Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (16 page)

Then at 2:45
A.M
., the chief radioman—with two wire service reporters, eavesdropping at the off-limits radio room doorway—thought he recognized her voice; so did the reporters, and at 3:45 they heard her again, more clearly now, saying, “Earhart. Overcast. Will listen on 3105 kilocycles on hour and half-hour.” So at 4:00
A.M
., the radio operator called on 3105, asking, “What is your position? When do you expect to arrive Howland? Please acknowledge.”

But she didn’t, though at 4:53
A.M
., as the operator was issuing a weather update on 3105, Amy interrupted with a faint, muffled, garbled message, with only “partly cloudy” discernible amidst static.

Fifteen minutes before she was due at Howland, at 6:14
A.M
., Amy’s voice could be heard saying: “Want bearing on 3105 kilocycles on hour. Will whistle in microphone.” But her whistle got lost in the harmonic whines of Pacific radio reception at dawn, and the operator couldn’t get a fix on her.

At 7:42 Amy’s voice, stronger, said, “We must be on you but cannot see you…gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. Flying at altitude one thousand feet.” A minute later, interrupting
Itasca’s
frantic transmissions, Amy’s voice, louder yet, chimed: “Earhart calling
Itasca.
We are circling but cannot hear you….”

The radio operator on the
Itasca
sent messages by voice and key and listened on every frequency that Amy might use. Her final transmission, at 8:44, was shrill and frightened: “We are on the line of position 156-137. Will repeat message. We will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. Listening on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.”

With no frame of reference, her “position 156-137” and “running north and south” were meaningless. Until 10:00
A.M
., the radio operator continued trying to make contact.

At 10:15
A.M
., the commander of the
Itasca
ordered full steam, beginning a desperate search at sea, soon to be joined by the minesweeper
Swan,
the battleship
Colorado,
the aircraft carrier
Lexington,
and four destroyers in a sweeping mass rescue effort the likes of which had never before been expended on a single missing aircraft.

Amelia Earhart was back in the headlines.

I was drawn into the matter of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance well before she got around to disappearing.

Midafternoon on Friday, May 21, in my office, in my swivel chair with my back to the uninspiring view of the El and Van Buren Street, a warm, barely discernible breeze drifting in the open window, I sat hunkered with a fountain pen over a stack of retail credit check reports, when the phone rang.

“A-1,” I said, over the street noise.

“Nate Heller? Paul Mantz.”

Even in those four words, I could tell he was worked up in some sort of lather; and since our only common ground was Amy, that got my attention. I shut the window to hear better, though the connection was remarkably good for long distance.

“Well hello, Paul…is everything all right with our girl’s round-the-world venture?”

“No,” he said flatly. “It’s gone seriously to shit. She’s taken off.”

I sat forward. “Isn’t that what pilots do?”

Bitterness edged his voice: “She took off on ‘shakedown flight’ of the Electra, she told reporters, but really she’s headed to Miami. She’s on her way.”

“Where are you, Burbank?”

An El train was rumbling by and I had to work my voice up.

“No, no, I’m in your back yard…St. Louis. Down here with Tex Rankin, we got an air meet at Lambert Field. Flyin’ competition aerobatics.”

“I thought you were working full-time as Amelia’s technical advisor.”

“So did I. February, I put all my motion picture flying on hold to give myself over to this cockeyed world flight. But when this air meet came up, Amelia and Gippy encouraged me to take a little time off and go.”

“Are you saying they double-crossed you? She sneaked off on her big flight while her top advisor was out of town? Why the hell would she do that?”

“I think it’s Putnam’s doing. Listen…this thing stinks to high heaven. We got to talk.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“…You want a job?”

“Usually. What do you have in mind?”

“You free this weekend?”

“I’m never free…it’s going to cost you twenty-five bucks a day.” Since G. P. and Amy were paying Mantz $100 a day, I figured he could afford it. Besides, I’d have to cancel my date Saturday night with Fritzie Bey after her last show at the Koo Koo Club.

“I’ll pay you for two days,” he said, “whether you take the job or not. I’m flyin’ the air meet all day tomorrow, but nothin’ on Sunday, and we’re not headin’ home till Monday.”

“You want to come to me, or should I come to you?”

“You come to me…. We can meet at Sportsman’s Park, Sunday afternoon—playin’ craps the other night, I won a pair of box seats for the Cardinals and Giants, should be a hell of a game. Dean and Hubbell on the mound.”

That might be worth the trip alone. Baseball wasn’t my first love—boxing was my sport, growing up on the West Side with Barney Ross like I did—but, after all, Dizzy Dean and Carl Hubbell were to the diamond what Joe Louis and Max Schmeling were to the ring.

“You take the train down here tomorrow,” Mantz continued, “and I’ll reimburse you. I’ll have ya booked into the Coronado Hotel.”

That was where Amy and I had stayed on the lecture tour; where I gave her that first neck rub….

“Is that where you’re staying?” I asked him.

