pen over a stack of retail credit check reports, when the phone rang.
“A-1,” I said, over the street noise.
“Nate Heller? Paul Mantz.”
Even in those four words, I could tell he was worked up in some sort of lather; and since our only common ground was Amy, that got my attention. I shut the window to hear better, though the connection was remarkably good for long distance.
“Well hello, Paul…is everything all right with our girl’s round-the-world venture?”
“No,” he said flatly. “It’s gone seriously to shit. She’s taken off.”
I sat forward. “Isn’t that what pilots do?”
Bitterness edged his voice: “She took off on ‘shakedown flight’ of the Electra, she told reporters, but really she’s headed to Miami. She’s on her way.”
“Where are you, Burbank?”
An El train was rumbling by and I had to work my voice up.
“No, no, I’m in your back yard…St. Louis. Down here with Tex Rankin, we got an air meet at Lambert Field. Flyin’ competition aerobatics.”
“I thought you were working full-time as Amelia’s technical advisor.”
“So did I. February, I put all my motion picture flying on hold to give myself over to this cockeyed world flight. But when this air meet came up, Amelia and Gippy encouraged me to take a little time off and go.”
“Are you saying they double-crossed you? She sneaked off on her big flight while her top advisor was out of town? Why the hell would she do that?”
“I think it’s Putnam’s doing. Listen…this thing stinks to high heaven. We got to talk.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
“…You want a job?”
“Usually. What do you have in mind?”
“You free this weekend?”
“I’m never free…it’s going to cost you twenty-five bucks a day.” Since G. P. and Amy were paying Mantz $100 a day, I figured he could afford it. Besides, I’d have to cancel my date Saturday night with Fritzie Bey after her last show at the Koo Koo Club.
“I’ll pay you for two days,” he said, “whether you take the job or not. I’m flyin’ the air meet all day tomorrow, but nothin’ on Sunday, and we’re not headin’ home till Monday.”
“You want to come to me, or should I come to you?”
“You come to me…. We can meet at Sportsman’s Park, Sunday afternoon—playin’ craps the other night, I won a pair of box seats for the Cardinals and Giants, should be a hell of a game. Dean and Hubbell on the mound.”
That might be worth the trip alone. Baseball wasn’t my first love—boxing was my sport, growing up on the West Side with Barney Ross like I did—but, after all, Dizzy Dean and Carl Hubbell were to the diamond what Joe Louis and Max Schmeling were to the ring.
“You take the train down here tomorrow,” Mantz continued, “and I’ll reimburse you. I’ll have ya booked into the Coronado Hotel.”
That was where Amy and I had stayed on the lecture tour; where I gave her that first neck rub….
“Is that where you’re staying?” I asked him.
“No! I’m at a motel out by the airport. I don’t want us to hook up till the game.”
“Why the cloak-and-dagger routine, Paul?”
“It’s just better that way. Safer.”
“Safer?”
“I’ll leave your ticket for the game at the Coronado front desk. You in?”
“I’m in,” I said, not knowing why, unless it was my love for Amy, or maybe my love for $25 a day with a Cards-Giants game tossed in.
Sunday afternoon in St. Louis, baseball fanatics from all over the Mississippi Valley squeezed into Sportsman’s Park, nearly thirty thousand of them bulging the stands. Many of them had driven all night to see Dizzy Dean try to stop master of the screwball “King” Carl Hubbell’s winning streak, which stood at twenty-one straight; here sat an Arkansas mule trader, there an Oklahoma dry goods salesman next to a WPA foreman from Tennessee, sitting in front of a country farm agent from Kansas, men in straw hats drinking beer, women in their Sunday best fanning themselves with programs, as the annual heat wave was getting a nice early start. Despite the heat, and the anticipation, the crowd wasn’t surly, laughing and applauding the pregame horse and bicycle exhibition and a drum and bugle corps show. The sky was blue, the clouds white and fleecy, and there was just enough of a breeze to flutter the flag above the billboard ads of the outfield fences.
Perched in a box seat along the first base line, I sported a straw fedora, light blue shantung sportshirt and white duck slacks, doing my best not to get mustard from my hot dog on the latter. No sign of Mantz; even with the game delayed half an hour to jam in all these fans, Amelia Earhart’s technical advisor did not get the pleasure of seeing the boyishly handsome, Li’l Abner-like Dizzy Dean stride cockily to the mound, flashing his big innocent smile to the bleachers, a faded tattered sweatshirt under the blouse of his red-trimmed white uniform.
His first pitch was a fastball that sent the Giants’ lead-off batter, Dick Bartell, to the ground. The crowd ate that up, and the umpire did not complain, and for the rest of the inning Dean, master of the beanball, behaved himself. In the second inning, with Hubbell on the mound, Joe Medwick had just knocked a high curveball into the
