Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (6 page)

The Hudson rep was a little guy with George Raft’s hair, Clark Gable’s mustache and Stan Laurel’s face. “What do you suggest, Mr. Heller?”

Arms were flailing, hands pawing the air, like the crowd was drowning in its own tidal wave of bad breath and body odor.

“Where are the keys to that buggy?” I yelled, nodding to the Hudson.

He blinked. “Under the floor mat—why?”

A housewife who only slightly outweighed me was climbing on me like she wanted to procreate. I put my hand in her face, like Jimmy Cagney feeding Mae Clarke a grapefruit, and shoved her back. Then I straight-armed a ten-year-old kid and took Amelia by the arm, yanked open the driver’s-side door and said, “Get in.”

She gave me only a moment’s look, to determine whether or not I was crazy, saw that I was, and got in; so did I. She crawled over into the rider’s seat and we both rolled up the windows and locked ourselves in. I reached down and fumbled around under the mat and finally found the car keys. Wild eyes and yellow teeth and waving arms were the view out the windshield.

I started the engine but nobody seemed to notice; the hubbub out there was a dimwitted din a mere Hudson motor couldn’t hope to be heard over. Then I leaned into the Hudson’s horn and it bleated like a cow a tree fell on, and they heard that. In fact, it scared the hell right out of them, and gave them notice to get their asses out of my way.

Putting the Hudson in gear, I guided that streamlined baby right down the center aisle, through the convention hall, startled, pissed-off auto show attendees getting out of my way, bowling pins avoiding an oncoming ball. For people at an auto show, it was like they’d never seen a moving car before; hell, I was only doing five or ten miles an hour.

When I neared the exits—a row of doors clearly designed for people, not Hudsons—I braked, put the car in park, gave her a glance that told her what to do, and we hopped out on our respective sides, leaving the motor running, and she came around the front of the Hudson and took my hand.

A couple of uniformed cops near the exits were viewing this escapade with wide eyes and open mouths; one of the cops yelled, “Say! You can’t do that!”

We were halfway out the door, still hand in hand, when I nodded toward my partner and said, “But this is Amelia Earhart,” and the cop was thinking about that when we were gone, scampering like a couple of kids out the Convention Hall’s high arched entrance where we grabbed the first of a row of waiting cabs.

In the backseat of the cab, she threw back her headful of tousled curls and laughed and laughed. I wasn’t laughing, but I was smiling to where my cheeks might burst, and my heart was hammering. The excitement was like a drug rushing through my veins.

“Oh my goodness!” Tears of delight rolled down her apple cheeks. “You’re amazing, Nate! Simply amazing!”

“I just drove a damn car from one end of a convention hall to the other, is all,” I said. “It’s not like I flew across an ocean or anything.”

“What wonderful fun. You do have a reckless streak, don’t you?”

“I’ve been accused of that.”

And that night—though she’d just endured fourteen hours of public scrutiny and abuse—we set out in the Franklin for the next stop on our itinerary, Fort Wayne. Not that she didn’t show some of the wear and tear of the long day; she looked frail, wan, the lovely blue-gray eyes surrounded by not so lovely puffiness. For a change, she allowed me—in fact, implored me—to do the driving. She curled up in her seat, like a cat, in a blouse and chino slacks, the curve of her back to me as she slept, and her rather nice backside….

“Those threatening notes are quite real,” Putnam had told me, back in the Palmer House dining room. “The bodyguard aspect of your job is every bit the way I explained it to you.”

“Then what’s the idea of asking me,” I said, “do I want to know the ‘real’ reason I was hired?”

He drew on the Havana cigar, leaning back in his chair, a man of means, about to discuss his prized possession. “My wife’s an attractive woman, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say, but now that you mention it, sure. She’s a peach. You’re a lucky guy.”

“Perhaps.” He sat forward now and those unblinking eyes revealed something new, something besides self-absorption and mild lunacy: sorrow. “I believe my wife is having an affair.”

This was not the first time I had heard a male client say this of his spouse; normally, it was news about as shocking as the sun coming up. But this I hadn’t seen coming. Perhaps it was in part the setting, the fancy dining room with its background sound of a string quartet and the clink of fine china and occasional clunk of silverware and polite conversation with laughter mingled in. The waiter was delivering our drinks and I grabbed and sipped my rum and Coke, rolling the liquid around in my mouth as I rolled Putnam’s words around in my brain.

