“Take a look down by the rudder pedals,” Tisor was saying, gesturing to the ladder, which Mantz quickly scaled.
Mantz wasn’t up in the Vega cockpit long before his head popped out and his face was as white as powdered sugar, only his expression was anything but sweet.
“Who’s been around here?” he asked Tisor.
“Nobody,” Tisor said, shrugging. “I unlocked the place just a little before one... Tod and Jim were waiting outside when I got here.”
Mantz was clambering down the ladder. “Nobody’s been around the Vega?”
“Not that I saw. Boys?”
The other two mechanics shook their heads, no.
“Shit,” Mantz said.
Tisor asked, “What do you make of it, Paul?”
“Drop or two of acid, maybe.” He placed a hand on Tisor’s shoulder. “God bless you, Ernie, for catching it. Can you repair those cables?”
“That shouldn’t be any big problem.”
“Fine. Get that done, then go over every rivet and nut and bolt on this baby. I want this patient to get a complete stem-to-stern physical, boys — look down her throat, and up her ass, understood?”
The three mechanics nodded, and quickly got to work.
Mantz turned to walk back to his office and I fell in step with him. “What’s going on, Paul?”
“Here’s Amelia and G. P.,” Mantz said, nodding to where Amy and her husband had just entered at the front of the hangar. “I’ll fill everybody in at the same time.”
They were walking toward us, Amy smiling, sporty in a plaid shirt and chinos, Putnam wearing his perpetual frown and an impeccably tailored blue twill suit.
Soon we were all seated in Mantz’s office with Mantz standing behind his desk. “I’m going to recommend we postpone,” he said, leaning his hands on the maps and charts before him.
“Why in hell would we do that?” Putnam demanded, seated but almost climbing out of his chair.
Next to him, between us, was Amy, who said quietly, “What’s happened?”
Mantz grimaced. “Your rudder cables — somebody left you a present, angel... a few well-placed drops of acid. The wires are almost eaten through.”
“What in God’s name...?” Putnam exploded.
“Acid?” Amy asked, as if she wasn’t sure of the meaning of the word.
“Probably nitric or sulfuric,” Mantz said. “You’d have flown a while, maybe a few hours, then they’d have given way... snapped like twigs.”
“Sending my plane out of control,” Amy said, hollowly.
Putnam thrust an accusatory finger in my direction. “This is just the kind of sabotage you were hired to prevent!”
“I wasn’t hired to sleep overnight in Paul’s hangar,” I said. “There’s nighttime security here at the airport, right, Paul?”
It was a question I knew the answer to, that having been one of the first things I asked Mantz about.
“Certainly,” Mantz said, “a full detail of highly competent night watchmen... but of course the airport is open well into the wee hours... and if someone who had a key to my hangar...”
“Like your wife Myrtle,” I said.
“Yes!” Putnam yelled. “We all saw her yesterday, yelling and screaming, and out of control!”
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.”