“All the time…. But this is kind of a shady business, leading your wife to believe I’ve been hired for one thing, getting me into her confidence, when actually I’m working against her.”
He gestured with an open hand, reasonably. “As I said, the threatening notes are very real. She may well be in danger from a deranged fan or some jealous competitor…most of these women fliers are dykes, you know, and are by nature frustrated.”
“You’re asking a lot for twenty-five bucks a day. This sounds like two jobs to me.”
Amusement turned his thin lips into a curve. “Is that what it takes to salve your conscience, Nate? Well, fine. We’ll make it twenty-five dollars a day for bodyguard duties, and another twenty-five dollars a day for…these other…investigative services. Fifty a day…”
He reached into his inside tuxedo jacket pocket and withdrew a checkbook.
“…and we’ll make that retainer not five hundred dollars, but one thousand dollars. Plus reasonable expenses, of course….”
And he uncapped a fountain pen and wrote my name and that very attractive amount on the check; it was upside-down from where I sat, but I could read it. Glistening there—my name attached to a thousand bucks. It was like an actor seeing his name in lights.
So I took the job. I didn’t like myself for doing it, but I did like the thousand bucks. The thousand bucks was swell.
And now I was at the wheel of Putnam’s wife’s Franklin, and she was snoozing next to me, curled up cutely, and for the first time, in any major way at least, I felt bad, even guilty. We’d had a nice moment together, this evening, she and I. She was warming to me. And I was a heel.
But a well-paid heel.
She woke up around 2:00 A.M., and announced she needed a rest stop. I pulled the big bus of a Franklin in at the Junction Diner at Angola, on U.S. 27, just a few miles over the state line into Indiana. While the outside of the little boxcar all-nighter had that sleek modern look—a stainless steel bullet edged with blue porcelain enamel in the neon glow of its sign—the interior was dominated by the warmth of oak and gumwood woodwork. A truck driver sat at a counter stool having pie and coffee, but the place was pretty dead, just a blowsy blonde waitress and the occasional glimpse of the bleary-eyed, blue-bearded short-order cook at the window of his hole of a kitchen. We ordered at the counter and carried our hot chocolate (hers) and black coffee (mine) to our cozy booth.
“You saved my tail today,” she said, dipping a spoon into the whipped cream atop her cocoa.
“I figure it was worth saving,” I said. That was about as flirty as I’d got with her.
She gave me half a smile as she nibbled whipped cream off her spoon; no makeup, hair even more a tangle than usual, face puffy from sleep and still cute as a paper doll. “I admire that kind of courage,” she said.
“Is that what it is?”
She was stirring the hot chocolate, now. “Call it guts, then…. I’m sorry if I’ve been a little, I don’t know…hard to get to know.”
The coffee was bitter. “Don’t be silly.”
“I learned a long time ago, not to confide in just anybody.”
“I like to think I’m not just anybody.” I saluted her with the coffee cup. “There are times I fancy myself somebody.”
She laughed. “Don’t be so anxious to be somebody. Look how much fun I have.”
“Like almost getting crushed to grape jelly in that crowd? You got a point. Since we’re talkin’ like a couple of humans, you mind if I ask you something just a touch on the personal side?”
“I think that would be all right,” she said, not quite sure.
“Where the hell were you brought up? Seems like every state in the union claims you as theirs.”
She chuckled and blew on her hot chocolate; steam shimmered off it. “That’s ’cause I was raised in just about every state in the union…. Well, not really. Just Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa…”
“Minnesota?”
“Minnesota, too. Not Michigan, that I can remember. My father moved us around a lot. He was an attorney working for the railroad. Rock Island Line.”
“Ah.”
“Actually, he had a lot of jobs. He drank.” She sipped her chocolate. “My mother is a fairly cultivated lady, from a well-to-do background, and it was hard on her, when her attorney husband turned out to be a…”
She didn’t say it, but the word hung in the air: Drunk.