Quietly, I spelled it out: “You mean, this is a divorce job? You want me to get the goods on your wife, so you can sue for divorce?”

Savoring a sip of his Manhattan, he shook his head, no. “Nate, I’m hoping that if I can confront my wife with proof of her…indiscretions…she will abandon this…this fling…and return to my arms.”

Those arms were folded, right now, and he seemed about as loving—and concerned—as a broker discussing stock options; still, the sadness in the glazed eyes behind the scholarly round-rimmed glasses could not be denied.

“How sure are you that she’s dallying?” I asked.

“Fairly sure. Quite sure.”

“Which is it? There’s a big difference between fairly and quite.”

“His name is Paul Mantz.” He took another sip of his Manhattan; in fact, he took two sips. “He’s a pilot, a stunt pilot in the movies. Cocky little pipsqueak, six years younger than A. E. Fast-talking, glib son of a bitch, full of himself.”

That latter could have been a description of Putnam.

“I brought him into the fold myself,” Putnam said, a twitch of disgust flicking in one corner of his mouth. “Met him when I was publicist on the picture
Wings,
where he put together a small team of pilots to stage the dogfights. I thought he’d be the ideal man to help A. E. prepare for the Honolulu-Oakland flight.”

“Why a stunt pilot for that job?”

Putnam shrugged. “To give the devil his due, Mantz is more than just a stunt pilot. He’s an engineer, set his own share of speed records, he’s president of the Motion Picture Pilots Association. Successful businessman, too, with a charter service, maybe you heard of it—the Honeymoon Express?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“It’s for Hollywood bigwigs and stars. You know—quickie Reno weddings and divorces. Las Vegas, too. Or just for celebrities to take weekend getaways, in Arizona and so on. After all, somebody in Hollywood is always fucking somebody else’s wife.”

I was swirling my drink in its glass, studying the dark liquid, as if looking for moral guidance; perhaps not the best place to look for it. “I don’t know about this, Mr. Putnam.”

“It’s ‘G. P.,’ and what the hell is there to feel uncomfortable about? You do divorce work, don’t you?”

“All the time…. But this is kind of a shady business, leading your wife to believe I’ve been hired for one thing, getting me into her confidence, when actually I’m working against her.”

He gestured with an open hand, reasonably. “As I said, the threatening notes are very real. She may well be in danger from a deranged fan or some jealous competitor…most of these women fliers are dykes, you know, and are by nature frustrated.”

“You’re asking a lot for twenty-five bucks a day. This sounds like two jobs to me.”

Amusement turned his thin lips into a curve. “Is that what it takes to salve your conscience, Nate? Well, fine. We’ll make it twenty-five dollars a day for bodyguard duties, and another twenty-five dollars a day for…these other…investigative services.
Fifty
a day…”

He reached into his inside tuxedo jacket pocket and withdrew a checkbook.

“…and we’ll make that retainer not five hundred dollars, but one thousand dollars. Plus reasonable expenses, of course….”

And he uncapped a fountain pen and wrote my name and that very attractive amount on the check; it was upside-down from where I sat, but I could read it. Glistening there—my name attached to a thousand bucks. It was like an actor seeing his name in lights.

So I took the job. I didn’t like myself for doing it, but I did like the thousand bucks. The thousand bucks was swell.

And now I was at the wheel of Putnam’s wife’s Franklin, and she was snoozing next to me, curled up cutely, and for the first time, in any major way at least, I felt bad, even guilty. We’d had a nice moment together, this evening, she and I. She was warming to me. And I was a heel.

But a well-paid heel.

She woke up around 2:00
A.M
., and announced she needed a rest stop. I pulled the big bus of a Franklin in at the Junction Diner at Angola, on U.S. 27, just a few miles over the state line into Indiana. While the outside of the little boxcar all-nighter had that sleek modern look—a stainless steel bullet edged with blue porcelain enamel in the neon glow of its sign—the interior was dominated by the warmth of oak and gumwood woodwork. A truck driver sat at a counter stool having pie and coffee, but the place was pretty dead, just a blowsy blonde waitress and the occasional glimpse of the bleary-eyed, blue-bearded short-order cook at the window of his hole of a kitchen. We ordered at the counter and carried our hot chocolate (hers) and black coffee (mine) to our cozy booth.

