Uncivil Aviation

He was a Sunday flyer, it was true, but he had been licensed for more than fifteen years and was proud of his skills. He liked being able to say to their friends, “Why don’t you come with us to Florida this weekend? Barbara and I are flying down in our private jet. I’m the pilot.”

The airport at Sandhurst, Pennsylvania wasn’t too far from the house—about twenty minutes. Today, he was on his way for a short hop only—over to Atlantic City. He wasn’t going gambling, no. He was an attorney; this was business, a rather large real estate closing for a client.

He approached the gate leading to the field and the guard recognized him and waved him through. Security was supposed to check IDs, of course, but nothing ever happened at Sandhurst, and besides, he tipped the guards a couple of hundred each at Christmas, so they ought to recognize him.

He walked over to the hanger where he had a talk with the mechanic who looked after his Beechcraft Starship. The little beauty was tuned up and ready to go.

The owner patted his craft before he boarded her. Flying was a thrill for him, each and every time, even still. He had it as good as the president of the United States, able to jet wherever he wanted, whenever he cared to. Only he got to fly the plane, which was one better.

He strapped in, ran through the checklist, and taxied off down the runway, as he chatted cheerfully with Dave in the tower. Up, up, and away, we gonna fly all day. He zoomed aloft, headed for the clouds, and what a perfect day for the flight. Once again, he was knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door.

Behind, in the cabin, he heard a noise and was gripped by a sudden anxious concern. Was something loose in there, rattling around? He listened. Silence. He relaxed. But there, he heard it again, closer now.

Suddenly, the door to his private little paradise swung open. He turned around, astonished, and stared straight into the eyes of a male interloper. “Who are you?” he gasped. But still, he wasn’t as afraid as he might have been, since the well-dressed stranger gave him a friendly smile and nod. There must be a mistake.

The intruder seemed about to explain and approached a little closer to the pilot so that he could be better heard. He bent his body down to the pilot’s and reached out to touch the jet craft’s owner gently on the thigh.

There was a sting and the attorney-flyer saw, as if from a distance, that he had been stung with a syringe.

The stranger still smiled as the flyer passed out. He eased the inert body from the pilot’s seat onto the floor and settled himself into the comfortable brown leather chair. He ascertained that everything on the control panel read just as it should, then checked out the flight plan. No problem. He flew on. The day was indeed a beautiful one.

He glanced down at his captive, not expecting much in the way of movement. There was none. Less than half an hour later, as they approached the Atlantic City Airport, the skyjacker set the plane to autopilot, on a course that passed well out over the ocean.

He dragged the body of the flyer from the cockpit and into the cabin, where he let the attorney rest a moment. The door was tightly closed, and the air pirate struggled for a second in opening it.

The thief braced himself against the side of the craft as the wind whipped in. He then took hold of the pilot’s form and inch-by-inch maneuvered the airplane’s owner through the door, and finally, completely over the threshold.

The body tumbled into the wild blue yonder, plummeting, but not as quickly as the inexperienced might expect. Wind currents tossed the man up as well as down as he fell, despite his solid weight.

Still living, yes, but not for long. The intruder worked at the door again, sealing it closed, then went back to the controls of the plane to bring it down for a landing in Atlantic City—just about right on schedule.

After letting the phone shrill three long rings, Helen Robbins jumped up to get it before the answering machine would. She didn’t have to, obviously, and actually it wasn’t even her phone—the number was Eric’s—but she never was able to resist picking up a demanding telephone.

“Hello,” she mumbled, her mouth still full of the roast beef and Swiss cheese sandwich on which she chewed.

“Eric Ryder, please,” requested a commanding male voice. Well, certainly the caller would ask for Eric. This was, after all, his phone, and not her place to answer it at all.

“He isn’t here,” she told the man. “I’m his associate. Maybe I can help you.” She wasn’t Eric’s associate, in all honesty, although she did associate with him as his fiancé and newly installed roommate, but, anyway, she was curious to see what the caller wanted.

“Mr. Ryder is an investigator?” the voice at the other end asked hesitantly.

“We’re security consultants and investigators,” Helen corrected. Or at least that was how Eric billed himself nowadays. And she had worked in security and sort of in investigations herself. In fact, she probably had every bit the background Eric did—maybe more.

“I have a problem,” stated the man.

