At the Hotel Statler (where we’d arrived at 2:00 A.M. the night before, Battle Creek being our previous stop), Amelia held a press conference in her suite over an omelet, six pieces of toast, a cantaloupe, and a pot of hot chocolate. A morning tour of the Hudson auto plant (where the Essex was made—the car she was currently endorsing, despite the Franklin she preferred, which was from a previous endorsement deal) was followed by a Women’s Advertising Club luncheon in the Detroit-Leland Hotel dining room, where she did not speak but received a warm ovation as guest of the Detroit Automobile Dealers Association. This made necessary a mid-afternoon tearoom stop with key members of the association, after a photo for their company publication was taken outside the three-story brownstone rooming house which a bronze tablet announced as the birthplace of Charles Lindbergh. Her lecture followed dinner for the auto dealers association at the Yacht Club and, finally, she made an appearance—but not a speech—at an auto show at Convention Hall, between Woodward and Cass Avenues, where an enthusiastic crowd turned ugly, pushing, shoving, trying to get a closer look at her, waving pens and pieces of paper, and hollering for autographs, pawing at her clothing, till it seemed they might tear themselves some souvenirs.
These were not the refined ladies in feathered hats and figured frocks we’d encountered at luncheons and lectures, nor the polite businessmen in suits and ties who made up the rest of her usual audience; these were real people. Blue-collar working stiffs, hard-working housewives, salt of the earth, backbone of America.
You know—goons.
“We got a problem here!” I said to the Hudson rep who was Amelia’s official escort. Arms outstretched like an umpire, I was doing my best to keep the clawing crowd away from an increasingly spooked Amelia; she was behind me, and we were backed up to a Hudson Eight on display there.
The Hudson rep was a little guy with George Raft’s hair, Clark Gable’s mustache and Stan Laurel’s face. “What do you suggest, Mr. Heller?”
Arms were flailing, hands pawing the air, like the crowd was drowning in its own tidal wave of bad breath and body odor.
“Where are the keys to that buggy?” I yelled, nodding to the Hudson.
He blinked. “Under the floor mat—why?”
A housewife who only slightly outweighed me was climbing on me like she wanted to procreate. I put my hand in her face, like Jimmy Cagney feeding Mae Clarke a grapefruit, and shoved her back. Then I straight-armed a ten- year-old kid and took Amelia by the arm, yanked open the driver’s-side door and said, “Get in.”
She gave me only a moment’s look, to determine whether or not I was crazy, saw that I was, and got in; so did I. She crawled over into the rider’s seat and we both rolled up the windows and locked ourselves in. I reached down and fumbled around under the mat and finally found the car keys. Wild eyes and yellow teeth and waving arms were the view out the windshield.
I started the engine but nobody seemed to notice; the hubbub out there was a dimwitted din a mere Hudson motor couldn’t hope to be heard over. Then I leaned into the Hudson’s horn and it bleated like a cow a tree fell on, and they heard that. In fact, it scared the hell right out of them, and gave them notice to get their asses out of my way.
Putting the Hudson in gear, I guided that streamlined baby right down the center aisle, through the convention hall, startled, pissed-off auto show attendees getting out of my way, bowling pins avoiding an oncoming ball. For people at an auto show, it was like they’d never seen a moving car before; hell, I was only doing five or ten miles an hour.
When I neared the exits—a row of doors clearly designed for people, not Hudsons—I braked, put the car in park, gave her a glance that told her what to do, and we hopped out on our respective sides, leaving the motor running, and she came around the front of the Hudson and took my hand.
A couple of uniformed cops near the exits were viewing this escapade with wide eyes and open mouths; one of the cops yelled, “Say! You can’t do that!”
We were halfway out the door, still hand in hand, when I nodded toward my partner and said, “But this is Amelia Earhart,” and the cop was thinking about that when we were gone, scampering like a couple of kids out the Convention Hall’s high arched entrance where we grabbed the first of a row of waiting cabs.
In the backseat of the cab, she threw back her headful of tousled curls and laughed and laughed. I wasn’t laughing, but I was smiling to where my cheeks might burst, and my heart was hammering. The excitement was like a drug rushing through my veins.
“Oh my goodness!” Tears of delight rolled down her apple cheeks. “You’re amazing, Nate! Simply amazing!”
“I just drove a damn car from one end of a convention hall to the other, is all,” I said. “It’s not like I flew across an ocean or anything.”
“What wonderful fun. You do have a reckless streak, don’t you?”
“I’ve been accused of that.”
And that night—though she’d just endured fourteen hours of public scrutiny and abuse—we set out in the Franklin for the next stop on our itinerary, Fort Wayne. Not that she didn’t show some of the wear and tear of the long day; she looked frail, wan, the lovely blue-gray eyes surrounded by not so lovely puffiness. For a change, she allowed me—in fact, implored me—to do the driving. She curled up in her seat, like a cat, in a blouse and chino slacks, the curve of her back to me as she slept, and her rather nice backside….
“Those threatening notes are quite real,” Putnam had told me, back in the Palmer House dining room. “The bodyguard aspect of your job is every bit the way I explained it to you.”
“Then what’s the idea of asking me,” I said, “do I want to know the ‘real’ reason I was hired?”
He drew on the Havana cigar, leaning back in his chair, a man of means, about to discuss his prized possession. “My wife’s an attractive woman, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say, but now that you mention it, sure. She’s a peach. You’re a lucky guy.”
“Perhaps.” He sat forward now and those unblinking eyes revealed something new, something besides self- absorption and mild lunacy: sorrow. “I believe my wife is having an affair.”
This was not the first time I had heard a male client say this of his spouse; normally, it was news about as
