Flying Blind Page 4

  “That’s true,” Putnam granted her, obviously not wanting this to turn into an argument. “Very true, and with the lecture series coming up, we should soon be in better shape.”

  She glanced at me, obviously uneasy that their personal business was being discussed in front of a stranger. Like me, she didn’t seem to understand why, exactly, I was here.

  “Also,” Putnam said brightly, cold eyes glittering behind the rimless glasses, “there’s something I’d like to show you, dear…perhaps after we’ve had dessert.”

  She looked at him with what might have been suspicion. “What?”

  His eyebrows went up, then down, like Groucho Marx, only not so funny. “Something you’ll like. Something potentially very profitable.”

  “May I ask…” She turned to me again, her smile warm and apologetic. “…and I mean no offense, Mr. Heller…” And now she turned back to her husband. “…if there’s a reason why we’re discussing business in a social setting?”

  “I think you probably already know the answer to that one, A. E.”

  “Simpkin,” she said to him, a nickname she’d already used several times over our sumptuous, expensive meal, “I’ve told you a dozen times I don’t take any of that seriously. It’s the sort of thing people in the public eye just have to put up with.”

  “I disagree,” he said with a frown, then flicked a finger in my direction. “At least you could do me the courtesy of getting a professional opinion from Nate, here. After all, security is his field. Didn’t he do a fine job this evening?”

  Amelia smiled and shook her head, then said to me, again, “I mean no offense, Mr. Heller, but—”

  “I agree with you,” I told her, giving up on the goulash. “I’ll be damned if I know what your husband is so impressed with about me.”

  Putnam’s thin line of a mouth flinched in a momentary scowl; then he said, “To be quite honest, A. E., I did some checking around about our guest.”

  “Slim recommended him,” she said, with a tiny shrug. “You told me.”

  “Actually,” Putnam said, “it was George Leisure who first mentioned Mr. Heller.”

  He really had been checking up on me. “How do you know George Leisure?” I asked, almost irritated. Who the hell had recommended me to Putnam, anyway? Leisure, a top Wall Street attorney, had been second chair to Clarence Darrow in the Massie trial in Honolulu in 1932; I’d been Darrow’s investigator.

  “Golfing pal,” Putnam said. “Mr. Heller, I’m told you’re discreet, and you have a certain familiarity with the special needs of the famous. Of celebrities.”

  There was some truth in that, though the retail credit firms I did the bulk of my work for—not to mention the husbands and/or wives looking to get the dirt on their spouses that made up most of the rest of my accounts receivable book—weren’t exactly household names.

  “I suppose so,” I said, just as the waiter arrived with dessert. We had all ordered the house specialty—Creole Juanita, a yam pudding—and Putnam and I were having coffee with it. Amelia had cocoa, explaining she drank neither coffee nor tea. A non-tea-drinking teetotaler.

  “My wife has received some threatening letters,” Putnam said, spooning his pudding.

  “Everybody in my position receives threatening letters,” she said, mildly impatient.

  I touched her sleeve, lightly. “Now it’s my turn to ask you not to take offense…but there is no one in this country, no one in the world, who’s in your position. I’ll be glad to listen to what’s been going on, and give you my best reading…no extra charge, no obligation.”

  She had a lot of nice smiles, but this one—faint but fetching—was my favorite so far. “That’s very decent of you, Mr. Heller.”

  “Hey, you paid for my services this evening,” I said, dipping a spoon into my Creole Juanita, “and bought me a nice meal. How can I help?”

  Putnam didn’t have the notes with him, but as he described them, this seemed fairly typical celebrity harassment—letters were assembled via cut-out words lifted from newspapers and magazines, not asking for a ransom—just hateful, threatening messages: YOU WILL FALL TO EARTH, THE CRASH IS COMING.

  “How many of these notes have you received?” I asked.

  “Three,” Amelia said. She was eating her pudding, not terribly worked up about this subject. The stuff was pretty much pumpkin pie without the crust, by the way.

  I asked, “Where did you receive them?”

  “At my hotel, in California. Before we left for Honolulu, and the Pacific flight.”

