Flying Blind

Chapter 8

Press coverage was minimal when Amelia Earhart (and an all-male crew) lifted off in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E from the Oakland Airport on St. Patrick’s Day, 1937, on what was, technically at least, the first leg of her round-the-world flight. Heavy rains had caused numerous postponements, and many reporters — who, frankly, were probably a little bored with Amelia Earhart by now, anyway, finding her a relic of a quaint, earlier era of pioneering aviation — had bailed out. But one memorable photo — which appeared all over the country, including Chicago — caught the Electra, shortly after takeoff, poised above the almost-finished Golden Gate Bridge.

When they arrived at Honolulu fifteen hours and forty-seven minutes later (setting a record), Paul Mantz handled the landing, due to fatigue on Amy’s part. At least, this is what Mantz later told me, dispelling the official word that the twenty-four-hour delay before beginning the first true leg of the flight (and the most dangerous) — Honolulu to tiny Howland Island, more than 1,800 miles away — was due to shaky weather forecasts; in fact, it was to give Miss Earhart time to rest up for the physically demanding flight. Mantz, who was only along for the Oakland-Honolulu leg, took advantage of the delay and flew one last test flight of the Electra, to check out a few last-minute adjustments that had been made.

The papers were referring to the sleek, all-metal, silver Electra with its fifty-five-foot wing span as “the Flying Laboratory” (a G. P. Putnam touch, no doubt) and I knew the ship was a great source of pride to Amy.

April of the year before, back on the lecture circuit (interspersing speaking engagements with campaign appearances for President Roosevelt’s reelection), she had been glowing about it.

“They’ve put fifty thousand dollars into a research fund,” she said, “can you imagine?”

I knew all about huge sums of money; I figured I had at least six bucks (factoring in tip) invested in our tables d’hôte (filet of sole with Marguery sauce for her and filet mignon for me). The elegant oak-paneled Chez Louis on East Pearson Street near the Gold Coast was one of the handful of places in Chicago where a celebrity could dine unaccosted, though many eyes were on my tall, slim companion in her canary shirt, string of pearls and tailored gray slacks. Amy was the first woman I knew who chose slacks as evening wear.

“So they gave you fifty thousand clams,” I said matter-of-factly, carving myself a bite of rare filet. “Who is ‘they’?”

“Purdue University. Or anyway, Purdue’s ‘Amelia Earhart Research Foundation’...whatever that is. Probably some rich alumni whose arms G. P. twisted.”

“Why Purdue University?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Since last fall, I have two positions with Purdue: I’m their aeronautics advisor but I’m also a consultant in the Department for the Study of Careers for Women.”

“Is that what they’re calling Home Economics now?”

A wry smile dimpled an apple cheek. “You tread a thin line with me, sometimes, Nathan Heller... I spend several weeks a semester there.”

“So it’s not just an honorary title, then?”

“No,” she said, touching her napkin to her lips, finished with her sole, “I live right in the dorms with the girls, eat in their cafeteria, sit elbow to elbow with them. I let these young women know they don’t have to settle for being nurses, they can be doctors; they don’t just have to be secretaries, they can be business executives.”

“That’s a swell sentiment, Amy, but do you think it’s realistic?”

Amy smiled at the colored busboy removing her plate. “Oh, I let them know they’ll be facing discrimination... both where the law is concerned, and good old-fashioned male stupidity.”

“It was probably good old-fashioned stupid males who ponied up your fifty grand... You wouldn’t have your eye on a new plane, by any chance? That twin-engine job you’ve been craving?”

The waiter was delivering our desserts.

She licked her upper lip in anticipation of the delicious parfait before her; or she might have been thinking about her new plane. “Two motors, dual controls, capable of a twenty-seven-thousand-foot altitude. It’s an Electra.”

I had a parfait too and spooned a bite of the frozen confection. “Isn’t that a passenger plane?”

“Yes, seats up to ten. But Paul’s going to strip it for auxiliary fuel tanks; he says we’ll have a capability of four thousand five hundred nonstop air miles.”

“That’s a long time between pee breaks,” I said.

Famous for subsisting on nothing but tomato juice on her long-distance jaunts, Amy had once confided in me that she turned her nose up at the tubular gadget used by the military for urination (“I never tinkle on a flight”).

“I may have to change my ways,” she admitted, dipping her spoon into the parfait glass. “Oh my goodness, Nathan, this Electra is my dream airy-plane. Paul’s fixing it up with all the latest gadgets: Sperry autogiro robot pilot, a fuel minimizer, wind deicers, blind-flying instruments... There’ll be over a hundred dials and levels on the control panel.”

“But will you bother to learn how to use them?”

“Of course! We’re calling the plane our ‘Flying Laboratory.’... I mean, it’s a research project, after all.”

“Right. For the Amelia Earhart Research Foundation. You can study the bladder capacity of a woman nearing forty.”

Digging for the final far-down bite in the glass, she gave me a tight-lipped, chin-crinkled smile, then asked, “And what experiment are you conducting? How many smart-aleck remarks a man can make and still get invited up to an emancipated woman’s hotel suite?”

I licked the last bite of parfait off my spoon and innocently asked, “Have I mentioned lately how much I admire Eleanor Roosevelt?”

And of course I received (and accepted) my invitation to her hotel suite, though I was disheartened by all her “good news”: it meant G. P. Putnam still had his hooks into her. Through various machinations, he was going to deliver her a new “airy-plane” — and in fact he did, on July 24, her thirty-ninth birthday.

When she took off for Howland Island at dawn from Honolulu’s Luke Field near Pearl Harbor, Paul Mantz — just an advisor on this trip — stayed behind. He had slipped a paper-orchid lei over Amy’s head before she followed her co-pilot navigator Harry Manning and assistant navigator Fred Noonan aboard the Electra.

Manning was beside her in the co-pilot’s seat with Noonan in the rear at the chart table against a bulkhead by a window — the Electra’s cabin stripped of seats, replaced with fuel tanks — when Amy started the engines and motioned to the ground crew to remove her wheel chocks.

The Electra began to roll down the wet runway but it gave no sign of lifting off before it began to sway in the crosswind, its right wing dipping down; Amy corrected by reducing power to the left engine and the plane yawed to the left, out of control, its right wheel and undercarriage sheared away in a scream of metal on concrete, the silver bird sliding down the runway on its belly spewing sparks and spilling fuel.

When the plane finally skidded to a stop, the hatch cover popped open and a white-faced Amelia Earhart emerged, shouting, “Something went wrong!” She and Manning and Noonan were unscathed and sparks had never met fuel, so there was no exploding plane, no fire, though fire trucks and ambulances were racing their way as the crew stumbled from the plane to safety.

Amy quickly regained her composure and told reporters, “Of course the flight is still on!” The Lockheed would be shipped back to the Lockheed factory in Burbank for repairs.

One of G. P. Putnam’s first voiced concerns, I understand, was to make sure the 6,500 presold first-day-of-issue philatelic covers be recovered from the wreck.

Traveling by commercial airliner, Amy stopped in Chicago in April, on her way to New York; we spent an evening together, in my apartment on the twenty-third floor of the Morrison Hotel, where in the glow of a single table lamp, with a soft backdrop of the Dorsey Brothers playing on the radio, we enjoyed a middling room service meal and each other’s company.

But this was not the Amy I’d dined with at Chez Louis, a year before — not the bubbling, optimistic Amy almost giddy with anticipation of obtaining her dream “airy-plane.”

This was a thin, wan, middle-aged woman, her weariness reflected by the dark puffy patches under her clear blue-gray eyes and lines above and at the corners of her wide sensuous mouth. Still a handsome creature, she was curled up on my couch beside me in a white blouse and navy blue slacks and white cotton anklets, possessed of a slim leggy frame that a much younger woman might have envied.

Nestled under my arm, sipping a cup of cocoa, she had just told me her version of the Honolulu crackup, which laid the blame on a tire blowout, when she looked up with her eyes wide and guileless. “Aren’t you going to ask, ‘Are you going to try again’?”

“No,” I said. I was working on a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “And by the way, I hope you don’t.”

“Why? Don’t you want me to be rich and famous?”

“Aren’t you already?”

She made a clicking sound in one cheek. “Just halfway... I’m afraid we’re pretty darn near broke, Nathan.”

“Then how can you expect to repair your plane and try again?”

“Unless I find fifty thousand dollars, I can’t.”

“What about the Purdue Institute for Female Bladder Research?”

She elbowed me, then sipped her cocoa and said, “They ended up kicking in eighty thousand in the first place,” she said. “That’s what the Electra and all its bells and whistles cost... Now I need another thirty grand for repairs, and twenty for incidentals.”

“What’s that? Your cans of tomato juice?”

“Flight arrangements are expensive, permissions from countries and lining up airstrips, having mechanics ready, and fuel waiting...”

“Why can’t you just plug into what you had set up before?”

“Before I was flying east to west; this time we’re going west to east.”

I frowned. “Why?”

“Changing weather conditions, G. P. says.”

“What does he know about it?”

She gave me a stern look. “He’s the one who’s finding that extra fifty thousand dollars.”

“That makes him an expert?”

“Would you do me a favor, Nathan?” She gestured to her head, then her neck. “I have one of my sinus headaches. I could really use a neck rub.”

Soon the nearly empty cup of cocoa was on the nearby coffee table, which had been pushed aside, so that she could sit on the carpet, Indian-style, her back to me, between my legs, as I worked the muscles of her upper back and neck.

“If G. P. doesn’t put this together,” she said, “I’m all washed up.”

“Don’t be silly. You have money.”

“Not much. I can’t even afford to support my family anymore... I couldn’t afford the upkeep on my mother’s house and we’ve taken her in with us... Did I tell you we bought a house in Toluca Lake, just down the street from Paul’s old place? Muriel I had to cut off entirely and now... oh yes, right there... she’s out peddling interviews about me to the press.”

“That’s a shame.”

“We had to shut down the fashion line... we were barely breaking even. I’ve invested in several business ventures with Paul but it’s too early to see how that’s going to come out... oh yes, yes, there...”

“Is that what this New York trip’s about? Raising cash?”

She nodded her hanging head. “Whatever’s necessary.

I’ve mortgaged my future on this one... but what are futures for? Did you hear me on The Kraft Music Hour?”

“Can’t say I did. What’s Bing Crosby like?”

She threw me a smile over her shoulder as I worked my thumbs in it. “Funny. Nice. But can you imagine how scared I was? How much I hated that?”

“Yeah.” I thought back to the lectures she endured, those necessary evils to pay the freight; sitting backstage paralyzed with fright, puking her guts out, then going on with a smile and poise a princess might have coveted.

“And in New York,” she said, “I’ll be appearing in the Gimbel’s eleventh-floor restaurant to personally help sell an additional one thousand first-day covers.”

More stamps, yet.

“What happened to the batch from your first try?”

“G. P. had them imprinted with the words: ‘Held over in Honolulu following takeoff accident,’ or some such. These new ones will be marked in some special way... Ouch!”

“Too hard?”

“Yes... just rub in circles for a while, then maybe you can go after that knot again... I’m signing a new book contract. That’s the major reason for the trip.”

“What’s the book about?”

“The flight, silly. I’ll keep a diary along the way and when I get back spend a week or, two polishing it up, and, presto...”

“Another instant book.”

“We’re pulling out all the stops this time.”

“Sounds like you and G. P. are quite a team.”

She turned and looked up at me. “Are you jealous?”

“Of your husband? I don’t know why I would be. I mean, it’s not like you sleep in the same bed or anything.”

“Actually, we do... but it’s not like that between us, anymore. I think he has a sense that... well, he knows this partnership is winding down... Uh, that’s enough, that was wonderful, thank you... Listen... I have something for you...”

She scooted her butt around and, still seated before me, dug in her breast pocket. She withdrew something the size of a folded-up handkerchief, which she pressed into my hand.

I unfolded it and it became a small silk American flag. “What’s this for?”

She had an impish smile. “Just a lucky keepsake. I took it along on all my long-distance flights.”

“Don’t you think you should take it on this one, too?”

“No, no, I... I want you to have it now.”

I held it out to her. “Give it to me when you get back.”

She shook her head, no. “Better take it now.”

I frowned at her. “What? You have some kind of premonition...?”

Her eyes popped open. “No! No. It’s just... a feeling.”

“If you have that kind of feeling, Amy, for Christ’s sake, don’t go!”

She crawled up on the couch and nestled in next to me, again. “Nathan, as far as I know, I only have one real fear — a small and probably female fear of growing old. I won’t feel so completely cheated, if I fail to come back.”

“I don’t want to hear that kind of talk.”

“Nathan...”

“It’s fatalistic bullshit.” I held the little flag out to her.

“I don’t want it. Take it with you.”

She took and refolded it, placed it back in her pocket and was clearly hurt. Which was fine with me.

“What’s got you thinking like this?” I asked her.

“Nothing.” She had her arms folded now, and was still next to me, but not nestled, her back to the sofa. “I don’t really have misgivings... except maybe for Fred.”

“Fred?”

“Fred Noonan.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s your navigator?”

“And co-pilot if necessary, though I’ll do all or most of the flying myself.”

“What about that other guy — Manning?”

“He dropped out after Honolulu. Scheduling conflict.”

I bet that conflict arose about the time the Electra went skidding on its belly trailing sparks and fuel down the runway at Luke Field.

“So what’s the story with Noonan?”

“Paul recommended him. He’s experienced, easy-going... I like him well enough.”

“So why do I still sense misgivings?”

Her response was unconvincingly chipper. “He has a background in ocean navigation, and a great reputation for putting that to use in air navigation.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“He’s really a remarkable man... a merchant marine as a kid, joined the British Royal Navy during the war; one of the first flying-boat pilots for Pan Am, navigator on the China Clipper, its first year.”

I said, “Answer my question.”

“What was your question?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

The blue-gray eyes went hooded. “...He’s a drinker.”

“Ah.” Teetotaling Amy of the cups of cocoa, the little girl who’d been slapped by her drunken father, did not suffer drunken fools gladly. “Has it been a problem?”

Her smirk was humorless. “I think he got drunk the night before the Honolulu takeoff.”

Actually, it had been an attempted takeoff, but I thought not correcting her was the gentlemanly thing to do.

“Was he in some way responsible for the crackup?”

“No. No. Not at all. And he seemed quite clear-eyed and sober and lucid, that morning.”

“That’s all you can ask.”

“He and his wife... he got married recently, to a lovely girl, Mary’s her name... Funny, ’cause that’s what he calls me, too. It’s my middle name... Mary. Anyway, driving back from their honeymoon, in Arizona someplace, they had this head-on collision with another auto.”

“Good God.”

“He wasn’t hurt, but his wife suffered some minor injuries, though not, thank goodness, the woman driving the other car... or her toddler. Fred was cited for driving in the wrong lane.”

“Was he drunk?”

She wouldn’t look at me. “Well, drinking, anyway.”

So I tried a conciliatory tone: “He just got married. Maybe he was celebrating.”

Now she looked at me. “Or maybe he was still upset about the Honolulu crackup. I know that upset him.”

“Why, if it wasn’t his fault?”

“Pan Am fired him for drinking. He apparently views this round-the-world flight as a last chance to vindicate himself... and make himself employable again. He says he has the backing to open a navigation school, if we pull off this flight.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “Amy, can’t you find anybody else? Or is it that, you can’t bring yourself to fire somebody who needs this job so bad?”

“He’s really very good. Paul thinks the world of him.”

“Paul isn’t risking his life.”

“G. P. insists on Fred.”

“G. P. isn’t risking his life, either. Why does G. P. want Noonan?”

“...Because Fred’s... never mind.”

She looked away from me again.

I pressed: “What?”

“I think it’s because Fred’s an... economical choice.”

“Oh, Christ!”

She returned her eyes to mine and her gaze was almost pleading. “Nathan, most of the good navigators are military and they obviously can’t be accessed. Fred Noonan is the man who charted all of Pan Am’s Pacific routes—”

“Didn’t you say Pan Am fired him?”

“Please don’t be cross, Nathan. I didn’t look you up so I could spend the evening wallowing in my problems...”

This was one of those rare times when she seemed near tears.

I gathered her into my arms and kissed her on the forehead. “You mean, you were lookin’ for a good time? Did you find my name scribbled on a phone booth wall?... I’m sorry, Amy. We won’t talk anymore, about any of this.”

She kissed my nose and said, softly, “This is the last flight, Nathan. When I come back, I’m going to have a different life.”

Was she implying I’d be part of it? I was afraid to ask. I preferred to think she was. In my bed that night, city lights filtering through sheer curtains like neon stars, her slender white form had a ghostly beauty as she rode me, cowgirl-style. She seemed lost in the act of lovemaking, just as I was lost in her, and I like to think she found a joy with me, in our sexual flight, that rivaled whatever it was in the sky that drew her there.

When Amy began her around-the-world-at-the-Equator flight, she took steps to keep it from the press, telling reporters on May 21 that she was heading out on a shakedown cruise to Miami, to test the Electra’s special equipment. With Noonan, her mechanic “Bo” McKneely, and her husband, Amy flew to Tucson that afternoon, one of her engines catching fire shortly after landing. She requested an overnight checkup for her ailing plane, knowing that her Electra had a history of malfunction, having flown it in the 1936 Bendix race in which the oil seals leaked and the hatch blew off.

From Tucson she flew the repaired Electra to New Orleans, arriving at 6:00 P.M. Saturday evening at Shushan Airport; checking in at the airport hotel, she and G. P. spent a quiet evening out with Amy’s old friend Toni Lake. All of these tidbits I picked up in the papers, following my friend’s flight long-distance, and even having to work at it somewhat, as the press didn’t seem to care all that much, this time around.

She was strictly an inside-pages phenomenon now, even when at Miami, the next morning, she brought her silver bird in with a shocking thud. She climbed from her cockpit after this “almost” crash landing to be quoted as saying, “I sure smacked it down hard that time!”

The Electra was misbehaving again: faulty shock absorbers, leaking fluid all the way from New Orleans, had caused the hard landing. The oil lines were also leaking, and McKneely led mechanics in an all-out assault on the problems.

On May 29 Amy told the press she would be taking off from Miami Airport, flying east to west on Pan Am’s route through the West Indies and then on down along South America’s east coast. Leaving G. P. and McKneely behind, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan lifted off at 5:56 A.M. on June 1 with five hundred fans in attendance, held back by a line of policemen, her loyal admirers waving and cheering their heroine of the skies.

The papers were less easily impressed. In Chicago the headlines of the next day’s papers belonged to the police riot on the South Side of Chicago in which ten striking Republic Steel workers were killed; and the next day, every front page seemed devoted to Edward of England marrying Baltimore’s Wallis Simpson.

Over the next six days, to modest press attention, the Electra glided over the east coast of Central and South America, with stops at San Juan, Puerto Rico; Caripito, Venezuela; and Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana; and — after a ten-hour flight, crossing 1,628 miles of jungle and ocean — touched down at Fortaleza, Brazil, with Natal her last stop before crossing the South Atlantic.

According to the papers, on her overnight stops, she was up at three or four in the morning after no more than five hours of sleep. But the flights themselves, in the noisy plane with its cramped cabin, were the real endurance test: she mostly communicated with navigator Noonan by sending him notes fastened to a pulley line with a clothespin. Otherwise one of them had to climb over the bulky auxiliary fuel tanks between her cockpit and Noonan’s navigation table.