“Of course,” she agreed. Who didn’t? Her problem right this minute was that she didn’t have a job and wanted one. That was one of her problems, anyway. The other matter she had on her mind…well…

“Let me start over. I’m Henry Viscotti, executive director of the Private Plane Pilots Association.”

Helen’s ears pricked up. “Oh, Henry Viscotti. I know who you are,” she blurted out. “I’m a member of the association. I flew with the Air Force. Now I fly when I can. When I can afford it, that is. I need to get those hours in. I was up out at Stewart Field, just last Sunday. What can I do for you?” She relaxed. Whatever Viscotti’s glitch was, she could handle it. The matter was in her ballpark. She could do the job.

Her effort to pick up the investigation for herself didn’t mean she was stealing work from Eric, she decided. He was off on an assignment and wouldn’t be back for a couple of days, at least. By then, she’d have this situation all cleared up. Taking the job really wasn’t a whole big deal. She and Eric were going to be married, after all. And he was hardly about to support her himself. She needed to earn a living, too.

“Do you want to discuss the investigation over the phone?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it be better for us to meet in person?”

“I’m flying up to Boston in the morning,” he responded. “But I can stop by at La Guardia on my way. Can you meet me there?” She assured him she could, and he told her where she would find him.

There, she had a job. Getting work never was that difficult for her, she had to admit. She took up the second half of her roast beef and cheese sandwich—just the sort of thing that Eric would make fun of her for eating. He liked to eat, but he regarded food, like everything else, with some suspicion. He knew that some evil was lurking in a sandwich like this, trying to do him in—if not now, then somewhere down the line.

She wondered again if she was doing the right thing. Oh, not about the job for Viscotti, but about marrying Eric. Men were so strange, so unpredictable, really, and Eric was one of the more peculiar of the species. He could be difficult, truculent, stubborn, opinionated. But that wasn’t the problem. She could be that way, too. The question was—did she really know him well enough? She had seen a policewoman on television the other day talking about the abusive male. You never actually knew which man was going to turn out to be a wife beater, maybe even wife killer, the detective claimed.

Many of these pathological types start the relationship with the most perfect of courtships. The woman never could be sure.

That was to say, in most cases, you couldn’t tell what kind of a person a man really was, until you were in too deep to bail.

If Eric was going to turn out to be a bastard with women, Helen would like to know that toot sweet. He had cheated on her once already—a very bad sign. But he had cheated on her with his ex-wife Michelle, which made Helen feel the offense was almost pardonable. Old habits die hard. Then too, he had been guiltily penitent. And they hadn’t been engaged yet when that had happened.

She debated the matter, drank a Radegrst—a Czechoslovakian beer—and lay on the sofa reading the June issue of Grenade, the one periodical to which her beloved faithfully subscribed. “Win a Ruger Mini-14,” the cover seductively coaxed. Did Eric, like the publisher of the magazine, believe that a certain senator had been shameful in promoting a Russian military recruitment video and calling the U.S. military “emasculating”? She hoped so. She had no politics, but a guy who’d never served had no business supporting the Russian military above their own.

The phone rang. This time, the sound was from her own phone, and she picked it up immediately. The caller was Eric, who sounded as if he were using a tin can set to call in on. “Is this a bad…ime? What time is it there…way?”

The big hand was on four in the afternoon, she told him. The time must be quite late in Moscow. No, she wasn’t doing anything, wasn’t up to anything at all. He wasn’t coming right back home, was he? “Don’t you…iss me…ney?”

“Fervently,” Helen answered and sent kissing noises into the telephone, making him laugh. Naturally, he thought she was being sarcastic. She guessed she was trying to be. Joking around was better than admitting that she really did miss him, liked him to be nearby for her to cozy up to. No, she wasn’t about to tell him anything like that.

In the morning, she borrowed his brand-new Honda to drive to the airport. Well, he had to expect that she would want some way to tool around since she was stuck up here in Port Chester, away from the city. She wasn’t the best driver in the world, however. Strange maybe for a pilot, but her mind wandered sometimes on the road. Today, she tried to pay better attention. He would kill her if she wrecked the car.

Or would he? She didn’t know. That was part of it. She hadn’t even known him a whole year.

He wouldn’t yell, she decided, but he would stare at her for a while, then go around feeling low. Anyway, she’d feel terrible if she got even a small dent on his lovely new car, and, worse, she’d have to pay to get it fixed.

