Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (7 page)

“So that’s where it began, you and your love for little red airplanes.”

“Maybe. But then, too, I remember one air show particularly, on Christmas Day, must have been, oh…1920?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I wasn’t there.”

“I think it was 1920, in Long Beach. They had races, wing-walking, aerobatics. I was enthralled! Then, three days later, at Rogers Field, off Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles…only in those days, it was more like the suburbs of Los Angeles…anyway, I went up for a ride with Frank Hawks, who was nationally known for setting speed records…. He took me up two, three hundred feet over the Hollywood hills, and I was a goner. I
knew
I had to fly.”

“Love at first flight.”

She showed me the gap-toothed grin. “That’s about right. My goodness, Nathan…you mind if I call you ‘Nathan’? It’s so much more elegant than ‘Nate.’”

“I prefer to think of it as ‘suave,’ but sure. Nathan’s fine.”

She leaned forward, her hands gathered around the cup, cupping the cup, as if holding something precious; those blue-gray eyes were alive—it was like looking into a fire. “Nothing could’ve prepared me for the physical and emotional wallop of that flight. To me, it’s the perfect state, the ultimate happiness…. It combines the physical and the intellectual…. You soar above any earthly concerns, responsible to no one but yourself.”

“I feel the same way about draw poker.”

She laughed, once. “That’s what I like about you. You don’t take anything too seriously, yourself included…yet I feel, deep down, you’re a very serious person.”

“I am deep. So’s a drainage ditch.”

Now her expression was almost blank as she studied me. “Does it bother you?”

“What?”

“Seeing someone so…obsessive about something? So committed? Isn’t there something
you
love to do?”

I sipped the coffee, shrugged. “I like my work, for the most part.”

“But do you
love
it?”

“I love working for myself. Not answering to anybody but the bill collector.”

Amusement tickled her mouth. “Well, then…you fly solo, too, don’t you?”

“I guess so. And…”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She sat forward again, urgency in her voice. “Are you embarrassed? Were you going to share something with me? Hey, I’ve opened up to you, mister. And that’s not my style. Don’t clam up on me…Nathan.”

“Okay, Amy. I’ll level with you.”

“Amy?”

“Yeah. Amelia’s a goddamn maiden librarian. And ‘A. E.’ is a stock broker or maybe a lawyer. Amy’s a girl. A pretty girl.”

Her eyes and lips softened. “Amy…. Nobody’s ever called me that.”

“It’s all I’m ever going to call you, from here on out.”

“I guess nobody ever called me that because it’s my mother’s name…. But that’s okay. I like my mother, except for having to support her and the rest of my family.”

“One of the prices of fame.”

“You started to say…”

“Hmmm?”

“You were going to level with me.”

I sighed. “…Yeah, I guess there is something I love about my work. Back in Pa’s bookshop, I used to read Sherlock Holmes stories and dime novels, about Nick Carter the detective….”

“And that’s what you wanted to be. A detective.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s what you turned out to be, too.”

“Sort of. Mostly what I do isn’t like the stories. It’s routine work, sometimes boring, sometimes shoddy, sometimes shady. Security work. Retail credit checks….”

She nodded. “Divorce cases, I suppose.”

“Yeah. But now and then something comes along, and I get to be a real detective…”

Another gap-toothed grin. “Like the magazines:
Real Detective, True Detective
…”

“Right. I help somebody. I solve something. A puzzle. A riddle. A crime.”

She was nodding again, eyes narrowed. “And in those instances, you feel like a detective. And you love that.”

“I guess I do. But it’s like what you do, Amy—it’s dangerous work. Sometimes you soar, and sometimes you crash.”

“You’ve done both?”

“Yeah. But the problem with what I do, I’m only flying solo where the business end is concerned…I’m really messing in people’s lives. Sometimes I get hired by the wrong people. Sometimes people I like get hurt.”

“And when that happens, you don’t love what you do.”

“No.” I was staring into my coffee; my face stared back at me from the liquid blackness. “Last year a young woman…young woman died because of me. Because I made a mistake. Because I believed a man’s lies, a man who said he was her father but was really her husband. Because I wasn’t as smart or shrewd as I thought I was.”

Suddenly her hand was on mine. “Oh, dear…. You loved her, didn’t you?”

Why the hell had I opened that can of peas?