“No! I’m at a motel out by the airport. I don’t want us to hook up till the game.”

“Why the cloak-and-dagger routine, Paul?”

“It’s just better that way. Safer.”

“Safer?”

“I’ll leave your ticket for the game at the Coronado front desk. You in?”

“I’m in,” I said, not knowing why, unless it was my love for Amy, or maybe my love for $25 a day with a Cards-Giants game tossed in.

Sunday afternoon in St. Louis, baseball fanatics from all over the Mississippi Valley squeezed into Sportsman’s Park, nearly thirty thousand of them bulging the stands. Many of them had driven all night to see Dizzy Dean try to stop master of the screwball “King” Carl Hubbell’s winning streak, which stood at twenty-one straight; here sat an Arkansas mule trader, there an Oklahoma dry goods salesman next to a WPA foreman from Tennessee, sitting in front of a country farm agent from Kansas, men in straw hats drinking beer, women in their Sunday best fanning themselves with programs, as the annual heat wave was getting a nice early start. Despite the heat, and the anticipation, the crowd wasn’t surly, laughing and applauding the pregame horse and bicycle exhibition and a drum and bugle corps show. The sky was blue, the clouds white and fleecy, and there was just enough of a breeze to flutter the flag above the billboard ads of the outfield fences.

Perched in a box seat along the first base line, I sported a straw fedora, light blue shantung sportshirt and white duck slacks, doing my best not to get mustard from my hot dog on the latter. No sign of Mantz; even with the game delayed half an hour to jam in all these fans, Amelia Earhart’s technical advisor did not get the pleasure of seeing the boyishly handsome, Li’l Abner-like Dizzy Dean stride cockily to the mound, flashing his big innocent smile to the bleachers, a faded tattered sweatshirt under the blouse of his red-trimmed white uniform.

His first pitch was a fastball that sent the Giants’ lead-off batter, Dick Bartell, to the ground. The crowd ate that up, and the umpire did not complain, and for the rest of the inning Dean, master of the beanball, behaved himself. In the second inning, with Hubbell on the mound, Joe Medwick had just knocked a high curveball into the left field bleachers for a 1-0 lead for the Cards. I was on my feet with the rest of the crowd, cheering (a somewhat different response from yours truly than if the Cards had knocked a Cubs ball into the Wrigley Field stands) when I realized Mantz was standing beside me.

We shook hands and, with the rest of the crowd, sat down. As usual, he had a dapper look, a light yellow shirt with its sleeves rolled up and collar open and crisply pleated doeskin slacks. But his usual cocky expression was absent, the somewhat pointed features of his face set in a pale blank mask, his mouth a straight line under the straight line of his pencil mustache.

With no greeting, no preamble of any sort, he started in: “I just got hold of that bastard Gippy, in New Orleans.”

“What’s he doing in New Orleans?”

We kept our voices down and only occasionally were shushed by those who were there to see the game.

“That’s where he and his wife spent the night,” Mantz said with a humorless smirk. “Today she’s off to Miami and from there…”

“Sky’s the limit,” I said. “So—did G. P. have an explanation for the sneak departure?”

On the mound the tattered sleeve of the right arm of Dean’s sweatshirt hung to his thumb, and when he whipped his arm forward to release the ball, the loose cloth snapped in the wind like a cat o’ nine tails.

“None,” Mantz said. “He just claimed it was Amelia’s decision and let it go at that. Jesus, Heller, the repaired Electra was only delivered just last Thursday.”

“The day before she took off?”

“Yes! Just three days ago! Hell…. She’d had no flying time in it whatsoever. And she knew damn well I was leaving—and after she and I talked about how we’d spend a week, at least, in preflight preparations, and test flights!”

“What was left to do?”

His eyes saucered. “What the hell wasn’t? I needed to check her fuel consumption levels—I worked out a table of throttle settings I needed to go over with her—and I had a list of optimum power settings for each leg. Shit, now she’s flying by sheer guesswork!”

Dean was loping down off the mound with a cocky, tobacco-chewing grin; another perfect inning.

“She has radio equipment, doesn’t she?”

Mantz lifted his eyes to the heavens. “I didn’t get a chance to check
that
out, either, and give her proper instruction. Hell, man, we never covered actual operation of the radio gear—you know, little things like taking a bearing with a direction finder, or how about just contacting a damn radio station?”

“Well, you must have showed her the ropes on the radio gear before the first attempt,” I said.

“No,” he admitted with a shrug. “Remember, she had a co-pilot, Manning, along that time, and he knew his stuff, where the radio was concerned.

Left-hander Hubbell had just struck out Pepper Martin, to the displeasure of the crowd.

“Are you saying she went off completely unprepared?”

He shook his head, no. “When we flew that first Oakland to Honolulu leg, before the Luke Field crackup, she showed real improvement. Held to her magnetic compass headings within a reasonable leeway, wandering only a degree or two off course, then doubled her error in the other direction, getting back on track.”

