Stephen Cannell - King Con

"Can you speak English?" she finally said.

"Hey, don' go disrespectin' my ass. I be tryin' t'drop some good science on you."

"Just say it. What is it?" she pressed, beginning to get frustrated. She reached out and turned on the light in her black and white, minimalist bedroom. She could see a low full moon through the sheer drapes.

"He come here, my Ace Cool, he be zooted up, he say here's de plan, Amp, I gonna work fer dem grease-balls, den I gonna go get me a dope ride, den boom, I be hook it up like I want. He say he gonna be livin' large, but he always been one boned-out nigga, spen' way too much time suckin' da glass dick. He always pumpin' up de volume on everythin', y'know? So I don' pay him much never mind. He say dey gonna go throw dat bitch you was guardin' an' dem two blue light specials down de elevator shaft. He say how dem guinea gray cats go got him a deuce-deuce t'carry… Tell how all he hadda do was sit ina ride out front. He tell me ever damn ting 'bout dat piece a'work."

Now she was on her feet, pacing with the phone.

"You're telling me that Carol Sesnick and the two police officers are at the bottom of the Trenton Towers elevator shaft?"

"Ain't you fuckin' listenin'? Dat's what I be sayin'! I bet you de fat man aginst d'hole in a doughnut dat's where dey be at."

"What's your name?"

"What's my name? Lemme see… for now, I gonna be d'dead cat on de line. Dis here be d'free sample… My Ace Cool, he one dead rag nigga now. Ain't nothin' gonna buy him no more rock. You look down der, you'll see I ain't jaw jackin'. But you want mo', you gotta tighten me up."

"If this is good, I'll pay. How do I get in touch with you?"

"Don' worry, sugga, I gonna be watchin' the T and V. I be come over hit on your wall."

And then she was listening to a dial tone. Victoria grabbed her phone book and dialed Ron Johnson's number. She had written it down yesterday morning. After a few rings she got Ron's wife.

"What is it?" she asked, her voice thick with sleep.

"This is Victoria Hart. I'm sorry to call you so late. Is Ron there?"

There was the sound of the phone being dropped and then passed… then Ron's voice came on, trying to sound wide awake, but he was faking. "Yeah. What's up?"

"I just got an interesting call. He didn't leave a name but he sounded black."

"That's racist shit, Miss Hart. Good thing we get along or I could write you up for that." His voice was a little tight, pissed off at being awakened.

"Come on, Ron, knock it off. You should've heard him. It was all ghettoese. If I didn't spend half my life taking depositions from these guys in jail, I never would've understood. He says Carol, Tony, and Bobby are at the bottom of the elevator shaft at Trenton Towers."

"We looked. Not there."

"What's down there?"

"It's goop. Fifty years of sludge."

"Did you put somebody in there and poke around?"

"No. Like I said, it's just gunk… from years of oil drippings and underground sewage. We looked at the plans and stuck a pole down. There's like a concrete and steel catch basin 'bout five feet deep; you stir it up, it stinks worse than fish house garbage."

"Get somebody over in waders and look again."

"You sure?"

"No, I'm not sure… There was just something about this guy that makes me think it's real."

"This two A.M. bullshit is fun, Vicky, we gotta do this more often," he said, and then was abruptly off the line. She knew he was already on the phone getting a detail together.

After making the middle-of-the-night call to Victoria Hart, Beano Bates moved slowly into the kitchen of his motel apartment in Coral Gables. The place was one baby step above a crash pad and depressing enough without the devastating news about Carol. He opened the refrigerator, took out a cold beer, and pressed it to his face, but didn't drink it. He didn't trust his stomach, which was churning. Roger-the-Dodger looked up at him, growled low, and then snapped out a sharp bark. Beano looked down at the dog for a long minute. "Why would she do it, Rog?" he said.

He had seen the report of Carol Sesnick's disappearance that night on the eleven o'clock news. It had hit him like a fist. It was even more devastating than the blows he had taken at the hands of Joseph Rina. As soon as the story was off, he had left the wood-framed, peeling apartment, run to the Escort, and driven to an all-night market that had newspapers from all over the country. He had bought the Trenton Herald. With his stomach still rolling, he had looked up the story of her disappearance and had read it carefully. The story recounted his beating under the name of Frank Lemay. It said that after filing his report with the Trenton Police, he had left the hospital…The Trenton Prosecutor, who the writer said was occasionally referred to as "Tricky Vicky" Hart, had refused to drop the charges when she had turned up a witness who had seen the assault. The witness's identity had been kept secret, but the paper said it was generally thought to be a man, until it was learned yesterday that the witness was a pediatric nurse named Carol Sesnick, who specialized in child cancer patients at the Trenton Children's Hospital. He put down the paper and felt tears sting in his eyes. He knew Carol hadn't been anywhere near the Greenborough Country Club when the beating had occurred. She had lied to Victoria Hart because Joe Rina had intended to kill Beano and promised to try again. Carol knew that and had stepped forward. With Joseph Rina in prison, Carol probably thought Beano would be safe. He forced his mind to work for a moment, but only on the facts.

He wasn't sure Carol and the two Jersey cops were in the elevator shaft, but Three Finger Freddy had told Beano the story of how the Rinas used to dispose of their dead bodies. The card shark told him they used to throw them down an elevator shaft. "No cops," he had explained in the Mercer County Hospital room, "want to go poking around in the sludge under an elevator."

Beano finished the story on Carol's disappearance and then started flipping around in the paper, looking for something plausible he could use. His mind was reeling with the disaster. Tears were in his eyes, but he brushed them away and continued to force himself to concentrate. He found a story on that stopped him. There was a picture of an Econoline van parked in a Hoboken junkyard. The story said a Rastafarian John Doe had been discovered in the stolen van with three 9mm slugs in him. Ballistics said they were from two different guns. Because the Rasta had heroin in his blood, the police in Trenton suspected it was a drug slaying. It had happened the same night as Carol's disappearance. Beano had heard a rumor that Tommy Rina often used disposable wheel men. That way he didn't have any loose ends or have to pay them the two or three thousand dollars it would normally cost for a getaway driver on a big hit. He wondered if the Rastafarian in the stolen van could have been part of the Rina job. The fact that he had died on the same night Carol had been kidnapped or killed gave the theory some credence.

Beano had gone back to his apartment and had spent an hour recapturing his once near-perfect ghetto dialect. During his one prison stretch, he had learned it from his cellmate, a fractured semi-crazed gang banger named Amp Heywood. Beano had never met Victoria Hart. She'd been put on the case after he'd already left the hospital, but there was a picture of her on the front page of the paper. For a State Prosecutor, she looked uncharacteristically beautiful. She had very short, no-nonsense hair. And she didn't look all that "tricky" to him. She looked earnest. He folded the paper and sat by the phone. He had to find out if Carol was dead. He had to get the Trenton Police to look in the bottom of the elevator shaft. He picked up the phone and made the two A.M. call to the embattled New Jersey Prosecutor.