Chapter 2

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.