shocking as the sun coming up. But this I hadn’t seen coming. Perhaps it was in part the setting, the fancy dining room with its background sound of a string quartet and the clink of fine china and occasional clunk of silverware and polite conversation with laughter mingled in. The waiter was delivering our drinks and I grabbed and sipped my rum and Coke, rolling the liquid around in my mouth as I rolled Putnam’s words around in my brain.
Quietly, I spelled it out: “You mean, this is a divorce job? You want me to get the goods on your wife, so you can sue for divorce?”
Savoring a sip of his Manhattan, he shook his head, no. “Nate, I’m hoping that if I can confront my wife with proof of her…indiscretions…she will abandon this…this fling…and return to my arms.”
Those arms were folded, right now, and he seemed about as loving—and concerned—as a broker discussing stock options; still, the sadness in the glazed eyes behind the scholarly round-rimmed glasses could not be denied.
“How sure are you that she’s dallying?” I asked.
“Fairly sure. Quite sure.”
“Which is it? There’s a big difference between fairly and quite.”
“His name is Paul Mantz.” He took another sip of his Manhattan; in fact, he took two sips. “He’s a pilot, a stunt pilot in the movies. Cocky little pipsqueak, six years younger than A. E. Fast-talking, glib son of a bitch, full of himself.”
That latter could have been a description of Putnam.
“I brought him into the fold myself,” Putnam said, a twitch of disgust flicking in one corner of his mouth. “Met him when I was publicist on the picture
“Why a stunt pilot for that job?”
Putnam shrugged. “To give the devil his due, Mantz is more than just a stunt pilot. He’s an engineer, set his own share of speed records, he’s president of the Motion Picture Pilots Association. Successful businessman, too, with a charter service, maybe you heard of it—the Honeymoon Express?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It’s for Hollywood bigwigs and stars. You know—quickie Reno weddings and divorces. Las Vegas, too. Or just for celebrities to take weekend getaways, in Arizona and so on. After all, somebody in Hollywood is always fucking somebody else’s wife.”
I was swirling my drink in its glass, studying the dark liquid, as if looking for moral guidance; perhaps not the best place to look for it. “I don’t know about this, Mr. Putnam.”
“It’s ‘G. P.,’ and what the hell is there to feel uncomfortable about? You do divorce work, don’t you?”
“All the time…. But this is kind of a shady business, leading your wife to believe I’ve been hired for one thing, getting me into her confidence, when actually I’m working against her.”
He gestured with an open hand, reasonably. “As I said, the threatening notes are very real. She may well be in danger from a deranged fan or some jealous competitor…most of these women fliers are dykes, you know, and are by nature frustrated.”
“You’re asking a lot for twenty-five bucks a day. This sounds like two jobs to me.”
Amusement turned his thin lips into a curve. “Is that what it takes to salve your conscience, Nate? Well, fine. We’ll make it twenty-five dollars a day for bodyguard duties, and another twenty-five dollars a day for…these other…investigative services.
He reached into his inside tuxedo jacket pocket and withdrew a checkbook.
“…and we’ll make that retainer not five hundred dollars, but one thousand dollars. Plus reasonable expenses, of course….”
And he uncapped a fountain pen and wrote my name and that very attractive amount on the check; it was upside-down from where I sat, but I could read it. Glistening there—my name attached to a thousand bucks. It was like an actor seeing his name in lights.
So I took the job. I didn’t like myself for doing it, but I did like the thousand bucks. The thousand bucks was swell.
And now I was at the wheel of Putnam’s wife’s Franklin, and she was snoozing next to me, curled up cutely, and for the first time, in any major way at least, I felt bad, even guilty. We’d had a nice moment together, this evening, she and I. She was warming to me. And I was a heel.
But a well-paid heel.
She woke up around 2:00 A.M., and announced she needed a rest stop. I pulled the big bus of a Franklin in at the Junction Diner at Angola, on U.S. 27, just a few miles over the state line into Indiana. While the outside of the little boxcar all-nighter had that sleek modern look—a stainless steel bullet edged with blue porcelain enamel in the neon glow of its sign—the interior was dominated by the warmth of oak and gumwood woodwork. A truck driver sat at a counter stool having pie and coffee, but the place was pretty dead, just a blowsy blonde waitress and the occasional glimpse of the bleary-eyed, blue-bearded short-order cook at the window of his hole of a kitchen. We ordered at the counter and carried our hot chocolate (hers) and black coffee (mine) to our cozy booth.
“You saved my tail today,” she said, dipping a spoon into the whipped cream atop her cocoa.
“I figure it was worth saving,” I said. That was about as flirty as I’d got with her.
She gave me half a smile as she nibbled whipped cream off her spoon; no makeup, hair even more a tangle than usual, face puffy from sleep and still cute as a paper doll. “I admire that kind of courage,” she said.
“Is that what it is?”
She was stirring the hot chocolate, now. “Call it guts, then…. I’m sorry if I’ve been a little, I don’t know…hard to get to know.”