  “Did you go to the cops in L.A.?”

  “No. I’ve had other crank mail, before. I think G. P.’s upset primarily because these are so…nasty…with the cut-out words and all, which make it…creepy.”

  “Did the notes come in the mail?”

  “Yes.” She pushed her pudding cup aside, half-eaten. Maybe this was bothering her, after all.

  “Then you might be able to take this to the FBI or the postal inspectors.”

  “Please understand,” Putnam said, his pudding finished long ago, “there’s a history of sabotage, where female fliers are concerned. During the first Women’s Air Derby, Thea Rasche got a note with cut-out words like the ones A. E.’s been receiving and got grounded with sand in her fuel tank…the rudder cables of Claire Fahy’s plane were weakened by acid, and Bobbi Trout was forced down with sand, or maybe dirt, poured in her fuel.”

  Amelia made a face. “Jiminy crickets, Simpkin, that was 1929.”

  “I would prefer to be safe than sorry,” he said crisply. Then he formed a businesslike smile and those unblinking eyes fixed upon me. “Nate, Amelia’s about to embark on a brief lecture tour…ten days, twelve appearances…on her way to California, where she’ll prepare for our next long-distance flight.”

  “Going after another record?” I asked her. “So soon?”

  But Amelia, who had brightened at her husband’s last words, ignored me and leaned toward Putnam, her voice breathless as she asked, “Then we’re on for Mexico City?”

  He smiled and patted her hand. “We’re on.”

  She was almost bouncing in her chair, an eager child. “Simpkin, how on earth did you manage it?”

  He sipped his coffee and then, too casually, said, “Merely persuaded the President of Mexico, our new friend Lázaro Cárdenas, to have the words ‘Amelia Earhart Good Will Flight’…in Spanish, of course…printed on a limited-edition Mexican twenty-cent airmail stamp. Of the less than eight hundred they’re printing, we get three hundred first-day covers to have you autograph and sell to collectors.”

  “Well, naturally, I’m pleased….”

  A mild frown creased his forehead. “What’s wrong, dear?”

  Her childish glee was gone. “It just seems a little…undignified.”

  “Flying around setting records is terribly expensive,” he said, and this was obviously not the first time he’d said this, or something close to it, “and we have to accept legitimate returns where we can get them.”

  She nodded. Sipped her cocoa. Asked, “And…selling these stamps…this will cover our expenses?”

  “It’s a start,” he said. He turned to me. “Nate, I can’t accompany A. E. on this lecture tour, nor can I join her, immediately thereafter, in California. I have preflight preparations to make, service and fuel to arrange, magazines and newspapers to contact, and several other sponsors I need to finalize before the flight…. I would like you to accompany A. E. on this lecture tour, and provide personal security for her, at the Burbank airfield, as she prepares for the Mexico City flight. Are you willing to do that?”

  Amelia was staring straight ahead, sipping her cocoa.

  I hadn’t anticipated a job of this scope. “Well, uh…when would we leave?”

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  I shrugged. “I would have to make some arrangements to cover my regular clients with other agencies…”

  Now he shrugged, in a matter-of-fact, take-it-or-leave-it manner. “Tw
enty-five dollars a day and expenses. I’ll write you out a retainer check for five hundred dollars before the evening’s through.” He pushed away from the table and rose. “Give it some consideration…. Excuse me, for a moment. They’re holding something for me at the desk that I’d like to show you.” He was speaking to his wife and had a pixie smile going below the professorial glasses. “I think you’ll be very pleased.”

  And he walked briskly from the dining room out into the lobby.

  I sipped my coffee, then looked her way and asked, “Are you comfortable with this arrangement, ma’am?”

  She laughed inaudibly. “Why don’t you stop calling me ‘ma’am,’ and I’ll stop calling you ‘Mr. Heller.’ If that’s all right with you…Nate?”

  “It’s jake with me, Amelia. Do you really think you need a bodyguard?”

  She frowned a little. “It’s difficult to say. It’s true there’s a lot of jealousy among the women in aviation.”

  “Gets a little catty, does it?”