The flight over the Atlantic went well, despite some headwinds and rainstorms, with the Electra’s performance finally on the beam and Noonan providing ace navigation. But when they neared the African coast on June 7, Amy ignored Noonan’s counsel to turn south for Dakar and instead headed north, flying fifty miles along the African coast. When she sighted St.-Louis, almost two hundred miles north of Dakar, she sent back a note to Noonan asking him what had put them north. His response: “You.” She later admitted as much.

They landed at St.-Louis, their revised destination, where barracks-like accommodations, complete with bedbugs and primitive toilet facilities, awaited them. But their first week had been successful: four thousand miles in forty hours.

After a short hop to Dakar, Amy met two days of bad weather; impatient, she switched her destination from Fort Niamey to Gao in French West Africa, finding a corridor between sandstorms to the north and a tornado to the south, and making the 1,140-mile flight in seven hours and change. The next morning she made the nearly one-thousand-mile trek from Gao over the Sahara Desert to Fort-Lamy in French Equatorial Africa. The heat was so punishing that the Electra could not be refueled until after sunset, as the gasoline might ignite upon touching the hot metal. Then it was on to El Fasher in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and, on June 14, another twelve hundred miles to Assab on the shores of the Red Sea, stopping for lunch at Khartoum in the Sudan and taking tea at Massawa, Eritrea. She was, at the end of her second week and fifteen thousand miles from Miami, better than halfway to her objective.

The next day she crossed the Red Sea, then the Arabian Sea to Karachi, Pakistan. Here she stayed for two unpleasant days in the unremitting desert heat, taking two camel rides, and the time to stop at the post office to choose stamps and supervise the cancellation of the 7,500 first-day covers in her keeping. On June 17 she and Noonan headed for Calcutta, but even in the air, no relief from the blistering heat could be found: at fifty-five hundred feet, the temperature was a brutal ninety degrees. Finally the heat let up, and rainstorms took over, including air currents that sent the Electra up and down at a rate of one thousand feet in seconds.

When she took off from Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport on June 18, the Electra struggled off a water-soaked runway, barely clearing the trees, and monsoon rains accompanied them over the Bay of Bengal on the way to Rangoon, Burma. She didn’t make it to Rangoon, settling on Akyab, but on June 19, they reached their destination, where they took in the Golden Pagoda, taking off the next day for Singapore. Word awaited her that mechanics would be on hand to overhaul her plane at Bandoeng, Java, which she made on the last day of her third week out. Her landing was an unsteady one, however, and she undoubtedly was suffering from what Paul Mantz later described as “extreme pilot fatigue.”

She had, after all, flown in 135 hours an amazing twenty thousand miles. She had slept in unfamiliar, sometimes primitive, even bizarre, surroundings; she had eaten little, slept less, and suffered from heat exhaustion, diarrhea, and nausea.

Three days of scheduled repairs for the Electra turned into six, and it wasn’t until June 27 — suddenly behind schedule, playing hell with G. P. Putnam’s plans to have her back by the Fourth of July for some grand press attention — that she and Noonan landed at Koepang on Timor Island, having given up on reaching Port Darwin, Australia, before nightfall. High on a cliff, Amy and Noonan and some villagers staked down the Electra on the grass-covered field, bordered by a stone wall designed to keep out wild pigs. She rose at 4:00 A.M., hoping to reach Lae, but was forced by headwinds to settle for Port Darwin, where she set down at 10:00 A.M. Some minor repairs were made, and — after a seven-hour-and-forty-three-minute and twelve-hundred-mile journey — the Electra reached Lae, Papua New Guinea, on June 29.

Weather and instrument problems delayed takeoff till Friday, July 2, when at 10:22 A.M., the Electra — carrying more than one thousand gallons of fuel, as well as Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan — wheeled lumberingly down a crude dirt runway a mere one thousand feet long. A 2,556-mile flight lay ahead, with navigator Noonan responsible for pinpointing tiny Howland Island somewhere in the mid-Pacific.

At the end of the runway was a cliff, a dropoff into Huon Gulf, and — providing spectators with a literal cliff-hanger — the Electra’s wheels stayed on the dirt runway until the final fifty yards, her propellers churning up puffs of red dust. No wind to help liftoff on this hot, clear morning. Spectators said it was as if the plane had jumped into the ocean, committing suicide; and indeed it did seem to fall off the runway, dropping behind the edge of the cliff.

When it reappeared, the Electra seemed to ride the gulf, no more than five or six feet above the surface, props throwing spray. It took a long time, the spectators said, for that plane to finally rise from the ocean’s surface into the sky, but at last it did. And on this clear morning, the Electra stayed visible for a long, long time.

Then, finally, it disappeared.

For the first seven hours of her flight, Amy stayed in contact with a radioman on Lae. On course, 750 miles out, still clearly heard, she was advised to maintain the same radio frequency until further notice. But that was the last she was heard on Lae.

The U.S.S. frigate Ontario, midway between Lae and Howland in the Pacific, waited to provide navigation and weather updates; the Electra should have passed over the ship where three sailors kept watch and a radio operator stood by. No sign of her. Of course, the good weather had turned bad after midnight, a nasty squall kicking in and holding on till dawn. This might have slowed Amy down and/or caused her to use up a considerable amount of fuel, outmaneuvering the storm, and unintentionally escaping the Ontario’s sight.

The Coast Guard cutter Itasca lay anchored just off Howland Island, assigned to help Amelia Earhart with radio direction signals, voice communication, and surface smoke. But starting at midnight, Itasca’s radio room had sent weather reports on the hour and half-hour, and Amy had not acknowledged any of them.

Then at 2:45 A.M., the chief radioman — with two wire service reporters, eavesdropping at the off-limits radio room doorway — thought he recognized her voice; so did the reporters, and at 3:45 they heard her again, more clearly now, saying, “Earhart. Overcast. Will listen on 3105 kilocycles on hour and half-hour.” So at 4:00 A.M., the radio operator called on 3105, asking, “What is your position? When do you expect to arrive Howland? Please acknowledge.”

But she didn’t, though at 4:53 A.M., as the operator was issuing a weather update on 3105, Amy interrupted with a faint, muffled, garbled message, with only “partly cloudy” discernible amidst static.

Fifteen minutes before she was due at Howland, at 6:14 A.M., Amy’s voice could be heard saying: “Want bearing on 3105 kilocycles on hour. Will whistle in microphone.” But her whistle got lost in the harmonic whines of Pacific radio reception at dawn, and the operator couldn’t get a fix on her.

At 7:42 Amy’s voice, stronger, said, “We must be on you but cannot see you... gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. Flying at altitude one thousand feet.” A minute later, interrupting Itasca’s frantic transmissions, Amy’s voice, louder yet, chimed: “Earhart calling Itasca. We are circling but cannot hear you...”

The radio operator on the Itasca sent messages by voice and key and listened on every frequency that Amy might use. Her final transmission, at 8:44, was shrill and frightened: “We are on the line of position 156–137. Will repeat message. We will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. Listening on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.”

With no frame of reference, her “position 156–137” and “running north and south” were meaningless. Until 10:00 A.M., the radio operator continued trying to make contact.

At 10:15 A.M., the commander of the Itasca ordered full steam, beginning a desperate search at sea, soon to be joined by the minesweeper Swan, the battleship Colorado, the aircraft carrier Lexington, and four destroyers in a sweeping mass rescue effort the likes of which had never before been expended on a single missing aircraft.

Amelia Earhart was back in the headlines.

Chapter 9

I was drawn into the matter of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance well before she got around to disappearing.

Midafternoon on Friday, May 21, in my office, in my swivel chair with my back to the uninspiring view of the El and Van Buren Street, a warm, barely discernible breeze drifting in the open window, I sat hunkered with a fountain pen over a stack of retail credit check reports, when the phone rang.

“A-1,” I said, over the street noise.

“Nate Heller? Paul Mantz.”

Even in those four words, I could tell he was worked up in some sort of lather; and since our only common ground was Amy, that got my attention. I shut the window to hear better, though the connection was remarkably good for long distance.

“Well hello, Paul... is everything all right with our girl’s round-the-world venture?”

“No,” he said flatly. “It’s gone seriously to shit. She’s taken off.”

I sat forward. “Isn’t that what pilots do?”

Bitterness edged his voice: “She took off on ‘shakedown flight’ of the Electra, she told reporters, but really she’s headed to Miami. She’s on her way.”

“Where are you, Burbank?”

An El train was rumbling by and I had to work my voice up.

“No, no, I’m in your back yard... St. Louis. Down here with Tex Rankin, we got an air meet at Lambert Field. Flyin’ competition aerobatics.”

“I thought you were working full-time as Amelia’s technical advisor.”

“So did I. February, I put all my motion picture flying on hold to give myself over to this cockeyed world flight. But when this air meet came up, Amelia and Gippy encouraged me to take a little time off and go.”

“Are you saying they double-crossed you? She sneaked off on her big flight while her top advisor was out of town? Why the hell would she do that?”

“I think it’s Putnam’s doing. Listen... this thing stinks to high heaven. We got to talk.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“...You want a job?”

“Usually. What do you have in mind?”

“You free this weekend?”

“I’m never free... it’s going to cost you twenty-five bucks a day.” Since G. P. and Amy were paying Mantz $100 a day, I figured he could afford it. Besides, I’d have to cancel my date Saturday night with Fritzie Bey after her last show at the Koo Koo Club.

“I’ll pay you for two days,” he said, “whether you take the job or not. I’m flyin’ the air meet all day tomorrow, but nothin’ on Sunday, and we’re not headin’ home till Monday.”

“You want to come to me, or should I come to you?”

“You come to me... We can meet at Sportsman’s Park, Sunday afternoon — playin’ craps the other night, I won a pair of box seats for the Cardinals and Giants, should be a hell of a game. Dean and Hubbell on the mound.”

That might be worth the trip alone. Baseball wasn’t my first love — boxing was my sport, growing up on the West Side with Barney Ross like I did — but, after all, Dizzy Dean and Carl Hubbell were to the diamond what Joe Louis and Max Schmeling were to the ring.

“You take the train down here tomorrow,” Mantz continued, “and I’ll reimburse you. I’ll have ya booked into the Coronado Hotel.”

That was where Amy and I had stayed on the lecture tour; where I gave her that first neck rub...

“Is that where you’re staying?” I asked him.

“No! I’m at a motel out by the airport. I don’t want us to hook up till the game.”

“Why the cloak-and-dagger routine, Paul?”

“It’s just better that way. Safer.”

“Safer?”

“I’ll leave your ticket for the game at the Coronado front desk. You in?”

“I’m in,” I said, not knowing why, unless it was my love for Amy, or maybe my love for $25 a day with a Cards-Giants game tossed in.

Sunday afternoon in St. Louis, baseball fanatics from all over the Mississippi Valley squeezed into Sportsman’s Park, nearly thirty thousand of them bulging the stands. Many of them had driven all night to see Dizzy Dean try to stop master of the screwball “King” Carl Hubbell’s winning streak, which stood at twenty-one straight; here sat an Arkansas mule trader, there an Oklahoma dry goods salesman next to a WPA foreman from Tennessee, sitting in front of a country farm agent from Kansas, men in straw hats drinking beer, women in their Sunday best fanning themselves with programs, as the annual heat wave was getting a nice early start. Despite the heat, and the anticipation, the crowd wasn’t surly, laughing and applauding the pregame horse and bicycle exhibition and a drum and bugle corps show. The sky was blue, the clouds white and fleecy, and there was just enough of a breeze to flutter the flag above the billboard ads of the outfield fences.

Perched in a box seat along the first base line, I sported a straw fedora, light blue shantung sportshirt and white duck slacks, doing my best not to get mustard from my hot dog on the latter. No sign of Mantz; even with the game delayed half an hour to jam in all these fans, Amelia Earhart’s technical advisor did not get the pleasure of seeing the boyishly handsome, Li’l Abner-like Dizzy Dean stride cockily to the mound, flashing his big innocent smile to the bleachers, a faded tattered sweatshirt under the blouse of his red-trimmed white uniform.

His first pitch was a fastball that sent the Giants’ lead-off batter, Dick Bartell, to the ground. The crowd ate that up, and the umpire did not complain, and for the rest of the inning Dean, master of the beanball, behaved himself. In the second inning, with Hubbell on the mound, Joe Medwick had just knocked a high curveball into the left field bleachers for a 1–0 lead for the Cards. I was on my feet with the rest of the crowd, cheering (a somewhat different response from yours truly than if the Cards had knocked a Cubs ball into the Wrigley Field stands) when I realized Mantz was standing beside me.

We shook hands and, with the rest of the crowd, sat down. As usual, he had a dapper look, a light yellow shirt with its sleeves rolled up and collar open and crisply pleated doeskin slacks. But his usual cocky expression was absent, the somewhat pointed features of his face set in a pale blank mask, his mouth a straight line under the straight line of his pencil mustache.

With no greeting, no preamble of any sort, he started in: “I just got hold of that bastard Gippy, in New Orleans.”

“What’s he doing in New Orleans?”

We kept our voices down and only occasionally were shushed by those who were there to see the game.

“That’s where he and his wife spent the night,” Mantz said with a humorless smirk. “Today she’s off to Miami and from there...”

“Sky’s the limit,” I said. “So — did G. P. have an explanation for the sneak departure?”

On the mound the tattered sleeve of the right arm of Dean’s sweatshirt hung to his thumb, and when he whipped his arm forward to release the ball, the loose cloth snapped in the wind like a cat o’ nine tails.

“None,” Mantz said. “He just claimed it was Amelia’s decision and let it go at that. Jesus, Heller, the repaired Electra was only delivered just last Thursday.”

“The day before she took off?”

“Yes! Just three days ago! Hell... She’d had no flying time in it whatsoever. And she knew damn well I was leaving — and after she and I talked about how we’d spend a week, at least, in preflight preparations, and test flights!”

“What was left to do?”

His eyes saucered. “What the hell wasn’t? I needed to check her fuel consumption levels — I worked out a table of throttle settings I needed to go over with her — and I had a list of optimum power settings for each leg. Shit, now she’s flying by sheer guesswork!”

Dean was loping down off the mound with a cocky, tobacco-chewing grin; another perfect inning.

“She has radio equipment, doesn’t she?”

Mantz lifted his eyes to the heavens. “I didn’t get a chance to check that out, either, and give her proper instruction. Hell, man, we never covered actual operation of the radio gear — you know, little things like taking a bearing with a direction finder, or how about just contacting a damn radio station?”

“Well, you must have showed her the ropes on the radio gear before the first attempt,” I said.

“No,” he admitted with a shrug. “Remember, she had a co-pilot, Manning, along that time, and he knew his stuff, where the radio was concerned.”

Left-hander Hubbell had just struck out Pepper Martin, to the displeasure of the crowd.

“Are you saying she went off completely unprepared?”

He shook his head, no. “When we flew that first Oakland to Honolulu leg, before the Luke Field crackup, she showed real improvement. Held to her magnetic compass headings within a reasonable leeway, wandering only a degree or two off course, then doubled her error in the other direction, getting back on track.”

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.

“That’s where Howland Island comes in,” Mantz said. “And to answer your question, Howland Island is a desolate dab of nothing in the middle of nowhere, half a mile wide and one mile and a half long, covered with seagull shit.”

“Just what is Franklin Roosevelt’s interest in a bird-shit repository?”

He threw a hand in the air, rolled his eyes. “Hell, I don’t know the politics, or the military ramifications, not really. But Howland and a couple other little islands are just about the only land between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands.”

“So what?”

“The Marshall Islands belong to the Japanese. There’s talk of the Japs and military expansion in the Pacific. This is all over my head, Heller, but even for somebody who doesn’t read anything but the funny pages, it’s not hard to figure: Uncle Sam musta needed an excuse to build a runway on Howland.”

“And Amelia was it.”

Down on the field was a flurry of play, and the crowd groaned in agony. Runs on hits by Lou Chiozza and Joe Moore had the score Giants 3, Cards 1.

Mantz said, “I heard G. P. say the government shelled out over three hundred grand, sending the Coast Guard dragging five-ton tractors over reefs and shoals... just as a courtesy to this famous civilian aviatrix, to aid her on her world flight.”

I had to smile at what seemed like outrageous string-pulling and manipulation of the government on G. P.’s part. “That doesn’t sound like a sellout to me, Paul. Sounds like you scratch my back, I scratch your back.”

“It didn’t bother me, either, at the time. G. P. wasn’t even that secretive about it. Oh, he’d say, ‘Now this is confidential,’ but he got a kick out of telling how he’d conned the taxpayers into paying for Amelia’s landing strip.”

Hubbell was down there striking Cards out so quickly, it was hard to keep track.

“So,” I asked, “why does it bother you now?”

Mantz’s eyes narrowed. “This change of direction in flight plan — the first try was east to west; but now, all of a sudden, it’s west to east.”

“Yeah — Amelia told me it had to do with ‘changing weather conditions.’”

He smirked and shook his head. “That’s the story G. P.’s handing the press — ‘a seasonal change in wind patterns.’ It’s baloney — hardly any ‘seasonal change’ happens in weather along the Equator, and zero change in wind direction. Prevailing wind’s always east to west, the opposite of wind in the northern and southern hemispheres... Hell, that’s why she chose flying east to west, in the first place!”

I was barely following him. “I don’t know beans about flying, but it seems to me, bucking the prevailing wind is stupid.”

“That’s as good a word for it as any. And switching the flight plans to west to east meant everything from the previous attempt had to be scrapped — creating all kinds of problems, adding huge expense in a situation where scrimping would seem mandatory.”

“What kind of added expense and extra problems?”

“Fuel, oil, spare parts, and personnel, in place for the east-west flight, had to be moved — for example, a mechanic dispatched from London to Karachi had to be assigned to somewhere else, Rangoon maybe, or Singapore. Credentials had to be reacquired, charts replotted, creating hours of work for engineers and mechanics at Lockheed.”

“Well, what do you make of that?”

Dizzy Dean was back on the mound.

“I’m not sure. I never got a straight answer from either Gippy or Amelia on the reason for reversing the direction of the flight. The only way I can figure it is, it’s got to be a directive from the same government quarters that funded the second try.”

“Is that where the money came from? Uncle Sam?”

Dean hurled a fastball (what the papers called his fireball) at Lou Chiozza, or to be more exact, at Chiozza’s head. Narrowly missing a beanball was a disconcerting experience, and Chiozza picked himself up from the dust, chastened.

“Well,” Mantz said, “Gippy and Amelia sure as hell didn’t come up with the dough, at least not all of it, not nearly. And listen, from the start, the military’s been on this like ants at a picnic. You don’t fly across the Pacific — particularly not when part of the plan is to land on a flyspeck like Howland Island — without the cooperation of Navy tenders, seaplanes, and personnel.”

“You said it yourself — Amelia has the President and First Lady in her pocket. She could pull that off.”

Chiozza struck out.