The crowd was cheering Cards second baseman Hughie Cruz; the Mississippi boy approached the plate with a mouthful of pebbles plucked from the infield, a trademark, and he was rolling them around in his mouth now, looking for a fastball. King Carl Hubbell threw him a screwball instead.

“…and she did do her homework,” Mantz was saying. “But that wasn’t flying. Like going over info on airport facilities, weather conditions, custom problems. And poring over detailed charts that Clarence Williams prepared…”

Like the ones Amy ignored on her Mexico flight.

“Surely she did
some
flying,” I said.

“Not near enough—she was hardly around. That goddamn Gippy had her tied up with advertising commitments, radio shows, public appearances…. You know what she spent most of her time doin’? Writing the first four or five chapters of the goddamn book her husband’s going to publish, when she gets home!
If
she gets home….”

“It’s that serious?”

Cruz popped out, and the crowd howled in disappointment.

Mantz touched my arm and drew my eyes from the field to his. “You want to know how serious it is? I don’t think that bastard
wants
her to make it back.”

I frowned in disbelief. “What? Aw, Mantz, that’s just loony…”

He blinked and looked away. “Or at least, I don’t think he cares.”

“Mantz, find a mechanic—you got a screw loose. Amelia’s his meal ticket, for Christ’s sake.”

I bought a beer off a vendor; Mantz declined.

“Heller, everybody on the inside knows this is Amelia’s last flight—and that she plans to divorce the son of a bitch. I’ve heard them argue! It’s an open secret she’s been having an affair with somebody for the last year or two….”

Now I blinked and looked away, feeling like Hubbell had hurled one of his screwballs at me.

Mantz was saying, “I think it’s probably Gene Vidal, the Bureau of Air Commerce guy? But
whoever
it is, Putnam knows she’s got somebody else, and he’s pissed.”

I shook my head. “G. P. doesn’t want her dead. She’s worth too much alive.”

He got his face right in mine, eyes dark and burning; he smelled like Old Spice. “Maybe he figures, if she pulls it off, fine—I mean, he’s got the five-hundred-dollar-a-crack lecture tours lined up, right?”

So her fee was going to double, out on the circuit, after the round-the-world trip. Not bad.

“But if she dies trying,” Mantz continued, “then he’s got a
martyr
to market…imagine what autographed first-day covers’d be worth if the
late
Amelia Earhart had signed ’em. What kind of sales he could rack up with the posthumous book? Movie rights? Hell, man, it’s endless—plus, he doesn’t have to suffer the embarrassment of being dumped by the celebrity wife he invented.”

Dean, back on the mound, had just struck out Joe Moore on a high fastball. No beanballs all afternoon, so far anyway, not counting the close call of the first pitch of the day; Dean was slipping.

“Even if that’s true,” I said quietly, trying for a reasonable tone, “what the hell can we do about it? This flight’s more important to Amelia than her husband—she knows what’s riding on it.”

Mantz’s sneer spelled out his contempt. “Let me tell you about Gippy Putnam—I say to him, we got to paint the Electra’s rudder, stabilizer, and wing borders a nice bright red or orange, to make it easier to locate the bird if it goes down. He refuses. He says it’s gotta be Purdue’s colors—old gold and black!”

I shrugged, sipped the beer. “He’s always cut corners for the sake of promotion.”

Mantz’s brow furrowed. “She almost died on the Atlantic crossing, did you know that, Heller? It’s not just an exciting goddamn story for her to tell at those lectures—it happened, and it almost killed her. Storms, and mechanical malfunctions, engine on fire, wings icing up, plane damn near spinning into the ocean.”

“I know,” I sighed, hating the truth of what he was saying, “I know.”

“If
your
wife narrowly escaped with her life like that, how anxious would you be to send her back up in the sky, on a flight ten times more dangerous? And yet Gippy’s pushed her into this suicide run…”

Lefty O’Doul swung at another Dean high fastball and struck out.

“You were part of it, Paul,” I said softly, no accusation in my voice.

But his face clenched in pain, anyway. “You think I don’t know that? Listen, I love that girl…”

“I thought you had a new fiancée.”

Myrtle Mantz had won her divorce decree last July, after plenty of embarrassment for Paul and Amy in the papers. Paul Mantz had steadfastly maintained, however, that theirs was strictly an employer/employee relationship.

“I love her like a sister,” he said irritably. “Why do you think this is eatin’ me up like a goddamn ulcer? I’m tellin’ ya, Gippy sold her out.”

I frowned at him. “How? Who to?”

“I don’t know exactly. That’s what I want to hire you to find out.”

“I don’t follow this. At all.”

The Giants were at bat. Burgess Whitehead had singled, Hubbell had sacrificed him to second, with Dick Bartell up. Dean half-turned to second, then with no stop in his fluid motion, pitched one at the plate, which Bartell reflexively swung at, popping out to left field. But the umpire called it a balk, and Dizzy Dean threw his cap in the air and charged toward the umpire to talk it over. The crowd went crazy with rage and glee.