King Con

Chapter Seven.

AFTER NINE MONTHS AND THREE MURDERS, VICTORIA Hart voluntarily withdrew the State's case against Joe "Dancer" Rina. The whole process took less than ten minutes. When Judge Goldstone dismissed the case, the little mobster nodded his head as if it had been God's will and slowly got to his feet.

Gerald Cohen was closing up case folders and filing them in his briefcase as the Princeton Glee Club cleared the battlefield, gathering up pens, pencils, case reports, and unused arguments from the long, wooden table. The handsome mobster timed it so that he and Victoria met in the doorway of the courtroom. He graciously stepped aside to let her pass. When they were in the hall, he turned to her…

"It's gratifying when justice finally prevails, isn't it, counselor?"'

"Are you talking to me?" she said, stunned by his arrogance.

"I believe I was." He smiled.

"Then tell your blond flunky who stole my case folders this morning to send them back. There's nothing in there I can use against you. This case is done… but I have to turn over my files for review. I'm sure you want my sorry performance evaluated."

"Of course, I don't know what you're talking about. But let me give you a tip, Vicky… I've been very patient with you. I've endured your subpoenas of my friends and business associates. For almost a year, I've put up with your brash, unsubstantiated allegations. There's a part of me that keeps asking why I've been so charitable. I don't have an adequate answer. Perhaps it's because you're an attractive young woman and I was raised to be courteous to women. However, you've used up all my patience. In the future, you might do well to give me lots and lots of room."

"The room I'm planning to give you is about ten feet square and has a view of the rock quarry. Get used to seeing me around, Joe, 'cause I'm just getting started on you."

She turned and walked away from him, squaring her shoulders, feeling his glare on her back all the way to the elevators. When she turned to push the DOWN button, she saw him still staring. He hadn't moved, but the look on his face transformed him. He no longer looked like a movie star. In that brief glance, she could see inside him as if some mystic chisel had stripped away his beauty and revealed his inner core. In that second, before he turned and walked away, she saw the deadly glare of pure evil. She wondered if she could deal with such a virulent enemy.

Victoria had given the orange juice glass to David Frankfurter before court and he had run it across the courtyard to the police lab. By the time she got back to her office, she had forgotten all about it, but David came through the door with a police printout in his hand.

"You ain't gonna believe this," he said, holding the crime lab report. "We got three good prints off that glass. Index, middle, and thumb, along with a partial palm. This guy you had breakfast with is quite a catch."

"Works for Joe Rina, right?"

"Not that I can tell." He handed her the yellow sheet.

"Beano Bates?" she said, perplexed. "A confidence man?"

"Not just a con man, the con man. This guy is reputed to be the best long grifter operating in America. He actually has sold the Brooklyn Bridge."

"Come on, that's a joke."

"No joke… It's a scrap iron scam. The way he worked it, Beano pretended to be a Brooklyn metal stress tester who was fired by the city. He had metal stress fracture X-rays and a buncha official-looking time line analyses. They convinced the mark, who was the greedy owner of a scrap metal company, that the bridge had serious metal fatigue and had been judged unsafe by the civil engineers and was going to be torn down. They said it was all being hushed up because the public outcry would be enormous. They set up a fake auction and this dummy paid a half-a-million dollars to Beano's phony inside man to rig the bids. The same scam was done once by some French sharpers on the Eiffel Tower. Beano Bates is the only white-collar criminal on the current FBI Ten Most Wanted List."

She started to scan the charges against him." This guy did a nickel in Raiford. Check and see if he was there the same time as Anthony Heywood, a.k.a. Amp."

"Already did. They were cellmates."

"So what the hell does he want with my case file?" she asked, and then looked at David. Both of them were trying to figure it out, but it didn't add up.

"Nothing here ties him to Joe Rina?" she finally asked.

"Naw. Looks like they run in separate gutters."

There was an empty silence in Victoria's office that was interrupted by her phone buzzer. She picked it up and got her secretary, Marie.