“Heller, U.S. naval policy is that no nonmilitary flights get any assistance, whatsoever, with the exception of emergency aid. Every pilot in America knows that. Listen, Manning was a Navy captain, and Noonan is a lieutenant commander in the naval reserve, for Pete’s sake.”

“That’s not surprising, is it? The military is where pilots get trained, for the most part.”

Dean hurled his fireball at Jimmy Ripple’s head. The crowd roared in delighted approval; another Dizzy Dean beanball show was under way!

“Sure most pilots get their training in the military,” Mantz said, “but does that explain why Amelia was driven around in a naval staff car? Or why we were given carte blanche at Luke Field in Honolulu, an Army/Navy airfield? Heller, Army Air Corps personnel dismantled the Electra in Honolulu and crated it for shipping back to Lockheed in Burbank, and we used a Navy hangar at Oakland Airport.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

His face was clenched with urgency. “Come back to California with me. I’ll point you in the direction of some other people who, like me, were part of the inner circle and then got closed out, suddenly. You need to do some snooping around both Burbank and Oakland—”

“Whoa. I don’t want this job, Paul.”

Jimmy Ripple struck out.

“Why not?”

“If the government’s in on this, if this is a military matter, if Amy’s agreed to... to, what? Participate in some espionage mission of some kind? Then that’s their business, and hers.”

Mel Ott stepped up to bat, waiting for his fireball.

“But I don’t think she even knows it’s a government effort,” Mantz said. “Or at least she doesn’t realize to what extent.”

Dean hurled the ball at Ott’s head, Ott jumped out of the way, cursing. The umpire said nothing, did nothing.

“I think this is all Gippy’s doing,” Mantz went on bitterly. “I mean, Christ, Heller, you know Amelia! You’ve heard her speak, you were her bodyguard on that lecture series!”

“What’s your point?”

“She’s a goddamn pacifist, for cryin’ out loud! She’s not gonna willingly cooperate with the military.”

Ott struck out.

“People make all kinds of deals with the devil,” I said, “if they want something bad enough. And I know how bad she wanted this flight.”

“I tell ya, if you can come up with proof that Gippy sold her out, I can get word to her, early in the flight.”

Hubbell was back on the mound. No beanballs for him. He just played his game.

“And what,” I said, with a single dry laugh, “she’ll turn around and come home? Do you always fly without a parachute, Mantz? Do you always land on your head?”

His mouth twitched a grimace. “She needs to know she’s being used.”

“Let’s suppose she is. Being used. Do I want to take on the military or the feds or whoever? No. Let Dizzy Dean argue with the umpire. I don’t need that kind of grief.”

“He’s put her in harm’s way, Heller. If she doesn’t make it home, Gippy murdered her. Or the same as.”

“I don’t think much more of that bastard than you do, Paul. I’m sure he’s made all kinds of, yes, deals with the devil... but I still don’t see him working against Amelia, hoping she’ll crash in the ocean. Not with those stamps on board, anyway.”

“...Somebody’s been following me, Heller.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I had a shadow ever since I got to St. Louis.”

“Who?”

“How should I know?”

“You see the guy?”

“No. I can just feel it.”

Dizzy hurled his fireball at Johnny McCarthy, knocking him down, into the dust. The umpire said and did nothing.

“I’m not doubting you,” I said.

“Why do you think I wanted to meet you in some out-of-the-way place?”

“You mean with thirty thousand people around us?”

“It’s one way to hide.”

He was right. And down on the field, the Giants were charging out of their dugout (except Hubbell, ever a gentleman) and a full-scale brawl between the two teams was under way. Fists and spikes flying. The fans loved it.

“If you’re being followed,” I said, “then maybe the government, the military, is in on this.”

“Yes!”

“In which case, I don’t want to be.”

When the brawl on the field was finally quelled, Dean was allowed to stay in the game (with a fine of fifty dollars) and he promptly, brazenly hurled another beanball at Johnny McCarthy. But the brawl did not resume, and McCarthy soon scored a double to left center and the game wound up Giants 4, Cards 1.

I thanked Mantz for inviting me to the game — it was worth the trip to St. Louis — and told him to forget about the fifty bucks for two days’ work. All he owed me was for my train ticket and meals and a few other minor expenses.

And as the days passed, I read about Amelia’s progress on her flight and all seemed to be going well. I was writing Mantz’s suspicions off to his dislike of Putnam, which was something I could easily understand, and his frustration at being shut out of the inner circle.

On June 4, Mantz — back in Burbank — called me, at my office, and asked, “Weren’t you around the hangar, last year, when Amelia and me had that tiff about her radio antenna?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was — she didn’t want to be bothered with unreeling it by hand or something.”

“It’s two hundred and fifty feet of trailing wire antenna, and yes, it is a pain in the ass to use. That’s partly why I installed a Bendix loop antenna for her. But those Coast Guard boys aren’t up on these latest gadgets, so it was vital she had that antenna along, as a backup, so the Coast Guard cutter near Howland Island can be sure to locate her.”

“From your tone, I take it she left the trailing wire behind.”

“I sent Putnam a telegram, expressing these concerns, before I left St. Louis... His letter of reply arrived in Burbank days after I got home.”

“And?”

“She didn’t leave the wire behind.”

“Good.”

“Right before she left Miami, she had the technicians shorten it and run it along the wings.”

“And that won’t do the trick?”

“Oh, it’ll work out swell — for stringing Christmas tree lights.”

“I’m not coming out there, Mantz.”

“Don’t bother. It’s probably too late, anyway.”

And he hung up.

I thought about what he had said, weeks later, when I heard the news that Amy’s plane was missing, somewhere between Lae and Howland Island, somewhere in the Pacific where a very expensive government rescue mission was in progress.

And that, finally, was the beanball that hit me in the head and prompted me to go back out to Burbank.

Chapter 10

The bar was a South Seas refuge, the patter and spatter of a tropical storm on its tin roof, water streaking and streaming in lazy patterns behind opaque window glass that glowed with a yellow-orange sunset as foliage outside cast curious silhouettes; no music played, no native drums pounded, but there was the not-so-distant caw of strange birds, and earthen bowls in netting hung from the bamboo-beamed ceiling where churned lazily the blades of fans fluffing the blades of palms hovering over tiny teakwood tables with wicker furniture and coconut shell candles, each table situated within this bamboo-and-thatched-hut world so as to provide an island for two.

I had almost missed the place, and not just because I was a stranger in these exotic parts. The pair of inter-locking, wooden-shuttered stucco boxes on North McCadden Place in Hollywood might have been a nondescript apartment complex but for the knee-high bamboo fence and the tropical thicket through which the bamboo-pole entrance peeked.

No sign announced this as one of the most popular joints in town; and it was too early — three-thirty-something in the afternoon — to put out the restraining velvet ropes. Of course, there would be no waiting for such regular customers as Rudy Vallee, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford (whose framed pictures, among many others, peered from a wall through hanging fronds).

Right now, however, the bar was unpopulated, except for a few stuffed parrots, fake monkeys, and a real bartender at his bamboo station. The “rain” on the false roof sprayed down the ceiling from garden hoses, and ran down the glass partitions of the “windows” to feed planters. The offstage bird calls came from a few real live caged parrots and macaws out in the open courtyard, where the palms weren’t phony like the ones whose shadows fell on me; bunches of bananas, here and there among the fake vegetation, were real and could be plucked by a bold customer and eaten, free of charge.

Don the Beachcomber’s was quite a joint, with a Chinese grocery just inside the door, a shop devoted entirely to different types and brands of rum (an idea whose time, I sincerely believed, had come), and a gift shop where fresh flower leis were available. Various meandering rooms presented themselves, with names like Paradise Cove, Cannibal Lounge and Black Hole of Calcutta, which was where I was waiting for my companion. This was the kind of joint where the lighting was so dim, just about any woman would look good, or at least mysterious.

Unfortunately, I was waiting for a man — and an airplane mechanic, at that.

Taking a cab from the train station, I had arrived at the United Airport at Burbank around two-thirty, and wandered into Mantz’s United Air Services hangar only to find no sign of him. It was Tuesday, July 6, a mild breeze doing its best to downplay a blistering heat that defeated my lightweight maize polo shirt and tan slacks, turning them into sticky swaddling cloth. I hadn’t warned Mantz I was coming; the day before, I’d gone back and forth about whether to stick my nose in this, then impulsively threw some things in a suitcase and caught a Sante Fe sleeper at Dearborn Station.

The vast hangar, nicely cool compared to the outside, was littered with small aircraft, among them several biplanes and Amy’s little red Vega, though Mantz’s Honeymoon Express wasn’t among them. A trio of jumpsuited mechanics was at work; one of them was washing down a sleek little racing plane, a Travel Air Mystery S, which I recalled Mantz saying belonged to Pancho Barnes, an aviatrix pal of Amy’s. Mantz allowed a number of fliers to store their planes in his hangar to make his “fleet” look bigger. The other two mechanics were working on the engine of another little red and white Travel Air, a stunt plane of Mantz’s.

I recognized two of the three mechanics — the guy washing the racing plane was Tod Something, and one of the pair working on the Travel Air was Ernie Tisor, Mantz’s chief mechanic. Pushing fifty, wide-shouldered, thick around the middle, hair a salt-and-pepper mop, the good-natured mechanic frowned over at me, at first, then grinned in recognition, then frowned again — it’s a reaction I’d had before.

Rubbing the grease off his hands with a rag, he ambled over to me; his tanned, creased, hound dog’s face was blessed with eyes as blue as the California sky under cliffs of shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

“Nate Heller,” he said. He gave me half a smile; something odd lingered in his expression. “If you’re looking for the boss, he’s on a charter, sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

The half-smile continued and seemed strained. “Well, him and Terry and Clark and Carole went off to La Gulla.”

Gable and Lombard. I was not impressed. I had met actors before. And Terry was Mantz’s new wife, or soon to be, anyway.

I asked, “What’s La Gulla?”

“A dirt strip down the Baja California peninsula.”

“What attraction does that hold?”

Now he gave me a complete smile, not at all strained. “No telephones, no pressure. Rolling hills and mountain quail.”

“Ah.”

“They’ll probably be back tomorrow morning, sometime.” He seemed to be studying me.

“Something on your mind, Ernie?”

“...You come out here ’cause of Miss Earhart?”

I shrugged. “Few weeks ago Paul asked me to get involved and, frankly, I passed.”

“Asked you before she got lost, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“Asked you, ’cause he thought something wasn’t... kosher about this setup.”

“Yeah.”

His eyes narrowed in an otherwise expressionless mask. “And you turned him down, and now she’s lost... and you don’t feel so good about it.”

“I feel lousy about it.”

His mouth flinched, and at last I understood what the look in his eyes meant: they were haunted, those sky-color eyes. “Me too,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder. Then he whispered: “Look, I wanna fill you in on some things... some things I saw.”

“Okay.”

“But not here.”

“Some bar around here we could find a corner in?”

He shook his head, no. “Not around here, either...

I give you the address of a place, think you can find it?”

“I’m a detective, aren’t I? That’s what cab drivers are for.”

“You don’t have wheels? Wait a second...”

He went inside Mantz’s glassed-in office and soon he was handing me some car keys, and a slip of paper with Don the Beachcomber’s address.

Still almost whispering, he asked, “Remember that convertible of Miss Earhart’s?”

“The Terraplane?”

“Right. She keeps it here, leaves it with the boss; it’s kind of a spare car... I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you use it.”

“Thanks.”

“Of course, if the boss thinks I overstepped, he’ll ask for the keys back and that’s that.”

“Sure.”

“You go on and find that address... See you there around four.”

It was ten after four, and I had polished off a plate of chop suey; for California, it was early to eat, but I was still on Chicago time and my last meal on the train had been breakfast. The waitress, a sweet brunette in a lei and sarong, asked if I cared for an after-dinner drink. My choices included a Shark’s Tooth, a Vicious Virgin, and a Cobra’s Fang. I opted for the house specialty, originated here: the Zombie. One ounce each of six kinds of rum blended with “secret ingredients...”

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.”

Out in the courtyard, a parrot asked, “Who’s a fool?”

“Ernie, can you make any sense of it? Why did they change directions?”

Having polished off the first egg roll, he picked up the second and gestured with it. “Well, first of all, think about the Lockheed Electra herself. She’s the ideal plane for a military mission... particularly with those powerful military-issue engines.”

“There are special engines on that plane?”

“...Not the first plane.”

“What do you mean, the ‘first plane’?”

His eyes were hooded and his voice was very soft as he said, “Heller, you may not want to know this. I know I don’t.”

“You know where that woman is, Ernie? She’s either floating on the ocean, or she’s under it.” I glanced around, gestured to the “atmosphere.” “Or maybe she’s on an island somewhere in the South Pacific, only she’s not sitting under a fake palm tree at a varnished teakwood table eating a damn egg roll.”

A macaw cawed.

“Between the crackup at Oahu and the takeoff in May,” Tisor said, “the Electra was over at Lockheed’s overhaul hangar.”

“Which is also in Burbank.”

“Yeah. Next-door neighbors of ours, but we weren’t privy to the repair job. It was kept under wraps.”

“Military guard?”

“Army. But I saw the plane when it was delivered over to our hangar, in fact I was there when Amelia saw it for the first time, and was she teed off! She said, ‘Why did they have to do this? I loved my old plane. Who’s paying for this?’ Hell, all she wanted was some adjustment in front to make it easier to operate the rudder pedals.”

“What did she get, Ernie?”

Now his eyes were wide. “A different fuckin’ plane. Bright and shiny and new, from the nuts and bolts to the tires. You gotta understand about Electras, there’s two basic types, the Model 10 Electra and the Model 12 Electra Junior. The Model 12’s a little smaller, but faster, lighter... This was a Model 12.”

I frowned, leaned forward. “Didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t any reporters comment?”

He grinned and shook his head, no. “The similarities between the two models outnumber the differences, and besides, these’re hand-built planes, no two alike. Lockheed tailors these birds to the specific needs of the customer; every ship’s a hybrid. For example, this Electra had the advanced, constant-speed props of the Model 12, but overall it had the size and outward appearance of the Model 10 — and the bigger engines I started to tell ya about, they probably made the gross weight similar... these were larger engines designed for military use, Pratt and Whitney Wasp Seniors, five-hundred-and-fifty-horse-power jobs. That baby had a greater effective payload than the original bird.”

“You’re saying Lockheed didn’t repair her plane — they gave her a new one.”

“Right.” He chomped on the egg roll, chewed as he talked. “And a new one designed with a different purpose than the first one.”

“A military purpose, you mean.”

He nodded. “That change of flight plan doesn’t make any sense from an aviator’s slant — but it makes all the sense in the world if she was on a military mission.”

“What sort of mission?”

A parrot in the courtyard asked the question again: “Who’s a fool?”

He drew a breath, a deep one, then he leaned into the flickery light of the half-coconut; it turned his face shades of orange and yellow. “I wasn’t over at Lockheed, when this ship was bein’ put together — understand? What I’m gonna tell you now is secondhand, and don’t ask me for the guy’s name. I need your word on that, or I’m through talkin’.”

“You got my word.”

He settled way back in his chair, folded his arms; now his face was in the shadow of a palm blade. “I was askin’ my friend, who’s an airframe technician at Lockheed, about how things was goin’, while the ‘repairs’ were under way? I was wonderin’ what was takin’ so long. Anyway, we were out drinkin’, and he was in his cups...”

“You feed him Zombies, too, Ernie?”

His smile flashed in the darkness. “No. This was boilermakers. And maybe what I’m about to tell you was the boilermakers talkin’, maybe it’s pure bullshit. But I don’t want to get my friend in trouble.”

“Understood.”

“First off, there’s the ping-pong balls.”

“Ping-pong balls.”

“That Electra had ping-pong balls stuffed in every nook and cranny — nowhere they’d get in the way, but where controls go out to wing flaps, in wing spars, and so on.”

“The point being?”

“Added buoyancy, in case they were forced to ditch in the open sea. I heard of that practice before, it’s a little unusual, Dick Merrill did it once, but I just mention that to show you the extremes they was going to.”

“That just sounds like a precaution to me.”

He moved forward a touch, into the light. “Here’s somethin’ my friend told me about that wasn’t no precaution. He said he cut two holes, sixteen to eighteen inches in diameter, to be used for installin’ cameras.”

“Cameras? What kind of cameras?”

“A pair of Fairchild, electrically operated aerial survey cameras that got mounted in the lower aft fuselage bay. Some Navy guys, technicians or engineers or something, installed ’em, and photoflash bombs in the aft.”

I blinked. “Bombs?”

A thick hand waved that off. “They’re not destructive, they just provide light for nighttime aerial photography.”

“More good reason to use a lighter plane.”

“Hey, the Lockheed Electra, either model, can fly high and fast, even without special modifications, like bigger engines. The plane I saw was a long-range reconnaissance aircraft with all the latest gadgets and goodies. With that customized bird, Amelia could climb higher and faster than the first Electra, zip off her official course and return on route without anybody the wiser; she can cruise at speeds up to, hell, two hundred and twenty miles per hour.”

“As compared to what?”

He shrugged, rocked in the wicker chair. “One hundred and forty.”

Alarmed, I said, “Then this elaborate sea search that’s under way, all the rescue projections are based on the wrong aircraft specifications!”

He shrugged again. “Maybe not. After all, the military knows the real specs. But look, this finally makes the west-east flight plan change make sense.”

“How so?”

A shaggy eyebrow rose. “By flying west to east, from Lae to Howland Island, where American military personnel are waiting, the film could be retrieved, the camera equipment removed, and she could head home, to American Hawaii, in a non-spy ship, for a grand welcome.”

I could think of another reason for the west to east change: that Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, so involved right now in searching for Amelia Earhart, would have been posted (and waiting) at Howland Island, tracking Amelia’s progress. Had she taken off from Howland Island, flying east-west, she would have been moving away from the ship, instead of toward it, as she undertook her mission.

Then she would have landed at Lae, a foreign territory, with her plane’s belly filled with film from a spy mission; should something have gone wrong, and the local government confiscated that film, the international repercussions would have been devastating.

“The change of direction does make perfect sense,” I said, “for a clandestine military operation.”

“Polly’s not a fool!” the parrot in the courtyard said.

“I’ve told you everything I know,” he said. “And what the hell you think you can do with it...” He threw his hands up. “...is beyond me.”

“Who else can I talk to?”

His eyes and nostrils flared. “Not my friend at Lockheed!”

I patted the air reassuringly. “I know, I know... I gave you my word. Who else was close to Amelia, and knows something... and thinks what Putnam did to his wife stinks?”

“Maybe you ought to talk to the secretary.”

“What secretary?”

“Margot DeCarrie.” He smiled, as if the mental image of her were a pleasant one. “Nice young kid, idolizes Miss Earhart, and Miss Earhart thought the world of her.”

He was getting his present and past tense mixed up, where Amy was concerned; I knew the feeling.

“How come I never met the girl?”

“She only started with the Putnams when they got the new house, in Toluca Lake, just this year. She’s live-in help. I’m friendly with her. You want me to pave the way?”

“You think she’d cooperate?”

“Living in that house, she coulda seen a lot. I know she’s broke up about Miss Earhart’s disappearance. She’s a wreck. Take it easy on her... don’t scare her... and I think she’ll open up like a flower.”

