Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (10 page)

“Why do I think you think Putnam sent those notes to himself?”

A sneer of a smile formed. “I don’t just think it—I know it. He brags about it, to his family and close friends. He uses it as an example of how clever he is.”

“You can go to the pokey for fraud like that.”

He blew a perfect smoke ring and watched it dissipate as he spoke. “Yeah, but to Gippy, it’s just another publicity stunt. And he prides himself on stirrin’ up the press.”

“And you think he’s doing the same thing now.”

“He’s capable of it. Sitting by himself some night, cutting out those words from papers and magazines, pasting them up, feeling like he’s one smart son of a bitch.”

“Then why would he hire me to protect Amelia?”

Of course, I knew the answer to that: because I was really hired for a completely other purpose.

“Probably for authenticity,” he said with a shrug. “To show his concern for his wife, when he leaks this to the papers.”

“Does Putnam know how low your opinion of him is?”

“He suspects.”

“Why do you do business with him, then?”

“He’s got a great wife. She’s only a so-so flier, but she’s got a great heart and more courage than a Marine battalion.”

“A so-so flier?”

He grunted a laugh. “You know how many crashes that sweet girl has had? At least a dozen.”

“Nobody told me that before I went flying with her.”

A Cheshire Cat grin formed under the pencil mustache. “To a pilot, a crash don’t count unless it kills you. If you can walk away from it, it’s just another successful landing…even if your plane blows up a few seconds later.”

“You’re worried about her, aren’t you?”

The grin vanished; his forehead tightened. “You’re goddamn right, I am. Each one of these feats of hers has to be bigger than the last. She’s running out of impressive baloney to pull off. She’s no spring chicken, either.”

I sat forward. “Why do you help her, then? I can see she respects you. Why don’t you just tell her to retire? Famous as she is, she ought to be able to rest on her laurels, and let G. P. market her fame for the rest of her life.”

He’d started shaking his head no about halfway through that. “She wouldn’t listen to me, Nate. As disenchanted as she may be with Gippy, she knows the bastard
invented
her.”

“Svengali?”

“Yeah, or Doc Frankenstein. Besides, Gippy’s a tightwad, a stingy fucking bastard…but he pays top dollar when he really wants something.”

“So he’s buying you, too.”

“Yeah. I’m not proud of it, but I’m a pilot in Hollywood…” He gestured to the gallery of famous faces. “…and Hollywood is a town of glamorous whores…. Like it or not, I fit in.”

I knew what he meant. He was at home in Hollywood like I was at home in the bushes of his Toluca Lake bungalow with my Speed Graphic. I didn’t like what I was doing, particularly, but it was a living, and I was good at it.

It was ten o’clock at night, after a day that had included another half-day of training for Amy in the little red Link and an afternoon here at Mantz’s house, where I had not been in the bushes, but relaxing in the living room. Shoes off, spread out on a couch, I read movie magazines and took catnaps while Mantz, Amy, and retired Navy Commander Clarence Williams, a dark-haired sturdy guy with a beaky nose and a dimpled chin, were gathered around the kitchen table going over charts and maps. Williams was no-nonsense in a military manner that got Amy’s attention.

On the afternoon trip to Mantz’s place, Amy had done the driving, tooling the sleek Terraplane past the farms, ranches and lush orange groves beyond the airport to the shaded streets of residential Burbank, where the foot soldiers of the dream factory lived in modest cracker-boxes.

Toluca Lake was another story, from the wide flawless sidewalks to the cozy interesting homes (“Lots of art directors live in Toluca,” Amy explained) and an eclectic array of shade trees, elms, oaks, redwoods, and, for the requisite Hollywood tropical touch, palms. She pointed out several movie star homes (“Bette Davis lives there…. That’s where Ruby Keeler lives”) and indicated a golf course beyond Valley Spring Lane.

“Do you play golf?” she asked.

“Only under duress.”

“I rather enjoy it. Would you consider joining me some afternoon, if I can get out of Paul’s clutches?”

“Sure. Is that a public course or a country club?”

“It’s a country club.”

“Might be a problem.”

“Why, Nate?”

“Most country clubs are restricted.”

“Oh…I’m sorry…I forgot…”

“I’m Jewish? That’s okay. I forgot it myself, a long time ago. Trouble is, other people keep bringing it up.”