“We better get back on the road,” I said, drawing my hand away, slipping out of the booth, digging a nickel from my topcoat pocket and tossing the tip on the table-top. “We can blab just as easy in the car, you know.”

“All right. My turn to drive.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re the captain.”

She looped her arm in mine as we walked out. “You’re not such a bad co-pilot to have along for the ride, Nathan.”

We talked more that night, and many nights after that; we became friends and there were times, when I walked her to her hotel room, where I felt perhaps our friendship might be more, moments when I almost had the nerve to kiss her.

But, of course, that would have been wrong.

After all, I was working for her husband.

Despite a blunt nose and wooden construction, the Vega was twenty-seven feet of streamlined design; with its fresh red paint job, the monoplane looked as if it were fashioned of metal. Though Amy indicated she was something like the fifth owner of the single-engine aircraft, the Vega awaiting us on a runway of Lambert-St. Louis Municipal Airport might have been brand spanking new; even its propeller had been polished to a silverlike sheen.

This reflected work that G. P. had commissioned. In one of the hangars of the sweeping modern airport with its radio-controlled towers, the Lockheed craft had been reupholstered and repainted, and refitted with extra fuel tanks.

“I didn’t exactly lie to you,” she had said the night before as we paused at the door of her room in the Coronado Hotel in downtown St. Louis.

Looking attractive if every one of her thirty-seven years, she wore a pale blue crepe gown of her own design; she was obviously weary after another long day on the personal appearance trail, having just spoken in a hotel dining room for the Daughters of the American Revolution (introduced as “a ray of hope in these bleak times”), where the only males in the room were the waiters and me.

“Sure you lied to me,” I said, leaning a hand against the wall, pinning her there, her back to her doorway. “You said no flying.”

“No I didn’t.” Amusement tickled her full, sensuous mouth; she had her hands tucked behind her back. “I said we wouldn’t be traveling by train.”

I waggled a finger in her face. “You said we wouldn’t be flying from town to town on this little lecture tour.”

Her chin lifted and she aimed her cool gaze down at me. “And we didn’t. The lecture tour is over, and now we’re flying to California…. What did Slim do to you, up in the air, to spook you so?”

“He had the stick jimmied somehow so that his pal Breckinridge would lose control of the plane. And I just about lost control of my bodily functions.”

Her laugh was humorless and not unsympathetic. “My goodness but that Lindbergh has the sickest sense of humor I’ve ever met in a man…. I once saw him pour a pitcher of ice water down a child’s pajamas.”

She was right about Slim, but I sensed a resentment for, and even jealousy of, America’s most famous flier, from his nearest rival—who happened to be saddled with the Lady Lindy moniker.

“It’s early,” she said. I could tell by her eyes that she had another of the sinus headaches that plagued her. “Want to come in for a moment?”

“You need another neck rub?”

Half a smile settled in the corner of a cheek. “Am I that transparent?”

“Not to most people.”

She had a suite, with a sitting area—this was an extravagance G. P. put up with so that she could receive the press on her own terms. Soon I was sitting on the couch and she was sitting on the floor like an Indian, her back to me, tucked between my fanned-out legs as I massaged her neck. Room service was on its way with some cocoa for her and a bottle of Coke for me.

We were great pals now, Amy and me, having shared the special intimacy of late-night gabfests as we rolled over the roadways of America in the middle of the night and the wee hours of the predawn morning; that big lumbering Franklin became a confessional, as the blanket of stars in clear Midwestern skies lulled us both into sharing confidences.

I knew the bitterness she felt for her family—her mother and sister, who she had to support, her late father, who had boozed their family into periodic poverty. I knew she had still not overcome the guilt for her “manufactured fame,” since on her first and most famous flight, the Atlantic crossing on the
Friendship,
she had really just been a “sack of potatoes” passenger.

And she knew that my idealistic leftist father had killed himself in disappointment over his only son joining the corrupt Chicago police department; shot himself in the head with my gun, a gun I still carried with me, the closest thing to a conscience I had.

These were not things we shared with just anyone.

Even so, I was keeping two secrets from her. One, of course, was that her husband had hired me to spy on her, to see if she were a faithful wife. The other was that I could feel my friendship for her deepening into something else. Of course, if I did something about the latter, it might clear up the former.

“That’s so good…so good, Nate….”

