"Take it easy. ... You can go up, just don't say it was me that let ya, okay?" he said, folding under Tommy's withering glare.
Gus pushed the button on the mahogany elevator, the door opened, and Tommy went inside the brass-railed, carpeted box. Gus leaned in and put the key in a lock on the elevator panel, turned it, and stepped back as the door closed and Tommy rode up past the lush High-roller area to the third floor, where he got off.
The floor was sterile. It was a painted concrete utility area where shift supervisors and casino muscle hung out on folding metal chairs. The central security room was up here. Tommy knocked on the door and S. Bartly Kneeland opened it and looked out at Tommy, staring at the simian thug through Coke bottle glasses. S.B. was a thin, crater-skinned, tubercular-looking geek. He had designed all of the security video in the hotel, including the Eye-in-the-Sky that monitored everything. All of the surveillance feeds were wired to this room.
"Tommy, you can't be up here. You're not rated," S.B. squeaked.
"Fuck that," Tommy said and pushed the little man with the palm of his hand. S.B. stumbled backwards and was now standing in the center of a twelve-foot-square room full of TV monitors, each equipped with a VCR machine. Tommy moved into the room and looked at the equipment. He had never been up here before because, as everybody kept reminding him, he'd been denied a license by the gaming board and this whole floor was off limits to anybody without a gaming commission card. He'd heard about it, though, and it lived up to his expectations. There were more than thirty TV monitors, each covering a different part of the hotel. They kept a lookout for known casino cheats and card counters, along with the growing legions of slot bandits using wire triggers. These were tools bent in the shape of a 7 that could be slipped up inside slots to trigger payoffs. These cheaters were known in the casino security business as "7UPs."
There were monitors watching the High-roller rooms, along with monitors covering the entire casino, including the drive-up at the entrance out front. Since all of the surveillance was from ceiling cameras, the room was called the Eye-in-the-Sky. There were other technicians in the room who walked around constantly looking at the various monitors. On one wall hung ten or twelve large leather-bound photo albums that had pictures of card sharps. Each leather-bound volume had a spine slip indicating what kind of cheats were pictured inside. Besides dice tats and 7UPs, there were volumes for nail nickers and crimpers (card markers), hand muckers and mit men (card switchers), as well as card counters and shiner players.
"I need to look at the lobby tapes for two o'clock yesterday and nine o'clock this morning," Tommy growled. "I also wanna see the tapes on the pull-ups out front for both those times."
"You can't be in here," S.B. said. He was sweating and he straightened his glasses, which had been knocked askew on his beak nose when Tommy had pushed him.
"Hey, dickhead. I didn't hear you right. I think it sounded like you just said I couldn't be in here. I hope, for your sake, that ain't what you said." Tommy's balls were clanging.
'Tommy I--" But S.B. said no more as Tommy interrupted him.
"I pay rent to this fucking joint for my jewelry store. For what? My store just got clouted. I wanna look at the security tapes now." He moved toward the little man, who took a quick step back and finally nodded his head, which bobbed up and down on his pencil neck like a dashboard doll. S. Bartly Kneeland's balls didn't clang; they chimed like Baccarat.
"Okay, okay. I'll get 'em, Tommy." He turned and moved to the rack of tapes. He pulled the four tapes Tommy had asked for, then slammed the lobby tape for yesterday afternoon into a separate viewing monitor on the far side of the room. Tommy elbowed him out of the way, grabbed the remote, and scanned the tapes, looking for anybody in a cowboy hat. Finally he saw him: A big guy in a fringed jacket and cowboy hat was walking across the lobby with a hooker. The time code read: 2:35 P.M. He hit regular speed and watched. He didn't recognize the cowboy and it was hard to see him under the hat, but there was something familiar about the hooker. He didn't think he'd ever rucked her. He would have remembered, 'cause she was a beauty. Still, he thought he knew her.
"I think I know this cunt with him," Tommy said. "I know this fucking bitch from somewhere." His simian brain struggled to make the connection, and then the cowboy and the hooker walked off frame. Tommy ejected the tape, then slammed in the front entrance tape for yesterday. He rolled it down to a few minutes earlier, and started to fast-forward again until he saw a white Nissan pull up in front of the hotel. The time code read: 2:15 P.M. He saw three people getting out. He couldn't make out the older man because he moved immediately into the hotel. The hat still blocked a good look at the cowboy's face, but now he got a full-face shot of the girl in the miniskirt. He froze the tape; it was the hooker he'd run into coming out of the can yesterday. Then realization dawned. ...
"Fuck me!" he cried out in amazement.
"You know her?" S.B. said, wishing Tommy would get the hell out of his room.
