Stephen Cannell - King Con

After six days of selection, Victoria was nervous about her jury. Defense attorney Gerry Cohen, on the other hand, seemed pleased. All through voir dire, he had his jury selection experts spread around him like card kibitzers, whispering, pointing, and pushing pieces of paper in front of him. As each juror was questioned, Gerry would nod sagely and then decide whether to use a peremptory challenge, dismiss a juror for cause, or accept. Victoria had to rely on gut instinct. She didn't have any background checkers with psychology degrees. She had only David Frankfurter to help her.

David was former Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter's great-grandson. He was a tall, skinny, twenty-seven-year-old Assistant State Prosecutor known around the office as "Dodger Dog" because of his last name and because he had been raised in Los Angeles and loved the Dodgers.

Victoria and David would study the jurors in the panel, trying to pick them by type. She wanted women more than men. She preferred married, white-collar, educated people with children, people who would see Joe Dancer for what he was, instead of some charming refugee from Hard Copy who had looks and romance draping him like Armani clothing. She was very worried about jurors ten and twelve, both young unemployed males who didn't fit her acceptable profile. With one alternate left to pick, and all of her peremptory challenges gone, she could be forced to accept the next candidate, whoever or whatever it was. The last alternate juror would be interviewed tomorrow, and the trial would start the following morning.

Her police driver, who she thought was named Alan, finally nodded in satisfaction, turned his headlights back on, and drove out the way he had come. A surprise thunderstorm had dropped a half-inch of rain late that afternoon, and now sheet lightning lit the horizon like flashes of distant artillery.

Ten minutes later, they arrived at the underground parking garage of Trenton Towers. They whisked by what looked like an empty gray Econoline van without paying much attention to it. They didn't notice that the windows were fogged.

Victoria took the old Otis eight-man elevator up to the fourteenth floor. The building was mid-fifties, but she had picked it because it had several advantages from a security standpoint: The floors were small and could be easily protected; there was only one elevator bank, limiting access; and the building had low occupancy and a completely vacant fourteenth floor, which gave them much needed separation from the other tenants. The old fifteen-story residential building was adjacent to a business district so it had little night traffic, making secure meetings between herself and Carol Sesnick easier to arrange.

The elevator opened on fourteen and Victoria walked out into the "safe house," carrying her briefcase, purse, and a garment bag. She was greeted by two plainclothes deputies whom, over the last two weeks, she had grown very fond of. Tony Corollo was the tall, silent Italian who seldom smiled but projected an easy warmth. The other was Bobby Manning. He'd been a Trenton High School football star. He had a ruddy complexion and a lock of auburn hair that hung in planned disarray on his forehead.

"Evening, Ms. Hart," they both chirped. "Bring us anything?"

She had been religiously stopping at the mini-mart near her apartment, picking up candy and reading material for them. She dug in her purse for some tabloid magazines.

"No Nestle's Crunch?" Bobby Manning said, grinning his question at her.

She found a package of Butterfingers she'd missed in the side pocket of her purse and handed it to him. "Best I could do, Bobby," she said, and they moved off their folding chairs in the hall toward the locked door that led to Carol's suite.

Victoria found Carol in the white tile bathroom trying a new hairstyle. She had curled it and her soft brown hair was now piled up on her head, giving her a French poodle pouf. She was in her slip, holding a hand mirror, with a disgusted frown on her ordinary but pleasant face.

"I fucked it up, V," Carol said, still looking in the mirror, wrinkling her freckled nose. "It wasn't exactly supposed to come out like this." She held up a picture in Glamour magazine that showed a thin-faced model with the same do, only it was subtly different. On the model the piled-up curls seemed to look fresh and perky. The narrow-faced blonde in the picture had her hair pulled back on the sides, tight curls cascading down her back. On Carol Sesnick the look was less effective. "What I got goin' here is pure Brillo pad, ain't it?" Carol said, pouting.

Victoria grabbed a hairbrush and started to rearrange the back of the hairstyle. "Turn around a little more," she instructed as she worked, pulling the sides back and clipping them up higher to better resemble the model in the picture.

Carol and Victoria were both in their early thirties, trim and fit, but the comparison ended there. Their reflections both glittered in the large mirror of the too-bright bathroom. They were a study in contrasts. Victoria was by far the prettier. She had classic bone structure, high cheekbones, and a sculpted face. But she was not a fashion adventurer… She wore her hair cut very short to save time. She would roll out of bed in the morning, jump in the shower, towel her hair dry, and hit it with a dryer while she went over her legal notes propped on the sink before her. She could be out the door in fifteen minutes. Her makeup was minimal, sometimes nonexistent. Despite this lack of primping, she had a radiant natural beauty that had earned her half-a-dozen offers to model by New York agents… sleek, well-dressed men who smelled of aftershave and slipped agency cards in her hand, suggesting she call. She dismissed these entreaties as sleazeball pickup routines, despite the fact that the cards they gave her were sometimes embossed in gold with the names of prominent agencies.

"There," Victoria said, clipping the other side of Carol's hair back with a barrette.

"I don't know," Carol said, studying her reflection dubiously. "I think I look stupid. Makes my face seem round."

"Maybe if you don't pile it up so high… let some of this, up here, straggle on the sides," Victoria said, pulling a few strands down. Since she took so little interest in her own hairstyle, she felt ill equipped to give beauty tips to others. She was much better at conducting a withering cross-examination.

"You got the dress!" Carol exclaimed, finally spotting the garment bag Victoria had draped over the commode.

"Yep. Gil Green shit a brick when he saw the bill. But, if O.J. can get Rosa Lopez that ugly blue outfit, you oughta get this pretty tan one." She pulled it out of the bag and held it up.

"Love it, love it, love it," Carol said, as she unzipped it and stepped in, then turned to the mirror. "Whatta you think?"

"You're gonna knock 'em dead, girlfriend." Victoria grinned. Under all the easy chatter she continued to marvel: Why would somebody risk everything just because it was the right thing to do? When she evaluated the tremendous sacrifices Carol Sesnick was making, it took Victoria Hart's breath away.

In the back of the gray Econoline van, Tommy "Two Times" Rina and Texaco Phillips were hunched over a Building Department schematic of Trenton Towers. They had computer-accessed the plans from the City Building Inspector's office by using a Rina Family computer technician. He'd downloaded everything.

"Fucking heating ducts are tiny… We'll never get inside them, they're forty fucking years old," Tommy said angrily, looking at the plans and smelling Texaco's horrible odor, which he knew was caused by anabolic steroids. In the front seat, behind the wheel, chewing on a toothpick, was a skinny Jamaican Rastafarian. His dreadlocks were greased and beaded; his dusky skin lacked luster.