Impact (8 page)

Personnel on the scene suggested that the crash may have been the result of a midair collision between the Hastings H-11 and a general aviation aircraft, possibly a Cessna 160. Markings on the upper portion of the H-11 vertical stabilizer may prove to be rubber residues from the nose wheel of the smaller aircraft. This has yet to be confirmed.

(Two additional possibilities were suggested to me,
off the record
, by Ralph Hutchins. On two previous occasions, aircraft approaching SFO on this flight path have been shot at and hit by unknown gunmen. One round penetrated the fuselage of a 737 and lodged in the baggage compartment; the other punctured the aileron of a DC-9. Both aircraft landed without further incident. Also, approximately one month ago, a 727 on approach to SFO received instructions from an ersatz traffic controller, instructions that would have placed the aircraft at risk had the pilot not recognized them as bogus. The cockpit voice recorder will presumably reveal whether this transpired on flight 617.)

In subsequent reports I will inform as to the disposition of the wreckage (current price of scrap—$650 per ton; initial cost of the H-11—$25,000,000), the personal effects of the passengers, and the preliminary findings of the NTSB Red Team. Because of inadequate lighting and constant interference from police personnel, videotapes made by me are of limited utility. Editing and picture augmentation may improve quality, and such steps will be undertaken at your request.

F. Raymond Livingood

Chief Investigator

Aviation Investigations, Inc.

THREE

It is one of the ironies of his life that in order to make his living proving that airlines are often negligent and aircraft frequently defective, Alec Hawthorne must spend fifty days a year using the instrument of travel whose inadequacies he knows best. Although the dilemma is old hat by now, he can't suppress his expertise. The glistening wide-body that carries him across the Atlantic is a miracle of engineering, but it is heir to a legacy of jumbo failures that pecks persistently at his mind—tires blowing, lavatories burning, doors exploding, engines failing, landing gear collapsing, bulkheads buckling, flaps retracting—to say nothing of the more mundane foul-ups that plague aircraft of any size.

Hawthorne stuffs a deposition transcript back in his bulging briefcase, reclines in his seat, and closes his eyes. Washington is less than an hour away. Dulles, the long ride into the city, suite at the Mayflower, dinner with Lame-duck Langston at the Cosmos Club. A busy schedule, but time in between for—what? Surely somewhere within the federal bureaucracy there is someone … yes. The woman from the San Diego case. The staff attorney with the FAA.

Willing, she'd made no secret of that. And able, he would wager. They were always able these days. What was her name? … Something incongruous. Christian. That was it. Molly Christian. GS-18 and rising. He'd call her the minute he got in. From the limo. They were always impressed when he called them from the limo. His sex life thrived on the cellular phone.

It would be nice to be with someone more enthusiastic than Martha for a change. Bedding Martha was like tying your tie—nice, but no big deal. Not that Martha would mind if he dallied with someone else: He had done it often, with her knowledge; occasionally, at her urging. Martha would no doubt relish the night off.

He flies through a cloud of eroticism until his anticipation fades. Molly Christian would almost certainly have left the FAA—San Diego was ten years ago. By now she'd be with a legal factory that peddled influence instead of law and legislation, and took full advantage of Molly's experience while advising its clients how to reduce to nil their contributions to the government that had trained her. To track her down would consume his evening, and for what?

At his side, Martha stirs, turns a page of
Aviation Week
, squirms to a more comfortable position, and reads on, oblivious to both her companion and her distance from the ground. Martha has no fear of abstractions. He doubts that she ever anticipates disaster, doubts that she sees a crucial distinction between mortality and its converse, doubts that she would react visibly if the airplane began to pitch and yaw and plunge toward the sea that very second. He shakes his head. Robots have their advantages, but it would be nice if this one would hint a bit of frailty. Like modesty and a file full of recipes, frailty was an endearing trait in a woman. Too bad they all had fallen out of favor.

