King Con (1997)

by Stephen Cannell

  "Isn't that kinda dangerous, cousin Beano?" Theodore Bates asked.

  "Yeah, but it's the only way that Tommy is gonna get the message. We gotta take him right to the edge. That means we gotta go to the edge with him." He looked at them and smiled. "Okay, now here's the gaff: Fentress County is a watered-down company that we actually own. It's listed on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. It hasn't been traded much in years, except for stock swaps John and I make twice a month to keep the stock active. Tomorrow the price is going to drop, courtesy of Victoria's disk." He held it up. "This will show that Fentress County Petroleum stock is falling out of bed. It's about to go bankrupt. You're all about to lose your jobs. You all have to play the situation, lots of nervous activity, strained looks, hopelessness. This is the Titanic, and we're sinking, okay?" He looked at them and they nodded. "Who has John picked to be the point-outs?"

  Six elderly men and two women held up their hands, and Beano nodded.

  "We'll have a separate point-out meeting in a minute, then I want you to run rehearsals. I'll walk you through the first one, then you can run two or three more when John gets here. We need to have this down pat by tomorrow, at eight A.M. The Vancouver Stock Exchange closes at one-thirty P.M. This whole 'stock reload' has to take place before the closing bell. We keep the pressure on so he doesn't have time to re-think it."

  Beano took the six men and two women who were point-outs into the President's office and talked to them for about twenty minutes. A point-out in a Big Store con is an inside player who is pointed out to the mark as a person of power or influence. The eight Bates point-outs would be identified as big stockholders--disgruntled heavy hitters who wanted their money back.

  By nine-thirty, it was time for Beano to leave. He had to be at the airport when Tommy showed up. He wondered where the hell Paper Collar John was. He was supposed to be here to do the rehearsals. None of the shillabers in front of him had ever done this kind of sting. "Okay, let me quickly ran you through this," he said, afraid to leave until he knew John was there.

  Beano led them from room to room, explaining what each area was for. He showed Theodore X. Bates, who was one of the point-outs, where he would do the crossfire, which was a point in the con where, if the mark lost his nerve, he would "overhear" an important conversation. He demonstrated the speaker phone in the secretary's office. He showed them the Board of Directors' room, one floor down, where the rest of the point-outs would gather prior to the sting. He coached the "stockholders" on their fines. It was well past nine-thirty when he finished, and if he didn't leave now, he would miss Tommy.

  "We'll keep rehearsing," Victoria said, and Beano looked at her skeptically. "Come on," she said angrily. "How long have I been in on this? How many times have we talked it through?" she argued. "I've run complicated felony murder trials. I know how to perform in front of a jury.... This isn't all that different."

  "There's a huge difference between talking and doing," he countered. "And a manacled defendant in court isn't a maniac like Tommy with a gun in his pocket."

  "I know what's supposed to happen. Go on, go to the airport. Steve and I will keep this moving till John shows up."

  Beano finally nodded; he had no other choice. He looked at his watch one last time, then kissed Victoria and left.

  * * * *

  John showed up twenty minutes later. When he stepped off the elevator, Victoria knew immediately something was very wrong. He looked awful. His face was pale and his eyes were rimmed in red. He'd been crying. Victoria took him by the hand and led him into one of the beautifully appointed offices and closed the door.

  "What's wrong?" she asked him, fearing the worst.

  "I've been on the phone to New Jersey," he said, his voice quivering. "The hospital called. Cora's not going to live much longer."

  "Oh, John, I'm so sorry," Victoria said, reaching out for his other hand.

  "I can't stay," he said. "She's awake. The doctor said they can keep her alive for maybe seven or eight hours. If I ever want to see her again, to say good-bye, I have to leave now. I have to go home.... She's been asking for me."

  Victoria looked at him, her mind racing. "But John, Tommy's seen the brochure we printed. You're in there as the President of this company. You have to sell him the stock. Without you, we can't do this."

  Paper Collar John stood there, tears running down his cheeks. "I'm sorry," he said. "Cora and I, we've been married for fifty-five years. She's been my best friend for my whole life, Vicky. I hate running out on you, but she's my wife. If Beano was here, he'd tell me to go. I won't let her die alone...."