“I appreciate the help.”

“I’ll make a call... but I should warn ya — that guy Miller may still be there.”

“Who?”

He gestured with an open hand. “I don’t know his first name. It was always just ‘Mr. Miller’... he’s some kind of consultant. My guess is he’s some sort of government intelligence guy. He’s one cold fish. Him and Putnam was thick as thieves.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Tall, six foot one, maybe. Probably forty. Pale, like all the blood got drained out of him. Slim but not skinny — what they call it, lanky, like the actor, Jimmy Stewart?”

“Ever have a run-in with him?”

He shifted in the chair; these wicker things weren’t all that comfortable. “He shooed me out of the hangar, once in a while, if him and Putnam and some of these others, military people, more guys in dark suits, was havin’ a conference or somethin’. He smiles but he never shows his teeth, and his tone is always, ‘fuck you,’ no matter how polite the words... I got a feeling he’s a serious bad apple.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

“Okay. I’ll call Miss DeCarrie. They got a public phone out front.” He pushed the wicker chair back, stood. “Should I set something up for tonight?”

“My dance card is free.”

He ambled off, almost bumping into the waitress, who then hip-swayed over in true Polynesian style, though my guess was she was Jewish. She collected my long tall empty glass and, her voice high-pitched, melodic, asked me, “Another Zombie, sir?”

“You’re a fool!” the parrot said.

Chapter 11

On Valley Spring Lane in Toluca Lake, a few blocks down from where Paul and Myrtle Mantz used to live, stood a similar Spanish-style bungalow, this one with a red tile roof rather than green, and stucco that was off-white rather than yellow, though at dusk the difference was negligible. A wing had been added to this cozy bungalow, however, giving it a one-story sprawl that overflowed onto the adjacent lot, making for a spacious lawn as immaculate as the greens of the golf course nearby. Palm trees provided shade and an oasis atmosphere, enhanced by the occasional cactus and even a century plant. Well-tended but thorny shrubs hugged the house and made me glad that this time I wasn’t heading for the bushes with my Speed Graphic.

It was a little after eight when I rang the bell; a wooden slab of a door opened about a third of the way, enough to give me a good look at an Oriental houseman in Charlie Chan’s white suit and black tie. He might have been thirty, he might have been fifty; whatever his age, he wasn’t terribly impressed by my presence.

“I’m here to see Miss DeCarrie,” I said, then told him my name. “I believe she’s expecting me.”

He nodded, closed the door, and when it opened again, just seconds later, it was like a magic trick: the deadpan Oriental replaced by a beaming young woman.

She was in her early twenties, as tall as Amy only more shapely, in the same sort of casual cowboyish clothes: a plaid shirt, tan cotton slacks, and boots. She had a similar short hairdo, though unlike Amy’s, hers was marcelled and dark brunette; she had a clear-complected, lightly made-up, heart-shaped face and wasn’t as cute as Betty Boop, but damn near.

“Oh, Mr. Heller!” she burbled, as if we were old friends finally reunited, her eyes bright and brown and wide, “how wonderful it is to see you!”

She flung the door open and allowed me to move through the shallow, terra cotta-tiled entryway into a living room, casually tasteful in its modern furnishings, dominated by a fireplace of massive gray stone over which a mirror created an illusion of spaciousness, next to which French doors looked out onto a patio where the shapes of more palm trees and a garden were ghostly through sheer curtains. The stucco walls were fairly bare, though one side wall was taken up by a lovely oil portrait of Amy, in flying jacket, hand on hip, a breeze catching her scarf.

“I guess you’ve guessed I’m Margot,” she said, her voice chirpy, her bee-stung lips forming a big smile; her eyes, however, were laced with red. “I feel like I already know you... A. E. has told me so much about you...”

“Thank you for seeing me,” I said. “Are you sure there’s no problem with your employer?”

“My employer is A. E.,” she said, sticking her chin out proudly. “As for Mr. Putnam, he’s at the San Francisco Coast Guard Station, with Mr. Miller, and isn’t expected till tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.”

She hooked her arm through mine and led me across the living room’s Oriental carpet through an archway into the dining room, off of which a hallway led into the addition to the house. She had a clean fresh smell about her, soap not perfume, I’d bet.

“Ernie said you’re looking into this,” she said, walking me along. “I know it’s what A. E. will want.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but you act like she spoke of me often.”

“Not often. But when she did, it was with great affection.” She paused at a closed door. “Let’s go in here — it’s A. E.’s study. I think she’d like us to do our talking in her presence, so to speak.”

I followed her in and she ushered me to a worn, comfy-looking sofa in a corner of a rather spartan study, under a wall of photos that wasn’t as excessive as Paul Mantz’s office display, but close to it: aviation memories and signed movie star mugs. Double windows looked out onto the patio and a well-tended garden; they were open to let in the dry cool evening breeze that had replaced the sweltering day. A centrally placed card table with a typewriter was a typically informal Amelia Earhart “office,” littered with books and typing paper and yellow pads. A more formal desk, a rolltop, took up one wall, and much of another was swallowed up by a trophy cabinet. Standing bookcases, a pair of file cabinets, and an easy chair made up the rest of the room.

“This looks like it might be Mr. Putnam’s study, as well,” I said, sitting down.

“It is — they shared it, but he hasn’t been using it since... well, since.” Margot closed the door. She wrinkled her nose, chipmunk cute, and said, “We’ll opt for privacy. Joe’s nice, but he’s loyal to Mr. Putnam.”

“Joe’s the houseman?”

“Yes. A wonderful gardener, too. He also does the heavy chores; my mother does the rest.”

“Your mother?”

She settled in next to me — not right next to me, but it was a good thing for her I wasn’t Jack the Ripper, because she was assuming the best about me, not always the safest course for a cute kid like this.

“When my mother got the housekeeper position here — I’m a local girl, well, Glendale local — I just went crazy. I’ve been a fan of A. E.’s since I was twelve! I just adore her — you should see my scrapbooks. Did you know she had scrapbooks, too, when she was a girl? Full of stories about women doing work that was supposed to be a man’s domain? And I’d been writing her fan letters since forever, and do you know, she answered every one?”

“Really?”

“So when Mother got this job, I just had to come around and meet A. E., and she was so wonderful, you just wouldn’t believe, well I guess you would knowing her like you do, but I started coming around and, well, maybe I made a pest of myself, telling her how I was a graduate from the business college over in Van Nuys, dropping all kinds of hints, telling her how terrible it must be to be swamped like she was with so much fan mail and all, and anyway, finally she said, A. E. said, I guess I really could use a Girl Friday at that, and ever since then I’ve been in charge of fan letters, filing, and even the household accounts... I studied more than secretarial skills at business college, I have accountancy capability too you know... and I help out in a lot of other ways, meeting airplanes, showing guests around, and entertaining A. E.’s mother, who just went to stay with her other daughter, A. E.’s sister, Muriel, in West Medford, for a while.”

“Is that right?”

“And you know it’s funny, I don’t really think A. E. feels all that close to her real sister, I mean I think she may kind of resent sending her checks all the time, actually I’m the one sending them lately, ever since A. E. disappeared, though I think Mr. Putnam may put a stop to it, but the thing is, we really did get close, we were more like sisters, I think, sometimes, than she was with her real sister, which is why I know what I know about you.”

“What do you know about me?”

“That you love her, too. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

And then she turned away from me in sudden embarrassment and began bawling like a baby. I gathered her up like she was a hurting child, which maybe she was, and held her to me, let her hug me and bury her face in my chest and cry there. I had to wonder when Margot said she loved Amy, if it was the Toni Lake variety; but my hunch was not. This was about hero worship, not hormones.

As she began to settle down, I fished a clean handkerchief out of my pocket and gave it to her; she thanked me, dried her eyes and moved away a little, sitting with her hands in her lap, clenching the hanky. She looked very small, her face devoid of makeup now, a pale cameo.

“But you don’t love G. P., Margot, do you?”

A little humorless smirk dimpled her cheek. “No. Not hardly. At first I accepted him... I mean, after all, A. E. married him, and she doesn’t make many mistakes.”

“That one was a whopper, though.”

“He’s a terrible man. Egotistical. Selfish. He’s nothing more than a publicity-seeker, with no regard for anyone but himself.”

“You’re right.”

She pressed her hands to her bosom and looked across at the trophy case. “A. E. made me feel so good about myself... She made me feel I could conquer the world.”

Margot had lapsed into the past tense about Amy, too. It was tough not to.

She turned her gaze upon me, and it was so earnest, I wanted to laugh — or cry. She asked, “What can you do about this, Mr. Heller?”

“I figure once I’ve had my arm around a girl, she’s earned the right to use my first name.”

She liked that. “Thanks, Nathan. You’re everything A. E. said you were...”

“Let’s not jump the gun. As for what I can do — I’m not even sure why I came out to California, Margot. It was an impulse.”

I told her about Paul Mantz trying to hire me — weeks ago, while Amy was still on American soil — to look into the funny business surrounding the world flight, and how I turned him down. How I may have missed the chance to head this disaster off before it started.

“Oh dear,” she said, looking at me with tenderness and pity, “you must feel terribly guilty!”

“You really know how to lift a fella’s spirits, Margot... If the Coast Guard and Navy can’t find her in the ocean, I’m not sure what good I can do in Burbank. But I do know I don’t want G. P. getting away with this.”

Her eyes got teary again and her lower lip quivered. “I don’t think he cares if she comes back... I don’t think he wants her to come back...”

“I suspect you’re right. But first things first — I’m still trying to piece together what’s really going on here.”

Her expression turned firm; dabbing the new tears away with my hanky, she asked, “How can I help?”

“Tell me what you’ve seen.” I gestured around us.

“What unusual has happened here at the house?”

She drew air in and then blew it out through a Clara Bow pucker. “Ooooh, so many things... One of the things that struck me was all the military people parading through.”

“What kind of military people?” I sat sideways on the couch, to look right at her. “You mean, like the Navy chauffeur who drove her around in a staff car, sometimes?”

“Well that, but these were very high-ranking officers, Army and Navy both. They’d come over and meet with G. P. and A. E., or sometimes with just G. P.”

“You remember any names, Margot?”

She nodded. “There was a General Arnold, and a General Westover...”

Generals were dropping by?

“This was after Mr. Miller moved in,” she elaborated.

Then she shuddered. “Such a cold man.”

“In what way? Who the hell is he?”

“He’s with the government, too — the Bureau of Air Commerce. I think A. E. put up with him only because she’s so friendly with his superior, Mr. Vidal. Mr. Miller is the ‘coordinator’ of the flight.”

“What does that mean?”

“Who knows? His first name is William, and I’ve never heard him called Bill; G. P. just calls him Miller. Most everybody seems to, although I wasn’t raised that way. I call him Mr. Miller. And other things, to myself.”

“When did he move in here?”

“In April, after the last of the meetings with Mr. Baruch. But he’s not here all the time, he has an office in Oakland—”

“Wait, wait, what meetings with who?”

“There were three meetings between G. P. and A. E. and Mr. Baruch starting in, uh, late March I believe, with the last one in early April.”

“This is Bernard Baruch we’re talking about.”

“Yes. He’s a gentleman in his sixties, early sixties, I would say; somewhat heavy-set but not fat. Beautiful white hair, glasses that sit on his nose. A nice man. Soft spoken, well spoken. Do you know him?”

“Not personally.”

Maybe they didn’t get around to current events at that business college in Van Nuys, but I knew who Bernard Baruch was, even if my newspaper of choice was The Racing News. Self-made Wall Street millionaire, philanthropist, so-called “park bench sage”... and advisor to FDR.

That was Bernard Baruch.

“Margot, did you take notes at these meetings?”

“No, but I was around... I overheard some things, things I probably shouldn’t have. I know A. E. was upset after the meetings, though it was all very... civilized. I don’t think she ever agreed to do what he wanted... or maybe I should say, what the President wanted.”

“What was that?”

She frowned; worry, not anger. “I think he asked her to volunteer to help the government... What would an ‘intelligence operation’ be exactly?”

“That would be spying, Margot. He must have asked her to use her plane to spy.”

Her eyes widened, in a blend of disbelief and fear. “I can’t believe she’d do that!”

Apparently I had put into words something that she had barely dared think.

Then she released her grip, her eyes hooded now, and the fingers of one hand rose to touch her lips, lightly, and when she spoke, her usual rush of verbiage slowed, as if each word had to work its way around the fingers poised protectively there.

“And, yet,” she said, “it does make sense, with those generals coming around, later. You see, I heard Mr. Baruch say that the military would... what was his language exactly? ‘Assist’ is only part of it, I believe the words were... ‘underwrite her enterprise.’ Does that mean...?”

“It means Baruch offered government financial backing to remount the world flight.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I can tell you this, I was the one who handled the accounting on the first try, so I know what kind of money was spent, and on what. This time, the second time around, it was very different — no bills came in at all. Not for aircraft expenses or repairs or hangar storage or even fuel. Nothing.”

I frowned. “Was Amelia aware of this?”

“Yes... She was really very blue, which was a big contrast from before, when she was flying to Honolulu. She was so enthusiastic, and lighthearted and laughing.”

Amy had always said she flew for the “fun of it.”

I asked, “Did you ever ask her why the military was getting so heavily involved?”

“Yes. Sort of... I didn’t put it that way exactly, though. I think I was more concerned about the people who’d been close to her who were being driven away, and shut out, her friends, people she trusted.”

“What did she say?”

“She said to me, ‘We can’t always do what we wish.’”

A hell of a statement from a woman who had made a lifelong habit of doing exactly what she wanted.

“Who was getting ‘shut out,’ Margot? Obviously, you kept your job.”

“Oh, there’s a lot of examples. There’s that boy up in Oakland who she took under her wing — Bobby Myers? I know she felt bad about that, but I heard Mr. Putnam tell her he was a ‘snot-nose snoop,’ and to stay away from him.”

“Who is this kid? How old is he?”

“Thirteen, fourteen, maybe? He’s one of the amateur radio buffs that were going to monitor the flight. A man named McMenamy set up a whole network of radio operators, partly to help Mr. Putnam with material for progress-report press releases. He got shut out, too.”

“Who, did? The kid, you mean?”

“Both of them.”

I reached behind me in my hip pocket and pulled out the little notebook I kept tucked next to my wallet; I removed the nubby pencil stuck in the spiral. “What was this guy’s name again?”

“Walter McMenamy. He lives in L.A., some kind of radio expert, works for Mr. Mantz, sometimes.”

I wrote that down. “And the kid’s name?”

“Bobby Myers. I heard Mr. Miller tell Mr. Putnam that he had to ‘pull the plug on those ham radio morons.’ I’ve never heard such cruel things as that man says.”

For hanging out in a house where presidential envoys and generals came constantly calling, this kid led a sheltered life.

She continued: “The list is really long, Nathan, of aides and advisors and volunteers, tossed out with the trash.” A thought flashed through her eyes. “Like Albert Bresniak, the photographer.”

“Spell that name.”

She did, and I wrote it down, and she explained, “Mr. Putnam picked him, personally, to be A. E.’s ‘official photographer.’ Very young, maybe twenty-two, very talented boy. He was supposed to go with her on at least some of the flight.”

That made sense. Putnam had a deal with the Hearst papers — they had been publishing excerpts from Amy’s flight journal that had been cabled and phoned home — and a photographer along on several legs of the flight would mean some nice exclusive photos.

“Was this photographer, Bresniak, scheduled to go on the first attempt?”

“No. Mr. Putnam approached him in April or May, I think. Albert was ready to go along clear up till a few days before A. E. took off. Mr. Miller was furious when he found out about Albert being invited. I heard him really bawling out Mr. Putnam.”

“And then Albert was suddenly part of the legion of the unwanted.”

“Yes... Nate. There’s something else I need to tell you. It’s quite personal, but I think it’s something you should know.”

“Shoot.”

A knock came at the door, but before either of us could respond to it, Joe — the houseman — leaned in and said, “Miss DeCarrie — Mr. Putnam and Mr. Miller pull in drive.”

“But they’re not due yet!”

“Mr. Putnam pull in drive. Mr. Miller with him.”

And then Joe shut the door and was gone.

“Criminey,” she said. “He wasn’t supposed to come back till tomorrow...”

“We got nothing to hide,” I said. “I’m not going out a window or anything.”

I walked her into the living room, where Putnam — impeccable as always in a double-breasted gray worsted and black and white tie — was just coming in, saying, “What do you expect me to do, Miller? Indulge in public sobbing?”

And the man coming in behind him said, “All I’m saying is, you came off cold-blooded to that reporter. ‘I have confidence in my wife’s ability to handle any situation...’”

Putnam stopped his companion’s conversation with the raised hand of a traffic cop, nodding toward Margot and me.

“We have company,” Putnam said. Behind the rimless glasses, his cold dark eyes were fixed on me in that unblinking gaze of his.

William Miller — looking like an undertaker in a black worsted suit and a black silk tie whose small red polka dots were like drops of blood — formed an immediate smile, a small noncommittal smile developed no doubt as a reflex. He was fairly tall, medium build, his hair prematurely gray and receding on an egg-shaped skull, complexion ashen, eyes dark and intense under dark ridges of eyebrow, his mouth rather full, even sensual, the only hint of emotional content in an otherwise cold countenance.

“Who have we here?” he asked, in a pleasant, even soothing baritone.

“Heller?” Putnam said, answering Miller as if he weren’t sure he was really recognizing me.

“G. P.,” I said. “You weren’t expected.”

“Neither were you,” he said. “What the hell’s this about?”

We were standing near the entryway, facing each other awkwardly like gunfighters who forgot their six-shooters.

“I’m concerned about your wife,” I said. “I came out here to offer my sympathy and help.”

“Mr. Heller called,” Margot said, with a smile as tellingly strained as Miller’s was ominously casual, “and I invited him over. I hope I wasn’t out of line, Mr. Putnam, but I knew he was a friend of A. E.’s...”

“Why don’t you leave us alone, Margot,” Putnam said. “Go to your quarters.”

She nodded and said, “Yes sir,” flashed me a pained smile, and was gone.

“You want something to drink?” Putnam asked me. He was slipping out of his suitcoat.

“Why not?” The Zombie had pretty well worn off.

“Joe!” he called, and the houseman appeared and took Putnam’s jacket. Miller made no move to remove his, nor did he move to take a seat; just stood there with that small meaningless smile, his arms folded, his weight evenly distributed on both Florsheimed feet.

“Bring Mr. Heller a rum and Coke,” Putnam told Joe. “Manhattans for Mr. Miller and myself.”

Miller gestured, no. “I’ll pass, tonight, thank you, Joe.”

Joe nodded, disappeared, while Putnam loosened his tie, unbuttoned his cuffs, rolled up his sleeves, saying, “Nate Heller, this is William T. Miller. He’s with, uh...”

He left it for Miller to fill in, which he did: “Bureau of Air Commerce.”

We shook hands; his grip was cool, also firm but he didn’t show off.

“Mr. Heller runs the A-1 Detective Agency in Chicago,” Putnam told Miller. “He did some work for me, a year or two ago. Accompanied A. E. on one of her lecture swings.”

