His eyebrows went up, then down, like Groucho Marx, only not so funny. “Something you’ll like. Something potentially very profitable.”
“May I ask…” She turned to me again, her smile warm and apologetic. “…and I mean no offense, Mr. Heller…” And now she turned back to her husband. “…if there’s a reason why we’re discussing business in a social setting?”
“I think you probably already know the answer to that one, A. E.”
“Simpkin,” she said to him, a nickname she’d already used several times over our sumptuous, expensive meal, “I’ve told you a dozen times I don’t take any of that seriously. It’s the sort of thing people in the public eye just have to put up with.”
“I disagree,” he said with a frown, then flicked a finger in my direction. “At least you could do me the courtesy of getting a professional opinion from Nate, here. After all, security is his field. Didn’t he do a fine job this evening?”
Amelia smiled and shook her head, then said to me, again, “I mean no offense, Mr. Heller, but—”
“I agree with you,” I told her, giving up on the goulash. “I’ll be damned if I know what your husband is so impressed with about me.”
Putnam’s thin line of a mouth flinched in a momentary scowl; then he said, “To be quite honest, A. E., I did some checking around about our guest.”
“Slim recommended him,” she said, with a tiny shrug. “You told me.”
“Actually,” Putnam said, “it was George Leisure who first mentioned Mr. Heller.”
He really had been checking up on me. “How do you know George Leisure?” I asked, almost irritated. Who the hell had recommended me to Putnam, anyway? Leisure, a top Wall Street attorney, had been second chair to Clarence Darrow in the Massie trial in Honolulu in 1932; I’d been Darrow’s investigator.
“Golfing pal,” Putnam said. “Mr. Heller, I’m told you’re discreet, and you have a certain familiarity with the special needs of the famous. Of celebrities.”
There was some truth in that, though the retail credit firms I did the bulk of my work for—not to mention the husbands and/or wives looking to get the dirt on their spouses that made up most of the rest of my accounts receivable book—weren’t exactly household names.
“I suppose so,” I said, just as the waiter arrived with dessert. We had all ordered the house specialty—Creole Juanita, a yam pudding—and Putnam and I were having coffee with it. Amelia had cocoa, explaining she drank neither coffee nor tea. A non-tea-drinking teetotaler.
“My wife has received some threatening letters,” Putnam said, spooning his pudding.
“Everybody in my position receives threatening letters,” she said, mildly impatient.
I touched her sleeve, lightly. “Now it’s my turn to ask you not to take offense…but there is no one in this country, no one in the world, who’s in your position. I’ll be glad to listen to what’s been going on, and give you my best reading…no extra charge, no obligation.”
She had a lot of nice smiles, but this one—faint but fetching—was my favorite so far. “That’s very decent of you, Mr. Heller.”
“Hey, you paid for my services this evening,” I said, dipping a spoon into my Creole Juanita, “and bought me a nice meal. How can I help?”
Putnam didn’t have the notes with him, but as he described them, this seemed fairly typical celebrity harassment—letters were assembled via cut-out words lifted from newspapers and magazines, not asking for a ransom—just hateful, threatening messages: YOU WILL FALL TO EARTH, THE CRASH IS COMING.
“How many of these notes have you received?” I asked.
“Three,” Amelia said. She was eating her pudding, not terribly worked up about this subject. The stuff was pretty much pumpkin pie without the crust, by the way.
I asked, “Where did you receive them?”
“At my hotel, in California. Before we left for Honolulu, and the Pacific flight.”
“Did you go to the cops in L.A.?”
“No. I’ve had other crank mail, before. I think G. P.’s upset primarily because these are so…nasty…with the cut-out words and all, which make it…creepy.”
“Did the notes come in the mail?”
“Yes.” She pushed her pudding cup aside, half-eaten. Maybe this was bothering her, after all.
“Then you might be able to take this to the FBI or the postal inspectors.”
“Please understand,” Putnam said, his pudding finished long ago, “there’s a history of sabotage, where female fliers are concerned. During the first Women’s Air Derby, Thea Rasche got a note with cut-out words like the ones A. E.’s been receiving and got grounded with sand in her fuel tank…the rudder cables of Claire Fahy’s plane were weakened by acid, and Bobbi Trout was forced down with sand, or maybe dirt, poured in her fuel.”
Amelia made a face. “Jiminy crickets, Simpkin, that was 1929.”
“I would prefer to be safe than sorry,” he said crisply. Then he formed a businesslike smile and those unblinking eyes fixed upon me. “Nate, Amelia’s about to embark on a brief lecture tour…ten days, twelve appearances…on her way to California, where she’ll prepare for our next long-distance flight.”
“Going after another record?” I asked her. “So soon?”
But Amelia, who had brightened at her husband’s last words, ignored me and leaned toward Putnam, her voice breathless as she asked, “Then we’re on for Mexico City?”
He smiled and patted her hand. “We’re on.”
She was almost bouncing in her chair, an eager child. “Simpkin, how on earth did you manage it?”
He sipped his coffee and then, too casually, said, “Merely persuaded the President of Mexico, our new friend Lázaro Cárdenas, to have the words ‘Amelia Earhart Good Will Flight’…in Spanish, of course…printed on a limited-edition Mexican twenty-cent airmail stamp. Of the less than eight hundred they’re printing, we get three hundred first-day covers to have you autograph and sell to collectors.”
“Well, naturally, I’m pleased….”
A mild frown creased his forehead. “What’s wrong, dear?”
Her childish glee was gone. “It just seems a little…undignified.”
“Flying around setting records is terribly expensive,” he said, and this was obviously not the first time he’d said this, or something close to it, “and we have to accept legitimate returns where we can get them.”
She nodded. Sipped her cocoa. Asked, “And…selling these stamps…this will cover our expenses?”
“It’s a start,” he said. He turned to me. “Nate, I can’t accompany A. E. on this lecture tour, nor can I join her, immediately thereafter, in California. I have preflight preparations to make, service and fuel to arrange, magazines and newspapers to contact, and several other sponsors I need to finalize before the flight…. I would like you to accompany A. E. on this lecture tour, and provide personal security for her, at the Burbank airfield, as she prepares for the Mexico City flight. Are you willing to do that?”
Amelia was staring straight ahead, sipping her cocoa.
I hadn’t anticipated a job of this scope. “Well, uh…when would we leave?”
“The day after tomorrow.”
I shrugged. “I would have to make some arrangements to cover my regular clients with other agencies…”
Now he shrugged, in a matter-of-fact, take-it-or-leave-it manner. “Twenty-five dollars a day and expenses. I’ll write you out a retainer check for five hundred dollars before the evening’s through.” He pushed away from the table and rose. “Give it some consideration…. Excuse me, for a moment. They’re holding something for me at the desk that I’d like to show you.” He was speaking to his wife and had a pixie smile going below the professorial glasses. “I think you’ll be very pleased.”
And he walked briskly from the dining room out into the lobby.
I sipped my coffee, then looked her way and asked, “Are you comfortable with this arrangement, ma’am?”