"The Gray Ghost wants to see you, stat," Marie's voice said, with concern. "The Gray Ghost" was office code for G.G… Gil Green.

"Okay, I'm on my way." She hung up and looked at David Frankfurter. "Gil wants me. What's the official scuttlebutt on this? Am I headed to Hoboken?" she asked.

"Siberia," he replied sadly.

She nodded, then got to her feet and moved slowly from the office, holding Beano's yellow sheet. She paused in the doorway and handed it back. "Put him through the National Crime Information Center computer. Get me a deep check. I particularly wanna see if he's got any connection to Carol Sesnick." Then she turned and walked out of her office and down the hall to the elevators.

"These kinds of things are always hard, Victoria," Gil said. This time he was looking at her and she could tell he'd rehearsed what he was about to say. A bad sign. He had some notecards he was referring to on his desk in front of him. Another bad sign. She assumed he'd been briefed by Labor Relations on how to handle this meeting to avoid a wrongful-termination suit. "The whole Joe Dancer disaster is going to have to be reviewed. I know you may view this as unfair, but as the Prosecuting Attorney, I think you may have made some decisions in this investigation that bear further examination."

"Such as…? Every move in this case was approved by you, Gil."

"Victoria, I don't want to get into this with you now. You are temporarily being reassigned to a lower-profile situation. I want you to work the booking desk for a while."

"You want me to be the booking clerk!" she said, appalled. That was a job usually held by the most junior member of the D.A.'s staff. It involved reviewing arrests the police brought in and deciding if there was enough evidence to warrant a criminal prosecution. Then the clerk turned the preliminary decisions over to a senior prosecutor for approval. Even though the job was always done by an attorney, "clerk" was not an accidental description.

"You can check with Betty on where she wants to put you. It's only temporary, just until the review is complete. You're still on full staff salary. I got that for you, but I think we all need to keep our heads down right now. I'm instructing you to make no statements to the press about this situation." Then his secretary buzzed. He picked up the phone. "Oh, right. Sorry… Yes, right away." He looked at his watch, shook his head, hung up, and got to his feet. It was bad theater. The buzz from his secretary was pre-arranged to bring the meeting to a quick close. "Sorry, Vicky, I'm late for an appointment," he lied, and waited impatiently for her to leave.

She slowly got to her feet. He looked uncomfortable. Gil was non-confrontational, which she always thought was strange behavior for a District Attorney.

"This is chickenshit, Gil. I deserve better than this."

"I'm sure your review will substantiate all of your decisions, but until it comes down, I think this is best. I've already given your background notes and motion files for the Rina case to Mark Switzer. He's doing the prelim. Turn the rest of your Rina stuff over to him ASAP."

She didn't have the nerve to tell him that the rest of her case folders had been stolen from her.

Victoria was popular in the office. She often stayed late and listened while young prosecutors ran their cases by her, hoping Tricky Vicky could find some legal loop-holes or creative strategy they could use. She knew there would be a crowd at the elevator wanting to know what happened. She couldn't bear to face them now, so she took the back stairs down to the trial division on the fourth floor, moved quietly past the Xerox room into her private corner office, and closed the door. In Gil's office, she'd been strangely submissive, as if there were some specific protocol for that kind of event that demanded a level attitude. All the meeting lacked was a blindfold and a last cigarette. Now she could feel her anger building. She cursed herself for not having chosen the moment to tell the D.A. what a low, shifty coward he was. She stood behind her desk, chewing a fingernail, looking out her corner window onto State Street Park across from the Criminal Courts Building. Her office was cramped but pin-neat; files and folders arranged by case with tight, usable precision.

The phone rang. She snapped it up.

"Victoria Hart," she said sharply, then her mood seemed to change. "Ted Calendar? From WTRN-TV?" she finally said.

The studio at WTRN-TV was small and stuffy, and Ted Calendar looked much older in person than he did on TV. Victoria had let the makeup lady dust her with powder, but there wasn't much she could do with the short hairstyle.