As Hawthorne observes her covertly, Martha closes the magazine and plucks a larger document out of her briefcase. It is a helicopter flight manual, and it will be the chief exhibit in one of their most difficult lawsuits.

Because their clients in the case are neither dead nor obviously injured, they lack reliable damage claims. Whiplash and headache, back trouble and blurred vision—although their lives have been permanently diminished by the crash, their complaints are of the type considered risky in the business, of uncertain value compared to overt maladies. He will be lucky if he gets them a hundred thousand each. Had they lost an arm or leg, he could get them a million.

The helicopter matter is interesting from another angle. Had the chopper gone down in California he would not have taken the case, but because the crash was in Alaska and Alaska law applied, he could afford the price of admission. Alone among the fifty states, Alaska allows successful personal-injury plaintiffs to recover attorneys' fees, a potential gold mine given precise record-keeping and a judge who was formerly a trial lawyer. Alaska also allows recovery of damages for pre-impact terror, and Hawthorne has already hired a psychologist who, with the help of sound effects, Equity actors, a Hollywood set designer, and a cassette of 8mm videotape, has re-created the moments before impact in such chilling detail that before Hawthorne is through with them, the jury will think
they
went down in the damn thing.

But as always, there are problems. The shuttle service that owned the helicopter is broke, and its insurance carrier is claiming a defect in coverage because of a late premium. The pilot, whose blood tested .08 alcohol immediately after the incident, has no money either, so there is only one source of funds to pay the victims—the company that built the chopper.

Hawthorne is trying to blame the amphibious skids—the balloon landing gear that were attached to the helicopter when it crashed, causing it to bounce and somersault after it hit the ground, aggravating the situation tenfold. Hawthorne's experts will say the bounce, and not the initial impact, was the proximate cause of the injuries; the manufacturer's experts will say the opposite. He has to establish that the manufacturer should have made it mandatory that the inflatable skids be used only over water.

Proof of an inadequate warning will be in the manuals and service bulletins circulated to purchasers of the particular model—in the hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper the manufacturer has turned over to Hawthorne during the discovery phase of the case, documents Hawthorne's legal assistants are at this moment pawing through in the bowels of his office—indexing, summarizing, computerizing, microfilming—preparing to present the relevant ones at trial. Ironically, if they nail the proof in the documents, there will
be
no trial. The company will settle so it will not risk alerting other customers to the problem with the skids and spawning additional lawsuits. Hawthorne has decided to take $150,000 per plaintiff if it is offered, but no less than twice that once the trial begins.

He wonders if it is a function of his age or his cash flow that he is hoping so hard for a settlement. In the old days he relished a trial—anytime, anywhere; on more than one occasion he had rejected reasonable settlements just to strut his stuff in court. But the thought of trying the copter case is painful: two months in Juneau, living like a monk on two hours' sleep a night while a judge who spends most of his time with timber sales and fishing rights tries to wend his way through the law of aviation accidents.

Even if he wins, there will be an appeal—two years' wait in the Ninth Circuit just to get a date for oral argument, another year till the appellate opinion is handed down—then a petition to the Supreme Court, certiorari denied, back to the trial court, judgment finally entered and, eventually, after all avenues of delay have been exhausted, paid by the manufacturer. Some ten years after it is earned, Hawthorne's fee will be received—and immediately begrudged, because it will seem disproportionate when compared to the award to the victims. Ignorant of the facts and blind to the ramifications of the neobarbarism advocated by the insurance companies, the newspapers will create another public relations disaster for the legal profession. For those and a thousand other reasons, settlement is preferable, but either way, Hawthorne calculates, the chopper case won't yield enough to get his business in the black.

As though she has read his mind, Martha looks up from her manual. “We need to talk.”

“About what?”

“Money.”

“You want a raise.” Feeling expansive after his conquest of the convening pilots, Hawthorne is prepared to bargain in good faith.

Martha shakes her head. “I want to work for a solvent enterprise.”

“So do I.”

“Then you'd better listen to what I have to say.”