Viscotti met her near where the small planes took off and landed, by the gate, since she didn’t have proper ID to get onto the field on her own. He led her into the lounge where the pilots sometimes hung out between their flights. The room longed for a refurbishing or at least to have its floor swept and sofa pillows plumped. The place had seen better days. But the space was only for the pilots, who generally weren’t the same individuals as the owners. If the lounge had been for the folks with the bucks, the atmosphere might have been a different story.

They were the only two in there today, and Viscotti offered to buy her a coffee from the machine. Helen frowned, but she accepted. She had been in too big a rush this morning before she’d left the house to have a cup. She needed the fix.

Viscotti was sort of a handsome older guy, the kind Helen sometimes felt curious about. The older men could be mellow and romantic, in a way that younger guys hadn’t thought of yet, but they could be such assholes, too. The worst of them were hyper-inflated male chauvinists, always astonished when a woman put them down, or challenged their authority. At least the younger guys weren’t surprised when something like that happened. The young guys had learned to, perhaps only on the surface, be defensive about their inevitable assumption of superiority.

“You’re a lovely young woman, Helen,” Viscotti began. The comment was probably her fault, for thinking him good looking.

She blinked and waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, she seized the conversation. “I’m licensed as a private investigator in New York State.” She actually was, although she had never done more than search for people who had skipped out on their debts.

He smiled at her, so she continued. “I served in the Air Force for ten years and I’m a licensed flight instructor—multi-engine.” She stopped. She could go on and list her license to carry a concealed weapon and so on, but she was beginning to feel somewhat silly.

Anyway, he was still smiling at her. “You said you had a problem,” she accused abruptly.

Viscotti immediately stopped smiling. “I’m telling you this in the strictest confidence, because this mustn’t leak out, certainly not to the press. The FAA inspector general has a full team that has already started the groundwork on this.” He paused, waiting for Helen to react.

He was so somber that she wanted to say something silly, like “Mum’s the word,” but instead she nodded with a solemnity exactly equal to his own.

“Several small planes have been hijacked,” Viscotti pronounced dramatically. “That is, or so we think. No actual hijackings have been reported, but somehow or other the planes seem to have disappeared. The pilots, and in one case, a passenger, have never been heard from again. Well, except for the two bodies that have shown up in the last few days.”

Helen grunted. “Dreadful,” she observed. “Security isn’t that good at most of the fields, especially the small ones,” she piously added. “Despite the FAA regulations.”

“No,” Viscotti agreed. “We see a lot of slackness out there.” He gazed off in the direction of the heartland and waved a hand toward those little airfields, then returned his glance to her.

“I’ll need more details, of course,” she continued. “Names, times, dates, flight plans, and so on.” This would be somewhat different from skip tracing, she realized, which was tracing the willful, and still living, “skipper.”

She wondered how much Eric had gotten paid for his last investigation. Had he told her? He never seemed to discuss actual sums he had in hand, only money that he’d like to make. He wasn’t cheap however, she was glad to say, although he did sometimes seem to be a little short for the moment.

“The board insists that we hire our own investigator,” Viscotti went on. “This matter is a primary concern to our membership and they’re going to be angry that the information wasn’t released to them at once. But of course, at this point, the FAA inspector general doesn’t want to go public with the news. She thinks any leaked information will make the investigation that much harder. From the association’s point of view, on the other hand, we don’t want it to seem as if we did nothing but wait—once this does become a matter of public record, later on. That’s why we need our own investigation.”

“Are you hiring me?” asked Helen casually, as if her heart weren’t already pounding with the excitement of the chase, and the prospect of earning a few dollars.

“Maybe.” Viscotti smiled appealingly again. “Don’t get me wrong, but where is Eric Ryder? He’s the one who was recommended to me—by an ATF agent, as a matter of fact.”

“Eric Ryder is in Moscow,” Helen responded unhelpfully. “Anyway, he’s not a flyer. I am. I know my way around an airfield and I’m the one who can do the job.” She thought a minute. “I can start right away. If you give me all the information you have. And an airplane.”

How much she was paid didn’t even matter, she realized, if she was given a plane to fly. She needed to fly a certain number of hours a year to retain her active status. And if there was anything that wasn’t cheap, that was fuel—especially jet fuel.

