The Memoirs of Nathan Heller
True Detective
True Crime
The Million-Dollar Wound
Neon Mirage
Stolen Away
Carnal Hours
Blood and Thunder
Damned in Paradise
Flying Blind
Majic Man
Angel in Black
Chicago Confidential
Bye Bye Baby
Chicago Lightning (short stories)
Triple Play (novellas)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright ©2011 Max Allan Collins
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by AmazonEncore
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 978-1-61218-089-2
To Mike Wynne—
who suggested this flight
of fancy and fact
Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time, and contradictory source material, will allow), fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones—all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.
“I think it’s too bad when aviation movies depend for their excitement on plane wrecks and lost fliers and all that sort of thing. Perhaps that’s good drama but it certainly isn’t modern aviation.”
—Amelia Earhart
Contents
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
1 CEILING ZERO
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
2 DEAD RECKONING
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
3 DEAD-STICK LANDING
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
EPILOGUE
Chapter 20
I OWE THEM ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1
The press called her “Lady Lindy,” but her family called her Mill. Schoolgirl pals preferred Meelie, certain friends Mary (Fred Noonan among them), she was Paul Mantz’s “angel,” and her husband used “A. E.” To the world she was Amelia Earhart, but to me, and only me, she was Amy.
I hadn’t thought of her in a long time, at least a week, when that damned Texan came around, stirring memories. For all the mentions of her in the media, even after so many years—some screwball was always mounting an expedition to “find her”—I’d managed to keep her real in my mind, not just a famous name, not just a “historical enigma” (as Leonard Nimoy called her on some silly TV show), always a person, a friend, someone I missed, with that bittersweet kind of longing you feel more and more, the older you get.
Old age is a combination, after all, of hard and soft, a senile sundae of cynicism and sentimentality, with much of your time spent reading, both aloud and silently, from a laundry list of bastards and sweethearts you spent a lifetime compiling. And not all of the sweethearts were women, and not all of the bastards were men.
My wife—my second wife, the marriage that took—and I had not given up our home in suburban Chicago, yet; I was telling people I was “semi-retired” from the A-1 Detective Agency, lying to myself that I was still in charge. I was still in charge like a brain-dead billionaire on life support is still in charge of his finances.
But at age sixty-four (with sixty-five a few months away), I didn’t need to work. My one-room agency in Barney Ross’s old building on the corner of Van Buren and Plymouth, established in 1932, had turned into suites of offices in six cities now, not to mention two floors of the Monadnock Building. I wasn’t the President of the A-1 anymore, but Chairman of the Board. We no longer did divorce work; our specialties were “anti-industrial espionage” and “security consultation.” I had become so successful, I didn’t recognize my own business.
So when the Texan came calling, I was still kidding myself that I was only “wintering” in Florida. We had a nice little rambling three-bedroom ranch-style on a waterway where we could sit and watch boats glide by, first in one direction, then the other, sometimes chased by water skiers, some of whom were pretty young girls. We could have had an oceanfront place, giving my tired old randy eyes even more ready access to sweet young things in skimpy bathing suits, but the “villa” available shared a wall with a next-door neighbor. Maybe that was a villa in Florida; in Chicago, we called it a goddamn duplex.
Our life in Boca Raton was fairly simple. I rarely played golf, though we had country club privileges (our house was part of a “neighborhood association”), because golf was a social pastime I had put up with for business purposes. I’ve always had better things to do than hit a little ball with a stick and chase the ball and then hit it with a stick again. Nor did I go fishing; I’d caught plenty of big fish in my time, but not the aquatic kind—fishing, it seemed to me, existed solely to provide the world with a more boring pastime than golf. My wife loved to garden, and I loved to watch her bending over in ours; she had a green thumb, and a great ass for an old gal. I told you I was a randy old bastard. Or is that sweetheart?
Anyway, my days were spent in a lawn chair, watching the boats go by, sipping rum and Coke, reading, occasionally accompanying my wife shopping, just as she would more than occasionally accompany me to the track. Evenings it was often cards, bridge club with my wife, poker with my buddies, retired cops, mostly. Since I’d only smoked during the war and was a mild drinker, my health was excellent, save for the sporadic aches and pains, never quite escalating into arthritis or bursitis, that a son of a bitch with as many healed-over bullet and knife wounds (even a machete scar) as I have ought to expect after a lifetime of merriment.
I had also started to write the memoirs of which this is the latest installment; but I had not yet come to the realization that writing those memoirs would become my salvation. That a man who had lived a life as eventful as mine, who was no longer of an age where that eventful life could be further pursued, could find, if not meaning, relief from the malaise of old age, in reliving that life. Besides, I had a fat advance from a publisher.
So I was noodling on a yellow pad, when the Texan strolled up, blotting out the sun like an eclipse with a pot belly.
“You’re Nate Heller, aren’t you?” With that drawl, only the word “pardner” was missing.