left field bleachers for a 1-0 lead for the Cards. I was on my feet with the rest of the crowd, cheering (a somewhat different response from yours truly than if the Cards had knocked a Cubs ball into the Wrigley Field stands) when I realized Mantz was standing beside me.
We shook hands and, with the rest of the crowd, sat down. As usual, he had a dapper look, a light yellow shirt with its sleeves rolled up and collar open and crisply pleated doeskin slacks. But his usual cocky expression was absent, the somewhat pointed features of his face set in a pale blank mask, his mouth a straight line under the straight line of his pencil mustache.
With no greeting, no preamble of any sort, he started in: “I just got hold of that bastard Gippy, in New Orleans.”
“What’s he doing in New Orleans?”
We kept our voices down and only occasionally were shushed by those who were there to see the game.
“That’s where he and his wife spent the night,” Mantz said with a humorless smirk. “Today she’s off to Miami and from there…”
“Sky’s the limit,” I said. “So—did G. P. have an explanation for the sneak departure?”
On the mound the tattered sleeve of the right arm of Dean’s sweatshirt hung to his thumb, and when he whipped his arm forward to release the ball, the loose cloth snapped in the wind like a cat o’ nine tails.
“None,” Mantz said. “He just claimed it was Amelia’s decision and let it go at that. Jesus, Heller, the repaired Electra was only delivered just last Thursday.”
“The day before she took off?”
“Yes! Just three days ago! Hell…. She’d had no flying time in it whatsoever. And she knew damn well I was leaving—and after she and I talked about how we’d spend a week, at least, in preflight preparations, and test flights!”
“What was left to do?”
His eyes saucered. “What the hell wasn’t? I needed to check her fuel consumption levels—I worked out a table of throttle settings I needed to go over with her—and I had a list of optimum power settings for each leg. Shit, now she’s flying by sheer guesswork!”
Dean was loping down off the mound with a cocky, tobacco-chewing grin; another perfect inning.
“She has radio equipment, doesn’t she?”
Mantz lifted his eyes to the heavens. “I didn’t get a chance to check
“Well, you must have showed her the ropes on the radio gear before the first attempt,” I said.
“No,” he admitted with a shrug. “Remember, she had a co-pilot, Manning, along that time, and he knew his stuff, where the radio was concerned.
Left-hander Hubbell had just struck out Pepper Martin, to the displeasure of the crowd.
“Are you saying she went off completely unprepared?”
He shook his head, no. “When we flew that first Oakland to Honolulu leg, before the Luke Field crackup, she showed real improvement. Held to her magnetic compass headings within a reasonable leeway, wandering only a degree or two off course, then doubled her error in the other direction, getting back on track.”
The crowd was cheering Cards second baseman Hughie Cruz; the Mississippi boy approached the plate with a mouthful of pebbles plucked from the infield, a trademark, and he was rolling them around in his mouth now, looking for a fastball. King Carl Hubbell threw him a screwball instead.
“…and she did do her homework,” Mantz was saying. “But that wasn’t flying. Like going over info on airport facilities, weather conditions, custom problems. And poring over detailed charts that Clarence Williams prepared…”
Like the ones Amy ignored on her Mexico flight.
“Surely she did
“Not near enough—she was hardly around. That goddamn Gippy had her tied up with advertising commitments, radio shows, public appearances…. You know what she spent most of her time doin’? Writing the first four or five chapters of the goddamn book her husband’s going to publish, when she gets home!
“It’s that serious?”
Cruz popped out, and the crowd howled in disappointment.
Mantz touched my arm and drew my eyes from the field to his. “You want to know how serious it is? I don’t think that bastard
I frowned in disbelief. “What? Aw, Mantz, that’s just loony…”
He blinked and looked away. “Or at least, I don’t think he cares.”
“Mantz, find a mechanic—you got a screw loose. Amelia’s his meal ticket, for Christ’s sake.”
I bought a beer off a vendor; Mantz declined.
“Heller, everybody on the inside knows this is Amelia’s last flight—and that she plans to divorce the son of a bitch. I’ve heard them argue! It’s an open secret she’s been having an affair with somebody for the last year or two….”
Now I blinked and looked away, feeling like Hubbell had hurled one of his screwballs at me.
Mantz was saying, “I think it’s probably Gene Vidal, the Bureau of Air Commerce guy? But