Most of the time she got by on her charm and old connections with people—guys mostly—who flew for some corporation or other and who would let her take over for a trip or two. But times were tough in a lot of ways, and the friends from her Air Force years had fewer jobs to share out with her—even when she did the run for the flying time and let them keep the total payment.

“You can fly me to Boston,” suggested Viscotti. “We’ll talk about it. I have business there. Then either you can fly me back to New York and we’ll say good-bye, or you’ll fly me down to Washington and then you can have the CitationJet.”

CitationJet! “Whose plane is it?” Helen asked, somewhat in awe of his casual disposition of a rather pricey piece of equipment.

“The plane is yours, in part,” answered Viscotti. He grinned. “The jet belongs to the association.” His grin widened. “But membership dues didn’t pay for that baby. It was kind of a gift from Cessna. A write-off for them and a good piece of advertising.”

“Then what will you fly?” asked Helen, as if this would leave him to wander the countryside on foot.

“I have a Piper Chieftain of my very own.” Viscotti laughed proudly.

They boarded the aircraft without further delay, and he gave her the nickel tour, presuming she was familiar with the plane’s specifications. She plopped into the pilot’s seat. The cushioning had a nice and homey feel, as if someone had been doing a lot of dancing in and out of airfields in this machine.

Viscotti handed her his pilot’s book, and she began running down the checklist, preparing for takeoff. She was glad she had just flown on Sunday. Truth be told, you could get a bit rusty, quickly. That’s why the FAA was right in insisting that a pilot fly a certain number of hours every year.

Viscotti regarded Helen with amusement as she went about her business, but he let her alone to do all the work involved in getting them into the air and headed for Boston.

Maybe she would stop by and see her parents when she was there, if she had the time. No, never mind. Her mother would want to nag her about details of the wedding. The wedding. The date was set for August 6th, nearly a year to the day since she had met Eric. Helen’s eyes misted over sentimentally, and she was insensible for a moment of Viscotti’s fingers pressing on her knee.

“Don’t mess with the pilot,” she advised him snappishly. He took his hand off, but not immediately. First, he stroked her flesh once gently, to let her know what she was missing by being so dismissive. She wasn’t worried that she was getting into anything she couldn’t handle, however. Which brought to mind the fact that she had her 9mm Beretta right here in her purse. That was interesting. Talk about careless airfield security. And at a big field like La Guardia, too. Smuggling a weapon on board wasn’t too difficult. Was that how the skyjacker or skyjackers had accomplished their mission?

Later, in Washington, he let her photocopy the relevant files at the association’s offices, which were down the road, not too far from National. “We’ll let you start out—on a trial basis, let’s make it,” said Viscotti. “I’ll need reports at least a couple of times a week. You can bill us for expenses, but I’ll review the bills pretty carefully, so don’t go overboard. You can take my card for fuel, but you’ll have to pay the airport fees up front on your own. I’ll need a tight accounting.”

“Yes, sir. Captain, sir.” She laughed.

Viscotti looked at her admiringly. “You ought to smile more often,” he remarked. He looked into her eyes. “There’s no need for you to fly right back to New York, is there? I’d like you to stay over, at least for dinner.”

The brightness remained stretched across her face. “I’ve got to dash,” she told him. “Lots of work to do.” She waved the photocopies in front of him, then flashed him a smile to soften the rebuff. “Thanks for the plane.” He’d find that in her report, too. He hadn’t even looked at her identification before handing everything over to her, including his organization’s private jet. Jiminy!

By the time she landed back at La Guardia, she was bushed. A lot had gone on. Her mind was racing. She hadn’t expected everything to move quite this quickly.

She secured the plane as best she could, but she agreed with Eric’s usual assessment that private planes should all have a security sensor system that could be monitored by the pilot from wherever she was. That would prevent anyone’s tampering with the plane or stowing aboard undetected.

She walked away from the jet but paused to look back. That was her brand-new baby. Not really hers, but just as good as.

She decided to drive into the city, where she had kept her apartment in case she and Eric broke up and didn’t get married, after all. Driving to Manhattan was closer than driving all the way back up to Port Chester. She’d put Eric’s car into a garage, like the considerate girlfriend that she was.

Eric’s car. Where the hell was it? Oh, my God! The Honda was gone! She panicked and ran to the Port Authority police officer posted at the gate.

The officer had heard that a car had been towed away there earlier in the day, he told her. Maybe that was the one she was talking about. He shrugged.

