I agree,” Mantz said.

Now I exploded, half out of my chair: “You guys are nuttier than Myrtle! You got somebody trying to sabotage Amelia Earhart’s airplane, and you look the other way? Jesus, G. P., I’d think you’d want the publicity…”

“Not this kind,” Putnam said. “It’s tainted by this divorce scandal.”

Appearing not at all upset, Amy asked, “Are there any other signs of sabotage?”

“No,” Mantz said. “We’re giving the Vega a complete inspection. Still, I’d feel more comfortable if—”

“If your people don’t find anything else,” Putnam said, “we go ahead with the flight…. That is, of course, if that’s my wife’s desire…”

“It is,” she said.

“You have no business,” I said to Amy, rather crossly, “getting on a plane, on a flight that’s dangerous under ideal conditions, when you’ve discovered sabotage like this.”

She didn’t answer; she wouldn’t even look at me.

Putnam said, “If you’d done your goddamn job, Mr. Heller, we wouldn’t have this problem, would we?”

“I did my job for you,” I said, “remember?”

Putnam blanched at that, knowing it was my way of reminding him of what he’d really hired me to do, but he bellowed on: “No police, and no postponement. If we postpone, we lose our coverage in the Sunday papers. We’ve got maximum press attention out of Amelia’s previous three long-distance flights, with these Friday takeoffs, and I see no reason to miss another golden opportunity…unless, of course, Paul, your people come up with some other act of sabotage.”

But they didn’t.

I despised G. P. Putnam. He was a reprehensible son of a bitch whose wife was a property for him to exploit and if her life were endangered along the way, he didn’t give a flying shit. Of course, I’d been taking fifty dollars a day from this reprehensible son of a bitch, to find out if his wife was cheating on him, and then slept with the woman myself. So maybe when it came to reprehensible sons of bitches, it took one to know one.

Around nine-thirty that night, the hangar cluttered with reporters from both the L.A. papers and the international wire services, I managed to get Amy alone for a moment, over by the
Honeymoon Express.

I said to her, “You know I’m against this.”

She looked jaunty and unconcerned in the leather flying jacket with red-and-brown plaid shirt, a red scarf knotted at her neck; her tan flying helmet was held in one hand.

“The boys didn’t find anything else,” she said. “They’ve repaired the rudder cables. Everything’s fine.”

“You’re probably right. There probably won’t be any other problems. Because for one thing, I don’t think Myrtle put the acid on those cables.”

She laughed in surprise. “Well…who did, then?”

“I don’t know who did it, but I can guess who hired it done.”

“Who,
Nathan?”

“The management…your ever-lovin’ husband.”

Her eyes tightened. “What? Why?”

“I accused him yesterday of sending those threatening notes himself. I think he hired somebody…maybe one of Mantz’s mechanics…to perpetrate a little act of sabotage. Something that could be discovered, and quickly remedied…and which would make G. P.’s phony notes look like the real thing, making him seem innocent, and somebody else…Myrtle Mantz…guilty.”

That made her wince. “Nathan, do you really think he’s capable of that?”

“Does Garbo wanna be alone? Listen, you want me to take hubby off in a corner and beat a confession out of him? Be glad to do it—no extra charge. I’m a former Chicago cop, remember—I know how.”

The full lips curved into a lovely smile, and she touched my face, gently, where she once had slapped it. “That’s one of the sweetest, if most violent, offers, I’ve ever had…”

God, how I wanted to kiss her right then; I like to think she was wishing the same thing.

Finally I said, “I got a sleeper out tonight, at midnight.”

The smile settled into a smirk. “Yes, G. P. mentioned he’d discontinued your security services, as of tonight…. But I’ll see you again.”

“These have been special weeks to me, Amy.”

“I love you, too, Nathan.”

And, Putnam waving her over, she went off to chat with a few members of the press, before climbing into the cockpit of her nameless red Vega.

At nine fifty-five, under the blazing floodlights of the Burbank airport, I watched her rumble down the endless runway and, finally, when her speed overcame the six thousand pounds of loaded-down, fueled-up Vega, she lifted into a clear but moonless night sky, which soon swallowed her up.

I didn’t say anything to Mantz or Putnam, who I’d handed the Terraplane keys over to, earlier. I just found my way to the United Airport terminal and went out front and got a cab to the train station.

Amy’s record-setting flight to Mexico City was fairly uneventful. She threw Commander Williams’s elaborate flight plans away and flew south, following the coastline until she figured she was parallel to Mexico City and took a left. When she couldn’t find it, she landed in a dry lake bed and asked directions of a farmer.

Delayed by weather, her eventual return to Newark (which included crossing the Gulf of Mexico, despite Mantz’s warnings) found her mobbed by fifteen thousand admiring fans who pawed at her and tore her clothing. Putnam reaped substantial publicity benefits from the flight, and had arranged for several honorary degrees and awards to be presented to her in the glow of this latest accomplishment.

Within a week of her return from Mexico City, Amelia Earhart was in Chicago, Illinois, to accept a medal from the Italian government at a conference of two thousand women’s club presidents, every one of whom represented a potential lecture booking on a future tour. I was employed by the Emerson Speaker’s Bureau, at Miss Earhart’s request, to provide security.

Her husband did not accompany her on the Chicago trip.

And since Putnam had essentially fired me, it was necessary that, in doing this job for his wife, I remain undercover.