He knows from the ditch just dug above her eyes that she is serious and angry, so he nods. When Martha is seriously angry, he obeys orders.

She swivels to face him squarely. Her suit is black and austere, offering the gloomy aspect she believes she must cultivate in order to be taken seriously. Behind her antique reading glasses, her eyes fix on him like landing lights.

“After you went to sleep last night, I got up and ran some numbers,” she begins. “What with the start-up costs in SurfAir and the likelihood that the ultralight case will be reversed and have to be retried, I calculate that at the close of fiscal 'eighty-seven, the Law Offices of Alec Hawthorne will show a net operating loss of half a million dollars.”

He feels his eyes widen and his veins swell. “You're kidding.”

“I don't kid,” she observes, “about money.”

“What's the balance on our note?”

“A hundred and a half. The people at Security Pacific are not going to want to see you coming back for more, especially in light of the promises you made last time.”

“Do I have any choice?”

“Several.” She doesn't wait for him to request enumeration. “First, the house. The place in Belvedere has six bedrooms and eight baths.”

“At last count.”

“You live alone. You don't need the space, and you could net a quarter-million if you sold it. So why don't you?”

“I entertain sometimes.”

“You throw an office bash at Christmas. Big deal. Given the tendency of the courts to extend dram shop liability to private parties, it isn't a good idea to be even
that
gracious anymore.” She blinks to scroll another item into her thoughts. “Then there are the condos. You haven't seen Jackson Hole in years.”

“I was thinking about doing some skiing just the other day.”

“A condo is not essential equipment. You want to slide down the Tetons, rent a place at the village for a week. Let some surgeon carry the mortgage.”

“It's a good investment.”

“You need cash, not unrealized capital gains. Also, you should sell one of the cars. Frankly, I think a Rolls looks a bit ridiculous anywhere but London, but then I've never understood about men and cars. The bottom line is, one of them should go.”

When he hesitates, she hurries on. “I'm not going to say anything about the office, even though it's excessive in every respect. I realize it's a security blanket or a phallic symbol or something, but we can put on a show and still slash the expenses.”

He closes his eyes and leans back in his seat, enduring his punishment the way he endures the dentist. “Like what?”

“Like travel. The last time you went to Paris, you paid eight hundred a night at the Georges Cinq and averaged two hundred dollars per lunch tab.”

“It's deductible, for Christ's sake.”

“When a business is running at a loss, deducibility is no longer a viable rationale. And it's not the amount that's important, it's your ignorance of the details. How much do you think we've spent on the helicopter case?”

He shrugs. “Fifty thousand?”

Her lips curled like blood-red worms. “Three times that. We've spent forty just tracking down the mechanic who installed the skids.”

“I thought he was CIA.”

“He is, but they don't give you a map to the homes of their agents. We had to send someone to Honduras to hang around and try to spot the guy. Plus there are the trips to Juneau and back, depositions of the corporate guys in New York, the mock-up of the chopper, the video, the—”

“Okay, already. I'll keep better track.”

“There are thirty other cases like that one in the office, Alec, and they're all sopping up money like a tampon.”

He opens his eyes. “You're crude, you know that?”

She drills him with a glance. “If I weren't crude, I wouldn't last a day in this business.” Martha returns to her manual.

He closes his eyes and sighs disspiritedly. Martha is right, of course; something must be done about the money. For all his fame and fortune, Hawthorne runs his business like a Ponzi scheme. What makes it difficult—and what Martha doesn't understand, because she believes success has something to do with merit—is that extravagance is essential to the game. Cases come to him not from the heirs of crash victims but from the lawyers handling the probate or the hand-holding. If Alec Hawthorne didn't look like the best aviation attorney on the West Coast, act like the best aviation attorney on the West Coat,
glow
like the best aviation attorney on the West Coast, the referrals would go to someone suitably audacious, and he is not willing to let that happen. He has been poor before; he doubts he can lift the load again.