I could feel her neck and shoulder muscles loosening. Then I began working my fingers into the tousled curls, digging at her scalp. Her moans of painful pleasure sounded almost orgasmic. Or maybe I just wanted them to.

“Why do you work so hard?” I asked, rubbing her scalp.

“For the money.”

“Your expensive obsession.”

“Yes, but also to buy books and clothes, and send my dear mother her monthly allowance to blow on my sister and her no-good husband. And I like to live comfortably…in a nice house with my bills paid and money in the bank.”

“You’re mostly living in hotels.”

“Oh yes…more of that…more of that….”

She had given herself completely over to my touch. I could smell her perfume—Evening in Paris—and her hair whispered the scent of all-American Breck. A raging hard-on was inches from the back of her head and she didn’t even know it. A thief with a pistol in his pocket had entered her shop and she didn’t even realize her valuables were at risk.

I said, “I always figured your husband was rich.”

“That’s what
I
thought…. But a lot of people aren’t as rich as they used to be.”

She meant the Crash.

“Anyway,” she continued, moving her head in a slow circle as I continued loosening up her muscles, “he still has access to money. He’s got the kind of tongue that attracts it.”

“Don’t you get tired of it?” I asked, referring to her grueling schedule, but she thought I meant something else.

“Of course I do,” she said. “Marriage doesn’t come naturally to me…but this is more a…business partnership. And I’m grateful for what G. P. has done for me…but, still…the endless schemes, his passion for celebrity, not to mention that ugly temper of his….”

“How ugly does it get?”

She peeked over her shoulder at me, for a moment, as I rubbed. “Does he get physical, do you mean? He knows I’d never put up with that. Ooooo, do that…do that…. A man raises his hand to me, he’s out of my life.”

“You sound like maybe you’ve had some experience in that department.”

“Not really…. Well, didn’t I tell you about my father and the bottle of whiskey?”

We had shared certain childhood secrets on our long rides through the Midwestern nights.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so….”

“He was supposed to not be drinking anymore…supposed to’ve taken ‘the cure.’ I guess I was seven or eight…yes, right there, right there, feel that knot there?…I was probably seven and he had to go on a trip all of a sudden. Sometimes he investigated accidents for the railroad and he’d have to drop everything and just go. So I decided to help him pack and I found a bottle of whiskey in his sock drawer. I was pouring it down the bathroom sink when he noticed me.”

“Oh, brother,” I said. I was working my thumbs at the muscles between her shoulder blades.

“He only struck me a few blows, before my mother intervened,” she said, “and spared me from a real beating…but I swore no man would ever hurt me again. Ouch!”

“Was that too hard?”

“Maybe a little. I think that’s enough, Nate.”

“I’m not tired. I can rub you some more.”

“No.” She wiggle-turned around and now was facing me, still seated Indian-style. She was working her head around on her neck again. “Do any more and it’ll just start to hurt….”

That was when I decided not to try to kiss her. And when my erection wilted.

Room service finally brought our cocoa and Coke, and she sat beside me, but not right beside me, and we talked for maybe another hour.

“I don’t know what I’d’ve done without you on this tour,” she said at one point, her cocoa down to the last sip or two. “It’s getting nasty out there.”

“Yeah, I thought maybe those D.A.R. dames were gonna start busting chairs over each other’s heads, for a while there.”

She laughed; it was almost a giggle. “No, ladies like tonight, that’s one thing, but these public appearances…the shoving, shouting…. I mean, my goodness, what kind of way is that to express admiration? They even cut pieces of fabric from the wings of your plane. Someday a souvenir hound will carry off a vital part and there’ll be a crash.”

“You think that’s what this is about?”

“What what’s about?”

We had spoken little about the threatening notes; I had moved from bodyguard to trusted confidant to friend, and it had just never come up, even if my erection had.

“Could one of your admirers be behind those sick notes?”

She made a goofy face and waved that off. “Why would an admirer threaten me?”

“To stand out from the anonymous crowd. To be special in your life.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me. Of course, then, neither does G. P.’s theory.”

“You mean, that it’s a rival aviatrix.”

She nodded. “I’m sure there’s jealousy, but my peers know I’ve been their champion, that nobody’s worked harder for the betterment of female pilots than Amelia Earhart.”