The tiny smile settled in one cheek; like Putnam, Miller rarely blinked. With these two standing staring at me, it was like having a conversation with a wax museum exhibit. “You’re a little off your beat, aren’t you, Mr. Heller?”

“Every time I leave Chicago,” I said pleasantly, “somebody says that. Do you think I should be staying in my own back yard?”

Miller’s shrug was barely perceptible. “There’s something to be said for home team advantage.”

A phone rang in the nearby hallway, and Putnam called, “I’ll get that, Joe! Just concentrate on those drinks!”

Miller and I stood facing each other, and I worked at giving him just as unconvincing a smile as he was giving me, while Putnam dealt with the phone call. We didn’t speak; we eavesdropped — not that we had any choice. Putnam was on a long-distance call and was working his voice up to an even more obnoxious level than usual.

“Well, Beatrice,” he was saying, “I know what you’re going through. Who could know better than I?... Yes... Yes, I know, dear...”

I asked Miller, “Do you know who he’s talking to?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

He thought about whether or not to answer, then did: “Fred Noonan’s wife.”

“Beatrice,” Putnam was saying, “I have a hunch they’re sitting somewhere on a coral island, just waiting for a ride home — Fred’s probably out sitting on a rock right now, catching their dinner with those fishing lines they had aboard. There’ll be driftwood to make a fire, and... Bea, please... Bea... For Christ’s sake, Bea! Look, one of two things has happened. Either they were killed outright — and that comes to all of us sooner or later — or they’re alive and’ll be picked up... Keep your chin up, Bea... Bea?”

Miller’s smile was gone; faint disgust had replaced it.

Putnam came strutting back, shrugging, saying, “She hung up on me! What the hell’s wrong with that woman? What does she want from me?”

“This is what I was talking about,” Miller snapped.

“What is?”

But Miller said nothing, and Joe came in carrying a little tray on his palm with my rum and Coke and Putnam’s Manhattan on it.

“Let’s sit out on the patio, shall we, gentlemen?” Putnam asked, plucking his drink off the tray.

I took mine also, sipped it.

“Actually, G. P.,” Miller said, glancing at his watch, “it’s been a long day... so if you’ll excuse me.”

“Nice meeting you,” I said.

Miller said, “Pleasure, Mr. Heller,” shooting me the meaningless smile one last time, and slipped past us into the dining room, turning toward the hallway to the new wing.

Soon Putnam and I were seated on the patio in white basket-weave metal lawn chairs, a round, white-metal, glass-topped table between us. Stretched out before us was a beautifully landscaped back yard washed ivory by moonlight, with stone paths, a trellis with climbing flowers, a fountain, potted agaves, and a flourishing vegetable garden.

But Putnam, leaned back in his chair, was glancing skyward. “It’s comforting to know she’s under this same sky,” he said, and sipped his Manhattan.

I gave the star-scattered sky a look, thinking, What a crock, and said, “I’m sure it is.”

“Who are you working for, Nate?” he asked, still looking at the sky. The moon was reflected in the lenses of his rimless glasses like Daddy Warbucks’s eyeballs.

“Nobody.”

“’Fess up. Who hired you? Mantz?”

Maybe Mantz had been right: maybe G. P. did have him followed in St. Louis.

I said, “I came out here because of Amelia.”

Now he looked at me, and half a smile formed; he raised his Manhattan glass and sipped. “Nate Heller? Working gratis? Has hell frozen over?”

“Does everybody have to have an angle?”

His expression turned astounded and amused. He gestured with the Manhattan glass almost as if he were toasting me. “You didn’t come here thinking I’d hire you? What could you do for A. E. that the Army and Navy can’t?”

Well within earshot were the open double windows of the study where Margot and I had spoken; I wondered if Miller was sitting in that darkened room right now, listening in, like a good little spy.

“Yeah, the Army and Navy,” I said, and took a swig of rum and Coke. “I notice you got them doing your dirty work... or is it the other way around?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Interesting houseguest you got there. He looks like John Wilkes Booth on the way to the theater.”

He leaned forward. “Why were you bothering my secretary?”

“I thought she was your wife’s secretary.”

“What has that stupid girl told you?”

I sipped my drink, shook my head, grinned. “How did you manage it, G. P.? How did you get Amelia to go along with you on this one? Or did you keep her in the dark about a lot of it? Of course, you had Noonan aboard, and he was Naval Reserve, and ex-Pan Am, the spy airline; was Noonan the real pilot of this mission?”

He smirked dismissively and sat back, sipped the Manhattan again. “What kind of gibberish are you talking?”

“I mean, Amelia’s a pacifist. You’d think the last thing she’d do is the military’s bidding. On the other hand, if her wonderful friends in the White House leaned on her, maybe...”

He was staring into his back yard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about you funding this flight by selling your wife out to the government. I’ve barely waded into this thing and already I’m drowning in the government’s involvement, from airstrips on Howland Island to cameras in the belly of that second Electra Uncle Sam bought her.”

That last one startled him. He gestured with the hand that held the Manhattan glass. “If what you’re saying is true... and I’m not saying it is, I’m not saying it isn’t... that would only make my wife a patriot.”

“Extra, extra, read all about it: we’re not at war right now. I seem to recall, in the campaign, FDR getting lambasted with a ‘warmonger’ label, for wanting to beef up the Army and Navy.”

“I seem to recall him winning the election, anyway.” G. P.’s face was expressionless now; his voice empty. “Please leave.”

“Maybe I do have an angle, at that. Like you said, G. P. Maybe there is a way for me to make a buck out of this.” I leaned across the table. “Can you imagine the kind of dough the Tribune would pay for a scoop like this? Colonel McCormick would dearly love to drag FDR’s aristocratic ass through the mud. I think they’ll like exposing you, too — we can start with you hiring that guy to put the acid on those rudder cables.”

His face remained impassive, but the hand holding the Manhattan glass trembled.

I snorted a laugh. “You know, it must have killed you, when you had to put a lid on so much of your publicity effort, once the military lowered its veil of secrecy. Here you trade your wife’s good name and maybe her life away, to fund the biggest flight of both your careers — and you can’t even properly exploit it! It’s a pisser.”

The glass snapped in his hand. He dropped the shards to the tabletop; his palm was cut, bloody. But he ignored it and said, “I would never risk my wife’s life. I love her. How can you accuse me of these atrocities? Do you actually imagine I don’t love her?”

Those unblinking eyes had filled with tears; maybe it was his cut hand.

“That’s the oldest murder motive in the book,” I said. “A woman you love that doesn’t love you, anymore... Better bandage that up.”

“You go to hell.”

“Probably. But I got a hunch I’ll be running into some familiar faces.”

I rose, and didn’t go back in the house, just walked around it, skirting a fancy Cord roadster in the driveway, and walked half a block down to where I had parked the Terraplane. For all my indignation, I was driving an automobile that belonged to Putnam, and even though I’d been told he wouldn’t be around, I had rightly figured it might make sense to leave it out of sight.

As I was starting up the car, the rider’s side door opened and Margot slipped in beside me, wearing a red silk kimono, belted tight around her. She was out of breath.

“Oh, thank God, I wanted to catch you before you left,” she panted. “What did you and Mr. Putnam talk about?”

“Not the weather. Margot, you better get back in there before he notices you’re gone. You may get fired for talking to me, anyway, and letting me in the house and all.”

Her heart-shaped face was lovely in the moonlight. “I don’t care. At this point, I don’t care... Nathan, we hadn’t finished talking.”

“I thought we had.”

She touched my arm with cool fingers. “No. There’s something... important... and personal. You have to know it.”

“What is it?”

“Can we go somewhere? Where are you staying?”

“Lowman’s Motor Court.”

Her anxious expression melted into a nostalgic smile. “That’s where you spent time with A. E., isn’t it?”

“Christ, how much did she tell you about us?” That wasn’t like Amy; she was usually so private.

“She told me a lot... We could talk in your room.”

I wasn’t sure what she had on her mind, but looking at her was enough to put something on mine.

“First tell me,” I said, and touched her face. “What’s this personal something you need to share?”

“Well... we were in the kitchen, having coffee, A. E. and me... it was just two days before she left... and I can’t remember her exact words, but she said when she came back she was going to give up flying, give up celebrity, and ‘just be a woman.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I think it’s because she thought she might be pregnant... Nathan? Nathan, are you all right?”

“...You go back in now, Margot.”

She leaned toward me. “She didn’t mention your name or anything, but I knew she’d just seen you in Chicago and—”

“Good night, Margot.”

And she stepped out of the Terraplane, and padded down the sidewalk in her kimono like a geisha. I drove back to the motor court, where a bed waited but not sleep.

Chapter 12

Nine o’clock the next morning found the sun slanting through high windows like swords in a magician’s box, seeking out Ernie Tisor and the other two mechanics who were busy at work on an older plane, mending a fabric wing with “dope,” the liquid tightening agent that filled the hangar with a pungent bouquet.

Shielded from sun and smell within his glassed-in office, Mantz — typically dapper in a navy shirt, white tie, and tan sport jacket — sat at his desk, flipping through some paperwork; famous framed faces on the wall behind him seemed to be looking over his shoulder, while others noticed me coming in. Though airfield and hangar noise had entered with me, he didn’t look up.

“What is it, Ernie?” he asked.

“It’s not Ernie,” I said, shutting the door behind me. I was wearing the same yellow polo shirt and tan slacks as yesterday and they probably looked like I’d slept in them, which I had.

His brow furrowed, his eyes widened. “What the hell are you doing here?”

I pulled up a chair and sat opposite him. “I’ve had warmer welcomes. I thought you wanted to hire me.”

He threw the papers on his desk and smirked in disgust. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it? You look like you fell off a moving train.”

“I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

His smile was as straight as his pencil-line mustache. “Don’t tell me Nate Heller’s developing a conscience. Little late for that, isn’t it, boy?”

“Just how late, do you figure?”

The smile disappeared; he leaned back in his swivel chair, and began to rock. “I talked Amelia through ditching the Vega, before the Pacific flight, and I did the same thing where the Electra’s concerned, before this one. But it’s not the kind of thing you can really prepare for — and you don’t exactly wanna go out over the water and practice.”

“Assume the best.”

He tented his fingertips, stopped rocking. “Okay, let’s say she wasn’t over choppy waters, first of all. Then let’s say she lowered her flaps at the right moment, glided on in perfectly, stalling out at just the right height above the water, and let’s also say the plane stayed in one piece after impact — and, classically, the tail section’ll break off in a ditch like that — you still have the plane in a nose-down floating posture, due to the empty fuel tanks and the heavy engines. Assuming she and Noonan overcame all that, based on the Electra’s specs, I give her nine hours at best before that ship sank.”

“Even with the ping-pong balls?”

He frowned. “What ping-pong balls?”

“I understand they stuffed every spare space on that plane with ping-pong balls for better flotation.”

A harsh laugh rose from his chest. “That’s a new one on me. Maybe it would buy ’em more time; if they could drop the engines in the sea, they might make a boat out of that plane and float for a good long while.”

“Could they do that?”

“I sure as hell don’t know how. They did have a life raft and other emergency equipment on board, but in those waters, they’d be better off staying in the plane, if it’s floating.”

“Why? They could paddle the raft.”

There were no teeth in his smile, and no humor, either. “Those are shark-infested waters, Nate. What the hell are you doin’ here?”

I rubbed my burning eyes with the heels of my hands. “I’m not trying to find Amelia and Fred. I’m pretty goddamn sure they’re not in Southern California.”

Another harsh laugh. “You are a hell of a detective, aren’t you?”

“You were right, Paul... dead right: G. P. did get Amelia tangled up in some kind of espionage mission.”

He began rocking again; his eyes were half-closed, but he was looking at me with a quiet intensity. “What can we do about it, now?”

“There’s a lot of rich Republicans who don’t like FDR.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I laughed. “I can hardly believe I said that; if my old man knew what I was thinking... he was an old union guy from way back. Socialist to the bone. I’ve been a Democrat myself, as long as I can remember.”

“I still don’t follow you.”

I leaned an arm on his desk. “I made a wisecrack to G. P. last night—”

Alarm widened his eyes. “You saw G. P.?”

“Yeah. In that bungalow with gland trouble, down the street from your old digs. I had a little chat with him, and before that, I talked to that cute secretary that works over there.”

Now the eyes narrowed. “You see that guy Miller?”

“Sure did. Kind of like an All-American version of Bela Lugosi, isn’t he?”

He was sitting way forward, shaking his head. “What in God’s name are you getting yourself into? Don’t think you’re getting me in—”

“You called me, remember?”

“Over a goddamn month ago!”

“Like I was saying, I made a wisecrack to G. P. about going to the Tribune with this lovely story, and on reflection, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea. This is the kind of bullshit presidents get impeached for, if somebody doesn’t shoot ’em first.”

He held both palms up, as if he were balancing something invisible. “What good does that do Amelia?”

“Probably nothing. But it puts G. P.’s nuts in a wringer, and everybody from the White House down who thought it was a good idea to con Lady Lindy into playin’ Mata Hari’ll find themselves all over the front page and out of work and maybe in jail.”

“You really didn’t get any sleep last night, did you?”

“I caught about two hours, after the sun came up. Don’t you like my idea?”

“Wouldn’t it just be easier to kill G. P.?”

“I don’t rule that out. I’d rather have him publicly humiliated first.”

Mantz was gazing at me as if I were insane; imagine that. “You’re not joking, are you?”

“Not in the least. You take that cocksucker up for a ride, I’ll toss him out of the plane. Deal?”

“You need some rest...”

“I’m not looking for you to subsidize my investigation, Mantz. I’m off the clock; call it a busman’s holiday. All I ask is for a little information, a little help; I need you to approach some people and set up some meetings.”

He was shaking a hand in the air, as if waving goodbye. “Look — I was all for this...”

“You pulled me in.”

“...but that was when Amelia hadn’t left the country, yet. We coulda done some good. We coulda saved her. But right now, her best chance is the government, the Coast Guard, the Navy, that they find her. And if she’s workin’ for them, it benefits them to find her — they gotta be spendin’ millions on this search—”

“Further proof you were right. Since when does the government, who can barely get Congress to give ’em two nickels for defense, go spendin’ that kind of dough looking for a downed stunt pilot?”

His expression was grave. “I’m sorry, Heller. I’m out.”

“You got a charter today?”

“...No.”

“You do now.” I reached in my hip pocket for my notebook. “I want to talk to these radio nuts... McMenamy, who I understand has done work for you, and this Myers kid, in Oakland.”

“Well...”

“You want dough? Here.” And I dug in my front pocket for my money clip, and tossed two double sawbucks on his desk. “That cover the charter?”

“You want me to fly you to Oakland to talk to a fourteen-year-old kid with a ham radio.”

“That’s right. And I want you to set up a meeting for me here, with the other guy, McMenamy.”

“Heller... stop...”

“Earlier, you assumed the best. Now let’s assume the worst: she crashed in the ocean and if she was unlucky and didn’t die on impact, the sharks made screaming meals out of her and Noonan. That’s a menu courtesy of G. P. Putnam and Uncle Sam.”

“I’ll make the calls,” he said. “And take your goddamn money. Get it off my desk.”

“Okay,” I said, and put the twenties back in my money clip, not giving a damn whether he took them or not.

That’s how far gone I was.

Within the hour, Walter McMenamy was seated before me at a table at the back of the Burbank terminal’s Sky Room restaurant. He’d been doing some work at Patterson Radio Company for his friend Karl Pierson, chief engineer for the firm and a fellow amateur radio enthusiast.

“We’re designing an entirely new type of short-wave receiver,” McMenamy said, his voice soft yet alive with enthusiasm. Probably in his mid-thirties, and despite his businesslike dark suit and navy and red tie, McMenamy came across as a husky kid, his oblong head home to a high forehead with dark widow’s-peaked hair, and boyish features: bright eyes, snub nose, full, almost feminine lips.

“Thanks for dropping everything,” I said, “to come talk to me.”

It was midmorning, and we were drinking Coca-Cola on ice.

“It’s my pleasure, Mr. Heller,” McMenamy said. “I’ve been busting to tell somebody, and when Paul said you’re looking into this mess, you couldn’t keep me away.”

“What have you been busting to tell somebody?”

He leaned forward. “Well, did Paul fill you in on what my role was to be, on the first attempt at the world flight?”

“Yes he did.”

McMenamy had been retained by the Putnams, at Mantz’s advice, as a technical advisor, selecting and installing the latest radio equipment in the Electra. He’d also been enlisted to assemble volunteers among fellow members of the Radio Relay League, a worldwide short-wave radio club, to follow the Electra, particularly over the more isolated regions on its flight path. A base station on Beacon Hill, near Los Angeles, was selected for optimal reception.

“We had a big responsibility,” McMenamy said, obviously relishing the thought, “providing en route communications that’d help ensure Amelia’s safety, and Mr. Noonan’s — particularly weather reports and forecasts.”

“And you could relay information to G. P. Putnam,” I said, “to feed the press.”

He nodded. “Day-by-day progress reports. It would have really built public interest.”

“What happened, Mr. McMenamy?”

“Call me Walt.”

“Call me Nate.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what the heck happened, Nate. I used to see Amelia a couple of times a week, but after the Luke Field crackup, I never spoke with her again. She came back from Honolulu on the Malolo... why are you smiling?”

“Sorry. I took a trip on the Malolo once. Just thinking about what a small world it is.”

“Not so small when you’re going around it in an airplane. Anyway, we went down to meet the ship, Karl and I, wanting to be waiting there to let Amelia know that her bad luck, cracking up the Electra and all, hadn’t dimmed our faith in her. That we were game for a second try, if she was... Boy, were we in for a surprise.”

He seemed to want me to ask: “How so?”

He leaned forward again and spoke in a near whisper: “She came down the gangplank surrounded by Navy personnel — officers and, what, Shore Patrol or MP’s? Anyway, it was a combination of brass and armed guards, and they whisked her right past us and into a Navy staff car.”

“Did she see you?”

He sat back, smirking disgustedly. “Oh, yes. She acknowledged me with this... pitiful smile... but didn’t say a darn word! And that was the start of it.”

“Of what?”

He was shaking his head, his expression gloomy. “Of the government completely taking over. Some Naval Intelligence officers, plainclothes guys, met with Karl and me at a restaurant. They said any messages from Amelia, that came in from the Beacon Hill station, would go through them, and then to the press. We weren’t to initiate contact with Amelia, either — just monitor her messages as they came in, which hardly any did. Some of what they released was false. They also swore us to secrecy.”

“Why are you telling me, then?”

A faint smile formed on the babyish lips, “Two reasons. First, Mantz says you’re okay. Second, Amelia’s missing. If we’d been allowed to maintain contact with her, if we hadn’t been shut out — who knows?”

“They didn’t shut you out entirely...”

“The only reason for that is they needed our technical expertise and equipment. We had better gear than the government. And they knew we’d be able to monitor Amelia’s signals anyway.”

“I’m sure they didn’t like that.”

“No. But we were doing it under their watchful eye.”

I glanced around the restaurant, which had only a scattering of patrons. “You think you’re under their watchful eye right now?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I was followed here. We shut the Beacon Hill operation down a couple days ago... but I still listen at home.”

“You say that like you heard something.”