Victoria was miked and sat in a straight-back chair opposite Ted. There was a fake fireplace behind them; a blue oval carpet and bookshelves in the wings completed the economical set. Ted Calendar was reading notes on his lap almost as if she weren't there. They were a few minutes from taping.

"Thanks for this opportunity to tell my side of it," Victoria said.

"Too bad about the Rina trial. Lotta fish got cooked but no dinner served, huh?" he said, still not looking up at her.

She found herself studying his too-blond wig, which was leaking perspiration down the side of his face. Then he looked up suddenly and caught her staring.

"Okay, Vicky…"

"I prefer Victoria."

"I prefer Theodore," he said with a smirk. "Lotta good it does me. What we have here is a live-on-tape interview. It will be broadcast on the evening news in a two-and-a-half-minute segment. We're going to have a hard out. I'll signal you when we're down to five seconds. Wrap it up fast, or you'll get cut off by the booth."

"Okay," she said, not sure exactly what she was going to say, but because of the anger in her, she was fearing the worst.

The stage manager held up five fingers, then ticked them down, one at a time, until he had a fist up and Ted grinned at the camera.

"Welcome to 'New Jersey Talking.' I'm Ted Calendar, and this is our fireside chat with people in the news." He turned to Victoria. "I'm here with Vicky Hart, the Prosecutor just coining off a devastating situation in her trial against alleged mobster Joe Rina. Nice to have you with us, Vicky."

"Thanks. Nice to be here, Teddy," she said, and watched him wince slightly.

"So the trial isn't going to happen. A lot has been made of this prosecution, yet you withdrew your case before opening arguments. Is that it? After all the hoopla, it just goes over the cliff without even a skid-mark?"

"The fact that my witness, Carol Sesnick, and two heroic police officers were brutally murdered and thrown down an elevator shaft is a real tragedy, and it's the reason we're not going to proceed with the attempted murder prosecution. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to know that these deaths, timed just days before opening arguments, were not coincidental."

"You're accusing Joseph Rina of these murders?" Ted said, sensing a story and leaning forward in his chair.

"You bet."

Ted Calendar looked at her skeptically. "You're saying that you have evidence that Joe Rina killed these three people?"

"I didn't say I had evidence. I said he did it."

"As a prosecuting attorney here in New Jersey, you can't say something like that unless you intend to back it up."

"Says who?"

"I would guess Gil Green. Gil would have both legal and ethical concerns, I think."

"This would be the same Gil Green who encouraged me, at length, to prosecute Joe Rina for attempted murder; who made a TV career out of talking about it for five months to get his political stock up, and now, because my key witness was murdered, is having me reviewed for doing it in the first place? I don't think we need to worry too much about Gil Green's ethical position. Let's worry instead about what happened to Carol Sesnick, Tony Corollo, and Bobby Manning. Those three people were my friends. Those three people were heroes. They gave their lives trying to do the right thing." She turned in her chair and faced the camera. "Joe Rina, if you're out there listening to me, I'm not going to rest until I see you brought to justice. I don't know how I'm going to prove you brutally killed my friends, but I'm going to." Her eyes were pinholes of burning anger as she looked into the camera. "I'm going to see you behind bars. I won't sleep until that day comes."

Ted Calendar looked into the lens as the camera faced him. In his "ear angel," the director told him to go right to commercial. "Powerful stuff…" he said to the camera. "Weil be right back," and they cut to black. He looked at her. "I'd like to do a second segment. Follow this up, if you can stay."

"I think I've done enough damage to myself," she said, and unhooked her mike. She walked off the stage and out of the studio. She got in her car and drove along the Delaware River to the John Fitch Parkway, heading north. Without really planning it, she was heading to her parents' house in Wallingford, Connecticut. She knew the broadcast would end her career in the D.A.'s office. Halfway there, tears started rolling down her cheeks. She wasn't making a sound, but the tears flowed. It was strange, as if sheer force of will prohibited complete emotional collapse, but she couldn't stop the tears. Victoria Hart was hangin' on for dear life and running home to her mother.