Helen looked toward where the CitationJet sat on the tarmac. She could make out only the plane’s outline in the approaching twilight.

She had exchanged one means of transport for another. Even Eric would understand that, really, she had gotten the better of the deal.

First thing in the morning, Helen reported to La Guardia security to have an ID made. They created a photo identification on their computer system in minutes, while she waited. She then walked out to the private plane section of the airport and slid the card through the card reader for admittance.

Spring was late this year, and the day was chill, but she had on a leather jacket. The plane would be cozy with its heat and pressurized cabin to compensate for some of its cost. She found a mechanic to check the plane out, had it fueled, and was in the pilot’s seat in about an hour. She filed a flight plan for Sandhurst, Pennsylvania.

Helen ran her fingers across the control panel. This was a spiffy little plane. Yesterday, because of Viscotti’s presence, she hadn’t been relaxed enough to really enjoy flying it, but today she was on her own. Today, too, along with the card Cessna had kindly supplied for the Citation, she had her own dog-eared book to thumb through in running the pre-flight check.

Helen exalted in a pure feeling of independence. That’s why, in part, she loved to fly. If you wanted to be your own woman, sometimes you had to take to the sky.

Of course, you had to wait in line to fly the airways, especially at an airport like La Guardia. Such spots always had plenty of traffic taking off and landing, and the flight activity has to be studiously prioritized and choreographed.

She roared off of a runway not quite long enough for absolute ease—probably about three thousand feet—a tight squeeze, but doable. Up above was a Hawker 1000, a corporate jet that had taken off immediately before her. The Hawker could fly non-stop New York to Los Angeles. The range of the jet she was flying was about half of that.

She climbed to thirty-thousand feet and stabilized, heading in a southwest direction. From time to time, Helen glanced at the radar screen, but she also kept watch for other aircraft visually, through the window. This close to several major airports, the skies could be crowded. Although no one was supposed to be at the same altitude in this flight “lane,” the correct procedure was to stay on the alert. Flying could be a lot like defensive driving in a car; you never knew how well trained-or how untrained—the other pilot was. You kept your eyes open.

She had gotten a good night’s sleep. Too good, because her honest intention to get up early enough to release Eric’s car from captivity had gone by the wayside. By the time she had shaken herself awake, she had had to rush to get out to the airport to do a day’s work. She swore she would get back early this afternoon, however, in order to rescue the poor little Honda.

Still, she had stayed up late enough to read the files that Viscotti had handed over to her. Five skyjackings had occurred—or so the documentation showed. In each case, the pilot had filed a flight plan—in four cases from his home airfield—had taken off as scheduled, had arrived at his destination, then, shortly after, had filed a new flight plan, and had flown to MIA—Miami International Airport.

In none of these instances had there been an SOS or actual complaint of a skyjacking, but the pilots had been reported by family as missing. And two bodies had shown up! One, John Rotz, an attorney, had floated onto the beach near Atlantic City, which had been his announced destination from his home field in Pennsylvania. The second, Lyle Adams, a chemist flying from Tweed-New Haven in Connecticut to Roanoke Regional, had been found by some rangers caught in a forest canopy in the Shenandoah National Park, where he had, very likely, dropped from the sky.

No reported plane crashes could account for these cases, and anyway, the planes had shown up in perfect condition in Miami. From there, the point of destination for each of the planes varied, but all had slated departures for Latin or Caribbean countries. The pilots taking off from Miami, in every instance, were listed as those originally signing on to fly—including Rotz and Adams, who clearly had not gone on to Nicaragua and Guatemala respectively. Had the jets—yes, they were all jets—shown up where they had been scheduled to arrive?

The FAA was hard-pressed to determine that. Obtaining the information from the other governments required some bureaucratic maneuvering. The autopsies, too, were not yet complete—or the FAA wasn’t telling all to Viscotti, a very real possibility.

Helen landed at Sandhurst without a bounce. Damn, she was good! She went into the office to hand her airport fees over to the secretary and carefully tucked the receipt into a separate compartment of her wallet. Paying airport fees would come to a lot of up-front money to lay out, she realized. “Is the general manager in?” she inquired.

“You just talked to him.” The secretary laughed. “He’s in the tower. We don’t have a lot of air traffic out here; I have to admit. He does it all. And I do the rest.”

Helen was disappointed. She wanted to interview him, but FAA rules prevented her from going up where the air controller sat.

