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.
Reprehensible son of a bitch that I was.
8
Press coverage was minimal when Amelia Earhart (and an all-male crew) lifted off in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E from the Oakland Airport on St. Patrick’s Day, 1937, on what was, technically at least, the first leg of her round-the-world flight. Heavy rains had caused numerous postponements, and many reporters—who, frankly, were probably a little bored with Amelia Earhart by now, anyway, finding her a relic of a quaint, earlier era of pioneering aviation—had bailed out. But one memorable photo—which appeared all over the country, including Chicago—caught the Electra, shortly after takeoff, poised above the almost-finished Golden Gate Bridge.