His face might have been young, but his eyes suddenly seemed old. “I still am... at night. The daytime frequency, 3105 kilocycles, I don’t pick anything up; too weak. But at night, on 6210 kilocycles, I’m still hearing her... she’s still out there.”

I leaned forward. “What are you hearing?”

“The prearranged signal — two long dashes, if they were on water, three if they were on land. She’s been sending the two long dashes. Ask Paul — he’s heard them.”

“Christ. And the Navy, the Coast Guard, they know?”

“Of course they do. I’ve heard a voice, too, weakly, through the static... SOS, SOS, KHAQQ, KHAQQ...”

“I know what SOS is...”

“KHAQQ — her call sign.”

“And she’s still there — on the water?”

He swallowed, and nodded.

Mantz popped in the restaurant, spotted us and strode over. “You boys getting along all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “You didn’t tell me you heard her signal.”

McMenamy, sipping his glass of Coke, watched Mantz reply.

“Hell, Nate, it could have been anybody. There’s a lot of sick hoaxing going on right now... Look, this Myers kid, in Oakland, there’s no phone in his house, but I got the airport manager to send somebody over... and you’ll be glad to know I’ve got this high-level conference between you and Jackie Cooper all arranged, for three this afternoon.”

“I appreciate this, Paul,” I said, and I meant it.

“I’ll fly you over in the Honeymoon Express... Been a while since you flew in a Vega, I bet.”

“A while,” I said.

The Duck Air Service Cafe at Oakland’s Bay Farm Airport, its walls decorated with framed flying photographs and pennants commemorating air shows and competitions, had wooden booths along windows that looked out on the airfield and its hangars. The interior of the glorified shack was a dark-stained oak, except for a small gleaming counter with wrought-iron stools and leather seats. Pies and cakes and ice cream were served up from behind the counter by Mom, while Pop made the sandwiches in a small kitchen in back.

The afternoon was warm but not sweltering, ceiling fans churning the air like big propellers; those flies that flypaper strips hadn’t shot down were dive-bombing the handful of customers in the place, which included me and Mantz, on one side of a booth, and young Robert Myers on the other.

I had bought the Myers kid a “snail,” which was his word for a cinnamon roll, and a glass of milk; he was wolfing them down, whether out of hunger or in competition with the flies, I couldn’t tell you.

He was a tall, bony kid with dark alert eyes, a strong nose and chin, and a shock of unruly blond hair in need of a barber; like a lot of kids in their early teens, his body approached manhood while his features still had a softness to them, as if not yet fully formed. He wore a crew-neck T-shirt with dark blue neck and sleeve trim, and his denim trousers were sailor-style denims — judging by how high they rode over his black speedsters, this was at least his second summer in them.

“Amelia never heard a snail called a snail before, either,” he said, chomping on the roll; his voice hadn’t changed yet. “I call her Amelia ’cause she said to. She always called me Robert, ’cause she knew I didn’t like Bobby, since it’s what my sister calls me when she gets mad.”

Mantz and I traded grins.

“Well, then, I’ll call you Robert, too,” I said, “if that’s okay. And you call me Nate.”

“All right, Nate. I can’t tell you how glad I am that somebody’s come to talk to me about all this. I about been bouncing off the walls, worryin’.”

“Why?”

He gulped some milk. “Jeez, I don’t even know where to start.”

“In the detective business,” I said, knowing he would be impressed by that, “we like to keep it tidy, orderly.”

He dabbed off his milk mustache with a paper napkin. “Start at the beginning, you mean.”

“Yeah. How did you happen to meet Amelia?”

He shrugged, nodded out toward the airfield, where a two-engine job was taxiing. “I been hangin’ around the airport since I was a kid.”

“That long?”

“Oh yeah, I can spend hours just watching the airplanes and ground crews, and there’s all sort of famous fliers around. I talked to Jimmy Doolittle and Howard Hughes and Bobbi Trout. Something interesting’s always goin’ on out here, parachute jumps, air races, powder puff derbies... that’s when I first met Amelia. But I didn’t really get to know her till fairly recent — when she was gettin’ ready for the world flight. The first time she tried it, I mean, early this year. It was almost like she went out of her way to pay attention to me and be friendly and all — since she’s a big-time celebrity, you might think I’m spreadin’ it on thick, but I’m not: she treated me like a little brother.”

Mantz chimed in, “Robert’s not exaggerating. Amelia took a liking to the lad.”

“Like, when she’d buy me a snail, she’d have it heated up for me... Said it was better warm, and was she right! I just wasn’t used to the finer things of life.”

Mantz and I traded smiles again.

“She had such pretty hands,” the boy said, looking through me. “Dainty and delicate, though her fingers were awful long... She’d sit and drink her cocoa...” He swallowed. I think he was holding back tears; I knew the feeling.

Then he went on: “You know, it’s four miles from my house, to here, and when she’d come along in that fancy Cord car of hers, she’d pick me up... Sometimes her mother was with her, and she was a nice lady, too.”

“You want another glass of milk, Robert?” I asked.

“Sure!”

I called over to Mom behind the counter for one, and got fresh Cokes for Mantz and me, too.

“Mr. Mantz may not realize it,” Robert said, “but this airport was real different, once prep for the flight got started. No more races, no more air shows, everything kind of shut down except for preppin’ the world flight. And lots of strange people around.”

“Strange, how?”

He nibbled at his snail. “Men in suits. They looked like businessmen. And sometimes military people... A General Westover came around, everybody seemed real impressed.”

They should. Westover was the head of the U.S. Army Air Forces.

The kid was saying, “Mr. Putnam would go in the office hangar and talk to them... usually without Amelia. It was almost like the hangar office was off limits to her, and I heard her complain about it, too — ‘What is he doing? Who are these people? What are they talkin’ about?’”

I turned to Mantz. “You saw this kind of thing, too?”

Mantz nodded. “But I wasn’t involved on the Oakland end, much. Noonan and the new mechanic, Bo McKneely, were handling things.”

“The security guard at night,” Robert said, waving a fly off his snail, “he was a Navy reservist.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “Were you out here at night, much?”

“No, but my sister had a crush on that Navy guard and was always bothering me about talkin’ to him for her. He’d show up kind of late in the afternoon...”

“If security was tight, Robert, what were they doing letting you hang around?”

“On the first try, before she crashed her plane in Hawaii, things weren’t so tight. Reporters were takin’ pictures and doing stories about Amelia... As for me, I’m kind of a mascot around here, I guess... as long as I don’t get in the way, mess with tools, or bother the mechanics or anything. Sometimes I run errands and help out a little. Like that time I helped you, Mr. Mantz, with that battery.”

“That’s right,” Mantz said, with a little smile. “You did help me haul that into the plane, didn’t you?”

“Big green heavy-duty Exide battery,” the kid said, nodding, “’bout three times the size of a car battery. That’s how she’s sendin’ her messages, I bet.”

Mantz said, “Out of fuel, she couldn’t be using the radio, otherwise; she’d need the right engine running to keep the plane’s batteries charged.”

“I got to watch the first takeoff from the hotel balcony,” Robert said, basking in the memory. “Amelia invited me — can you picture that? Me with her Hollywood friends with their fancy clothes and flashy jewelry! But you shoulda seen the dirty looks Mr. Putnam gave me. He woulda never put up with me bein’ around if Amelia hadn’t told him to... Wasn’t any fanfare on the second takeoff.”

I sipped my Coke. “You and Mr. Putnam didn’t hit it off?”

Robert frowned, shook his head. “He’s a nasty person. Sometimes he had his son with him, called him ‘Junior’? He’s a nice kid, I don’t know, a year or two older than me. Not wild or anything... quiet.”

“Well behaved,” Mantz agreed.

“Well, I saw Mr. Putnam slap him, yell at him, really dress him down, for nothin’... Once in the washroom over in the terminal building, Mr. Putnam hit him for ‘not washing up’ good enough.”

“You ever have a run-in with him?” I asked.

“Run-in! Run down is more like it!”

I waved a fly away from me. “What do you mean?”

“Well, this one day a man in an Army uniform... I don’t know what rank, but he sure wasn’t a private... came in the cafe here, while I was sitting at the counter with Amelia and Mr. Noonan. Havin’ snails and milk, like always. This Army man had a bunch of papers for them to sign, ‘releases,’ he called them, or ‘clearances’ or something, I don’t know... Anyway, Mr. Noonan said maybe I better leave, and so I did, and when I came out, Mr. Putnam spotted me. He came over, shouting at me, ‘What did you see in there?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ And I started walking away, and he blocked me and started yelling! About how I’d seen and heard a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to, calling me a ‘punk,’ saying things like ‘Don’t you have a home?’ He told me to stay away and stop snooping around.”

I glanced at Mantz, who was frowning, then asked, “Did you say anything, Robert? Or just walk away?”

“Heck, no, I didn’t walk away! I yelled right back at him — said I had as much right as he did to come around the airport. He looked like he was gonna grab me... only I’m not small, like his son, and he musta thought better of it. But he started yelling again: ‘If I catch you around here again, you’ll disappear and no one will know where to find you!’ Then he kinda stormed off.”

Mantz was shaking his head in disgust.

I asked, “What did you do, Robert?”

“Started to walk home. I just thought he was a real nut, I was ticked off, and you know how it is when you’re mad, and the thoughts are sorta racing... I wasn’t gonna let him scare me away, there was no way I wasn’t comin’ around the airport anymore, it’s my home away from home. And while I was walkin’, it’s kind of a lonely stretch of road, and it was kinda late, hopin’ to hitch but figurin’ I was probably out of luck, I heard a car comin’ and thought, great! Finally a ride! Only it was this big black Hudson and Mr. Putnam was driving. He was looking at me all pop-eyed and crazy and you don’t have to believe me, but I swear he aimed that big car right at me and gunned it. I jumped out of the way, into the ditch — he was going so fast, driving so crazy, he sort of lost control and almost went in the ditch himself; he slammed on his brakes and started backing up, and turning around! If this other car hadn’t come along just then, and picked me up, I don’t know what woulda happened.”

“Maybe,” Mantz said softly, “it was an accident and he was backing up to come see if you were all right.”

“I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” Robert said. “I haven’t for a long time.”

“That’s a good policy,” I told the boy. “Did you tell the police? Or your parents, or anyone?”

He shook his head and his blond mop bobbed. “No. Mr. Putnam’s rich and famous. I’m just a poor kid. Who’re they gonna believe? But at least he left me alone after that. Of course, it was just a few days before the flight, the second flight. Did you know she took film along, a lot of film?”

“Really?” I asked, giving Mantz a sideways glance.

“Did you help with that, Mr. Mantz?” the boy asked. “I mean, everybody knows you’re famous for aerial photography.”

“No.”

Robert gestured out the window. “Well, I saw some Navy people deliver some big boxes to the hangar. A big white seal was on all the boxes — it said ‘Naval Air Photography, USN,’ or something close to that. Mr. Putnam had those Navy guys load ’em on the plane. I think they put ’em way in the back... That’s what they made her do, isn’t it? Take pictures of islands she flew over. Islands that belong to the Japanese, right?”

Mantz and I exchanged startled looks. How could this kid know that?

He was still talking, lost in memory: “She made me promise, you know. Before she left. She told me she was going on a very secret and dangerous mission and that if I heard anything had happened to her or Mr. Noonan, I was supposed to tell somebody... my mother... the police... or somebody...” He sighed. “Well I finally have.”

“It must feel good, Robert,” I said quietly, “to get this off your chest.”

He grinned, but it was a halfway, qualified grin. “It does, ’cause when I called the police, the man just laughed at me.”

“You called the police about what Amelia told you?”

His forehead tightened. “No... not exactly... it was about what I heard on the radio.”

“What do you mean, radio?”

“We have a Philco, it’s a super-heterodyne that gets short-wave transmissions. It’s a family hobby — my dad and brother and me. We put up a sixty-foot copper mesh antenna.”

I took a last swig of Coke and said, “You don’t have a phone in the house, and you have a short-wave radio with a sixty-foot antenna?”

“Oh, it gets more than short wave. We listen to Jack Armstrong, Tom Mix, and the Shadow, too!” He shrugged. “I’ve heard dozens of transmissions from Amelia, since she took off from Lae...”

I blinked, then looked over at Mantz who rolled his eyes, when Robert wasn’t looking.

The boy was saying, “I listen every night... It’s summer, and my dad works nights, and Mom doesn’t care if I stay up; I mean, she knows how much trouble I have sleeping with my brother in the same bed, snoring. So, I’m just fooling around, twisting the dial, and I come onto this woman’s voice saying, ‘That was close! We just cleared the tail fifty feet!’ I couldn’t believe my ears! It was Amelia’s voice! On my radio! It didn’t take me long to figure out what I was hearing — I mean, reading about the flight in the paper every day, for a month! What I heard was Amelia on takeoff, when she was just leaving the airstrip.”

“Robert,” Mantz said, gently, “you know there have been some radio recreations, some dramatic—”

“Not happening at the exact same time as when she took off! I’m sorry, Mr. Mantz — I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just — I know what I heard.” His speech picked up speed, as if his conversation were lifting off a runway after a long taxi. “And then she was talking to a radioman back on Lae, named Balfour, saying Mr. Noonan had passed her a sealed envelope with a note about a change of flight plans. She seemed really peeved... The radioman said he didn’t know about the change, that his orders were to give her weather reports. She said something about flying north to Truk Island.”

It was like listening to an idiot savant rattle off trigonometry equations. “You remember all this?”

He nodded, blond shock bouncing. “I wrote it down. I got my school notebook and I’ve been writing everything down.”

“There’s more?”

“Dozens of transmissions over the last few days!”

I sat forward, not really buying any of this, but impressed with his imagination. Mantz looked amused.

“She came on later, more relaxed, not so mad, even giggling a little, as she called out the names of islands she was flying over, trying to pronounce them — I heard her mention the tip of Rabaul, for instance. She lost contact with Lae about three hundred miles out, but I heard her say Noonan was getting good pictures of the Caroline Islands.”

“And you’re hearing all this over your Philco?” I asked.

“Sure! I heard her talkin’ to that ship, the Itasca, too! I heard her make her first contact with ’em, when they asked her to identify herself and she said, ‘The name is Putnam, but I don’t use that.’”

I had to chuckle; that did sound like her. Even Mantz was smiling a little, though I could tell he figured this kid was spinning a yarn.

“I listened all night,” Robert said. “She came on naming islands as she passed over them, sayin’ they were off her left or right wing... Bikar, Majuro, Jaluit, I’m leavin’ a few out but I got ’em written down... She said there was plenty of good light and they could see the islands fine. Then she had trouble getting the Itasca to hear her — here I am, in my living room in California, and I can hear her fine! I mean, there’s static and everything, and she kinda comes in and out, but I heard her asking Itasca to turn on their lights, sayin’ she must be circling the ship, but she couldn’t come down because it was too dark, she got there too early. Then it just got worse and worse... They weren’t answering her... She kept saying her fuel was low. She told the Itasca she was gonna try for Hull Island, but they didn’t hear her, and that’s when she spotted the Japanese fighter planes.”

“Fighter planes.”

He nodded, wild-eyed. “One was above her, the other two were near her wingtips; they fired on her! Machinegun bursts!”

“Look, kid—” Mantz began.

The boy just kept going, gesturing with both hands. “They were trying to force her to land at Hull, but when she looked down, she saw these ships offshore — a fishing boat, and two battleships — but they were able to outrun the Japs in the Electra, it was much faster. Mr. Noonan had her fly toward an island called Sydney, just a hundred miles away, and all the time she was still callin’ the Itasca, no response. And then one engine sputtered out — they could see the island! But then the other one went out, too, and I heard her say, ‘Oh, my goodness! We’re out of fuel!’”

As silly as this story was, hearing Amy’s familiar “Oh, my goodness!” from this kid’s mouth sent a chill up me.

“I heard the plane make this awful loud thud — you’d think it would have sounded more like a splash, but it didn’t — and I waited for seconds that seemed like hours before she came back on, saying, ‘We missed the trees and the coral reef... We’re on the water.’ She said Mr. Noonan injured his head, shoulder, and arm and she stopped transmitting to go check on him... Then it was morning, and I lost them... I’d been listening twelve hours or more.”

“Is this the story you told the police?” I asked.

Mantz was leaned back with a hand over his eyes.

“Oh, you listened to a lot more of it than the desk sergeant on the phone did... They’re still out there, Nate... Mr. Mantz... Amelia and Mr. Noonan. I’ve been listening to them every night. She comes on every hour and doesn’t stay on long — conserving the battery. They’re floating on the water... They’re hot and they’re hungry and Amelia’s really mad, she keeps saying, ‘Why are you doing this to us? Why don’t you come get us? You know where we are.’ Things like that. It’s real sad. But they are still alive... Isn’t that a relief?”

I nodded.

He leaned forward, puppy-dog eager, looking from me to Mantz and back again. “Would you like to come to my house and listen, tonight? I’m sure my mom and dad wouldn’t mind.”

“Thanks, kid,” Mantz said, with a sick smile. “I think I’ll take a rain check.”

I put a hand on Mantz’s shoulder. “Paul, can I have a word with you, for a minute? Outside?”

His eyes narrowed. “Sure.”

“Robert, you think you can handle another snail?”

The boy beamed. “Boy, could I! Warmed up and everything?”

“Live a little,” I said, and nodded over to Mom behind the counter, who smiled and took care of the order, as Mantz and I headed outside.

He dug a pack of Camels out of his sportcoat and lighted one up, saying, “You can’t believe any of that baloney. Tell me you don’t.”

There was runway noise and I had to work my voice up. “How do you explain some of what he knows? The names of those islands, for example?”

Mantz smirked, shrugged, blew smoke out his nose like a dragon. “I never heard of those islands. Maybe he made ’em up.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“Maybe he’s got a Rand McNally atlas in his house. Look, he and Amelia were friends, all of that stuff he told you was legit... But now he’s stayin’ up at night, with his head filled with what he’s readin’ in the papers about his famous friend, and he’s listening to staticky garbage and his imagination is running wild.”

“Is it possible for that Philco to be picking her up?”

“Sure.” The cigarette bobbled in his mouth as he spoke. “McMenamy thinks he’s heard her, too — of course, he hasn’t heard twenty or thirty exciting episodes like Robert has!”

Through the window we could see the kid chowing down on another snail.

I said, “I don’t understand how either of them could be hearing what the Itasca and the rest of the Navy and Coast Guard can’t.”

Mantz raised an eyebrow. “Well, the Electra’s radios sure can’t transmit over any considerable distance, but there’s always ‘skip.’”

“What’s skip?”

“A freak but common phenomenon. Sometimes radio reception turns up hundreds, even thousands of miles away.”

“And that’s what Robert could be hearing?”

“I think Robert’s hearing pixies.”

“I’m going to take him up on his invitation.”

“You gotta be pullin’ my leg! You can’t—”

“Go home. I’ll catch the train back to L.A. tomorrow.”

“Heller—”

“I’m going over to Robert’s to listen to the radio. Who knows? Maybe Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy, will win the big game.”

“I’m an Amos ‘n’ Andy man myself,” Mantz said, pitching his cigarette, sending it sparking to the ground. “And I’m takin’ my plane back to Burbank, before I miss tonight’s installment.”

