“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 do
es 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.
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