Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (21 page)

“A while,” I said.

The Duck Air Service Cafe at Oakland’s Bay Farm Airport, its walls decorated with framed flying photographs and pennants commemorating air shows and competitions, had wooden booths along windows that looked out on the airfield and its hangars. The interior of the glorified shack was a dark-stained oak, except for a small gleaming counter with wrought-iron stools and leather seats. Pies and cakes and ice cream were served up from behind the counter by Mom, while Pop made the sandwiches in a small kitchen in back.

The afternoon was warm but not sweltering, ceiling fans churning the air like big propellers; those flies that flypaper strips hadn’t shot down were dive-bombing the handful of customers in the place, which included me and Mantz, on one side of a booth, and young Robert Myers on the other.

I had bought the Myers kid a “snail,” which was his word for a cinnamon roll, and a glass of milk; he was wolfing them down, whether out of hunger or in competition with the flies, I couldn’t tell you.

He was a tall, bony kid with dark alert eyes, a strong nose and chin, and a shock of unruly blond hair in need of a barber; like a lot of kids in their early teens, his body approached manhood while his features still had a softness to them, as if not yet fully formed. He wore a crew-neck T-shirt with dark blue neck and sleeve trim, and his denim trousers were sailor-style denims—judging by how high they rode over his black speedsters, this was at least his second summer in them.

“Amelia never heard a snail called a snail before, either,” he said, chomping on the roll; his voice hadn’t changed yet. “I call her Amelia ’cause she said to. She always called me Robert, ’cause she knew I didn’t like Bobby, since it’s what my sister calls me when she gets mad.”

Mantz and I traded grins.

“Well, then, I’ll call you Robert, too,” I said, “if that’s okay. And you call me Nate.”

“All right, Nate. I can’t tell you how glad I am that somebody’s come to talk to me about all this. I about been bouncing off the walls, worryin’.”

“Why?”

He gulped some milk. “Jeez, I don’t even know where to start.”

“In the detective business,” I said, knowing he would be impressed by that, “we like to keep it tidy, orderly.”

He dabbed off his milk mustache with a paper napkin. “Start at the beginning, you mean.”

“Yeah. How did you happen to meet Amelia?”

He shrugged, nodded out toward the airfield, where a two-engine job was taxiing. “I been hangin’ around the airport since I was a kid.”

“That long?”

“Oh yeah, I can spend hours just watching the airplanes and ground crews, and there’s all sort of famous fliers around. I talked to Jimmy Doolittle and Howard Hughes and Bobbi Trout. Something interesting’s always goin’ on out here, parachute jumps, air races, powder puff derbies…that’s when I first met Amelia. But I didn’t really get to know her till fairly recent—when she was gettin’ ready for the world flight. The first time she tried it, I mean, early this year. It was almost like she went out of her way to pay attention to me and be friendly and all—since she’s a big-time celebrity, you might think I’m spreadin’ it on thick, but I’m not: she treated me like a little brother.”

Mantz chimed in, “Robert’s not exaggerating. Amelia took a liking to the lad.”

“Like, when she’d buy me a snail, she’d have it heated up for me…. Said it was better warm, and was she right! I just wasn’t used to the finer things of life.”

Mantz and I traded smiles again.

“She had such pretty hands,” the boy said, looking through me. “Dainty and delicate, though her fingers were awful long…. She’d sit and drink her cocoa….” He swallowed. I think he was holding back tears; I knew the feeling.

Then he went on: “You know, it’s four miles from my house, to here, and when she’d come along in that fancy Cord car of hers, she’d pick me up…. Sometimes her mother was with her, and she was a nice lady, too.”

“You want another glass of milk, Robert?” I asked.

“Sure!”

I called over to Mom behind the counter for one, and got fresh Cokes for Mantz and me, too.

“Mr. Mantz may not realize it,” Robert said, “but this airport was real different, once prep for the flight got started. No more races, no more air shows, everything kind of shut down except for preppin’ the world flight. And lots of strange people around.”

“Strange, how?”

He nibbled at his snail. “Men in suits. They looked like businessmen. And sometimes military people…. A General Westover came around, everybody seemed real impressed.”

They should. Westover was the head of the U.S. Army Air Forces.

The kid was saying, “Mr. Putnam would go in the office hangar and talk to them…usually without Amelia. It was almost like the hangar office was off limits to her, and I heard her complain about it, too—‘What is he doing? Who are these people? What are they talkin’ about?’”