  Beano would know how to figure something out, save the sting, Victoria thought. The way it was planned, from now on Beano had to be with Tommy. There was no way to even reach him and warn him. Tomorrow at eight A.M., Beano would walk in here with Tommy and the play had to go down with or without John. It was up to her and Steve Bates to make it happen. Steve was a short-con expert who'd never done this before. She was a State Prosecutor, a lawyer. Even though she could perform for a jury, she found strength in solid facts. Beano was right...bullshit was her weakest category.

  "Is there anybody here who can play inside for us?" she finally asked John.

  "I don't know. Most Bateses do short plays, house hustles and the like." Then he looked at her very carefully. He wrote down a number on a piece of paper and handed it to her. Then he told her what to do. After she heard his solution, her knees were weak with fear and excitement. "It will never work," she protested.

  "Call him. He can help," Paper Collar John replied; then he turned, and with tears still on his face, he walked out of the Big Store and took the elevator to the street.

  Victoria Hart stood there with her heart pounding. The FBI was outside and fifty Gypsy roofing sharpers were inside. She was caught in the middle and left to deal with the sting alone.

  Chapter Thirty-One.

  THE BUILDUP

  BEANO WAS TEN MINUTES LATE GETTING TO THE PAcific Air Private Jet Terminal. The Challenger was already chocked and Tommy was standing out in front of the Pacific Aviation Flight Service Company, looking pissed at being kept waiting. He had rented a tan Lincoln Town Car and the two leather bags with the five million dollars were already in the trunk.

  "The fuck you been?" Tommy said. His anger at seeing the geek physicist brought up bile he could taste.

  "This entire experience is so nerve racking. I can't find Dr. Sutton. I've looked and looked," Beano whined, as he pushed his tortoise-shell glasses up on his nose and squinted through them. He had changed his clothes in the car and was now wearing a short-sleeved pink shirt with a plastic pen protector and a clip-on bow tie and was carrying a scarred briefcase.

  Tommy looked at him and remembered that, when he had first seen him in the bar at Sabre Bay, he had actually thought the geologist was handsome, a threat to his campaign to fuck Dakota. That was before he'd heard him wimper and plead. Once you got to know Dr. Clark, he was about as sexy as leather pants on an insurance executive.

  "Who the rack cares about Dr. Sutton?" Tommy said angrily.

  "Well, uh ... how to put this ... uh ..." Beano took off his glasses, pulled up his shirttail, and cleaned them before slipping them back on his nose. "Dr. Sutton was never, as I'm sure you remember, all that excited about your inclusion as a financial entity," he stammered weakly.

  "Who the fuck cares what that bag of bones thinks?"

  "Well, I'm not saying this is really going to happen, but... well, Dr. Sutton took all the graphs and three-D seismic shots. The biotherms and the anticlines, along with his geophone resonance material, and he ... well, he left."

  "So he left. Fuck him. Who needs him? We got what we need from him."

  "Well, you see, Mr. Rina, I don't think he took all that material with him because he wanted to frame it and hang it on his wall, so to speak...."

  "So, why did he take it, shithead? I'm tired of playing twenty questions. Spit it out," Tommy barked, thinking this fucking geek was begi
nning to annoy him worse than Calliope Love. At least he could park his Johnson in Calliope's mouth occasionally to shut her up.

  "I'm very concerned that maybe he decided to seek out another partner. You see, if he could convince one of the major stockholders of the viability of our find at Oak Crest, well then, there'd be a competitive bidder."

  Tommy's hand shot out and grabbed Beano by the throat. Beano was yanked forward, letting out a little squawk as he was pulled into Tommy's face. "You fucking people amaze me. I'm not some dink you can cut outta the play. I'm a real fucking sore loser. Don't you get that yet?"

  "I get it," Beano squeaked. "Please, please ... can't breathe."

  Tommy let him go. Beano took several deep breaths and straightened his glasses.

  "I'm not saying he did it; it's just he didn't like the sixty-forty split, kept complaining about it. I argued with him but he took his stuff and left. At first, I just thought he was going to drive around and pout and would come back. Now, I wonder. He might try and make another deal on this information."

