Stephen Cannell - King Con

"Tricky Vicky ain't so tricky, is she?" Stan said limerickly, after filling Gil in.

"She's consorting with a known felon. She's guilty of half-a-dozen Class-B felonies, maybe one Class-A beef. This could be big; I'm on my way to you." Gil was already adding up the political points.

"What do you want my team in Frisco to do?" Stan asked.

"Something more is going on here. I want to find all the edges before I pounce. Wait till Victoria is alone and pick her up. Take her to the Federal Building. Stay on Bates, but don't arrest him. I'll be on the next flight."

Grady Hunt and Denny Denniston were on point and followed Beano and Victoria to a small but neat two-story motel next to the Golden Gate Marina. Within five minutes they had the Marina Motel staked out with five back-up units. Everybody was "jacked and flaked."

They watched as Beano drove out alone at three-thirty in the yellow Caprice. He turned right and headed down toward Market Street; two units followed him and then the rest moved in on the the motel room.

Victoria was in room 22 and they hit the door without warning. "Freeze, FBI!" Grady Hunt screamed as he pinned himself against the inside wall, his 9mm Beretta cupped in his hand, his heart lunging, his finger on the four-ounce trigger. Denniston took a shooting stance from a cover-fire position outside. Both agents held Victoria in their sights.

"On the floor. Now!" Grady shouted as Victoria, who was unpacking her overnight case, looked up, startled.

"What are you doing?" she stammered.

"On your face. Now!"

She kneeled down, and before she touched the floor, Grady landed on her and cuffed her quickly and brutally. They pulled her up and out of the room, jammed her into the back of the plainclothes sedan, and pulled away, smoking tire rubber as they left.

The whole apprehension took less man three minutes.

The Federal Building downtown on Flower Street was like Federal Buildings everywhere: Hand-me-down furniture squatted in overcrowded case rooms, with fly-specked windows that looked out onto brick walls, and coffee-stained Styrofoam cups filled with cigarette butts floating filter-deep in sludge.

Victoria had been put in a holding cell with a oneway mirror. She sat there alone for an hour, wondering what the hell to do. Obviously she had stumbled into a surveillance trap, but she didn't know how much they knew. She hoped she could bluff her way out. She'd been a prosecutor for five years, so she knew that there were basically two reasons why cops cool out a suspect like this: Guilty arrestees, when left alone, often would relax and even go to sleep, because once caught, they were prepared for the worst and gave up to it. Only the innocent would fidget and pace, because they knew they were innocent and they tended to panic. She knew that on the other side of her one-way mirror she was being closely observed, so she spoke out loud to the hidden mike she knew was somewhere in the room: "I know this routine, guys. I pulled this cool-out a hundred times myself. I'm not gonna take a nap, so can we get on with it?" When nobody came, she contemplated the other reason cops held somebody like this. It was usually because they were waiting for the principal interrogator to show up.

Gil Green arrived at the Flower Street Federal Building at five-thirty-five. He asked for a polygraph operator to be put on standby, then he asked that Victoria be brought down from her holding cell.

He was dressed in a conservative gray suit with a charcoal tie and matching handkerchief. His nondescript features were arranged in a placid expression as Victoria was led through the door and seated in a wooden chair in the sterile, windowless interrogation room.

"Victoria, I wish I could say it's a pleasure to see you," Gil opened dryly.

"Aw, go ahead and say it anyway, Gil. Insincerity always seems to work for you."

"We're already at ground level in two sentences," he smiled. "I can't tell you how happy I am to see you in such trouble. I'll never forgive you for that interview on 'New Jersey Talking,'" he said softly.

"I'd like to know why I've been arrested."

"Do you want the charges chronologically or alphabetically?"

"How 'bout just so they make sense?" she said.

And then he told her about the surveillance of the Pasta Palace, about the fact that they had witnessed her meeting with Joe Rina and dropping off a package. Then her consorting with Beano Bates, a known felon, which, if she had prior knowledge, made her an accessory-after-the-fact in all of his crimes. When Gil got through, she continued to look at him, trying hard not to let her face give her away.

"So far I can't see the crime," she said. "Joe Rina isn't wanted for anything. I can meet with him without facing indictment. As for Mr. who…?"

"Bates."

"Bates. Well, he said his name was Curtis Fisher, so there goes your prior knowledge. I met him in a bar five days ago. He seemed nice. You say he's a criminal? Well, can you imagine that?" She looked at him and they locked hostile gazes.

He was so bland, she couldn't, for the life of her, read him. His thin lips and wispy hair all seemed to blend together on his pale, featureless face.

"Victoria, you are in major trouble. Let me run a few possible scenarios for you."

"Please do," she said agreeably.

"I think it went like this… You had a case that could put Joe Rina in prison. Maybe he threatened you or threatened your family or maybe he just offered you a helluva lot of money, or maybe you went to him with a For Sale sign. Either way, I think you cut a deal and you sold him the location of your witness. Carol and two brave cops got murdered. Your case got pitched and you ran off to San Francisco with the money to hang out with a Federal criminal."

"Lots of 'I thinks' and 'maybes' in that brief, Counselor. You might want to harden it up before you file it. And it's always nice when you have evidence. Can you document a shred of this?"

"I have you on video in Joe Rina's office yesterday, dropping off material." He smiled without humor. It was a strained, ghastly smile, almost as if he were shifting gas. "Tell me what was in the folder you dropped?"

"Family pictures," she said evasively.

"Beano X. Bates is a con man on the FBI Ten Most Wanted List. That list has been circulated through your office once a month for the five years you've been there. Bates has been on it for twenty-six months; his picture is on the wall in the coffee room, downstairs."

"I don't pay much attention to those lists, Gil; I was a very busy little girl, what with all the bullets I was taking for you and everything."

"Beano's here in San Francisco. We have a surveillance team set up on him right now. When I snap my fingers, he's dust. I could have picked him up with you, but I thought because of our association, I owed you this meeting first. If you insist on playing hardball with me, then he goes away."

He watched her closely and could see her flinch ever so slightly when he said that. He knew he was on the right track.

"You don't owe me a meeting, you're just trying to turn me."

"I don't need to turn you, Vicky. I got you dead bang. I got him dead bang. I'm hardly out looking for a charge to pin on Bates. I've got a shopping list of felony warrants I can use."

"Okay, then what are you looking for?"

"I'm not a great attorney, I'm sure you know that."

She held her comment.

"But I'm a pretty decent student of human nature and I know how the game is played. So, I say to myself, 'Why is this happening? Why is Victoria pulling such a harebrained stunt?' And you know what the answer is?"

"Too many Hostess Twinkies?"

"Something else is going on. There's a piece of this puzzle that I'm not seeing… and what I want from you is that piece. You're way too smart for any of the scenarios I just got through running. I figure if you level with me, then maybe I'll help you. Maybe we cut a deal and minimize the damage to you and Bates."