The secretary saw the problem. “I’ll call Dave down,” she told Helen good naturedly. “He likes to sit up there sometimes, but we probably won’t have another plane until this evening when a couple of commuters fly back home. We’re dead out here.”

Dead. John Rotz was dead, all right. But how had that happened? And where? The skyjacking wouldn’t have taken place at a sleepy little airfield like Sandhurst. It must have occurred at the busier Atlantic City.

Dave Smeis, a gray-haired old bird, came down from his tower and invited Helen into his office. As he put some water on for coffee, she showed him her identification and told him she was investigating for the Private Plane Pilots Association. The association’s name carried some weight, especially at the little airfields. Mostly all of the pilots belonged.

“It’s about Rotz, isn’t it?” Smeis asked.

“Yes, sir, it is. Naturally the loss of a plane in this way is a pretty unusual occurrence and the PPPA wanted to track it down. Of course, anything could have happened to Rotz. He could have had an argument with some hood at a casino and have wound up in the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, that’s probably what did happen. But we can’t let these incidents go by.”

Helen thought she was being pretty sly by approaching the inquiry in this manner. Smeis, she knew, talked to pilots all the time and those pilots talked to other pilots at other airfields. In a few days, every active private pilot in the country would be gassing about the PPPA investigation. She wanted to put as harmless a spin on it as possible.

“I’m sorry for the guy,” said Smeis. “I’m sorry for the widow, especially. But Rotz wasn’t popular out here at Sandhurst, I have to tell you.” He poured the boiled water into two cups, each holding a measured quantity of instant coffee eager for the flavor—such as it was—to be released. “Milk?”

Helen nodded, and waited with bated breath to hear why Rotz had not been a favorite with the airfield crowd. Perhaps he’d been some kind of mob lawyer and had, indeed, been the victim of an organized crime hit.

Smeis handed her a cup—an old mug with a Bay City Slickers logo on it. Where was Bay City? she wondered. “He was a rich guy and acted like it,” Smeis continued. “Most of the pilots here at the field are hardworking people with not a lot of money, or maybe, yes, they have some bucks, but don’t strut around as if they do. The main thing is, they love to fly. One or two guys who fly out of here built their own planes from out of a kit. You ever build a kit plane?”

She shook her head in the negative.

“It’s hard. Believe me. The cost of the kit is cheap, but you pay the price at the other end, putting it together.” He chuckled, overwhelmingly amused by the plight of the kit builder. “I helped my son put together his first plane. Constructing the thing took us three damn years, because, after all, how much time does anyone have for that?” His voice softened. “Of course, Danny is dead now.”

“A crash?” she asked quietly.

“Yes.” Smeis nodded. “But over North Vietnam.”

“Oh. Air Force?”

“Navy. He was a Navy flyer.”

She maintained a respectful silence. Whenever you talked to flyers for more than two minutes, you heard about one crash or another—some of them their own that they chuted out of, or simply walked away from—although occasionally with a lengthy hospital stay on the back end. If you flew, once in a while you had to acknowledge the risks; you’d be a fool not to.

But wartime deaths were another thing. They were something else entirely, and she had heard about a lot of those as well, mostly in bars, late at night, talking to the older flyers who had been There.

“Rotz wasn’t one of the gang,” Helen prodded after the proper pause.

Smeis shook his head. “He never stuck around and talked flying,” he told her condemningly. “It was peculiar-like. Every flyer wants to shoot the breeze once in a while about his experiences. Rotz never did.” Smeis settled back in his chair. “I can tell you about one mission I flew over North Korea,” he began.

“Navy?” Helen inquired.

“No. Air Force.” Smeis laughed, like the joke was on him.

She spent the next hour trying to hurry along Smeis’s reminiscences. She would have simply walked out in the middle of the conversation, but Smeis had promised to drive her out to Rotz’s house—which, eventually, he did. So she didn’t actually escape the old war stories, which he kept rattling off in the car.

Who was watching the tower? she wondered. Smeis didn’t seem concerned. Would his secretary take over as air controller should a plane have to make an emergency landing before they got back? Helen shuddered to think. That one in a million chance sometimes happened. Around airplanes, you never forgot that it could.

The home was a beauty. An old stone cottage from the front, the house turned out to be bigger inside than one might have imagined. Additions to the rear of the structure hadn’t at all harmed the aesthetics from the entry.