All she did say was: “Kind of strange for us kids, too.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Just my sister Muriel and me. We would stay with my grandparents, my mother’s parents, part of the year, growing up. They were well off and I think it’s rather hard on kids, seeing how the other half lives, then going back to the other side of the tracks.”
I nodded. “I know what you mean. My uncle was wealthy, my pop was a diehard union man. An old Wobbly.”
“Ha! Old boyfriend of mine took me to a Wobbly meeting once.”
“It can be a good place to pick up girls.”
“Ah, well, Sam already had a girl, didn’t he? Though not for long. Your father wasn’t much for capitalism, huh?”
I sipped my coffee. “That’s the funny thing. He was a moderately successful small businessman. He ran a radical bookshop for years, in Douglas Park.”
“Douglas Park,” she said, nodding. “I know where that is.”
I grinned at her. “You really did live in Chicago, then?”
“For about a year, when I was seventeen. We had a furnished apartment near the University of Chicago. I did a miserable stint at Hyde Park High. Hated the teachers there like poison and I think the other girls thought I was a weird duck.”
“Were you?”
“Of course! In the yearbook they called me ‘the girl in brown who walks alone.’”
“And why did they do that?”
“I guess because I wore brown a lot and—”
“Walked alone. I get it.” I walked alone over to the counter with my coffee cup and got a refill; Amelia seemed to be doing fine with her hot chocolate.
Sitting back across from her, I asked, “Why flying? If you weren’t a rich kid, how did you manage that, anyway? It’s not a very proletariat pastime.”
She pretended to be impressed by the big word, saying, “Your father really was a Marxist, wasn’t he?…Jiminy crickets, I don’t know, I get asked that all the time, but never know what to say. How did I do it? Scrimped and saved and worked weekends at airfields, any job they’d give me. Why did I do it? I always did love air shows…. Probably got the bug in Toronto.”
“Toronto? Don’t tell me you’re Canada’s native daughter, too?”
“Not really. Muriel was going to college there, and I’d lost interest in my own schooling, so when I went up to visit her, and saw all the wounded soldiers—this was, you know, during the war—I had an impulse to try to help. I took a job as a nurse’s aide at a military hospital.”
“That sounds like a lot of laughs.”
Her eyes widened. “It was an education. I only lasted a few months. Those poor men, with their poison gas burns, shrapnel, TB…. I made a lot of friends among the patients, many of them British and French pilots. One afternoon, a captain in the Royal Flying Corps invited Muriel and me to an airfield and he did stunts in his little red airplane.” She drew in a breath and her eyes were lifted, as she remembered. “That plane said something to me when it swished by.”
“So that’s where it began, you and your love for little red airplanes.”
“Maybe. But then, too, I remember one air show particularly, on Christmas Day, must have been, oh…1920?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I wasn’t there.”
“I think it was 1920, in Long Beach. They had races, wing-walking, aerobatics. I was enthralled! Then, three days later, at Rogers Field, off Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles…only in those days, it was more like the suburbs of Los Angeles…anyway, I went up for a ride with Frank Hawks, who w
as nationally known for setting speed records…. He took me up two, three hundred feet over the Hollywood hills, and I was a goner. I knew I had to fly.”
“Love at first flight.”
She showed me the gap-toothed grin. “That’s about right. My goodness, Nathan…you mind if I call you ‘Nathan’? It’s so much more elegant than ‘Nate.’”
“I prefer to think of it as ‘suave,’ but sure. Nathan’s fine.”
She leaned forward, her hands gathered around the cup, cupping the cup, as if holding something precious; those blue-gray eyes were alive—it was like looking into a fire. “Nothing could’ve prepared me for the physical and emotional wallop of that flight. To me, it’s the perfect state, the ultimate happiness…. It combines the physical and the intellectual…. You soar above any earthly concerns, responsible to no one but yourself.”
“I feel the same way about draw poker.”
