King Con (7 page)

“We looked. Not there.”

“What’s down there?”

“It’s goop. Fifty years of sludge.”

“Did you put somebody in there and poke around?”

“No. Like I said, it’s just gunk … from years of oil drippings and underground sewage. We looked at the plans and stuck a pole down. There’s like a concrete and steel catch basin ‘bout five feet deep; you stir it up, it stinks worse than fish house garbage.”

“Get somebody over in waders and look again.”

“You sure?”

“No, I’m not sure. … There was just something about this guy that makes me think it’s real.”

“This two
A.M.
bullshit is fun, Vicky, we gotta do this more often,” he said, and then was abruptly off the line. She knew he was already on the phone getting a detail together.

After making the middle-of-the-night call to Victoria Hart, Beano Bates moved slowly into the kitchen of his motel apartment in Coral Gables. The place was one baby step above a crash pad and depressing enough without the devastating news about Carol. He opened the refrigerator, took out a cold beer, and pressed it to his face, but didn’t drink it. He didn’t trust his stomach, which was churning. Roger-the-Dodger looked up at him, growled low, and then snapped out a sharp bark. Beano looked down at the dog for a long minute. “Why would she do it, Rog?” he said.

He had seen the report of Carol Sesnick’s disappearance that night on the eleven o’clock news. It had hit him like a fist. It was even more devastating than the blows he had taken at the hands of Joseph Rina. As soon as the story was off, he had left the wood-framed, peeling apartment, run to the Escort, and driven to an all-night market that had newspapers from all over the
country. He had bought the
Trenton Herald.
With his stomach still rolling, he had looked up the story of her disappearance and had read it carefully. The story recounted his beating under the name of Frank Lemay. It said that after filing his report with the Trenton Police, he had left the hospital. …The Trenton Prosecutor, who the writer said was occasionally referred to as “Tricky Vicky” Hart, had refused to drop the charges when she had turned up a witness who had seen the assault. The witness’s identity had been kept secret, but the paper said it was generally thought to be a man, until it was learned yesterday that the witness was a pediatric nurse named Carol Sesnick, who specialized in child cancer patients at the Trenton Children’s Hospital. He put down the paper and felt tears sting in his eyes. He knew Carol hadn’t been anywhere near the Greenborough Country Club when the beating had occurred. She had lied to Victoria Hart because Joe Rina had intended to kill Beano and promised to try again. Carol knew that and had stepped forward. With Joseph Rina in prison, Carol probably thought Beano would be safe. He forced his mind to work for a moment, but only on the facts.

He wasn’t sure Carol and the two Jersey cops were in the elevator shaft, but Three Finger Freddy had told Beano the story of how the Rinas used to dispose of their dead bodies. The card shark told him they used to throw them down an elevator shaft. “No cops,” he had explained in the Mercer County Hospital room, “want to go poking around in the sludge under an elevator.”

Beano finished the story on Carol’s disappearance and then started flipping around in the paper, looking for something plausible he could use. His mind was reeling with the disaster. Tears were in his eyes, but he brushed them away and continued to force himself to concentrate. He found a story on page 20 that stopped him. There was a picture of an Econoline van parked in a
Hoboken junkyard. The story said a Rastafarian John Doe had been discovered in the stolen van with three 9mm slugs in him. Ballistics said they were from two different guns. Because the Rasta had heroin in his blood, the police in Trenton suspected it was a drug slaying. It had happened the same night as Carol’s disappearance. Beano had heard a rumor that Tommy Rina often used disposable wheel men. That way he didn’t have any loose ends or have to pay them the two or three thousand dollars it would normally cost for a getaway driver on a big hit. He wondered if the Rastafarian in the stolen van could have been part of the Rina job. The fact that he had died on the same night Carol had been kidnapped or killed gave the theory some credence.

Beano had gone back to his apartment and had spent an hour recapturing his once near-perfect ghetto dialect. During his one prison stretch, he had learned it from his cellmate, a fractured semi-crazed gang banger named Amp Heywood. Beano had never met Victoria Hart. She’d been put on the case after he’d already left the hospital, but there was a picture of her on the front page of the paper. For a State Prosecutor, she looked uncharacteristically beautiful. She had very short, no-nonsense hair. And she didn’t look all that “tricky” to him. She looked earnest. He folded the paper and sat by the phone. He had to find out if Carol was dead. He had to get the Trenton Police to look in the bottom of the elevator shaft. He picked up the phone and made the two
A.M.
call to the embattled New Jersey Prosecutor.

After he hung up, he stood in the kitchen, rolling the cold beer on his forehead. His stomach was jumping, threatening to erupt. Then, almost without warning, he turned and vomited into the sink. Roger-the-Dodger never took his eyes off Beano. He cocked his head and watched the grifter solemnly.

“Quit looking at me, Roger. Jesus, you’re worse than
a Catholic nun down there.” He ran some cold water and washed out his mouth; then Beano suddenly had a vision of Carol. It flashed in front of him, playing in his memory and squeezing at his boiling stomach. They’d been in Arizona in the big house that his father, Jacob, had rented at the end of the roofing season. Roofing scams were seasonal. By winter, nobody would risk tearing a roof off, so the family spent two months in Arizona, living in luxury. That had been the first time his cousin Carol had come to visit. She had been six and he’d been nine. They’d hit it off instantly. He loved her shy sense of humor and the little dusting of freckles that spread across her turned-up nose. But most of all, he loved the way she looked at him. It was something close to hero worship, and it brought out the best in Beano.

