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."