Stephen Cannell - King Con

"Oh, my goodness," Beano flustered, "how clumsy… how awful…" He grabbed his napkin and began to spread it around on her suit, making it worse.

"Stop it! Just stop it!" she said, then grabbed two napkins off the next table and looked desperately at Angel, the waitress. "Where's the ladies' room?" Angel pointed to a door in the back of the deli. "Stay here," Victoria ordered Beano, then hurried off to repair the damage, leaving her briefcase behind in the confusion.

When she returned, five minutes later, Beano Bates and the Rina files were gone. "Dammit to hell!" she cursed at herself. Her dress was drenched with cold water and pulp shreds and hung on her like a wet saddle blanket. She felt like a fool as she looked down at the empty table. All that was left was the overturned glass of orange juice. Victoria Hart carefully picked it up and wrapped it in a fresh paper napkin. Then she put it into her briefcase and left the delicatessen. She had five minutes to make it to court.

AFTER NINE MONTHS AND THREE MURDERS, VICTORIA Hart voluntarily withdrew the State's case against Joe "Dancer" Rina. The whole process took less than ten minutes. When Judge Goldstone dismissed the case, the little mobster nodded his head as if it had been God's will and slowly got to his feet.

Gerald Cohen was closing up case folders and filing them in his briefcase as the Princeton Glee Club cleared the battlefield, gathering up pens, pencils, case reports, and unused arguments from the long, wooden table. The handsome mobster timed it so that he and Victoria met in the doorway of the courtroom. He graciously stepped aside to let her pass. When they were in the hall, he turned to her…

"It's gratifying when justice finally prevails, isn't it, counselor?"'

"Are you talking to me?" she said, stunned by his arrogance.

"I believe I was." He smiled.

"Then tell your blond flunky who stole my case folders this morning to send them back. There's nothing in there I can use against you. This case is done… but I have to turn over my files for review. I'm sure you want my sorry performance evaluated."

"Of course, I don't know what you're talking about. But let me give you a tip, Vicky… I've been very patient with you. I've endured your subpoenas of my friends and business associates. For almost a year, I've put up with your brash, unsubstantiated allegations. There's a part of me that keeps asking why I've been so charitable. I don't have an adequate answer. Perhaps it's because you're an attractive young woman and I was raised to be courteous to women. However, you've used up all my patience. In the future, you might do well to give me lots and lots of room."

"The room I'm planning to give you is about ten feet square and has a view of the rock quarry. Get used to seeing me around, Joe, 'cause I'm just getting started on you."

She turned and walked away from him, squaring her shoulders, feeling his glare on her back all the way to the elevators. When she turned to push the DOWN button, she saw him still staring. He hadn't moved, but the look on his face transformed him. He no longer looked like a movie star. In that brief glance, she could see inside him as if some mystic chisel had stripped away his beauty and revealed his inner core. In that second, before he turned and walked away, she saw the deadly glare of pure evil. She wondered if she could deal with such a virulent enemy.

Victoria had given the orange juice glass to David Frankfurter before court and he had run it across the courtyard to the police lab. By the time she got back to her office, she had forgotten all about it, but David came through the door with a police printout in his hand.

"You ain't gonna believe this," he said, holding the crime lab report. "We got three good prints off that glass. Index, middle, and thumb, along with a partial palm. This guy you had breakfast with is quite a catch."

"Works for Joe Rina, right?"

"Not that I can tell." He handed her the yellow sheet.

"Beano Bates?" she said, perplexed. "A confidence man?"

"Not just a con man, the con man. This guy is reputed to be the best long grifter operating in America. He actually has sold the Brooklyn Bridge."

"Come on, that's a joke."

"No joke… It's a scrap iron scam. The way he worked it, Beano pretended to be a Brooklyn metal stress tester who was fired by the city. He had metal stress fracture X-rays and a buncha official-looking time line analyses. They convinced the mark, who was the greedy owner of a scrap metal company, that the bridge had serious metal fatigue and had been judged unsafe by the civil engineers and was going to be torn down. They said it was all being hushed up because the public outcry would be enormous. They set up a fake auction and this dummy paid a half-a-million dollars to Beano's phony inside man to rig the bids. The same scam was done once by some French sharpers on the Eiffel Tower. Beano Bates is the only white-collar criminal on the current FBI Ten Most Wanted List."

She started to scan the charges against him." This guy did a nickel in Raiford. Check and see if he was there the same time as Anthony Heywood, a.k.a. Amp."

"Already did. They were cellmates."

"So what the hell does he want with my case file?" she asked, and then looked at David. Both of them were trying to figure it out, but it didn't add up.

"Nothing here ties him to Joe Rina?" she finally asked.

"Naw. Looks like they run in separate gutters."

There was an empty silence in Victoria's office that was interrupted by her phone buzzer. She picked it up and got her secretary, Marie.

"The Gray Ghost wants to see you, stat," Marie's voice said, with concern. "The Gray Ghost" was office code for G.G… Gil Green.

"Okay, I'm on my way." She hung up and looked at David Frankfurter. "Gil wants me. What's the official scuttlebutt on this? Am I headed to Hoboken?" she asked.

"Siberia," he replied sadly.

She nodded, then got to her feet and moved slowly from the office, holding Beano's yellow sheet. She paused in the doorway and handed it back. "Put him through the National Crime Information Center computer. Get me a deep check. I particularly wanna see if he's got any connection to Carol Sesnick." Then she turned and walked out of her office and down the hall to the elevators.

"These kinds of things are always hard, Victoria," Gil said. This time he was looking at her and she could tell he'd rehearsed what he was about to say. A bad sign. He had some notecards he was referring to on his desk in front of him. Another bad sign. She assumed he'd been briefed by Labor Relations on how to handle this meeting to avoid a wrongful-termination suit. "The whole Joe Dancer disaster is going to have to be reviewed. I know you may view this as unfair, but as the Prosecuting Attorney, I think you may have made some decisions in this investigation that bear further examination."

"Such as…? Every move in this case was approved by you, Gil."

"Victoria, I don't want to get into this with you now. You are temporarily being reassigned to a lower-profile situation. I want you to work the booking desk for a while."

"You want me to be the booking clerk!" she said, appalled. That was a job usually held by the most junior member of the D.A.'s staff. It involved reviewing arrests the police brought in and deciding if there was enough evidence to warrant a criminal prosecution. Then the clerk turned the preliminary decisions over to a senior prosecutor for approval. Even though the job was always done by an attorney, "clerk" was not an accidental description.

"You can check with Betty on where she wants to put you. It's only temporary, just until the review is complete. You're still on full staff salary. I got that for you, but I think we all need to keep our heads down right now. I'm instructing you to make no statements to the press about this situation." Then his secretary buzzed. He picked up the phone. "Oh, right. Sorry… Yes, right away." He looked at his watch, shook his head, hung up, and got to his feet. It was bad theater. The buzz from his secretary was pre-arranged to bring the meeting to a quick close. "Sorry, Vicky, I'm late for an appointment," he lied, and waited impatiently for her to leave.