Stephen Cannell - King Con

She slowly got to her feet. He looked uncomfortable. Gil was non-confrontational, which she always thought was strange behavior for a District Attorney.

"This is chickenshit, Gil. I deserve better than this."

"I'm sure your review will substantiate all of your decisions, but until it comes down, I think this is best. I've already given your background notes and motion files for the Rina case to Mark Switzer. He's doing the prelim. Turn the rest of your Rina stuff over to him ASAP."

She didn't have the nerve to tell him that the rest of her case folders had been stolen from her.

Victoria was popular in the office. She often stayed late and listened while young prosecutors ran their cases by her, hoping Tricky Vicky could find some legal loop-holes or creative strategy they could use. She knew there would be a crowd at the elevator wanting to know what happened. She couldn't bear to face them now, so she took the back stairs down to the trial division on the fourth floor, moved quietly past the Xerox room into her private corner office, and closed the door. In Gil's office, she'd been strangely submissive, as if there were some specific protocol for that kind of event that demanded a level attitude. All the meeting lacked was a blindfold and a last cigarette. Now she could feel her anger building. She cursed herself for not having chosen the moment to tell the D.A. what a low, shifty coward he was. She stood behind her desk, chewing a fingernail, looking out her corner window onto State Street Park across from the Criminal Courts Building. Her office was cramped but pin-neat; files and folders arranged by case with tight, usable precision.

The phone rang. She snapped it up.

"Victoria Hart," she said sharply, then her mood seemed to change. "Ted Calendar? From WTRN-TV?" she finally said.

The studio at WTRN-TV was small and stuffy, and Ted Calendar looked much older in person than he did on TV. Victoria had let the makeup lady dust her with powder, but there wasn't much she could do with the short hairstyle.

Victoria was miked and sat in a straight-back chair opposite Ted. There was a fake fireplace behind them; a blue oval carpet and bookshelves in the wings completed the economical set. Ted Calendar was reading notes on his lap almost as if she weren't there. They were a few minutes from taping.

"Thanks for this opportunity to tell my side of it," Victoria said.

"Too bad about the Rina trial. Lotta fish got cooked but no dinner served, huh?" he said, still not looking up at her.

She found herself studying his too-blond wig, which was leaking perspiration down the side of his face. Then he looked up suddenly and caught her staring.

"Okay, Vicky…"

"I prefer Victoria."

"I prefer Theodore," he said with a smirk. "Lotta good it does me. What we have here is a live-on-tape interview. It will be broadcast on the evening news in a two-and-a-half-minute segment. We're going to have a hard out. I'll signal you when we're down to five seconds. Wrap it up fast, or you'll get cut off by the booth."

"Okay," she said, not sure exactly what she was going to say, but because of the anger in her, she was fearing the worst.

The stage manager held up five fingers, then ticked them down, one at a time, until he had a fist up and Ted grinned at the camera.

"Welcome to 'New Jersey Talking.' I'm Ted Calendar, and this is our fireside chat with people in the news." He turned to Victoria. "I'm here with Vicky Hart, the Prosecutor just coining off a devastating situation in her trial against alleged mobster Joe Rina. Nice to have you with us, Vicky."

"Thanks. Nice to be here, Teddy," she said, and watched him wince slightly.

"So the trial isn't going to happen. A lot has been made of this prosecution, yet you withdrew your case before opening arguments. Is that it? After all the hoopla, it just goes over the cliff without even a skid-mark?"

"The fact that my witness, Carol Sesnick, and two heroic police officers were brutally murdered and thrown down an elevator shaft is a real tragedy, and it's the reason we're not going to proceed with the attempted murder prosecution. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to know that these deaths, timed just days before opening arguments, were not coincidental."

"You're accusing Joseph Rina of these murders?" Ted said, sensing a story and leaning forward in his chair.

"You bet."

Ted Calendar looked at her skeptically. "You're saying that you have evidence that Joe Rina killed these three people?"

"I didn't say I had evidence. I said he did it."

"As a prosecuting attorney here in New Jersey, you can't say something like that unless you intend to back it up."

"Says who?"

"I would guess Gil Green. Gil would have both legal and ethical concerns, I think."

"This would be the same Gil Green who encouraged me, at length, to prosecute Joe Rina for attempted murder; who made a TV career out of talking about it for five months to get his political stock up, and now, because my key witness was murdered, is having me reviewed for doing it in the first place? I don't think we need to worry too much about Gil Green's ethical position. Let's worry instead about what happened to Carol Sesnick, Tony Corollo, and Bobby Manning. Those three people were my friends. Those three people were heroes. They gave their lives trying to do the right thing." She turned in her chair and faced the camera. "Joe Rina, if you're out there listening to me, I'm not going to rest until I see you brought to justice. I don't know how I'm going to prove you brutally killed my friends, but I'm going to." Her eyes were pinholes of burning anger as she looked into the camera. "I'm going to see you behind bars. I won't sleep until that day comes."

Ted Calendar looked into the lens as the camera faced him. In his "ear angel," the director told him to go right to commercial. "Powerful stuff…" he said to the camera. "Weil be right back," and they cut to black. He looked at her. "I'd like to do a second segment. Follow this up, if you can stay."

"I think I've done enough damage to myself," she said, and unhooked her mike. She walked off the stage and out of the studio. She got in her car and drove along the Delaware River to the John Fitch Parkway, heading north. Without really planning it, she was heading to her parents' house in Wallingford, Connecticut. She knew the broadcast would end her career in the D.A.'s office. Halfway there, tears started rolling down her cheeks. She wasn't making a sound, but the tears flowed. It was strange, as if sheer force of will prohibited complete emotional collapse, but she couldn't stop the tears. Victoria Hart was hangin' on for dear life and running home to her mother.

THE PICTURES WERE MORE GRUESOME THAN HE'D IMAGined: shots of him unconscious in the pre-op theater, his head swollen, his two middle teeth missing. He had blood all over him; his jaw was broken. He was covered with a cold sweat as he studied them.

"Really knocked the shit out of me, didn't he, Rog?" Beano said, and laid the hospital photos aside.

He'd been through the files two times, to no avail. The whole Amp Heywood/Cedric O'Neal/Martin Cushbury scam on Victoria Hart had produced very little… only the horrible pictures, which had knotted his stomach and brought the unreasonable fear bubbling up, filling his senses, like untreated sewage. Beano had read her trial strategy, which didn't help him either. He had her opening statement, which he thought was inventive and dramatic and just ever so tricky: "More than a man was beaten in the parking lot of the Greenborough Country Club," she had intended to say. "The boundaries of self-restraint and human decency were also viciously and demonically attacked." Pretty good. She didn't have Beano, so society and human decency were standing in for him. Beano had read it twice and found nothing in it besides some nice imagery and three spelling errors. There were no background facts on Joseph or Tommy. If he was going to run a Big Store confidence game on the Rinas, he would desperately need to know everything about them. But very little of it was here. He had swung for a grand slam and had whiffed completely.