The Myers house, though in a heavily residential section on the north edge of Oakland, sat alone on a small hill, a shingled bungalow absurdly dominated by that sixty-foot copper antenna Robert had told us about. That, at least, had been no exaggeration.

The boy had hitchhiked home, on the understanding that I would drop by after supper, his parents suitably warned. Robert knew I planned to check in at the Bay Farm Airport Hotel, which I did, and it was there that he tracked me down.

“I thought you didn’t have a phone,” I said into the receiver, as I sat on the edge of my bed in the hotel room.

“We don’t,” the kid’s voice said, “but our neighbor does. My folks want you to come over for supper. My mom’s a really good cook.”

I accepted, and drove over there in a buggy that Mantz’s friend, airport manager Guy Turner, loaned me, a ’32 Ford station wagon with bay farm airport stenciled on either side. When I parked out front, the hangars of the airport four miles away were visible from the hill the house perched upon.

Dinner was pleasant enough, in the small dining room of the cramped, modestly furnished home — meat loaf and mashed potatoes and creamed corn, served up by Robert’s mother Anna, an attractive woman in her thirties. His father Bob, Sr., a solid-looking quiet man, a little older than his wife, worked night shift in a canning factory. Robert’s sister, a cute blonde, probably seventeen, and a younger brother, maybe twelve, were fairly talkative, not at all put off by the presence of a stranger.

I had been introduced as a friend of both Paul Mantz and Amelia Earhart, and as a detective who was interested in checking out the short-wave transmissions Robert had reported. They understood I was not from the police, and I implied I was working for Mantz, whom both parents had met at the airport on an occasion or two.

Questions about what Chicago was like predominated, and the father — who had said little throughout the meal — finally said, over apple pie, “You think there’s somethin’ to this? What Robert’s been hearing on the radio?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“Paper says there’s lots of hoaxers.”

“I know.”

“Any fool with a short wave can get on and pretend to be the King of England.”

“Sure.”

“Lot of sick-in-the-head people in this world, you ask me.”

“No argument,” I said.

“Robert’s always been creative,” his mother said. She had lovely eyes and a nice smile, and Robert and his sister had gotten their blond hair from her, though Anna’s was now a dishwater variety. She had the haggard look of an overworked, underappreciated working-class mother.

“You mean Bobby’s always been a nut,” his sister said.

The younger brother laughed, too loud.

“Shut it,” the father said, and they did.

The mother smiled and laughed, nervously. “Brothers and sisters,” she said. “You know how it is.”

After supper, the father took off for work with his lunch pail in hand, and Mrs. Myers did the dishes, declining my offer of help. Her daughter pitched in, while the younger brother hung around the living room with us, as Robert sat me down on the couch across from the fireplace and the square-shouldered Philco console, which was not yet turned on.

For several mind-numbing hours, Robert showed me the charts and notes and maps he’d created, the supposed physical evidence of the transmissions he’d been hearing. He spread these out on the coffee table before me, and walked me through them, explaining his methods, reading aloud, and I could follow very little of it.

I had begun to suspect that Robert was, indeed, a “creative” young man, and possibly a seriously disturbed one.

Around nine o’clock, Mrs. Myers excused herself, having shooed the younger brother off to bed already (after the boy showed me the flying wings badge he’d sent for from a radio show called The Air Adventures of Jimmy Allen). The daughter had gone over to a girlfriend’s house to spend the night, or anyway that’s what she told her mother. Soon the house was dark, and I was on the couch and Robert — ring notebook and pencil at the ready — was kneeling in front of the Philco, as if it were an altar, bathed in its green glow, twisting the knobs, the dials, searching for Amelia.

And finding static.

“You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see.”

This went on for some time. I sat with a hand covering my face, feeling like a moron, pitying this kid, exhausted, having slept very little over the past thirty-six hours, wondering why the hell I didn’t go back to Chicago where I had paying clients.

“Oh my goodness, did you hear that?”

The voice came from the Philco.

“Fred just said he saw something!”

“I told you!” Robert said, gleeful. He began writing, recording what he heard.

I sat forward.

“Did you hear that, Itasca? Please hurry, please, please hurry!”

Amy’s voice. It sure as hell sounded like Amy’s voice.

Another voice, fainter, male, but picked up over her microphone: “It’s them! The Japanese!”

“They’re going to be saved!” Robert said, turning to me, eyes glittering in the near darkness. He kept writing. My heart was racing.

The male voice again, faint but shouting: “So big! The guns are so big!”

I stumbled off the couch, and found myself crouching next to Robert, a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

The voice that seemed to be Amy’s said: “They’re lowering small boats...”

“Thank you, God,” Robert was saying, as he scribbled cursive notes. “Thank you, God, for letting someone find them.”

Amy said, rapid-fire words: “I’ll keep talking, Itasca, as long as I can...”

But static flared up.

They were gone.

“Is there anything you can do?” I asked the kid.

His terrified expression belied his calming words: “They’ll be back... they’ll be back...”

Finally, I heard the man’s voice again: “They’re here! They’re opening the door!”

And Amy said, “Did you hear that, Itasca? They’re coming in!”

Robert covered his mouth with a hand. He had dropped his notebook.

Sounds of grunting, metallic banging around in the plane, accompanied Amy’s near screams: “Oh my goodness, he’s resisting them! No, Fred — no! Oh, they’re beating him terribly... Stop! Stop!”

And that was followed by a sound that could only have been a slap.

Then dead silence.

We listened for a long time, but all we heard was that awful deathly stillness, and static. He picked the notebook up and recorded those last terrible sentences. Finally I helped the boy to his feet and we stumbled together over to the couch, flopping there, exhausted.

What had we heard? Cruel hoax? Or cruel reality?

“They’re saved, though, right?” he asked. “It’s better than nothing, the Japs saving them. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

Sitting there in the near dark, I nodded and smiled and put my arm around the boy, and pretended not to notice he was weeping.

He did me the same favor.

Chapter 13

The sky was a glowing pastel blue with bright stars that created shimmering crosses if you looked right at them; the stars were electric, arranged in caricatures of constellations, and the sky merely the sculpted ceiling that rose in a gentle slope from behind the stage to shelter the posh crowd out on the mirror-varnished dance floor. They were gliding around to “A Foggy Day in London Town” as performed by Harl Smith and His Continental Orchestra, at the Club Continental, a shout away from Burbank’s United Airport, formal in its linen-covered tablecloths, fine china, and sterling silverware, intimate in its cozy booths, tables for two, and pastel-tinted wooden paneling.

In my herringbone blue garbardine, the nicest suit I owned, I was underdressed. A good-looking brunette in furs and gown who might have been Paulette Goddard was dancing with a guy I didn’t recognize but who, like most of the men on the dance floor, wore a tuxedo.

I found Mantz at one of those cozy booths, seated across from a cute blonde; he was in a white dinner jacket with a black bow tie, and she wore a yellow chiffon evening dress with an admirable décolletage.

“Sorry to track you down like this,” I said. “But I’m leaving tomorrow morning, on the train.”

“Glad you did,” he said, and nodded toward his companion. “My fiancée, Terry Minor... This is the guy I was tellin’ you about, Terry — Nate Heller from Chicago.”

“A real pleasure, Nate,” she said, and beamed, offering her hand for me to shake; she had a firm, friendly grip.

“Pleasure’s all mine, Terry,” I said.

She was in her early thirties, not movie star pretty, but it was easy to see what Mantz saw in her, and I’m not just referring to her neckline. Her hair in hundreds of tiny blonde curls, eyes bright and blue, she radiated the same tomboyish appeal as Amy.

“Sit down,” Mantz said, sliding over in the booth.

“I hate to think what he’s told you about me,” I said to Terry with a grin.

“I told her how you saved my behind,” Mantz said, frosted martini in hand, “when Myrtle came gunnin’ for me... Considering why you were hired that night, that was pretty white of ya.”

He was fairly well oiled, good-naturedly so.

Softly, I asked him, “Have you, uh, informed Terry about why I’m in town?”

“I’ve filled her in,” he said. “We don’t have any secrets.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said with a little smile, sipping her own frosted drink.

That made him smile; in addition to being well lubricated, he was lovesick over this cutie.

“So... you’ve come to your senses, then,” he said. “You’re finally givin’ up on this foolheaded fishing expedition.”

I gave him half a smile. “Are you forgetting what fool headed me there, in the first place?”

That made Terry giggle, but her steady gaze let me know she didn’t take this subject lightly.

I waved a waiter over and ordered a rum and Coke. “Hell no I’m not giving up. I’m heading home and sell my story to the Trib.”

“Figures,” Mantz snorted. “Leave it to you to find a way to make a buck out of this.”

“I’m not in it for the money,” I said testily. “But what’s the harm of having your cake and eating it, too?”

Now the orchestra was playing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

“There are some damn dangerous people involved in this affair, Nate,” Mantz said. “That bird Miller, for one.”

“Frank Nitti’s a friend of mine,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’ve run into tougher birds than William Miller.”

Last night, I’d told young Robert not to mention to anyone, even his parents, what we’d heard on the family Philco; but assured the boy he’d be hearing from me. I’d gone from the Myers house to the Bay Farm Airport Hotel, where after my day and a half of no sleep, I collapsed on the bed in a comalike pile. I didn’t wake up till noon, and took the train back to Los Angeles, catching a cab to the Burbank airport. There, late afternoon, I spoke with Ernie Tisor, to see if he’d be willing to come forward with what he knew, explaining that it would be to the press, not the authorities. He was willing. Mantz had left for the day, but Tisor mentioned his boss’s plans to take Terry out for dinner and dancing at the Club Continental. Then I’d driven the Terraplane to Lowman’s Motor Court, where I still had a room, from which I called both Margot DeCarrie and Walter McMenamy, to see if they were willing to come forward, too. Both said yes.

And, after a shower and a shave, I’d finally gotten out of that yellow polo and tan slacks and into my garbardine.

At the moment, Mantz was looking at me with his eyes round under a furrowed brow. “You don’t really believe you heard Amelia and Fred getting nabbed by the Japs?”

I’d just shared with Mantz and his fiancée the results of my slumber party at the Myers kid’s house.

“If it was a hoax,” I said, sipping my rum and Coke, “it was a hell of a job.”

Mantz smirked, shaking his head. “You do know, don’t you, that the March of Time did a reenactment of the flight, the day after Amelia disappeared? And so many calls came in, at Pearl Harbor, they flashed the Itasca that Amelia was transmitting!”

“I think I know the difference between Amelia’s voice and Westbrook Van Voorhis,” I said, referring to the radio show’s announcer.

He put a hand on my shoulder; his speech was slightly thick. “Nate, every paper in the country’s givin’ banner headlines to any scrap of information on our missing girl, and that includes every rumor, false hope, and practical joke... These publicity-seeking radio hams are jammin’ the airwaves with their phony broadcasts!”

“I’m enlisting McMenamy to check with his radio-ham pals,” I said. “We’ll sort out the pranksters and publicity hounds, and see if anybody else heard what that kid and I did, last night. Anyway, even without that, I got juicy stuff for FDR’s enemies in the Fourth Estate.”

Harl Smith and his boys were having a go at “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”

“Excuse me,” Terry said, gently, “but I don’t see how this helps Amelia.”

Mantz had said almost the same thing, yesterday.

“It doesn’t,” I admitted. “But it helps me.”

“Make a buck?” Mantz asked.

“Sleep at night.”

“You really wanna see G. P. get his tit in a wringer,” Mantz said with a chuckle.

Terry didn’t blink at his crudity.

I took a last gulp of rum and Coke. “Him and the other sons of bitches who put her at risk... Pardon my French.”

“I think you’re very sweet,” Terry said, stirring her drink with a swizzle stick.

“I don’t get accused of that, often.”

“Amelia’s lucky to have a friend like you,” she said.

With his fiancée’s seal of approval, I figured this was the perfect time to spring it on Mantz.

I slipped an arm around his shoulder. “So, Paul, how about it? Will you come forward, when I’m lining up sources for the Chicago Tribune?”

He sighed; his mouth twitched. He glanced across at Terry who was looking at him, carefully.

“Sure,” he said. “It might be fun to watch Gippy Putnam twist in the wind.”

They invited me to have dinner with them, and I accepted, with no further talk of the Amelia matter. The happy couple shared Chateaubriand, and I tried the Lobster Newburg. Later, as the orchestra played “Where or When,” I danced with Terry, who pointed out Mr. and Mrs. Joe E. Brown, Mr. and Mrs. George Murphy, and Marion Marsh with lanky, craggily handsome Howard Hughes, who you may recall was an acquaintance of Robert Myers. Hughes wasn’t wearing a tux, either; we had that much in common.

As I was taking my leave of them at their booth, Mantz said to me, “If you haven’t picked up your train tickets, Nate, keep in mind I can get you a discount on fares, if you fly United or TWA. You got to come by and drop off the Terraplane at my hangar, anyway.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I kinda had my fill of airplanes.”

Traffic was light as I made my way back toward Lowman’s Motor Court, and I wasn’t speeding, in fact I was probably poking. My stomach warm and full, I felt a certain satisfaction knowing what I was going to do about Putnam and company. I did believe what Robert and I had heard last night, and had a small sense of relief knowing Amy was alive, though a nagging sense of dread about what she might be going through, a spy in the hands of the Japanese.

So I was surprised, as I loped along North San Fernando Road, when I heard the siren coming up behind me, and my first notion was they were on their way to some emergency. I pulled over to let them pass, but they rolled in behind me, a black patrol car, its side-mounted white spotlight hitting the Terraplane with its blinding beam.

Terraplane idling, I got out, shielding my eyes from the glare but still able to see a cop getting out on either side of the black Ford, the blouses of their dark uniforms bisected by the black leather straps of their holsters, badges gleaming on blouses and flat-crowned caps.

This was a somewhat undeveloped stretch, North San Fernando Road also being Highway 6, scrubby landscape on either side of us. A breeze was whispering through the underbrush; suddenly the night seemed chillier.

“What’s the problem, officers?” I asked, meeting them halfway.

Their faces were pale blots; with that light in my eyes, I could make out no features, but the first voice was older: “Okay, boyo — lean your hands against the side of the car.”

I gladly turned my back on the blinding light, heading back to the Terraplane, where I leaned against the sleek curve of a fender, waiting for the frisk. It came. My gun was back in the motel room, which was a good thing, I guessed. I felt my wallet leave my back pocket; my little notebook was in the motel room, also.

“Does this car belong to you?” the second one asked; he was young, or anyway younger.

“No it doesn’t.”

“You’re damn right it doesn’t,” the older cop said. “This car was reported stolen.”

Christ! Putnam. Somehow he got wind I was using Amy’s car, and he set me up, the prick.

“This is a misunderstanding,” I said, and risked looking back with a small smile. “I was loaned this car.”

“That may come as news to the guy you pinched it from,” the older one said. “You’re going to have to come with us, boyo.”

A night in jail loomed ahead. No reason to fight it. Mantz could straighten it out tomorrow morning; this was just Putnam’s way of getting back at me.

The older officer took me by the arm and hauled me around; a little rough, nothing special, par for the copper course. I knew enough not to cross him.

“Hey, Calvin,” the younger one said, gazing into my open wallet as if it were a crystal ball. “I think this guy’s a cop...”

Calvin, still holding onto my arm, snatched the wallet from his young partner’s grasp and held it close to his face. “What’s this... Chicago Police Benevolent Association?... You on the job?”

“I work private now,” I said. “I was on the Chicago department for ten years.” That was a five-year lie.

I could now make out their faces. The older one had sharp features and dull eyes. The younger one had a bulldog mug that would make a great cop face, in a few years, but right now it looked a little silly.

“Ten years, you say,” the older one said. “Why’d you step down?”

“Disability,” I lied. With my free hand, I gestured to the arm he had hold of me by. “Took one in the shoulder.”

He blinked and let go of my arm as if it were hot. “How’d it happen, son?”

I’d gone from “boyo” to “son” — an encouraging raise in rank.

“Stickup guy,” I said, as if that explained it.

They nodded, as if I’d explained it.

The older cop’s sharp features softened. “You didn’t really steal this car, did you, son?”

“No. It was loaned to me. Like I said.”

The two cops looked at each other, then the younger one’s bulldog mug wrinkled into a plea of mercy, and the older one nodded.

“Look, friend,” the older one said, promoting me again, “this was a roust. We were supposed to haul you in. Keep you busy.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know.” The younger one shrugged. “A guy tipped us you’d be driving down this road sometime this evening, and we been keepin’ an eye out.”

I jerked a thumb toward the Terraplane. “Was this car reported stolen?”

“No,” Calvin said, shaking his head, a thumb in his gunbelt. “But the guy said you’d buy the story.”

I nodded. “And you’d just put me in a holding cell for a few hours.”

“Yeah,” the young one said. “And call a number and let this guy know we had ya... then again when we let ya out.”

Didn’t these clowns know they might have been setting me up for a rubout? No self-respecting Chicago cop would do that — for less than a C-note.

“What did this guy look like?”

“Gray hair, dark eyebrows, dark suit,” the younger one said. “Medium build, maybe six feet. Respectable-looking.”

Miller.

“What did he pay you?”

“Sawbuck each,” Calvin said.

Life was cheap in California. I dug in my pocket, but the younger one said, “No! Your money’s no good.”

I don’t think his partner appreciated this magnanimous gesture, but he let it go.

In fact, he said, “We ain’t gonna be party to rousting a brother officer.”

“Thank you, fellas,” I said.

And they tipped their hats to me, walked back to their black Ford, cut the spotlight, and headed back toward Burbank.

A few minutes later, I pulled into Lowman’s Motor Court, wondering just what the hell I’d gotten myself into. If Miller was military intelligence, willing to buy off local cops to set me up in some fashion, I needed to head home in a hurry, back to my contacts at the Trib. The sooner this was in print, the better.

I didn’t remember leaving the lights on in my cabin, and in retrospect you’d figure a guy in my business would be smarter; but the truth is, if I was smart I wouldn’t be in my business, and nobody had been parked in my stall, or the two stalls next to mine, which was the last in the row of cabins, so when I stepped inside and found the two guys tossing my room, I was genuinely surprised.

And they were surprised to see me, as after all I was supposed to be in a holding cell in Burbank or Glendale or somewhere. So I froze and they froze...

They were the best-dressed shakedown artists I ever saw, clean-shaven men in their late twenties in dark well-pressed suits with tasteful striped ties and clean collars and flourishes of hanky in their damn breast pockets and lighter-color fedoras with snappy snugged-down brims. The one nearest me was larger, with the blank expression of a college boy on an athletic scholarship; the other one was smaller but sturdy-looking with a blandly handsome face out of a shirt ad. Neither had taken off his coat to search the place, which was turned well and truly upside-down, bed stripped, mattress on the floor, drawers out of the dresser, the couple chairs upended, nightstand lamp sitting on the carpet, my suitcase on the floor, my clothing scattered. They were insurance investigators poking around the aftermath of a tornado.

The dresser, though its drawers were stacked atop each other on the floor, remained upright, and on it were a few key effects of mine, specifically my little notebook and my nine-millimeter Browning.