I turned to Mantz. “You saw this kind of thing, too?”

Mantz nodded. “But I wasn’t involved on the Oakland end, much. Noonan and the new mechanic, Bo McKneely, were handling things.”

“The security guard at night,” Robert said, waving a fly off his snail, “he was a Navy reservist.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “Were you out here at night, much?”

“No, but my sister had a crush on that Navy guard and was always bothering me about talkin’ to him for her. He’d show up kind of late in the afternoon….”

“If security was tight, Robert, what were they doing letting you hang around?”

“On the first try, before she crashed her plane in Hawaii, things weren’t so tight. Reporters were takin’ pictures and doing stories about Amelia…. As for me, I’m kind of a mascot around here, I guess…as long as I don’t get in the way, mess with tools, or bother the mechanics or anything. Sometimes I run errands and help out a little. Like that time I helped you, Mr. Mantz, with that battery.”

“That’s right,” Mantz said, with a little smile. “You did help me haul that into the plane, didn’t you?”

“Big green heavy-duty Exide battery,” the kid said, nodding, “’bout three times the size of a car battery. That’s how she’s sendin’ her messages, I bet.”

Mantz said, “Out of fuel, she couldn’t be using the radio, otherwise; she’d need the right engine running to keep the plane’s batteries charged.”

“I got to watch the first takeoff from the hotel balcony,” Robert said, basking in the memory. “Amelia invited me—can you picture that? Me with her Hollywood friends with their fancy clothes and flashy jewelry! But you shoulda seen the dirty looks Mr. Putnam gave me. He woulda never put up with me bein’ around if Amelia hadn’t told him to…. Wasn’t any fanfare on the second takeoff.”

I sipped my Coke. “You and Mr. Putnam didn’t hit it off?”

Robert frowned, shook his head. “He’s a nasty person. Sometimes he had his son with him, called him ‘Junior’? He’s a nice kid, I don’t know, a year or two older than me. Not wild or anything…quiet.”

“Well behaved,” Mantz agreed.

“Well, I saw Mr. Putnam slap him, yell at him, really dress him down, for
nothin’
…. Once in the washroom over in the terminal building, Mr. Putnam hit him for ‘not washing up’ good enough.”

“You ever have a run-in with him?” I asked.

“Run-in! Run
down
is more like it!”

I waved a fly away from me. “What do you mean?”

“Well, this one day a man in an Army uniform…I don’t know what rank, but he sure wasn’t a private…came in the cafe here, while I was sitting at the counter with Amelia and Mr. Noonan. Havin’ snails and milk, like always. This Army man had a bunch of papers for them to sign, ‘releases,’ he called them, or ‘clearances’ or something, I don’t know…. Anyway, Mr. Noonan said maybe I better leave, and so I did, and when I came out, Mr. Putnam spotted me. He came over, shouting at me, ‘What did you see in there?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ And I started walking away, and he blocked me and started yelling! About how I’d seen and heard a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to, calling me a ‘punk,’ saying things like ‘Don’t you have a home?’ He told me to stay away and stop snooping around.”

I glanced at Mantz, who was frowning, then asked, “Did you say anything, Robert? Or just walk away?”

“Heck, no, I didn’t walk away! I yelled right back at him—said I had as much right as he did to come around the airport. He looked like he was gonna grab me…only I’m not small, like his son, and he musta thought better of it. But he started yelling again: ‘If I catch you around here again, you’ll disappear and no one will know where to find you!’ Then he kinda stormed off.”

Mantz was shaking his head in disgust.

I asked, “What did you do, Robert?”

“Started to walk home. I just thought he was a real nut, I was ticked off, and you know how it is when you’re mad, and the thoughts are sorta racing…I wasn’t gonna let him scare me away, there was no way I wasn’t comin’ around the airport anymore, it’s my home away from home. And while I was walkin’, it’s kind of a lonely stretch of road, and it was kinda late, hopin’ to hitch but figurin’ I was probably out of luck, I heard a car comin’ and thought, great! Finally a ride! Only it was this big black Hudson and Mr. Putnam was driving. He was looking at me all pop-eyed and crazy and you don’t have to believe me, but I swear he aimed that big car right at me and
gunned
it. I jumped out of the way, into the ditch—he was going so fast, driving so crazy, he sort of lost control and almost went in the ditch himself; he slammed on his brakes and started backing up, and turning around! If this other car hadn’t come along just then, and picked me up, I don’t know what woulda happened.”

