Airport (15 page)

The remark produced handclapping and more nods of approval.

There was a tendency, he continued, to regard legal proceedings as automatically slow and tedious. Often that was true, but on occasions, if determination and legal skill were used, the law could be harried along. In the present instance, legal action should be begun at once, before airlines and airport, by perpetuation of noise over a period of years, could claim custom and usage. As if to underline the point, still another aircraft thundered overhead. Before its sound could die, Elliott Freemantle shouted, “So I repeat–my advice to you is wait no longer! You should act tonight. Now!”

Near the front of the audience, a youngish man in an alpaca cardigan and hopsack slacks sprang to his feet. “By God!–tell us how we start.”

“You start–if you want to–by retaining me as your legal counsel.”

There was an instant chorus of several hundred voices. “Yes, we want to.”

The chairman, Floyd Zanetta, was now on his feet again, waiting for the shouting to subside. He appeared pleased. Two of the reporters had craned around and were observing the obvious enthusiasm throughout the hall. The third reporter–the elderly woman from the local weekly–looked up at the platform with a friendly smile.

It had worked, as Elliott Freemantle had known it would. The rest, he realized, was merely routine. Within the next half hour a good many of the retainer blanks in his bag would be signed, while others would be taken home, talked over, and most likely mailed tomorrow. These people were not afraid of signing papers, or of legal procedures; they had become accustomed to both in purchasing their homes. Nor would a hundred dollars seem an excessive sum; a few might even be surprised that the figure was that low. Only a handful would bother doing the mental arithmetic which Elliott Freemantle had done himself, and even if they objected to the size of the total amount, he could argue that the fee was justified by responsibility for the large numbers involved.

Besides, he would give them value for their money–a good show, with fireworks, in court and elsewhere. He glanced at his watch; better get on. Now that his own involvement was assured, he wanted to cement the relationship by staging the first act of a drama. Like everything else so far, it was something he had already planned and it would gain attention–much more than this meeting–in tomorrow’s newspapers. It would also confirm to these people that he meant what he said about not wasting any time.

The actors in the drama would be the residents of Meadowood, here assembled, and he hoped that everyone present was prepared to leave this hall and to stay out late.

The scene would be the airport.

The time: tonight.

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A
T APPROXIMATELY
the same time that Elliott Freemantle was savoring success, an embittered, thwarted, former building contractor named D. O. Guerrero was surrendering to failure.

Guerrero was fifteen miles or so from the airport, in a locked room of a shabby walk-up apartment on the city’s South Side. The apartment was over a noisome, greasy-spoon lunch counter on 51st Street, not far from the stockyards.

D. 0. Guerrero was a gaunt, spindly man, slightly stoop-shouldered, with a sallow face and protruding, narrow jaw. He had deep-set eyes, pale thin lips, and a slight sandy mustache. His neck was scrawny, with a prominent Adam’s apple. His hairline was receding. He had nervous hands, and his fingers were seldom still. He smoked constantly, usually lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of the last. At the moment he needed a shave and a clean shirt, and was perspiring, even though the room in which he had locked himself was cold. His age was fifty; he looked several years older.

Guerrero was married, and had been for eighteen years. By some standards, the marriage was good, if unspectacular. D.O. (through most of his life he bad been known by his initials) and Inez Guerrero accepted each other equably, and the idea of coveting some other partner seemed not to occur to them. D. O. Guerrero, in any case, had never been greatly interested in women; business, and financial maneuvering, occupied his thoughts far more. But in the past year, a mental gulf had opened between the Guerreros which Inez, though she tried, was unable to bridge. It was one result of a series of business disasters which reduced them from comparative affluence to near poverty, and eventually forced a succession of moves–first from their comfortable and spacious, if heavily mortgaged, suburban home to other quarters less pretentious, and later still to this seamy, drafty, cockroach-infested, two-room apartment.