She laughed, once. “That’s what I like about you. You don’t take anything too seriously, yourself included…yet I feel, deep down, you’re a very serious person.”
“I am deep. So’s a drainage ditch.”
Now her expression was almost blank as she studied me. “Does it bother you?”
“What?”
“Seeing someone so…obsessive about something? So committed? Isn’t there something you love to do?”
I sipped the coffee, shrugged. “I like my work, for the most part.”
“But do you love it?”
“I love working for myself. Not answering to anybody but the bill collector.”
Amusement tickled her mouth. “Well, then…you fly solo, too, don’t you?”
“I guess so. And…”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She sat forward again, urgency in her voice. “Are you embarrassed? Were you going to share something with me? Hey, I’ve opened up to you, mister. And that’s not my style. Don’t clam up on me…Nathan.”
“Okay, Amy. I’ll level with you.”
“Amy?”
“Yeah. Amelia’s a goddamn maiden librarian. And ‘A. E.’ is a stock broker or maybe a lawyer. Amy’s a girl. A pretty girl.”
Her eyes and lips softened. “Amy…. Nobody’s ever called me that.”
“It’s all I’m ever going to call you, from here on out.”
“I guess nobody ever called me that because it’s my mother’s name…. But that’s okay. I like my mother, except for having to support her and the rest of my family.”
“One of the prices of fame.”
“You started to say…”
“Hmmm?”
“You were going to level with me.”
I sighed. “…Yeah, I guess there is something I love about my work. Back in Pa’s bookshop, I used to read Sherlock Holmes stories and dime novels, about Nick Carter the detective….”
“And that’s what you wanted to be. A detective.”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s what you turned out to be, too.”
“Sort of. Mostly what I do isn’t like the stories. It’s routine work, sometimes boring, sometimes shoddy, sometimes shady. Security work. Retail credit checks….”
She nodded. “Divorce cases, I suppose.”
“Yeah. But now and then something comes along, and I get to be a real detective…”
Another gap-toothed grin. “Like the magazines: Real Detective, True Detective…”
“Right. I help somebody. I solve something. A puzzle. A riddle. A crime.”
She was nodding again, eyes narrowed. “And in those instances, you feel like a detective. And you love that.”
“I guess I do. But it’s like what you do, Amy—it’s dangerous work. Sometimes you soar, and sometimes you crash.”
“You’ve done both?”
“Yeah. But the problem with what I do, I’m only flying solo where the business end is concerned…I’m really messing in people’s lives. Sometimes I get hired by the wrong people. Sometimes people I like get hurt.”
“And when that happens, you don’t love what you do.”
“No.” I was staring into my coffee; my face stared back at me from the liquid blackness. “Last year a young woman…young woman died because of me. Because I made a mistake. Because I believed a man’s lies, a man who said he was her father but was really her husband. Because I wasn’t as smart or shrewd as I thought I was.”
Suddenly her hand was on mine. “Oh, dear…. You loved her, didn’t you?”
Why the hell had I opened that can of peas?
“We better get back on the road,” I said, drawing my hand away, slipping out of the booth, digging a nickel from my topcoat pocket and tossing the tip on the table-top. “We can blab just as easy in the car, you know.”
“All right. My turn to drive.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re the captain.”
She looped her arm in mine as we walked out. “You’re not such a bad co-pilot to have along for the ride, Nathan.”
We talked more that night, and many nights after that; we became friends and there were times, when I walked her to her hotel room, where I felt perhaps our friendship might be more, moments when I almost had the nerve to kiss her.
But, of course, that would have been wrong.
After all, I was working for her husband.
4
Despite a blunt nose and wooden construction, the Vega was twenty-seven feet of streamlined design; with its fresh red paint job, the monoplane looked as if it were fashioned of metal. Though Amy indicated she was something like the fifth owner of the single-engine aircraft, the Vega awaiting us on a runway of Lambert-St. Louis Municipal Airport might have been brand spanking new; even its propeller had been polished to a silverlike sheen.