Mrs. Rotz led Helen into a generous-sized family room overlooking a grove of pines and offered her a vodka martini. Helen shook her head, refusing the offer. “I’m flying,” she explained.

Rotz’s widow took the information in a spirit of sadness. “I never really liked going up in the plane with John,” she said. “I knew he was a good pilot, but I didn’t like it. I would rather have flown a commercial jet any time. But the flying pleased him so much, I just gritted my teeth. After a while, I got more or less used to it.”

“Where was he off to that last day you saw him?” Helen asked as gently as she could. Being sensitive in that way wasn’t in her nature, she knew. This trying to be diplomatic with people was tiring.

“Atlantic City. He had a closing on some property for Slapps, one of the casinos there that intended to expand. The deal was a big money thing, but nothing too complicated.”

“Your husband told you this?”

“We discussed it. I saw the papers. I’m an attorney myself by training, although I haven’t practiced in years. There wasn’t the need, you see.” Mrs. Rotz appealed to Helen to understand her failure to move on professionally. “He was extremely successful. But he consulted me on many of his negotiations. He valued my opinion. He never made a mistake though. He was good. I’d just cheer him on, really.”

Was that the wife’s required role? Helen mused. Was that what Eric was going to expect her to do? She didn’t think that type of thing was in her. She couldn’t sit at home and say, “Yes, dear, that’s terrific,” every night. She found it a bizarre concept. If that was marriage, marriage wasn’t up her alley.

“Did your husband have any business or personal enemies?” Helen asked. The question reverberated loudly in the still and peaceful house. Helen didn’t breathe for a moment, trying to retract some of the abrasive emphasis of the inquiry.

Mrs. Rotz smiled. “Everyone liked John,” she said. “He was a charming man. He knew so many people. He was so entertaining.”

But apparently everyone hadn’t liked Rotz all that much. Someone had been entirely indifferent to his charm and had killed him without flinching.

Smeis gave her the lowdown on how he had updated his 1976 Cessna into a modern turboprop flying machine by adding features like a backup vacuum system, anticollision system, and a three-blade prop. Smeis, it seemed, was one of the mechanics for the field—as well as everything else.

“Did you check out Rotz’s plane the day he last flew out of here?” Helen asked.

“Nothing was wrong with that plane,” Smeis responded firmly. “She was a fine piece of equipment, in fact. The nicest plane on the field. Most of us, I told you, can’t afford that sort of thing. We don’t fly a lot of jets from here. That’s a nice crate you’re flying today, by the way.”

She grinned. She was pleased with it.

“Do tricks?” he asked. “There’s an aerobatics meet down in Warrenton, Virginia, the middle of May.” He raised his eyebrows at her in enticement.

Atlantic City was a short hop away and she was getting the hang of the Citation, which was user-friendly—very high tech and accommodating. The jet was barely eating any fuel at all, compared to some gas guzzlers she had flown.

Helen had to circle the Atlantic City Airport a couple of times before the controller gave her permission to land, but the skies were blue with a few fluffy clouds, and she was in no particular hurry.

She slid in on a runway that gave her plenty of space to overshoot, not that she needed it. She jumped out. Yes, she wished she had a sensor system. She didn’t understand anyone feeling comfortable in this day and age just walking away from an aircraft, no matter how locked up it was.

She marched into the office and paid her landing fees. “Can I speak to the general manager of the airfield?” she asked.

“Do you have an appointment?”

So that was how it was. “Assistant general manager?” she bargained.

“Mr. Frankel is out to lunch.”

Helen took a cab to Slapps Casino, which had employed Rotz for the real estate deal. She asked for Steve Falon, the primary owner, according to Mrs. Rotz. Falon wasn’t there…Maybe he was lunching with Frankel from the airfield.

Helen then inquired about the security director and was shown into the office of Tim Mead, a burly guy whose stance announced he had been with some police force long enough to have the attitude down pat. But he was a slick guy, too. This was the private sector and the job demanded working with the public.

Helen introduced herself, showed her identification, and explained her mission. “I worked at Westlake Industries as information security manager for a short time,” she added, cultivating a camaraderie.

“Why a short time?” Mead wondered. Keeping a job was an important topic for security managers these days.