“Maybe,” Mantz said softly, “it was an accident and he was backing up to come see if you were all right.”

“I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” Robert said. “I haven’t for a long time.”

“That’s a good policy,” I told the boy. “Did you tell the police? Or your parents, or anyone?”

He shook his head and his blond mop bobbed. “No. Mr. Putnam’s rich and famous. I’m just a poor kid. Who’re they gonna believe? But at least he left me alone after that. Of course, it was just a few days before the flight, the second flight. Did you know she took film along, a lot of film?”

“Really?” I asked, giving Mantz a sideways glance.

“Did you help with that, Mr. Mantz?” the boy asked. “I mean, everybody knows you’re famous for aerial photography.”

“No.”

Robert gestured out the window. “Well, I saw some Navy people deliver some big boxes to the hangar. A big white seal was on all the boxes—it said ‘Naval Air Photography, USN,’ or something close to that. Mr. Putnam had those Navy guys load ’em on the plane. I think they put ’em way in the back…. That’s what they made her do, isn’t it? Take pictures of islands she flew over. Islands that belong to the Japanese, right?”

Mantz and I exchanged startled looks.
How could this kid know that?

He was still talking, lost in memory: “She made me promise, you know. Before she left. She told me she was going on a very secret and dangerous mission and that if I heard anything had happened to her or Mr. Noonan, I was supposed to tell somebody…my mother…the police…or somebody…” He sighed. “Well I finally have.”

“It must feel good, Robert,” I said quietly, “to get this off your chest.”

He grinned, but it was a halfway, qualified grin. “It does, ’cause when I called the police, the man just laughed at me.”

“You called the police about what Amelia told you?”

His forehead tightened. “No…not exactly…it was about what I heard on the radio.”

“What do you mean, radio?”

“We have a Philco, it’s a super-heterodyne that gets short-wave transmissions. It’s a family hobby—my dad and brother and me. We put up a sixty-foot copper mesh antenna.”

I took a last swig of Coke and said, “You don’t have a phone in the house, and you have a short-wave radio with a sixty-foot antenna?”

“Oh, it gets more than short wave. We listen to Jack Armstrong, Tom Mix, and the Shadow, too!” He shrugged. “I’ve heard dozens of transmissions from Amelia, since she took off from Lae…”

I blinked, then looked over at Mantz who rolled his eyes, when Robert wasn’t looking.

The boy was saying, “I listen every night…. It’s summer, and my dad works nights, and Mom doesn’t care if I stay up; I mean, she knows how much trouble I have sleeping with my brother in the same bed, snoring. So, I’m just fooling around, twisting the dial, and I come onto this woman’s voice saying, ‘That was close! We just cleared the tail fifty feet!’ I couldn’t believe my ears! It was
Amelia’s
voice! On
my
radio! It didn’t take me long to figure out what I was hearing—I mean, reading about the flight in the paper every day, for a month! What I heard was Amelia on takeoff, when she was just leaving the airstrip.”

“Robert,” Mantz said, gently, “you know there have been some radio recreations, some dramatic—”

“Not happening at the exact same time as when she took off! I’m sorry, Mr. Mantz—I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just—I know what I heard.” His speech picked up speed, as if his conversation were lifting off a runway after a long taxi. “And then she was talking to a radioman back on Lae, named Balfour, saying Mr. Noonan had passed her a sealed envelope with a note about a change of flight plans. She seemed really peeved…. The radioman said he didn’t know about the change, that his orders were to give her weather reports. She said something about flying north to Truk Island.”

It was like listening to an idiot savant rattle off trigonometry equations. “You remember all this?”

He nodded, blond shock bouncing. “I wrote it down. I got my school notebook and I’ve been writing everything down.”

“There’s more?”

“Dozens of transmissions over the last few days!”

I sat forward, not really buying any of this, but impressed with his imagination. Mantz looked amused.

“She came on later, more relaxed, not so mad, even giggling a little, as she called out the names of islands she was flying over, trying to pronounce them—I heard her mention the tip of Rabaul, for instance. She lost contact with Lae about three hundred miles out, but I heard her say Noonan was getting good pictures of the Caroline Islands.”