Max Allan Collins
Flying Blind
To Mike Wynne—
who suggested this flight
of fancy and fact
“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.”
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.
Prologue
February 14, 1970
Chapter 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.
“I’m Nate Heller,” I said, and I was, even if I was Nate Heller in sunglasses, a Hawaiian-print shirt, chino shorts, and sandals. No trench coat or fedora, despite the goofy pictures I’d posed for, for Life magazine, a hundred years ago. “Private Eye to the Stars,” they called me. We’d opened up our Los Angeles office, by then.
Anyway, the Texan. He was as big as... a Texan. He wore a multicolor Hawaiian shirt that looked like a paint factory drop cloth, unlike my own tasteful purple and white affair. A young guy — maybe fifty-five — he wore new blue jeans and wrap-around black sunglasses, and his hair was white at the temples and suspiciously black everywhere else and curly and dripping with more Vitalis than a Sam Giancana bodyguard. He had a bucket head and a shovel jaw, and the hand he extended was smaller than a frying pan.
I just looked at it.
He took no offense, just reeled in his paw and sat on the edge of the deck chair next to mine, sort of balancing precariously there, asking, after the fact, “Mind if I sit myself down?”
“Who else is gonna do it for you?”
He grinned — his teeth were as white as well-polished porcelain bathroom tiles; caps or dentures. “You’re a hard man to find, Mr. Heller.”
“Maybe you should’ve hired a detective.”
An eyebrow arched above a sunglass lens. “That’s partly why I’m here.”
“I’m retired.” That was the first time I didn’t use “semi”; dropping the prefix was either an admission to myself, or maybe just a lie to cool this Texan’s interest.
“You never answered my letters,” he said. He pronounced “my” like “mah.” Like a lot of Southern men, he managed to sound simultaneously good-natured and menacing.
“No,” I said, “I never did.”
“Least you’re not pretendin’ you never got ’em. Did you read ‘em?”
“About half of the first one.”
A motorboat purred by, pulling a shapely blonde whose hair was made even more golden by the sun; the blue water rippled, and so did the muscles on her tummy.
“The rest you just pitched,” he said.
I nodded.
“Left messages at your office. You never answered them, neither.”
“Nope,” I said, speaking his language.