  Her eyes flared at that. “Actually, there’s a great deal of camaraderie…. Have you heard of the Ninety Nines? That’s an organization of women pilots, and I’m a past president.”

  “Presidents get assassinated, now and then.”

  “Well…truth be told, there’s a lot of petty malarkey because of the attention I get. Or, I should say, the attention G. P. gets me.”

  “You have mixed emotions about that, don’t you?”

  “I do. But G. P.’s right—going for flying records is costly.”

  “You did say you had an expensive obsession…. Listen, if I take this job, we won’t be…flying from one town to another, or anything, will we?”

  At the corners of the blue-gray eyes, amusement crinkled. “Don’t you like flying? Or is it flying with a woman?”

  “I just prefer train travel…. You know, I imagine a lecture tour’s like a whistle-stop political campaign, where you need to be able to rest up between engagements.”

  “So you’re thinking of my welfare, my convenience….”

  “Well, that’s part of my job, isn’t it? I’m not casting aspersions on you, ma’am…Miss Earhart…Amelia. It’s not that I’m afraid to fly with a female pilot, particularly one with your reputation. I mean, I was up with Lindbergh….”

  “Knowing Slim, and his sadistic sense of humor, he probably tried to scare the heck out of you.”

  “Not the ‘heck,’ exactly.”

  She patted my hand; her touch was cool, and her voice was soothing, somewhat sarcastically so, but soothing.

  “We’ll be traveling by car, Nate…. Not enough of these towns have suitably situated airstrips. Hope you won’t be terribly disappointed…that we won’t be traveling by train, I mean.”

  “Like you said. Just thinking of you.”

  Putnam was coming back into the dining room, carrying a paper sack that seemed incongruous with his tux, and wearing a tight, self-satisfied little grin. Before he sat, he grandly withdrew from the sack a flimsy reddish-brown suede hat with a silk band.

  The band bore a facsimile of Amelia Earhart’s signature, and the thing was cheap-looking, like it had cost about a quarter.

  “This costs twenty-five cents to manufacture,” Putnam said, sitting, as she took the hat from him and turned it in her hands, studying it with a blankly pensive expression. “And retails for three dollars.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said absurdly, “it’s a hat.”

  She passed it to me. “What do you think of it, Mr. Heller?”

  I thought I wouldn’t want to get caught in the rain in a hat made out of cheap felt like this one, but all I said was, “It’s a little small.”

  “It’s a girl’s hat,” Putnam said. “A little girl.”

  “This is a hat for a child,” Amelia said. Her voice sounded strangely cold.

  “Yes, it is. Small hats to make a small fortune.”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t approve this. I won’t have my name used to cheat children.”

  For the first time that I noticed, Putnam blinked. “But they’re making them now….”

  “Tell them to unmake them.”

  “That’s impossible! I’ve already signed the contract….”

  “Well, then that puts me in a difficult position,” she said. “I obviously can’t sue the manufacturer. But I can sue you.”

  He touched the front of his tux with a splayed hand; his eyes showed white all ’round. “Me? Your husband?”

  “I never granted my permission for my name to be used in this manner…” She dropped the hat into the paper bag on the floor between them. “Do you want me to sue you for abusing my power of attorney?”

  His voice was hushed, but loud with humiliation. “Of course not.”

  “Then you will call the…the hat people, first thing in the morning, G. P., and cancel that contract.”

  He just sat there, stunned, for a moment, struck dumb; then nodded.

  Now she looked at me with a blandly sweet expression; the blue-gray eyes seemed as hard as they were beautiful, and as soft. “Mr. Heller? Nate?”

  “Yes?”

  She rose and offered me her hand; I took it, which is to say, shook it—she had a firm grip, but didn’t overdo it. Not like her husband.

  “We’ll discuss the arrangements of the lecture tour tomorrow. I realize you gentlemen have some business to do…a matter of a retainer, I believe…so I’ll excuse myself and go on up to our room.”

  She left the table, and the eyes of the high-society types around the dining room—a judge here, a senator there—were upon her, partly because she was an attractive woman who walked in a pleasingly, flowingly feminine manner; but also because that tousled-haired head of hers bore one of the most famous faces in America.