  "Get in the fucking car," Tommy demanded.

  "I have my own car."

  Tommy backhanded him.

  Beano got in the car. Tommy drove, and they pulled out of the parking lot.

  A few seconds after they left, Reo Wells turned on the headlights of his midnight-blue Lexus. He put the car in drive and followed Tommy's rented Lincoln Town Car out of the parking lot and down Airport Drive toward San Francisco. Nobody saw the FBI surveillance team on the roof of the American Airlines building across the street. They radioed their chase car, which was two blocks up the street, waiting.

  Tommy and Beano pulled into the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Stockton Street. Tommy's attorney was waiting for them under a huge crystal chandelier in the ornate, richly appointed lobby. Tommy checked in and was directed up to a large suite on the fifteenth floor. Tommy dropped the two bags next to the bed. He had refused to let the bellhop carry them or show him up to the room.

  Beano found himself standing opposite Tommy's lawyer, whose most distinguishing feature was gray-black wisps of hair that were growing like ragweed out of all the wrong places on his face. It poked in bushy clumps out of his ears and nose. It crowned his eyebrows, which seemed to trumpet constant surprise as they curled in bushy splendor up on his forehead. To make things worse, he had dressed funereally. His name, Beano learned, was Alex Cordosian. Alex now pulled a huge folder out of his bulging briefcase and laid it down on the table. Beano looked at the tab and saw that it was marked "Fentress County P&G." Beano hoped that getting past Mr. Cordosian wouldn't be hard. He was banking on a proven fact: Once a mark was hooked, it was usually impossible to knock him off the con. The mark's greed and dreams of riches made him throw away all caution. Beano only had to fill in whatever holes needed filling and keep reminding Tommy of the billions of dollars at stake. Tommy wouldn't want reason from his attorney. He would want to be told he was right. At least, that's what Beano hoped.

  "To begin with, I just found out about this three hours ago, so I've had almost no time to research," Cordosian complained. "I've tried pulling the Ten-K's off the computer for this outfit, but they haven't filed any recently. They're on the Vancouver Exchange, which has very lax listing requirements. They've been quite inactive as far as trading. Four years ago they were a penny stock and now they're almost up to nine and a half."

  "Who the fuck cares?" Tommy said, as he fished in the mini-bar for some Scotch and ice.

  "Well, sir, the float on the stock is very thin. Only four or five hundred thousand shares outstanding. You start buying it up in quantity and the stock is going to go up like a Chinese rocket. You'll be chasing it... paying more for each new share because of the pressure your own buying is putting on the stock. Furthermore, they haven't filed a Ten-K for years. It could even be a shell company that somebody has been buying back and forth to push the price up."

  "Shell company?" Beano piped up from over by the window. "It's not a shell. What are you talking about? It's a closely held company, that's all. I worked there for six years. They own a pile of land in Fentress County. Here, look at this," he said and pulled some papers out of his briefcase.

  "The fuck is that?" Tommy demanded.

  "Stock analysts' reports," he said, handing them to Alex and reeling off the big brokerages' names. "Morgan Stanley; here's the Goldman Sachs report." The reports were all counterfeit on stolen letterhead. They all said the company was for real, but had been doing poorly of late. "The principal stockholders have taken the major position in the stock," Beano continued. "They control all of the Class-A Preferred so they don't have' to file Ten-K's." He looked over at Tommy. "Where'd you get this guy? Gee, it's always like this. I get something really good and then attorneys come in and screw everything up."

  "I'm just saying there's some due-diligence stuff to do here. We don't want to throw five million dollars around without looking at this company a lot more carefully."

  "Is it currently active on the Vancouver Exchange?" Beano challenged.

  "Yes," the narrow-shouldered attorney answered.

  "Are the outstanding shares registered?"

  "Yes, but that's not the point."

  "Why don't we just let Dr. Sutton and his partners have it? Let the whole deal just slide away," Beano said, sarcastically. "Let's just waste time asking a million dumb questions and let the other guys have the oil and billions of dollars of profit."