Even though Inez Guerrero did not enjoy their situation, she might have made the best of it if her husband had not become increasingly moody, savagely bad tempered, and at times impossible to talk with. A few weeks ago, in a rage, he had struck Inez, bruising her face badly, and though she would have forgiven him, he would neither apologize nor discuss the incident later. She feared more violence and, soon after, sent their two teen-age children–a boy and a girl–to stay with her married sister in Cleveland. Inez herself stayed on, taking a job as a coffee-house waitress, and although the work was hard and the pay small, it at least provided money for food. Her husband seemed scarcely to notice the children’s absence, or her own; his mood recently had been a deep and self-contained dejection.

Inez was now at her job. D. O. Guerrero was in the apartment alone. He need not have locked the door of the small bedroom where he was occupied, but had done so as an added guarantee of privacy, even though he would not be there for long.

Like others this night, D. O. Guerrero would shortly leave for the airport. He held a confirmed reservation, plus a validated ticket–for tonight–on Trans America Flight Two to Rome. At this moment, the ticket was in a pocket of his topcoat, also in the locked room, slung over a rickety wooden chair.

Inez Guerrero had no knowledge of the ticket to Rome, nor did she have the slightest inkling of her husband’s motive in obtaining it.

The Trans America ticket was for a round trip excursion which normally cost four hundred and seventy-four dollars. However, by lying, D. O. Guerrero had obtained credit. He had paid forty-seven dollars down, acquired by pawning his wife’s last possession of any value–her mother’s ring (Inez had not yet missed it)–and promised to remit the balance, plus interest, in monthly installments over the next two years.

It was highly unlikely that the promise would ever be fulfilled.

No self-respecting finance company or bank would have loaned D. O. Guerrero the price of a bus ticket to Peoria, leave alone an airline fare to Rome. They would have investigated his background thoroughly, and discovered that he had a long history of insolvency, a parcel of long-standing personal debts, and that his homebuilding company, Guerrero Contracting Inc., had been placed in bankruptcy a year earlier.

An even closer check into Guerrero’s tangled finances might have disclosed that during the past eight months–using his wife’s name–he had attempted to raise capital for a speculative land deal, but failed to do so. In course of this failure he had incurred even more debts. Now, because of certain fraudulent statements, as well as being an undischarged bankrupt, exposure, which seemed imminent, would involve criminal prosecution and almost certainly a prison term. Slightly less serious, but just as immediate, was the fact that the rent of this apartment, wretched as it was, was three weeks overdue, and the landlord had threatened eviction tomorrow. If evicted, they would have nowhere else to go.

D. O. Guerrero was desperate. His financial rating was minus zero.

Airlines, though, were notably easygoing about extending credit; also, if a debt went sour they were usually less tough in collection procedures than other agencies. This was calculated policy. It was based on the fact that fare-paying air travelers, over the years, had proven themselves an unusually honest cross-section of society, and bad debt losses of most airlines were remarkably low. Deadbeats like D. O. Guerrero troubled them rarely; therefore they were not geared–because it was not worth while–to defeat the kind of subterfuge he had used.

He avoided, by two simple means, more than a cursory credit investigation. First, he produced an “employer’s reference” which he had typed himself on the letterhead of a defunct company he once operated (not the bankrupt one), the company’s address being his own post office box. Second, in typing the letter he deliberately misspelled his surname, changing the initial from “G” to “B,” so that a routine consumer credit check of “Buerrero” would produce no information, instead of the harmful data recorded under his correct name. For further identification he used his Social Security card and driver’s license, on both of which he carefully changed the same initial beforehand, and had since changed it back again. Another point he remembered was to make sure that his signature on the time payment contract was indecipherable, so it was not clear whether he had signed “G” or “B.”

