“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.”