  Putnam sighed. “That little attack of conscience is going to cost me royally.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He stopped a passing waiter and ordered a Manhattan; I asked for a rum and Coke.

  While we waited for our drinks, he asked, “What do you think of the hat?”

  “Would you mind making out my retainer check first?”

  “That bad, is it?”

  “Hat’s a piece of shit, G. P.”

  “Well, hell, yes, of course it is, but a profitable piece of shit. You mind if I smoke a cigar?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Care for one yourself?”

  “No.”

  He lighted up a big Havana number, waved out the match and took a deep draw off the cigar, the eyes behind the round rimless glasses narrowing to slits.

  Then he said, “Now…would you like to know why I really hired you?”

  3

  The wax-mustached, bunny-nosed “Managing Director” of the Coliseum—a buff brick building between Locust Street and Grand Avenue in Des Moines, Iowa—had proudly told me, earlier that evening, that the facility in his charge played an important cultural role in Des Moines, citing as a recent example a presentation by the Russian ballet. I decided it would be less than gracious to mention that the bulletin board in the lobby heralded the upcoming poultry show as his next attraction; and anyway, I needed him to help me set up a folding table for tonight’s speaker, after her presentation, to sign copies of her most recent book, The Fun of It.

  My role as bodyguard entailed any number of activities I hadn’t expected, including hauling in from the trunk of her Franklin a slide projector, a reel of 16-millimeter film, a carton of books, and of course a small tin cash box for me to make change out of, being the guy who’d be selling The Fun of It (it would be undignified for the author to do so herself).

  The capacity of the joint was 8,500, and that was exactly how many butts were fitted into the seats. Mine was not among them—I was standing, arms folded, my back to a side wall, fairly near the stage, where I could keep an eye on the speaker and the crowd. They were mostly ladies, dressed in their Sunday finery, though this was a Thursday evening—fe
athered chapeaus and pearls and lacy gloves that would have waited till Easter if such an important guest hadn’t come to town. A few men in suits and ties were sprinkled around the hall, and nobody looked like a farmer, nobody seemed to have manure on their shoes. Nobody looked like somebody who might have sent Amelia Earhart a fan letter comprised of cut-out words from magazines and newspapers, either; still, you never know.

  The stage was rather large, empty but for an American flag at one side, an Iowa state flag on the other, a silver-white movie screen, a lectern, and a single armchair, near the state flag. A murmur of anticipation was rumbling across the room, like a motor warming up.

  We were in the second week of our lecture tour. We had stayed in Chicago the first night, where she’d spoken at the Orchestra Hall to a group of 1,000 4-H members, and had done De Kalb last night, at Northern Illinois State Teachers College, speaking to a much smaller group, coeds mostly (“We welcome home an Illinois girl”). Then it had been on to Gary, Indiana, and Battle Creek, Michigan, and a blur of cities and towns that gradually curved back westward.

  Onstage, Miss Earhart displayed an unpretentious grace and an effortless command, with a deceptively casual, off-the-cuff manner (though she gave one basic speech with little improvisation) that made the audience members feel she was speaking directly to each of them.

  But I knew that right now, in the dressing room backstage, she was sitting quietly, head lowered, hand over her eyes, in a zombielike state, having already thrown up, once or twice. I’d found out the hard way that she, like Garbo, wanted to be alone. She needed at least fifteen minutes to gear herself up for the ordeal of facing a crowd.

  The house lights went down as the movie projector began its whir, and black-and-white images came up on the screen, the sonorous voice of Lowell Thomas, made tinny by tiny speakers, elucidating newsreel footage that began with the lonely unattended Boston takeoff of the Fokker seaplane Friendship, followed by a mob in Southampton, England, where Amelia got her first taste of fame; then ticker-tape parades, Amelia with Lindbergh, cheering onlookers at airfields where she’d set various speed and altitude records, Amelia with President Hoover, Amelia flying the ungainly goose that was an autogiro, takeoffs, landings, swarming crowds, Amelia with President Roosevelt and Eleanor….