"It's 'Tricky Vicky' Hart, all dressed up like a hooker. It's the fucking bitch who prosecuted Joey." Tommy took the tape out, grabbed the other ones, and started to leave the room.
"You can't take those," S.B. said. "The shift boss has to sign for all of them every twenty-four hours. ..."
But Tommy Rina was already gone.
He called his brother Joe from the lobby and told him about the pearl and the tapes and Vicky Hart and the cowboy. His brother greeted this information with dead silence.
"Joe, you hear what I'm fucking saying? This cunt hit us for a hundred large."
"Something else is going on, Tommy," Joe said calmly. He never let his voice reveal his emotions.
"Fuckin' A, this split-tailed D.A. stole a hundred K from us. I told ya this bitch needs to get hit by a speedin' car."
"Tommy, when the facts in evidence don't fit the parameters of common sense, there is usually a piece of the equation missing. It makes no sense for Victoria Hart, a prosecuting attorney, to commit a jewelry hustle at our store. So that means there's something else going on. Unless you misidentified her?"
"Joe, this is her. I been watchin' her on the news since you got busted. Lemme go get this twat and finish her off. This is nuts. We can't let these people piss on us."
"I'm gonna send Texaco down to work with you. In the meantime, check the airplane arrivals and departures for her name. Peter can do that for you. Let's see who Miss Hart is traveling with. Let's find out who this cowboy is before we make a move."
Tommy was frustrated. "What we gotta do, Joe, is get this caravan of camels outta our asshole."
"Don't do anything till I tell you," and Joe hung up.
When Tommy got to his penthouse on the top of the Ignatious Hotel, Calliope was standing there, holding two airline tickets for the Bahamas that had just come special delivery.
"Look what I won!" she trumpeted proudly as he came through the door, scowling. "I wasn't even listening to the dumb station. It was rock 'n' roll and I only listen to country, but I guessed 'Long-stemmed Roses' by Tanya Tucker, and guess what ...? They were having a weekend country countdown and I won anyway. Is that lucky?"
Tommy wasn't listening. He was starting to call friends at other hotels in Atlantic City to see if Victoria Hart was registered.
"I won two round-trip tickets to Nassau!" she squealed, hoping he'd get interested by her excitement.
"I can't go down there right now."
"Well, I wanna go," she said petulantly. "They're my tickets and they're only good for two days."
"Look, I'll buy you tickets later, or we'll fly down to Sabre Bay on Joey's jet. Who da fuck cares about free airline tickets? I gotta deal with this thing. My jewelry store got hit. Ya know how that looks? Everybody knows that's my joint. Somebody hits my joint, they gotta catch a bus or I look like a piece a'shit."
"I'm going, with or without you," Calliope said, holding her ground, figuring that she had the advantage because she was a magnificent bed partner. She knew Tommy had n
ever had better tube cleaning in his whole life, and Calliope wanted to go to the Bahamas on these tickets. There was principle involved. ... She had won them herself and she intended to use them.
The argument lasted an hour. "They do have phones in the Bahamas, y'know," Calliope reasoned savagely.
He finally agreed to go the day after tomorrow, just to shut her up. If he made that flight, it would put him at the Sabre Bay Club on the same day Victoria Hart and Beano Bates had planned to arrive in Nassau.
Chapter Twelve.
THE MOOSE PASTURE
BEANO FINALLY TOLD VICTORIA HOW THE MAIN CON was supposed to work. They were all on the Delta flight to San Francisco. Roger-the-Dodger had his nose pressed against the screen of a large carrying case that had a sign across it that read CANINE DRUG ENFORCEMENT, u.s. CUSTOMS in large red letters. Beano had told the stewardess he was a government dog trainer and that Roger was being delivered to the Customs Drug Enforcement Team at SFO. This allowed the terrier a privileged position on the floor between their seats, in first class, instead of a freezing ride in the nut-puckering environs of the luggage compartment. As the engines hummed softly and flight attendants took drink orders, Beano explained to a partially awestruck Victoria how a moose pasture con worked. He told her about preparing the field, which included the government painting scam, and about the Fentress County Petroleum and Gas Company, which was a Bates family-owned business. He explained how the oil company was nothing but a watered-down corporate shell that Paper Collar John had bought for a hundred dollars five years ago for possible future use in a moose pasture. FCP&G's most attractive feature was that it ostensibly owned thousands of acres of prime land in north Fentress County, Tennessee. He explained that these deeds of ownership were basically worthless, because they came from old land grants issued a hundred fifty years ago at about the time of Andrew Jackson.
"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&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&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&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&G logo on it?"
"What's the FCP&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.
"Victoria, if you want justice for Carol, I promise I'll get it for you. I'll get Tommy and Joe to rat each other out, but you gotta stick with me."
King Con (1997) Page 13
