King Con (39 page)

Steve Bates came up and shook Beano’s hand. “John had everybody put on name tags ‘cause I figured you ain’t met some of these family members,” he said.

Beano smiled and nodded. “That’s great,” he said. “Where’s John?”

“Don’t know,” Steve said. “He was supposed to be here, but we should get started. He’ll show up.”

Victoria wondered if the FBI Agents might have broken their promise and picked up John, but why would they? It would ruin everything. She’d given Gil her word, which was her bond … and then she remembered that Gil’s word was worth almost nothing.

Beano stood in front of the group. “I’m Beano,” he announced unnecessarily, as they all nodded and grinned. They’d seen him on
America’s Most Wanted.

“Thanks for being part of this Big Store,” he began. “The mark, as I’m sure John has told you, is Tommy Rina. But there’s something that he probably hasn’t told you.” He paused to make his point. “Tommy is, in my opinion, certifiably insane, a homicidal maniac who can’t control his temper. When he loses it, you can’t steer him. He’s an unguided missile. If he comes through hot, he’ll shoot up the place. You should all know this, and if anybody wants out, now’s the time, no hard feelings.”

They all looked down, shook their heads, and waited for him to go on.

“Whatever we take from him, we split evenly.”

An old man named Theodore X. Bates, from San Francisco, stood up. He was handsome, with a closely trimmed white beard and full white hair. “That’s real nice, cousin Beano, but Carol was our family. We talked it over ‘fore you got here, and we don’t want no money. We’re doin’ this for her, same as you. Don’t seem right
to take money for it.” They all murmured their assent.

Beano took a moment with that, and then he nodded. “Thank you, that really means a lot,” he said, looking out at them. “Okay … here’s how we’re gonna run the bubble.” Then he told them about the sting, explaining in detail what they were supposed to do and how they should act. He showed them a computer disk that Victoria had programmed, which would replicate the falling stock price of Fentress County Petroleum and could be interfaced with the on-line Quotron business report, which ran the real New York ticker at the bottom of the screen. “Remember, those of you who haven’t played inside on a Big Store, the idea here is this has to be so realistic and so flawless that it would never even occur to the mark that what’s going on here is not real. Never for a moment come out of character, no matter what happens.”

They nodded and murmured and fell silent as Beano continued: “This Big Store con we’re running is a variation on ‘The Magic Wallet.’ It was originally developed by a sharper named William Elmer Mead at the turn of the century, but it works just as good today. It basically gets the mark to invest in a dying company to save it. His magic wallet will buy the failing company at the last minute and make him rich. We have to convince Tommy that Fentress County Petroleum is on its last legs, that the float on the stock is so thin that his five million could control a hundred-million-dollar company.” They nodded. “This isn’t like running a short con. On this we have to be ready to move in any direction to head off the mark’s questions. He’s gonna be nervous about laying out five million dollars. He may even bring an accountant or attorney. He may get balky at the last minute. If that happens, I have a stall and a red ink close-out set up. We’re gonna do the play-off somewhere else. The play-off is against the wall.”

“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.

B
EANO WAS TEN MINUTES LATE GETTING TO THE PA
cific 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 beginning 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.