“You saved my tail today,” she said, dipping a spoon into the whipped cream atop her cocoa.

“I figure it was worth saving,” I said. That was about as flirty as I’d got with her.

She gave me half a smile as she nibbled whipped cream off her spoon; no makeup, hair even more a tangle than usual, face puffy from sleep and still cute as a paper doll. “I admire that kind of courage,” she said.

“Is that what it is?”

She was stirring the hot chocolate, now. “Call it guts, then…. I’m sorry if I’ve been a little, I don’t know…hard to get to know.”

The coffee was bitter. “Don’t be silly.”

“I learned a long time ago, not to confide in just anybody.”

“I like to think I’m not just anybody.” I saluted her with the coffee cup. “There are times I fancy myself somebody.”

She laughed. “Don’t be so anxious to be somebody. Look how much fun
I
have.”

“Like almost getting crushed to grape jelly in that crowd? You got a point. Since we’re talkin’ like a couple of humans, you mind if I ask you something just a touch on the personal side?”

“I think that would be all right,” she said, not quite sure.

“Where the hell
were
you brought up? Seems like every state in the union claims you as theirs.”

She chuckled and blew on her hot chocolate; steam shimmered off it. “That’s ’cause I was raised in just about every state in the union…. Well, not really. Just Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa…”

“Minnesota?”

“Minnesota, too. Not Michigan, that I can remember. My father moved us around a lot. He was an attorney working for the railroad. Rock Island Line.”

“Ah.”

“Actually, he had a lot of jobs. He drank.” She sipped her chocolate. “My mother is a fairly cultivated lady, from a well-to-do background, and it was hard on her, when her attorney husband turned out to be a…”

She didn’t say it, but the word hung in the air:
Drunk.

All she did say was: “Kind of strange for us kids, too.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Just my sister Muriel and me. We would stay with my grandparents, my mother’s parents, part of the year, growing up. They were well off and I think it’s rather hard on kids, seeing how the other half lives, then going back to the other side of the tracks.”

I nodded. “I know what you mean. My uncle was wealthy, my pop was a diehard union man. An old Wobbly.”

“Ha! Old boyfriend of mine took me to a Wobbly meeting once.”

“It can be a good place to pick up girls.”

“Ah, well, Sam already had a girl, didn’t he? Though not for long. Your father wasn’t much for capitalism, huh?”

I sipped my coffee. “That’s the funny thing. He was a moderately successful small businessman. He ran a radical bookshop for years, in Douglas Park.”

“Douglas Park,” she said, nodding. “I know where that is.”

I grinned at her. “You really did live in Chicago, then?”

“For about a year, when I was seventeen. We had a furnished apartment near the University of Chicago. I did a miserable stint at Hyde Park High. Hated the teachers there like poison and I think the other girls thought I was a weird duck.”

“Were you?”

“Of course! In the yearbook they called me ‘the girl in brown who walks alone.’”

“And why did they do that?”

“I guess because I wore brown a lot and—”

“Walked alone. I get it.” I walked alone over to the counter with my coffee cup and got a refill; Amelia seemed to be doing fine with her hot chocolate.

Sitting back across from her, I asked, “Why flying? If you weren’t a rich kid, how did you manage that, anyway? It’s not a very proletariat pastime.”

She pretended to be impressed by the big word, saying, “Your father really was a Marxist, wasn’t he?…Jiminy crickets, I don’t know, I get asked that all the time, but never know what to say. How did I do it? Scrimped and saved and worked weekends at airfields, any job they’d give me. Why did I do it? I always did love air shows…. Probably got the bug in Toronto.”

“Toronto? Don’t tell me you’re Canada’s native daughter, too?”

“Not really. Muriel was going to college there, and I’d lost interest in my own schooling, so when I went up to visit her, and saw all the wounded soldiers—this was, you know, during the war—I had an impulse to try to help. I took a job as a nurse’s aide at a military hospital.”

“That sounds like a lot of laughs.”

Her eyes widened. “It was an education. I only lasted a few months. Those poor men, with their poison gas burns, shrapnel, TB…. I made a lot of friends among the patients, many of them British and French pilots. One afternoon, a captain in the Royal Flying Corps invited Muriel and me to an airfield and he did stunts in his little red airplane.” She drew in a breath and her eyes were lifted, as she remembered. “That plane said something to me when it swished by.”