Amy, Mantz, and Commander Williams had slaved over the charts till around six, at which time we all headed over to a steakhouse in Glendale where we hooked up with Toni Lake. Dinner was nice, though I was glad Amy was paying—it was a pricey seventy-five cents a steak, à la carte—and I dropped Amy back at Mantz’s bungalow, ostensibly heading back to Lowman’s Motor Court.

Only I didn’t head back. The Terraplane was parked over on Toluca Estates Drive, in front of Mary Astor’s house (always had kind of a yen for her and wouldn’t have minded a glimpse, but no luck). The night was cool and dry, a breeze riffling leaves, including those of the bushes I was snuggled behind; I was in a sportshirt and slacks and didn’t look much like a private detective, more like a peeping tom…if there’s a difference.

The blinds on the window were shut, but I could see around the edge of them, and—thanks to light from a lamp out of my range of vision, presumably on the bedstand—catch a view of the doorway and a dresser next to it; also the edge of the bottom of the bed. This angle would not give me the prize-winning
in flagrante delicto
shot I craved, but if this bedroom were the site of a man and woman making whoopee, sooner or later the two of them might appear together within my view, enjoying a before or after hug and kiss, in dishabille.

I’d done this kind of work plenty of times before, but tonight I had a sick feeling and a racing heartbeat. To tell you the truth, as close as I’d gotten to Amy, as much as I liked her, I might have ditched G. P.’s snoop job, if I wasn’t so goddamn jealous of Mantz. What did he have that I didn’t have? If she’d had the good sense and better taste to have an affair with me instead of Mantz, I would have never considered ratting on her to her husband.

I’m just that kind of guy.

Around ten-fifteen Mantz came in, alone. He was already in striped maroon pajama bottoms, and his chest was bare and hairy; he had a well-muscled upper torso, and a magazine was rolled up in one fist, as if he were going to swat a bug with it. For a moment I thought he might be coming after me, but he disappeared toward the bed and I could hear the box springs squeak as he climbed in, and even from my limited perspective could see that he’d gotten under the covers.

Presumably, he was reading the magazine.

No sign of Amelia. Was he waiting for her? Was she already in bed and I couldn’t see her from this angle?

It didn’t take long to figure out the latter wasn’t the case. Though the window was closed, the night being cool enough to warrant that, I’d been able to hear the box springs clearly when he climbed into bed. Presumably, the sound of conversation, and certainly the joyful noise of lovemaking on that mattress, would have found their way to my ears.

Half an hour later, he was still alone, and apparently still reading. No Amy.

Knowing where the guest room was, I worked my way around to the other side of the house and a new set of bushes. The window here was closed, as well, the blinds down, and furthermore the lights were out. But bed-springs were squeaking, so somebody was in there all right, possibly tossing and turning…

Only from the sound of it, that somebody was having one hell of a restless night. Either that, or getting their ashes well and truly hauled.

Puzzled, I returned to my previous post, wondering if Mantz had managed to perfectly time it and leave his bedroom and climb in with Amy just as I was circling the house to switch windows.

But Mantz was apparently still in bed, the bedstand lamp aglow; I would have sworn, listening closely, I could hear the pages of his magazine being slowly turned.

And so back to the guest bedroom window I went, where a bedspring symphony was still in full sway. Two voices, emitting muffled, restrained but very audible grunts, groans, sighs, and cries, accompanied the squeaking springs. Snugged between bushes and the stucco exterior of the bungalow, poised at the edge of the blinds, my Speed Graphic and I waited for things to settle down, hoping a light would eventually go on and satisfy my professional, not to mention prurient, curiosity.

Finally a light clicked on.

Amy had reached for the bedstand lamp and filled the guest room (the yellow plaster walls of which were decorated with framed Mantz aviation movie stills) with a golden luster appropriate to the afterglow of a satisfying amorous event. She wore the maroon pajama top that Mantz had apparently loaned her, but the person next to her in bed wasn’t Mantz, rather a nude woman, or at least nude to the waist because that was where the sheet fell. The woman was voluptuous bordering on plump, her torso pale next to her dark-tanned leathery face and short black boyish hair.

Nonetheless, there were less pleasant things in the world to view, particularly for a lech like me, than a nude-to-the-waist Toni Lake.

