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.
“Look,” Mantz said, having to work his voice up a little, “let’s just start with Howland Island.”
“What is Howland Island, anyway?” I asked. “I never heard of the damn place before this flight.”
“Nobody had, except some military types.”
“Military?”
From the field, Dizzy Dean could be heard yelling, “I quit!” to the umpire, and he trundled toward the dugout. An uproar from the stands soon built into a thunderous chant: “We want Dean…We want Dean…We want Dean…”
Mantz really had to work to be heard over that. “That’s the part of this thing that’s putting that nosedive feeling in the pit of my stomach. See, the original plan was to use Midway Island for refueling—that’s a Pan Am overnight stopover for Clipper passengers. They got a hotel there and even a golf course…”
“We want Dean…”
“Sounds ideal.”
“We want Dean…”
“Yeah, only there’s nowhere to land, no runway. Midway’s strictly a seaplane port, by way of a sheltered lagoon.”
“We want Dean…
“So why didn’t Amelia pick a seaplane for her flying laboratory, instead of the Electra?”
“We want Dean…”
“Actually, the Electra could’ve been fitted with pontoons…but those are expensive, many thousands of dollars.”
“We want Dean…”
Mantz continued with a nasty smile: “Now you know, Eleanor Roosevelt damn near has a crush on Amelia; and FDR feels about the same way. So Gippy had Amelia write the president for help and permission to refuel the Electra in-flight over Midway…which by the way I considered inadvisable unless it was completely unavoidable.”
Dizzy Dean, giving in to the crowd’s urging, strode from the dugout back onto the mound.
I had to wait for the applause to die down before I could say, “That sounds expensive, too.”
“Not if you can stick the government for it.
“And FDR okayed that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What does the government get out of it?”
Bartell singled to right; Whitehead scored, tying the game. The crowd roared in dismay.