  "I've been hired by Mr. Rina to analyze this transaction. That's what I intend to do," Alex said hotly.

  "'Cept I agree with him," Tommy said, pointing at Beano. "Attorneys fuck everything up." He filled his mouth with Scotch and bar ice. "I got you here to document the transaction ... okay? Nothing else. You start asking all these dumb fucking questions about S.E.C.'s and Ten-K's or whatever, and I'm gonna jam all this paperwork so far up your ass you'll need fucking Roto-Rooter to take a shit."

  Alex Cordosian looked at Tommy, shocked. What kind of talk is this? he wondered. He had done legal work for Joseph Rina in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Joe was a refined and astute businessman. Alex never had to deal with Tommy before. Tommy had already told him downstairs that if he let anyone know what he was doing, including Joe, he'd kill him. Kill him! It was absurd ... like a bad movie. But Alex didn't like the look of Fentress County Petroleum and Gas. Something was strange about it, and he needed time to do the due diligence. Yet this little thug across the room from him was threatening his life for trying to do his job! Even so, he was determined to protect his client. He would do the best he could to dissuade the ugly mobster from making an expensive impulse buy.

  They talked for almost an hour. Beano answered Alex Cordosian's questions slowly, claiming ignorance on most of them because, after all, he was just a geologist. He frequently interrupted the lawyer, repeating, "There's a huge pay-zone under the Oak Crest field. End of story." He insisted they buy Fentress County in the morning, before Dr. Sutton could make a competing move. Alex kept explaining it was going to be very hard, if not impossible, to get his due-diligence answers in such short order. Beano sure the hell hoped Alex was right. Luckily, during the hour or so of questioning, Tommy was getting more frustrated and angry.

  "Are you fucking through yet?" he asked the harried little lawyer more than once.

  At midnight, Tommy threw Alex out with instructions to meet him on the twenty-fifth floor of the Penn Mutual Building tomorrow at eight A.M.

  Tommy had decided not to let Beano out of his sight. He told the geologist he would have to stay in the same room with him. He said he didn't want Dr. Clark to take a powder like Dr. Sutton. Tommy moved into the bedroom, kicked off his loafers, and turned on the TV. "Whatta you wanna watch?" he asked politely, "Goldilocks and the Three Chicago Bears, with Ashley Lynn, or Video Cum Shots, with Donna Dare and Toluca Lake?"

  "Tough choice," Beano said dryly. "Maybe you oughta pick."

  Tommy pushed in his selection and flopped down on the bed. Beano went into the other
room and lay on the sofa. He looked up at the ceiling and tried to run through the sting one last time, while the sound of Donna Dare's moaning and sighing came in from the bedroom. When he glanced over at Tommy in the next room, the mobster had his zipper open and his hands down in his pants.

  "Another opening, another show," Beano mused to himself. He closed his eyes to shut out the ghastly sight. He was stuck with Tommy till morning.

  Chapter Thirty-Two.

  THE STING

  AT EIGHT A.M., THEY PARKED IN THE SIDE LOT NEXT TO the Perm Mutual Building. Tommy locked the two suitcases full of cash in the trunk and walked briskly from the car, not waiting for Beano. He headed directly to the front of the building.

  Tommy hurried through the double glass doors as Beano followed.

  "When's this stockholders' meeting?" Tommy demanded as they rode up in the elevator.

  "It's supposed to be at eight-fifteen," Beano said.

  The doors opened on twenty-five to a bustle of activity. A young man with an armful of folders dove into the elevator before they could get out. He was chased in by a young woman, who held the door but didn't enter. "Tell Mr. Munroe the stock just ticked down an eighth of a point to five and seven-eighths," he said desperately to the girl, who looked harried and confused.

  "I can't bust in there with that kinda news," she said. "You go run the Eastern and Southeastern fields' B.P.D. reports for Miss Luna like she wanted. I'll see if I can get Mr. Hatcher to slip a note to Mr. Munroe."

  "Barrels per day," Beano told Tommy, who looked angrily at him for a translation as they got out of the elevator. The doors closed, whisking the young man away.