I backed away from the window, and the bushes behind me rustled like the wings of startled birds. Afraid I might have given myself away, I ducked down, hiding under and within the shrubbery like the weasel I was.

Shaking, sweating despite the night’s coolness, I didn’t know what the hell to think. I felt ashamed that I’d intruded upon such a scene, even though my intrusion wasn’t known to my victims; and I felt sickened, not by Amy’s sexual perversion—I was never one to sit in judgment of other people’s sex lives, being primarily interested in my own—but at the thought that this special woman, toward whom I’d been developing ever-deepening feelings, some carnal, some not, was in a sense a stranger to me. She was not who I thought she was, and I would never be close to her.

It just doesn’t pay for a guy to fall in love with a lesbian.

Crouched there in the bushes, thoughts racing, I knew one thing for certain, and one thing only: I would take no candid photos of Amy and her friend Miss Lake. If that was what Putnam had been after, he’d have to find another sleazy private eye to do it. This sleazy private eye had had his fill.

So I left my nest under the bushes, and was skulking away from the house toward the sidewalk, when a car came moving down Valley Spring Lane, very slowly, and with its lights off. Finding this curious, I slipped behind a palm tree and watched as the car, a snazzy red and white Dusenberg convertible, drew up in front.

I recognized the car, because I’d seen it out at United Airport the day we’d arrived: it belonged to Myrtle Mantz, who had left on the train yesterday afternoon, to visit her mother in Dallas.

Only she hadn’t.

Myrtle Mantz was in Toluca Lake, driving the Dusenberg.

With the lights out.

She parked, got quietly out of the car. She was wearing a lime blouse and hunter-green slacks, her long red hair pinned up, and looked very pale in the ivory moonlight; she seemed to have no makeup on and her pretty face was immobile, her eyes glazed. She stood on the sidewalk and gazed at her house as if she were a ghost that had returned to haunt it.

She had something in her right hand that I couldn’t make out too well, but it might have been a gun….

I scurried to the back door, ready to shoulder it open but found it blessedly unlocked; I moved through the dark kitchen where the Frigidaire was purring, left my Speed Graphic on the table where the charts and maps were still spread out, and slipped through the hall and into the guest bedroom where the bedstand lamp was still on and Amy was in bed, pillows propped behind her, while Toni Lake was off to one side of the room, where she’d been getting dressed, in fact was pretty well back into her white blouse and brown jodhpurs.

Lake scowled at me, not appreciating this invasion one little bit, and Amy’s eyes were wide with surprise and the beginnings of indignation, but I didn’t let her say a word.

Instead I whispered, “Myrtle’s coming up the front walk with a gun. Go out the back way. Now!”

Amy scurried out of bed, grabbing her bathrobe, and Lake followed us out into the hall and through the kitchen, Amy getting into and belting the bathrobe as she went; I could hear the front door opening—Myrtle had opened it quietly, but I was listening for it, whereas Mantz wouldn’t be.

“You got a car?” I whispered to Lake.

She nodded.

“Get yourselves the hell away from here,” I said to them both, opening the back door for them. “Sleep somewhere else tonight.”

Amy frowned at me, as if she didn’t know whether she loved me or hated me, although now that I knew what I did about her, what was the difference?

Then they were gone, and I went over and stood hugging the Frigidaire and peeked past it down the hall, where Myrtle was going into Mantz’s bedroom.

And I got a good look this time: it was a gun all right, a .32 revolver, a Smith and Wesson maybe, just a little bitty thing that could fit in a handbag, but you still wouldn’t want to get shot in the eye with it.

I didn’t have a gun with me. My nine-millimeter was in my suitcase at Lowman’s Motor Court; I was not licensed to carry a firearm in the state of California and, besides, this was the kind of assignment where you packed a camera, not a pistol.

So armed only with my wits—no remarks, please—I sneaked down the uncarpeted hallway, which was empty now; she was in Mantz’s bedroom—actually, it was her bedroom, too, wasn’t it?

And from the hallway as I crept along, I could hear her saying, with a Southwestern lilt, “Where’s your angel, Paul?”

“What are you doing here?” His response registered surprise, but not fear; maybe she had the gun behind her back. “She’s in the guest bedroom, where do you think she is?”