This reflected work that G. P. had commissioned. In one of the hangars of the sweeping modern airport with its radio-controlled towers, the Lockheed craft had been reupholstered and repainted, and refitted with extra fuel tanks.
“I didn’t exactly lie to you,” she had said the night before as we paused at the door of her room in the Coronado Hotel in downtown St. Louis.
Looking attractive if every one of her thirty-seven years, she wore a pale blue crepe gown of her own design; she was obviously weary after another long day on the personal appearance trail, having just spoken in a hotel dining room for the Daughters of the American Revolution (introduced as “a ray of hope in these bleak times”), where the only males in the room were the waiters and me.
“Sure you lied to me,” I said, leaning a hand against the wall, pinning her there, her back to her doorway. “You said no flying.”
“No I didn’t.” Amusement tickled her full, sensuous mouth; she had her hands tucked behind her back. “I said we wouldn’t be traveling by train.”
I waggled a finger in her face. “You said we wouldn’t be flying from town to town on this little lecture tour.”
Her chin lifted and she aimed her cool gaze down at me. “And we didn’t. The lecture tour is over, and now we’re flying to California…. What did Slim do to you, up in the air, to spook you so?”
“He had the stick jimmied somehow so that his pal Breckinridge would lose control of the plane. And I just about lost control of my bodily functions.”
Her laugh was humorless and not unsympathetic. “My goodness but that Lindbergh has the sickest sense of humor I’ve ever met in a man…. I once saw him pour a pitcher of ice water down a child’s pajamas.”
She was right about Slim, but I sensed a resentment for, and even jealousy of, America’s most famous flier, from his nearest rival—who happened to be saddled with the Lady Lindy moniker.
“It’s early,” she said. I could tell by her eyes that she had another of the sinus headaches that plagued her. “Want to come in for a moment?”
“You need another neck rub?”
Half a smile settled in the corner of a cheek. “Am I that transparent?”
“Not to most people.”
She had a s
uite, with a sitting area—this was an extravagance G. P. put up with so that she could receive the press on her own terms. Soon I was sitting on the couch and she was sitting on the floor like an Indian, her back to me, tucked between my fanned-out legs as I massaged her neck. Room service was on its way with some cocoa for her and a bottle of Coke for me.
We were great pals now, Amy and me, having shared the special intimacy of late-night gabfests as we rolled over the roadways of America in the middle of the night and the wee hours of the predawn morning; that big lumbering Franklin became a confessional, as the blanket of stars in clear Midwestern skies lulled us both into sharing confidences.
I knew the bitterness she felt for her family—her mother and sister, who she had to support, her late father, who had boozed their family into periodic poverty. I knew she had still not overcome the guilt for her “manufactured fame,” since on her first and most famous flight, the Atlantic crossing on the Friendship, she had really just been a “sack of potatoes” passenger.
And she knew that my idealistic leftist father had killed himself in disappointment over his only son joining the corrupt Chicago police department; shot himself in the head with my gun, a gun I still carried with me, the closest thing to a conscience I had.
These were not things we shared with just anyone.
Even so, I was keeping two secrets from her. One, of course, was that her husband had hired me to spy on her, to see if she were a faithful wife. The other was that I could feel my friendship for her deepening into something else. Of course, if I did something about the latter, it might clear up the former.
“That’s so good…so good, Nate….”
I could feel her neck and shoulder muscles loosening. Then I began working my fingers into the tousled curls, digging at her scalp. Her moans of painful pleasure sounded almost orgasmic. Or maybe I just wanted them to.
“Why do you work so hard?” I asked, rubbing her scalp.
“For the money.”
“Your expensive obsession.”
“Yes, but also to buy books and clothes, and send my dear mother her monthly allowance to blow on my sister and her no-good husband. And I like to live comfortably…in a nice house with my bills paid and money in the bank.”
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