I had braved two sips of the Zombie when Tisor wandered in, glancing around the otherwise still-empty Black Hole of Calcutta.
Forehead tight with worry and flecked with sweat, he wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and chinos; in this context, he looked like a jungle trader who left his pith helmet and hunter’s jacket at the door. He pulled out the wicker chair across from me and sat.
“Riskin’ a Zombie, huh?” he asked, apparently recognizing the tall slender glass.
“You’ll notice I’m not chugging it down.”
“There’s a house limit on two of those babies.”
“This seems like kind of an unlikely hangout for mechanics, Ernie. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
“It’s not a hangout, but sometimes for special events, goin’-away parties, celebrations. Best Chink food around.”
I was sorry to hear that; the ersatz Cantonese chow here had nothing on the Won Kow in Chinatown back home, but maybe Ernie and his airfield pals hadn’t made it to the local Chinatown. The waitress wandered over and Ernie ordered a beer and a plate of egg rolls to nibble on.
“That’s what Jimmy ordered,” he said, “a Zombie. The night of his goin’-away party, night he spilled the beans.”
“Jimmy who? What beans?”
He sighed, shook his head. “Maybe I better get a beer or two down me, first.”
I reached out and clutched his forearm. “Let’s get a head start, Ernie. Who’s Jimmy?”
“Jimmy. Jim Manhof.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. “Skinny kid, mechanic, he was around when you was out here, last year. I don’t know whether you met him, exactly.”
I let go of his arm, leaned back. “I remember. You got a new man in his slot, I notice.”
“Yeah. Pete. Good boy, Pete. Jimmy, uh... his work started slippin’, and Mantz got on his ass and Jimmy finally quit. Last I heard, he had a job in Fresno, at Chandler Municipal.”
“Good for Jimmy. What about the beans Jimmy spilled?”
He swallowed. Shook his head. “I never told Paul about this. I don’t know why I’m tellin’ you...”
“I won’t tell Paul. Think of me as your priest.”
“I ain’t Catholic.”
“Neither am I, Ernie. Spill.”
The beer arrived. The waitress smiled at me; she was very pretty but her crooked teeth would keep her out of the movies. To let you know the state of my mood, I didn’t even ask for her phone number.
He gulped down half the beer, wiped the foam off his lip with a sleeve and said, “It was Jimmy put the acid on those rudder cables.”
“No kidding?”
“He told me about halfway through the second Zombie.”
“Nobody else heard him own up to that?”
“No. Tod was asleep, head on his arms like a kid snoozin’ at his school desk; he’d already finished his second Zombie.”
“Did Jimmy say why he put acid on Amelia’s rudder cables?”
“Somebody hired him to... but it wasn’t supposed to be sabotage, exactly...”
“What the hell was it, then?”
“It was meant to be found, and repaired, before the plane took off. The guy that hired Jimmy said it was just a sort of... prank.”
“A real knee-slapper.”
“And of course, we did find it... Jimmy himself pointed it out to me. So, in a way... no harm was done. In a way.”
“Yeah. What’s the harm in sending a pilot off on a dangerous transcontinental flight, knowing her plane’s been sabotaged? Hoping all the damage got noticed by her trusty mechanics?”
He was shaking his head. “I know. It’s real, real shitty. But that’s not even the shittiest part. The shittiest part is who hired Jimmy.”
“Her husband, you mean. G. P.”
His eyes popped. “How the hell did you—”
“I told you — I’m a detective.”
I filled Ernie in on G. P.’s motive, the phony threatening notes that the rudder cable sabotage was meant to validate.
“He’s such a raging asshole,” Tisor said, shaking his head some more. “Lord knows what he’s got her into now.” And he ran a hand over his face and up into his salt-and-pepper hair. “Aw... Christ. Such a sweet kid. What’s that bastard done to her...”
A parrot squawked in the courtyard.
“What do you mean, Ernie? What is it you’ve seen?”
He was holding his face in his hand and peering through the web of his fingers. “This is so goddamn dangerous... We could both get our asses in one hell of a sling. What are you trying to prove, Heller?”
“You tell me,” I said. It was an honest answer.
He stared at the flame in the coconut, as if its flickering held meaning. “This has to be some kind of... military business. The government’s been on this thing like a heat rash since the first day. I mean, why else would everybody on Uncle Sam’s payroll be so eager to please?”
“For example.”
He was looking at me now, not the flame. “Before the first attempt, we did a lot of our prep over at March Army Air Base — near Riverside?”
“Military installations aren’t usually available for the activities of private citizens, are they?”
“Hell no! That’s strictly off limits! Yet, here we got the run of the place, with their mechanics pitchin’ in with us, and, get this: armed military police outside the building.”
“That’s one way to keep the press out.”
“But when we were at Oakland, we used the Naval Reserve Hangar, and got the same kind of help, and security. Don’t you find that, I don’t know... unusual? Kinda out of the ordinary, the Army and Navy throwin’ in together like that?”
It was very odd. The Army and the Navy were separate entities, divided by rivalry, each with their own turf, their own hierarchies, their own agendas. What would it take to bring them together on one project?
The answer came to me at once, and made the skin on the back of my neck crawl — or was that merely a reaction to my latest sip of Zombie?
“Their Commander-in-Chief could elicit their support and cooperation,” I said.
He swallowed thickly. “You mean, the President.”
“I mean, the husband of Amelia Earhart’s pal Eleanor.”
“We shouldn’t even be talking about this.”
The waitress brought Tisor his egg rolls and a second beer.
“Ernie,” I said, “G. P. Putnam put his wife’s fame — and her life — on the bargaining table. If the President of the United States was on the other side of that table, does that make it any more acceptable?”
“I didn’t even vote for the son of a bitch,” he said, biting the end off an egg roll.
I had. Twice. Thank God for the two-term limit, so I wouldn’t have to do it again.
“You know, this kind of thing ain’t that unusual,” Tisor said. “It’s an open secret in our business, Pan Am’s in bed with Uncle Sam. Pan Am gets the contracts for overseas mail service, and the government gets... favors now and then.”
“This is something Amelia would be aware of.”
“Sure. Everybody knew what the government was gettin’ out of the flight.”
“An airstrip at Howland Island.”
“Right. And Miss Earhart was okay with that, I’m sure. I know she appreciated gettin’ this help from ‘Franklin’ — that’s how she referred to him, y’know.”
“I know.”
“But when I heard about the change in flight plan, switchin’ from east to west to west to east? I knew somethin’ was up. Despite all the bull they handed the press about ‘seasonal change in wind patterns,’ any experienced pilot — any Pan Am pilot, for sure, which includes Fred Noonan — knew that switch made no sense.”