Stephen Cannell - King Con

"A lot has happened since then," he grinned at her from seat 5B of the westbound flight. "The land has all been settled on by squatters who now have clear title. Technically, the land grant is still valid but not enforceable. The neat thing about Fentress County is that the County Clerk still has the land grant and deeded plot numbers on record, and if anybody calls to verify our deed's historical existence, she'll look it up and tell you that good ol' FCP amp;G owns the parcels in question, even though these lots are legally owned by the people living on them. This wonderful act of confusion is being supplied by the State of Tennessee because they haven't bothered to take the old land grants off their books. We can value that property at whatever we want. When Tommy's accountant checks, it's gonna look damn good on our balance sheet. Another plus is that this old dead company actually still has real live stockholders. They invested in the company when it was active ten years ago. It went broke, so they wrote it off on their taxes and forgot it, but legally these stockholders still own thirty percent of the Class-B stock. It's still registered, giving it the look of an operating public company. The stock is listed on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, where the listing requirements for companies are very lax. Up till a week ago it was a penny a share; the total value of the outstanding stock was less than twenty-five thousand dollars. Since then, my uncle John and I have been trading a block of hundred thousand shares back and forth to create an artificial market. We've already got the price up to almost a dollar. The float on this stock is so thin, it goes up fast. In a week, if we keep making two trades a day, we should have it up over ten. We're going to sell it in San Francisco because the Chronicle lists the stocks traded on the Vancouver Exchange. When Tommy's people try and get a value, that Tennessee land is going to make the ten-dollar price seem legit."

She was writing all this down on a yellow legal pad. Beano had considered telling her to stop because it was spooking him. He was more paranoid than a corrupt S amp;L president, and he hated leaving a paper trail, but it was part of Victoria's anal compulsion, so he let it go without comment.

An hour later, when he had finally finished describing the whole hustle to her, she closed the yellow pad and looked straight ahead, saying nothing. He finally leaned his seat back and tried to go to sleep, but he could feel her gaze on him. Occasionally, he would open his eyes and catch her staring. He wasn't sure if he had impressed her or frightened her to death.

They landed in San Francisco and carried their overnight bags and the oversized empty kennel coop, along with the canvas satchel containing a little over a hundred thousand dollars, down the long terminal to the rental car area. Roger-the-Dodger trotted along beside them on a red leash that Beano had bought for him last Christmas.

Beano was very specific with the Hertz girl about the make and color of the rental car he wanted. He demanded a mid-sized light green two-door. He turned down a blue Mustang and finally accepted a light green Ford Escort with a tan interior.

They drove to the Stanford Court, which was an upscale executive hotel on Nob Hill, where John registered under his own name and was shown to his room. Then they all met ten minutes later in a booth in the darkened executive bar. Roger curled up on the seat and put his chin on Victoria's lap. He watched carefully as Beano counted out ten thousand dollars on the seat beside him.

"Take the rest of this and set up a bank account for FCP amp;G with BofA," Beano instructed, handing John the canvas bag with ninety thousand dollars in it. "Take Victoria with you. I'll take Roge and go pick out the moose pasture."

"Not so fast, Bubba. I'm with you," Victoria said.

"Why? It's just a trip to go look at farms. You're a lawyer; you can help negotiate the building real-estate contract," he said, using some "Ditch Vicky" logic.

"The way you explained it on the plane, it's a lot more than looking at farms, and I want to see some of these Bates family members everybody's been telling me about."

She was like gum he couldn't get off his shoe, but Beano decided since she knew the whole scam anyway, it was better to get her aboard psychologically than to isolate her. "Okay, we'll drive to Modesto." He turned to John. "We should be back here tomorrow night. Start trying to find two floors in a high-rise office building we can rent. It would be great if it was downtown near the other big oil companies. Be nice to look out our corporate windows at the Texaco or Shell Building across the street."

"I'll find us a couple'a top floors down on Market, near the Exxon Tower, where we can get signage rights," John said. "How 'bout a lighted sign on the roof with the FCP amp;G logo on it?"

"What's the FCP amp;G logo?" she asked.

"It's a moose with an oil derrick up his ass." Beano grinned. John got up, said good-bye, picked up the canvas satchel, and headed out of the bar.

"Why Modesto?" she asked.

"The San Joaquin River valley is one of the last potentially huge oil basins in the Northern Hemisphere. Only a few meager natural gas wells have come in so far, but there's still a lot of speculation. That valley has what geologists call a huge sandstone stratigraphic trap. That gives it the makings of a major discovery. It also makes it a perfect place to run a moose pasture, because if any mooch we're targeting decides to check it out, our story is gonna make sense geologically."

They drove the light green Ford Escort out of San Francisco and headed east on State Highway 9. Soon the cityscape turned to rolling farmlands. Roger had found a place in the back seat and was back there having doggie dreams, yipping and licking his lips. They drove in silence for almost an hour. Beano was still wondering about Victoria. She was an ex-prosecutor… It was a little disconcerting to him to think she had been able to infiltrate him this deeply. He wondered if it was her guile and beauty that had softened him, or perhaps their common interest in revenge. Or maybe it was just another by-product of the beating with the nine-iron that he suspected had turned him soft. He had caught himself several times trying to make her smile, using his number-ten rainmaker and being crushed when it failed to get results. Now her silence was beginning to bother him more than his failed smile.

"You okay?" he finally asked.

"Yeah, I think." Victoria had a strange expression on her face.

"Say it," he encouraged. "What's on your mind? You've been too quiet. It's beginning to spook me."

What she said was not the condemnation he expected, but unrestrained excitement.

"I didn't know it was so easy to do stuff like this. I mean, that gag with the pearl was brilliant. We didn't even break any laws. We just sold a pearl for an inflated value… now we got this phony oil company complete with stockholders and registered land."

"Didn't you ever work bunco?" he said, surprised. "Didn't you ever catch a big securities-fraud case?"

"I prosecuted a few bunco cases, but they were just block hustles, street scams. Two years ago I plea-bargained a case where this street hustler, I can't remember his name, was selling mechanical dogs that were supposed to bark and walk around, only they were defective. They would walk but not bark. The con man got 'em from the factory for two-thirds off, and when the mark would bend down to look at the toy dog, this faker would actually throw his voice and make the barking sounds himself. He sold hundreds at Christmas. It was so cheesy it made me laugh. He got seven months, but it was nothing like this. This is a big-time criminal enterprise."

Coincidentally, Beano knew the block hustle she was talking about. It was a Bates family specialty. They bought the defective toys from a manufacturer called The Talking Animal Farm. They also bought ducks that didn't quack, which were Easter favorites, and Santa's elves that refused to say "Ho-ho-ho." He also thought he might know the arrestee in Victoria's story. It was most likely a second cousin of his, named "Sidewalk Sonny" Bates. Sonny had taken a fall in Trenton about two years ago for running that grift, but Beano decided not to mention it.