The misspelling was perpetuated by the clerk who yesterday made out his airline ticket in the name of “D. O. Buerrero,” and D. O. Guerrero had weighed this carefully in light of his immediate plans. He decided not to worry. If any query was raised afterward, the error of a single letter, both on the “employer’s reference” and the ticket, would appear to be a genuine mistake. There was nothing to prove he had arranged it deliberately. In any case, when checking in at the airport later tonight, he intended to have the spelling corrected–on the Trans America flight manifest as well as on his ticket. It was important, once he was aboard, to be sure there was no confusion about his correct identity. That was part of his plan, too.

Another part of D. O. Guerrero’s plan was to destroy Flight Two by blowing it up. He would destroy himself along with it, a factor which did not deter him since his life, he reasoned, was no longer of value to himself or others.

But his death could be of value, and he intended to make sure it was.

Before departure of the Trans America flight, he would take out flight insurance for seventy-five thousand dollars, naming his wife and children as beneficiaries. He rationalized that he had done little for them until now, but his final act would be a single transcendent gesture on their behalf. He believed that what he was doing was a deed of love and sacrifice.

In his warped, perverted mind–driven by desperation–he had given no thought to other passengers who would be aboard Flight Two, nor to the aircraft’s crew, all of whose deaths would accompany his own. With a psychopath’s total lack of conscience he had considered others only to the extent that they might circumvent his scheme.

He believed he had anticipated all contingencies.

The business about his ticket would not matter once the aircraft was en route. No one could prove he had not intended to pay the installments he contracted for; and even if the fake “employer’s reference” was exposed–as it probably would be–it demonstrated nothing except that he had obtained credit under false pretenses. That, in itself, would have no bearing on a subsequent insurance claim.

Another thing was that he deliberately bought a round-trip ticket to create the appearance of not only intending to complete the outward flight, but also to return. As to choosing a Rome flight, he had a second cousin in Italy whom he had never seen, but occasionally talked of visiting–a fact which Inez knew. So at least there would seem an element of logic to his choice.

D. O. Guerrero had had his plan in mind for several months while his fortunes were worsening. During that time he studied carefully the histories of air disasters where airliners were destroyed by individuals seeking to profit from flight insurance. The number of instances was surprisingly large. In all cases on record the motive had been exposed by post-crash investigation and, where conspirators remained alive, they were charged with murder. The flight insurance policies of those involved had been invalidated.

There was no means of knowing, of course, how many other disasters, where causes remained unknown, had been the result of sabotage. The key factor was the presence or absence of wreckage. Wherever wreckage was recovered, trained investigators pieced it together in an attempt to learn its secrets. They usually succeeded. If there was an explosion in mid-air, its traces remained, and the nature of the explosion could be determined. Therefore, D. O. Guerrero reasoned, his own plan must preclude the recovery of wreckage.

This was the reason he had selected Trans America’s non-stop flight to Rome.

A large portion of the journey of Flight Two–
The Golden Argosy
–was above ocean, where wreckage from a disintegrated airplane would never be found.

Using one of the airline’s own passenger brochures which conveniently showed air routes, aircraft speeds, and even had a feature called
Chart Your Own Position
, Guerrero calculated that after four hours’ flying–allowing for average winds–Flight Two would be over mid-Atlantic. He intended to check the calculation and amend it, if necessary, as the journey progressed. He would do so, first by noting the exact time of takeoff, then by listening carefully to the announcements which captains always made over cabin p.a. systems about the aircraft’s progress. With the information it would be a simple matter to decide if the flight was behind schedule, or ahead, and by how much. Finally, at approximately a point he had already decided on–eight hundred miles east of Newfoundland–he would trigger an explosion. It would send the aircraft, or what remained of it, plummeting toward the sea.

No wreckage could ever be found.

The debris of Flight Two would remain forever, hidden and secret, on the Atlantic Ocean floor. There would be no examination, no later exposure of the cause of the aircraft’s loss. Those left might wonder, question, speculate; they might even guess the truth, but they could never
know.

Flight insurance claims–in the absence of any evidence of sabotage–would be settled in full.