“A complicated personal thing,” she said. Primarily, she had gotten engaged to a man whom her boss had hated for various reasons—some mysterious, some obvious. Eric, for one thing, had taken Ryan’s job on a temporary basis while Ryan was in rehab in a Westchester substance abuse center, sweating out twenty years of 60 proof.

Mead had heard about the Rotz business. The story had been in the local paper—with no inferences drawn—but some talk had also circulated around the casino because of Rotz’s work with them.

“He was the attorney on everything, then, not just the real estate deal?”

“On all the business matters. We use an insurance lawyer for our liability cases.”

“Many of them?” She was curious.

“Yeah, the public thinks the casino is loaded. People lose a bundle; they want to recoup it in a lawsuit after tripping on the sidewalk.”

Helen smiled. “Off the record, is this place mob connected?” she asked. She was aware that the question wasn’t in particularly good taste.

Mead grimaced. “I don’t like to think so,” he replied. “If some mob money is in here, it doesn’t show up in management style.”

“I’m only interested because of Rotz,” she explained carefully. “I want to find out how it happened. Who saw him that day?”

Mead was surprised. “No one saw him. I thought you understood that. He never showed up.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Helen. “You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

So Rotz had landed the plane and had been waylaid at the airport. Maybe on his way to his meeting.

“Let me show you the casino,” Mead offered. “Mr. Falon should be back in a little while. You can probably talk to him then.”

He brought her out where the action was. Strange to say, but the tourists were heavy at it, working like dogs to toss away their hard-earned bucks, or the few dollars that had come in that month with their Social Security checks or company pensions.

“Mostly it’s the fools who think they are going to come out ahead of the house,” said Mead, “but the cheats hope for it, too, and that’s where I come in. My staff is on the lookout for anyone trying to mark the blackjack cards by scratching them with their rings—so they can spot the high-value cards—or the people who toss loaded dice on the table. We’re also on watch for the crooks who slip a bet onto the roulette table after the ball has dropped on the winning number. A lot of crazy stuff goes on.” He laughed.

“What about underage players?”

“That’s a constant,” he agreed. “It gives the casinos a bad name, and none of us likes that. But can you always tell a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from a nineteen-year-old tourist who may be married and have two kids? It’s very iffy.” He shrugged. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“I wouldn’t say no to a Coke.”

Mead called over one of the waitresses and looked around the casino. “It’s a zoo.” He sighed. “Fun for one day, but kind of wearing as the years go by.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Most stuff seems to be that way.”

“There’s Falon,” he told her, pointing unobtrusively. “I’ll see if he’ll speak to you. Wait here a sec.”

She waited and took the drink from waitress, gulping it down. What time was it? Almost three. Getting late, and she hadn’t eaten lunch. Not to mention that she hadn’t spoken to anyone at the Atlantic City Airport and that she had to go back to La Guardia to pick up Eric’s car. If it weren’t for that, she would fly back into the Westchester County Airport.

Falon came over and Mead introduced Helen to him, then discreetly headed off. “Thanks, Tim,” Helen called out after him.

She turned to face Steve Falon and found he was staring at her with the look of a returning war vet who hadn’t glimpsed a female in a couple of tours. She was used to that look, and she hated it. The sexual aggression in his face gave her a queasy stomach.

She smiled. “I’m making some inquiries about John Rotz for the Private Plane Pilots Association.” She waited. One thing she had learned as a skip tracer was that people liked to fill in the gaps. If you didn’t step on their lines, some of those you questioned would blunder around nervously until they told you everything you wanted to know.

Falon wasn’t the nervous type, however. “I was sorry to hear about his death. Did his plane crash?”

“You had an appointment to see him on April 12th at noon for a real estate closing?”

“Yes. He never showed up.”

“Did he call to explain why he couldn’t make it?”

“He never called.” Falon’s eyes bored into her.

“Did you telephone his office to check on his whereabouts?”

“Yes, of course. His assistant didn’t know where he was since he had said he would be with me.”

“Do you know of anyone who’d have wanted to put a stop to the real estate transaction?”

“No,” said Falon. “We closed the following week with another attorney.”

That was that then, but she marked Falon down for a guy who was “connected.” But maybe she thought so just because he stared at her like that, which she guessed he did in order to throw off her concentration. The stance was unconscious maybe, but she found it nasty. “Thank you, Mr. Falon. You’ve been a help.”

“Can I offer you another drink?” he asked, taking from her hand the empty glass she had forgotten but still held clutched in rigid fingers.