I was aware, from the question and answer portions of her lectures, that as a founding leader of the Ninety Nines she had worked to make that organization of women pilots a central information exchange on job opportunities.

But I also knew that efforts like that could be dismissed as self-aggrandizement and politics.

“People can be pretty damn petty,” I pointed out. “Besides, Amelia-Earhart-who’s-done-so-much-for-the-betterment-of-female-pilots, trust me…anybody who refers to herself in the third person has enemies.”

She pretended to be annoyed. “You think I’m self-important?”

“For a celebrity, not particularly.”

“Is that what I am? A celebrity?”

“It’s what puts the gas in your airplane, Amy.”

Now it was the next morning and the gas was in the plane. The tall, slender woman I’d lusted after the night before was standing next to me on the tarmac, near her ship, buckling a tan helmet under her chin, flashing me that gap-toothed grin she hid from photographers. The weariness was gone, her eyes a piercing blue-gray, her chin firm, and she made a striking Lindberghesque figure in her brown broadcloth chinos and boots befitting a farmer, and of course a properly wrinkled, oil-stained leather flying jacket with its collar winging up, zippered a casual two or three inches, blousing open to reveal a brown-and-tan plaid shirt with a brown bandanna knotted gaily about her graceful throat.

“So is the Vega a good plane?” I asked, working my voice up above the airfield noise. It was windy enough to make my suit and tie flap; my fedora was flattened to my skull with a hand trying to prevent the hat’s takeoff, and with my small suitcase in the other hand, I looked like a door-to-door salesman who wandered off his route.

“It’s fast,” she said.

“That wasn’t the question.”

“Well, the heat buildup in that cramped cockpit can get pretty disagreeable; that’s why I don’t need a flying suit.”

“The question was, is it a good plane?”

“Yes and no.”

“Tell me the ‘no’ part.”

“It can be a little tricky near the ground. That single-chassis construction, with the no-longer-on fuselage, won’t take any plane of the year awards.”

“Why’s that?”

“Folds up like an accordion in a crackup.”

“Jesus! What do you do about that?”

She shrugged. “Don’t crack up.”

And she climbed the small ladder leaning against the plane by the wing, opened the isinglass cockpit cover, and crawled in.

With that heartening observation to cheer me, I boarded through the cabin door toward the middle of the aircraft, crawling over massive fuel tanks to take the single remaining seat, where I buckled myself in. Glancing around at the boxlike tanks that provided less than reassuring company, it occurred to me I was seated in the middle of a flying bomb.

Though she was somewhat above me, I could still get a good view of Amy in the claustrophobic cockpit, her legs resting practically up under the engine mount. No wonder it got hot up there. She started the engine, and while it idled she watched the response of the panel of round dials, checking oil and fuel temperature and engine revolutions per minute.

Curling her long, feminine, artist’s fingers about the stick, she taxied down the runway, turning into the wind, holding the brakes steady and hard, yanking the stick all the way back into her midsection. Revving the motor, she reached up and turned a switch; the sound of the engine’s thrum shifted, and apparently this was what she wanted to hear, because her smile was reflected in the windshield.

With her left hand, she advanced the throttle, slowly, easily, and the churning of the propeller grew to a hard fast roar, as the Vega built speed, racing down the runway. She eased the throttle ahead, to its limit, keeping the stick forward, bringing up the tail; the plane seemed to want to get into the air but she wasn’t quite ready to let it.

Then she yanked back on the stick and the plane rumbled off the runway, riding the wind, climbing to ten thousand feet and lending me a fine view out my little window of the rolling countryside, shades of brown alternating with emerging green and occasional patches of snow, threaded by sun-glistening rivers and tributaries, interrupted by the occasional town of toy houses.

We didn’t talk much, not with her crammed into that cockpit and the Vega’s deafening prop and engine noise. She was allowing two days to make the nearly two-thousand-mile trek, and had assured me we’d land well before sundown, in Albuquerque.

The trip was mostly uneventful. I ate a box lunch and read the latest issue of
Ring
magazine and even dozed off, periodically, though late in the day, flying over New Mexico, I got jostled awake by bucking bronco turbulence.

I unbuckled and, moving with the grace of a drunk on an ice floe, made my way to the opening between cabin and cockpit and stuck my head up and in; even right next to her, I had to yell: “Anything I should know back here? Like where my parachute is?”