It took perhaps a second and a half for all of that to register, and another half-second for one of the clean-cut customers — the one nearest me, who’d been thumbing through a Bible withdrawn from the nightstand drawer, perhaps seeking guidance — to lunge at me, straight-arm slamming the door behind me, sealing me within the cabin, and with his left hand, in a blow as casual as it was powerful, slapping me with the Bible.

The Good Book taught me a lesson, sending me to my knees; but I’d learned other lessons long ago, and swung an elbow up into his groin, not once, but three times, eliciting a howl and sending him tumbling back, cushioned by the mattress on the floor, though I don’t think it did him much good.

The smaller intruder, his face white and wide-eyed with alarm, was reaching inside his suitcoat and I doubted it was for his card. I was still on my knees — the bigger guy was busy rolling around, clutching his balls and yowling in pain — and my fingers found that Bible and I flung it at the smaller bastard, and its pages fluttered like wings as it flew past him, crashing into the far wall, but startling him enough to send his fedora flying and gain me time to get to my feet, grab the nightstand lamp from the floor, and hurl it at him like a bomb.

This missed him also, smashing into, and just plain smashing, the dresser mirror, but at least it kept the bastard on his toes. The bigger one seemed to be emerging from that fetal ball he’d been rolling around in, and I stomped him in the stomach before charging toward the smaller guy, who was clawing under his suitcoat. If he wanted a gun, mine was right next to him, on the dresser, and when I reached him, I snatched the nine-millimeter in my grasp, shaking off shards of mirror making brittle rain, and whapped the barrel across his face, breaking his nose in a shower of blood, twin streams of scarlet shooting from his nostrils, and when his hand emerged from inside his suitcoat, he indeed did hold a gun, a short-barreled .38, but it didn’t last long, fumbling from his unconscious fingers as he tumbled backward, in a crumpled pile that would do his nicely pressed suit absolutely no good at all.

I turned back to the bigger intruder, who was pushing up off the mattress, a very tough man in a nice suit; his hat had flown off too, his face a mask of the rage that had overridden the pain from my elbows in the nuts and stomp to the stomach. He was digging under his suitcoat and probably wasn’t looking for his comb; I pointed the nine-millimeter at his face and said, “Let’s play Wild West and see who wins.”

Something registered in his eyes, and his hand froze within the coat, and I leaned forward and slapped him with the nine-millimeter, like he’d slapped me with the Bible, and his eyes did a slot-machine roll before he fell backward onto that mattress again.

Something was grasping at my pants leg, and I glanced over my shoulder and down where the smaller guy had crawled over — tears streaming down his face with its shattered nose and blood trailing into his mouth like a dripping scarlet Groucho mustache — and I shook him off, as if he were a dog trying to hump my leg. I pointed the gun down at him and said, “This is my best suit. Get blood on it at your own risk.”

He was breathing hard and then he started to choke on the blood in his mouth from his nose. I said, “Shit,” and stuck my gun in my belt, reached down and picked him up by the lapels and sat him on the bed’s box spring, to help him not strangle on his own blood. I’m just that kind of guy.

The bigger one, asprawl on the mattress, was still unconscious. I removed his gun from its shoulder holster, turning myself into a two-gun kid by stuffing it in my waistband next to my nine-millimeter; then I looked in his inside suitcoat pocket for his billfold. The name on his driver’s license was John Smith and he resided in Encino, California; no pictures of a wife and kids, no business cards, no nothing. The other guy, who was sitting there whimpering and snorting blood, didn’t protest when I checked out his billfold.

His name was Robert Jones, and he lived in Encino, too. He also had no wife and kids, nor any sign of being in any sort of business.

A knock came at the door. Had somebody finally noticed the slight commotion? The mild hubbub?

“Yeah?” I called.

The voice was timid, male. “Mr. Heller, are you all right? It’s the manager. Should I call the police?”

“No! No, I’m fine.”

The timid voice tried for strength. “Mr. Heller, please open the door. I’m afraid I have to insist...”

I dug in my pocket for my money clip, figuring a sawbuck ought to pave the way to a little silence. With some luck I could catch a night train to somewhere; a sleeper sounded mighty good right now. Maybe a double sawbuck...

I opened the door and William Miller’s hand holding a damp white cloth reached out and the overwhelming odor of chloroform accompanied my final thought, which was to wonder if I’d ever wake up again.

Groggy, my mouth filmed with a medicinal aftertaste and the thickness of sleep, with perhaps just a hint of Lobster Newburg, I blinked under the glare of a high overhead light, a conical shaft of brightness that singled me out in a darkened room. For the second time tonight, I was in the spotlight. If this was still tonight...

I sat slumped in a chair, a simple metal folding chair, and my hands were free; I ran one of them up over my face and felt the stubble of beard and ran my fingers into my scalp and massaged. My Florsheimed feet were roped to the legs of the chair; another rope looped my midsection, tying me to the chair. I was in the pants of my garbardine suit and in my white shirt, my suitcoat gone, my tie gone. And needless to say, the nine-millimeter and .38 I’d stuffed in my waistband were long gone.

The glare of the overhead lamp made it hard to focus, but gradually I achieved a sense of where I was. Beyond the cone of light I sat within was a vast, cool darkness, but a certain amount of light — moonlight and perhaps electrical light — came from high distant windows. The smell of gasoline and oil and wing dope wafted through the drafty structure. Gradually, dark bulky shapes within the darkness made themselves known, like beasts crouching in jungle night shadows.

A melodramatic response, perhaps, to being held captive in an airplane hangar, but justifiable. I had knocked the shit out of a couple of Miller’s cronies and now Miller had me — or someone Miller had turned me over to had me — and the only reason I had any hope of getting out of this alive was that I wasn’t dead yet.

Footsteps echoed in the cavernous room, footsteps in the darkness, hollow clops punctuated by gun-cock clicks.

Then I could make out the outline of him, moving out from between the large shapes that were parked aircraft, and finally he stepped just inside my circle of harsh light.

“Forgive the precautions,” William Miller said in that mellow balm of baritone.

Again his lanky frame was draped in a dark undertaker’s suit, navy with a red-and-white-striped tie. It was hard to see where his gray hair began and the grayish flesh left off. He stood with folded arms, his full lips pursed in an amused smile, but his eyes dark and cold under the black ridges of eyebrow.

“Stand a little closer,” I said. “I can’t hear you.”

He waved a scolding finger my way. “Don’t make me sorry I didn’t bind your hands, as well. You did quite a thorough job on Smith and Jones.”

“Are they military intelligence? Or am I contradicting myself?” My tongue felt thick and my head throbbed with a headache almost as blinding as the glare of the overhead lamp. But I was damned if I’d let him sense that.

Now his hands had moved to his hips. “Are you aware that the FBI has a file on you?”

“I’d be flattered if I gave a damn,” I said. “Is that who they were?”

He chuckled. “I understand you once spoke to Director Hoover ‘disrespectfully.’”

“I told him to go fuck himself.”

The dark unblinking eyes had fastened on me, appraisingly. “You also prevented him from being kidnapped by the Karpis and Barker gang. And I understand, from Elmer Irey, that you were helpful last year, in the ongoing IRS investigation of the late unlamented Huey Long’s confederates in Louisiana.”

“If this is a testimonial dinner,” I said, “go ahead and roll out the cake with the stripper in it.”

He began to pace, slowly, measured steps, not nervous, in an arc that traced the edge of my circle of light. “I also gather that you’re a friend of Eliot Ness, that you aided him on various matters when he was with the Justice Department and, later, the Alcohol and Tax Unit.”

“Yeah, I’m a regular Junior G-man. You can untie me now.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said ambiguously. “You’re also a known confidant of the criminal element in Chicago. You left the police department under a cloud, and you’ve had frequent dealings with members of the Capone mob.”

“So which is it? Am I a public-minded citizen, or a lowlife crook?”

His mouth smiled faintly but there was no smile in his eyes, at all. “That’s up to you... You mind if I make myself comfortable?”

“Please. Come sit on my lap if you want.”

Miller chuckled again. “I like your sense of humor. Very droll.”

That was a new word for it.

He stepped outside the circle into the darkness, but my eyes were accustomed enough to that darkness that I could make out his movement. He took something from somewhere and came walking back. Another metal folding chair. He placed it at the edge of the pool of light and sat. Crossed his legs. Folded his arms. Smiled meaninglessly.

“You see, we’re aware that you’re considering going to the press with what you’ve learned,” he said. “I mention these various aspects of your life and career to show why we feel you might be willing to cooperate with your government...”

It was out in the open now.

“...and, if you decline to help, to remind you how easily we might discredit you and anything you came up with.”

I laughed once but it was loud enough to echo. “So all you wanted was to talk this over with me? Is that what your friends ‘Smith and Jones’ were doing in my cabin? Looking for me? Under my bed? In my suitcase and dresser drawers?”

“Actually, we were looking for this...” And he withdrew from his side suitcoat pocket my little notebook; he held it up as if it were an item on auction. “...and anything else pertinent, any other notes or documents you might have assembled.”

Then he tossed it to me.

I caught it, and thumbed through. All the pages relating to Amy were missing.

“Everyone you’ve spoken to, we’ll be speaking to,” Miller said.

“Tied to chairs?”

His smile broadened. “No... You’re really the only one who requires... special treatment.”

“You forgot the kid gloves.”

Now the smile disappeared. “We intend to appeal to the patriotism of these individuals, Mr. Heller... We don’t anticipate any problems with any of them. Mr. McMenamy would surely not like to have his ham radio operating license pulled, nor would any of the other buffs who’ve reported hearing similar transmissions. The Myers youth is... a youth. He’s unlikely to make a fuss and, even so, who would pay attention? Miss DeCarrie will understand that it was Miss Earhart’s wish to cooperate with her government, and will respect the wishes of her employer and friend. Mr. Mantz and Mr. Tisor occasionally work on government contracts and I’m sure will do the right, public-spirited thing.”

“Or you’ll yank whatever licenses they need to do business. You bastards’ll turn me into a Republican yet.”

“Mr. Heller, stumbling around in the dark...” And he gestured to the blackness of the hangar surrounding us. “...flying blind as you have, you’ve imperiled a top-secret government operation. We are trying as best we can to... stage-manage what could become an international incident of such proportions that the next world war could be precipitated.”

The volume of his voice had gradually risen; it was now reverberating in the vast chamber.

“And, Mr. Heller, speaking with a certain insider’s knowledge of both military and naval intelligence, I can tell you with all honesty and no small regret that your country is at this time in no shape to enter such a conflict.”

This was a new one on me: I’d never been accused of almost precipitating a world war, before.

I said, “I’m just supposed to take your word for all this.”

Both feet on the floor now, he folded his hands in his lap and tilted forward. “Mr. Heller, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart is big news. But how long do you think the disappearance of a corrupt private detective would sustain the interest of the American people?”

Were there others in the darkness around us? I sensed as much, but couldn’t be sure.

I said cheerfully, “Too bad your boys Smith and Jones didn’t stop by my motel a little earlier... They might have intercepted that detailed letter I sent my attorney.”

He sat back and folded his arms again and the soft mouth formed a sort of kiss. Then he said, “All right... Now we’ve exchanged threats. Mine is not empty, whereas yours is a fairly pathetic improvisation, but let’s treat each other with a little mutual respect, nonetheless. I’ll pretend I believe there’s a real chance that such a letter exists. And I won’t remind you that a blowtorch to the soles of your feet might elicit the truth in this matter and/or the name of your attorney. I won’t insult your intelligence in that manner.”

“You’re a swell guy, Miller. I feel so good with the security of my nation in your principled hands.”

“You’re a funny one to talk about principles... You forget I’ve read your FBI file. You have a reputation for looking the other way, when money’s involved.”

“Then let’s see the color of yours.”

“An interesting notion, and I don’t rule it out... but I think in this instance we’ve gone past your innate avarice and passed into an... emotional realm. You see I’m aware — unlike Mr. Putnam, who is cooperating with us, but knows less than he thinks he does — of your... this is delicate... friendship with Mr. Putnam’s wife.”

Funny how a guy threatening to torture me with a blowtorch a few seconds ago now felt the need to indulge in arch euphemism.

“I’ll tell you this,” I said. “I know Mr. Putnam’s wife well enough to know that she wouldn’t get in bed with the military. She hates war.”

“Yes, and she cooperated with us for that very reason... and because she and her husband could not get sufficient backing for the world flight, otherwise.”

I leaned forward as far as the rope around me would allow. “Why Amelia? Why drag a public figure, a beloved public figure, into your dirty business?”

He sighed. “This was a service only she could provide, Mr. Heller. As the most famous civilian aviatrix in the world, she enjoyed an unparalleled advantage: the freedom to fly anywhere in that world, including places where her own country was banned.”

I sneered at the son of a bitch. “She was a civilian, and a heroine to America, and you cheapen that into making her a spy? Not to mention putting her life at risk!”

He waved that off. “That Lockheed of hers can outrun any unfriendly plane — and Mr. Noonan is not a civilian; he’s the anchor of this mission. We did not consider Miss Earhart to be in any danger. Even the Japs would think twice before shooting down Amelia Earhart because she was off course!”

“Off course in a plane whose belly’s packed with aerial survey cameras.”

That rated a shrug from Miller. “The world would write that off as the Japanese trying to cover up for their ill-advised actions. Which is something the Japs, who are hardly stupid, would figure out for themselves.”

“Then what the hell happened? It looks like they did fire on her...”

Another shrug. “Just trying to force her down... She did stray off course, after her mission was accomplished. It’s unfortunate...”

“You screwed up.”

Something like regret touched the impassive features. “Actually, Amelia did. She’s not really much of a flier.”

“You knew where she was, when she was radioing for help. You knew she was down in Jap waters.”

He said nothing.

“But you didn’t go in after her, did you?”

Now he put his hands on his knees and leaned forward just a bit, as if lecturing a precocious but difficult child. “Mr. Heller, we believe Japan is building military bases throughout the tiny islands of the Pacific. They are forbidden by treaty to do this, but their islands in the Marshall, Carolines, and Mariana groups are closed to ‘foreigners’ like us. We believe they’re fortifying for war, Mr. Heller, violating their covenant with the League of Nations.”

“And you want to prove that.”

The tiniest shrug. “We at least want to know it. The President has to know, if he’s to carry out his responsibility to provide our country with an adequate defense, should the Philippines or Hawaii be attacked.”

“Sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”

He stood. His voice was firm; though he wasn’t speaking terribly loud, echo touched his words: “Amelia agreed to cooperate. She did this in part as a favor to her friend, President Roosevelt. If you make this public, you will not only go against her wishes, but tarnish her image not just here, but abroad.”

I raised a forefinger. “Plus start the next war. Don’t forget that.”

“Your actions may endanger her — might cause her captors to... destroy the evidence.”

“Execute her, you mean.”

“We believe she’s alive. We prefer to keep her that way.”

“I doubt that. The best thing for you people is for her never to be seen again.”

“We’re not monsters, Mr. Heller. We’re soldiers. But so is Miss Earhart.”

I had to laugh. “She’d slap you for that... Did your people hear what Robert Myers and I heard last night?”

An eyebrow arched. “Frankly, no... But various of our ships in the Far East fleet have intercepted coded messages sent by Japanese vessels and shore installations in their Mandated Islands back home to Japan... messages that indicate Miss Earhart and Mr. Noonan are indeed in Japanese hands.”

“Jesus! Why don’t you negotiate their release, then?”

“We can’t admit we sent Earhart and Noonan,” he said, “and the other side can’t admit they have Earhart and Noonan. That is the reality of world politics on this very shaky stage.”

I looked at him for a long time, his oval face with its lifeless features, the dead eyes, the soft mouth. Then I asked casually, or as casually as a man tied in a chair could ask, “You just shared top-secret information with me, didn’t you, Miller?”

“Classified material, yes.”

“That means if I don’t cooperate, you’re going to kill me.”

The mildest amusement puckered the soft lips. “Oh, Mr. Heller... I would never do that. You’re a citizen of the United States of America, the country I love, the country I serve.”

“You’d have somebody else do it.”

“Precisely.”

I held out my hands, palms up. “These are free because you want me to sign something.”

“Perceptive... Yes. It’s a contract, actually.”

“A contract?”

He withdrew the document, folded lengthwise in thirds, from an inside suitcoat pocket. “A backdated contract. You’ve been working for the government, in the capacity of investigator. As such, you’re subject to a policy of strict confidentiality.”

“Really,” I said, taking the contract, reading it over quickly, finding it surprisingly simple and in keeping with what he’d outlined. One portion remained to be filled in. “What are you paying me?”

“You’ve suffered a lot of inconvenience, Mr. Heller, and had considerable travel expense. What would you say to two thousand dollars?”

“I should throw this in your face.”

“Have I insulted you, suggesting you take payment to walk away from a matter so personal to you?”

“Make it five.”

I agreed to take their money, for two reasons. First, money doesn’t know where it comes from, and this foul sum would spend just like money that smelled better. Second, this would convince Miller and those he represented that I would forget what I’d seen and heard.

“You are going to try to get her back,” I said, as I signed the contract, using my leg as a desk.

“Of course... but it will be delicate. It’s difficult for a country that denies responsibility to arrange the release of prisoners whose captors deny their presence.”

He took the contract from me, then looked sharply into the darkness just over my shoulder and nodded and footsteps came up quickly behind me and a hand reached around in front of me and again a chloroform-soaked cloth masked my face.

I awoke in a private compartment of a train eastbound for Chicago. I found my nine-millimeter in my packed suitcase. Neatly folded in my billfold was a five-thousand-dollar check from the Office of Naval Intelligence. In the inside suitcoat pocket of my blue garbardine, which I wore, was my copy of the contract, with Miller’s signature.

Legal and aboveboard.

On July 19, the Navy abandoned its efforts and declared the search for the Electra over. Though intercepted radio messages (never made public) indicated Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had been picked up by the Japanese almost two weeks earlier, the Navy used the continuing search as an excuse for continued, expanded reconnaissance of this strategic area of the Pacific. They were not allowed into Japanese-controlled waters, however, though the Japanese professed to be helping in the search.

Ten ships, sixty-five airplanes, and four thousand men had scoured two hundred and fifty thousand square miles of Pacific Ocean in a four-million-dollar effort. Not a trace of the Electra or its crew or even a life raft turned up. No oil slick, no scrap of floating debris. Nothing.

One month to the day after the search for Amy ended, Paul Mantz married Terry Minor in Hollywood’s fabled wedding chapel, the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather. When the papers covered it, they described Mantz as “technical advisor for Amelia Earhart,” and quoted him as saying, “It’s time to get on with our lives.”

Miller apparently got to everyone I’d talked to, because no one came forward, and I certainly didn’t go to the papers.

I was a good American, after all; and anyway, I had no desire to be the government’s next disappearing act. But as the days and months passed, I would open the paper each morning, looking for the headline announcing her return. Amy’s good pal President Roosevelt wouldn’t let her rot in some Japanese jail, would he? An arrangement would be made; some exchange; something that would allow both countries to achieve their goals and the honorable Japanese tradition of saving face.

But the headline never came. Amelia Earhart had vanished from the pages of the papers as completely as she had somewhere over the Pacific. She had flown out of the news and into the pages of history, where she lay prematurely buried.