Not that she was all goodness. Carol possessed an impish sense of the scoundrel that was probably bred in her from generations of family treachery. Beano’s mother was a Sesnick and Carol came from that side of the family. The Sesnicks were American Gypsies. … They ran tarot scams and were excellent dips. At six, Carol could pick your pocket without your ever knowing. She taught Beano that Gypsy skill during their first winter together. Beano’s mother had worked with them on their academic lessons. They had studied side-by-side in the hot, makeshift schoolroom his mother had set up over the garage. He and Carol had lots of sleep-outs in a tent in the backyard. Once he had tried to scare her; tried to tell her that bears came down out of the hills and pawed through the trash at night. She looked at him, her six-year-old eyes wide with fright. “I’m afraid of bears, Beano,” she told him solemnly, then reached out and took hold of his hand. “But if they come, I know you’ll protect me.” What could you do about someone like that? All Beano could do was love her.

He had never been asked to protect anyone before. There were no bears, but he promised her that he would never let anything happen to her. She held his hand and went to sleep. She was still there in the morning, bundled next to him in her blanket.

Beano had felt so bad about the he that he never lied to her again. It had been the only completely honest friendship in his life. From that moment on, he had kept his promise to protect her. They had always stayed in touch. He had visited her family three times at Christmas. She had come to see him several times while he was in Raiford Prison in Florida. She was like his little sister. They were first cousins, but more important, they were soulmates. She had been one of the few in her family not to go into the game. She wanted to be a pediatric nurse and lately had been working in the cancer ward at Children’s Hospital. When she spoke to him about the children, tears came to her eyes: “Beano, there’s such courage in these little ones. They fight so hard, but there’s never enough money. … If I had any, I’d give it all to them.” Beano knew she meant it, but couldn’t help wondering if she was trying to compensate for the whole family’s engagement in criminal enterprises. Several years ago, Beano had sent her his end of a two-month land swindle to pay for her nursing school. In return, she had lied to try to save him from Joe Dancer. Now he knew Carol was dead. Tears came into his eyes. … He couldn’t deal with her loss.

He went into the bedroom and flopped down on the single bed. The tears rolled down his cheeks and dampened his pillow. He was crying for Carol, and he was crying for himself. He was crying for the two children holding hands in that pup tent, twenty-five years ago. If she could die for him, then he could die for her. Somehow he would have to get his nerve back. He would
take the Rina brothers down. He would bust them so that nobody would be left standing.

Beano Bates, with tears still running down his cheeks, started to think about the layout for his last Big Con.

I
T WAS NINE A.M. AND THEY WERE ALL BACK IN MUR
ray Goldstone’s courtroom. Gerry Cohen and the Yale Glee Club were smiling over a long wooden table piled high with juror research. Victoria was alone at the Prosecution table. Joe Rina wasn’t there. He was shooting a round of golf.

The prospective juror’s name was Gino Delafore and he was turning into a disaster for Victoria. He was only forty-two, but he listed his occupation as ’ “
retired
florist.” He had massive shoulders and thick, graying black hair. If Victoria Hart had been looking for somebody to play the Godfather, she would have cast him, but as her second alternate and the last seat to fill on this jury, he was a big mistake. She had a feeling he was a ringer, but with no peremptory challenges left, there was almost nothing she could do about it. As her questioning continued, it became more and more obvious that the Defense had gotten to Gino. After each one of her questions, he would glance surreptitiously at Gerald Cohen for approval. Victoria would have dismissed him in seconds if she had a challenge left. David Frankfurter was on a cellphone out in the corridor, talking to the Trenton PD, trying to get more facts. So far, all they had come up with was that a bookmaking operation had
once operated from a magazine stand directly in front of Gino’s flower shop. Victoria was trying to establish some contact between Delafore and the Defendant so she could show cause for his dismissal. Judge Goldstone was beginning to fidget, getting set to close her down.

“Did Joe Rina or Tommy Rina ever buy flowers at your shop?” she asked.

“No, ma’am … or if they did, I wasn’t aware of it.” Another glance at Cohen.

“But it’s possible, isn’t it? According to the Trenton phone book, there are about twenty florist shops in the city … so there’s at least a one-in-twenty chance that he did.”

“I think I would’a remembered …” Gino Delafore said. Again he looked over at Gerald Cohen, who was avoiding Gino’s gaze by studiously surveying his notes.

Finally Gerry looked up. “Is this going to take much longer, Judge? This juror is acceptable to the Defense. Ms. Hart has run out of challenges. If she’s trying to dismiss Mr. Delafore for cause, she needs facts, which are obviously in short supply over there.” He waved his arm at the Prosecution table. “Can we get this moving?” His nasal voice whined in the courtroom.

“How ‘bout it, Ms. Hart?” the Judge asked.

“Just one or two more questions, Your Honor.” She turned back to Gino Delafore. “Do you know somebody named Sam Definio?”

“Yes. He used to have a little magazine stand in front of my shop.”

“But you knew he had a long record of involvement in criminal enterprises, including bookmaking and loan-sharking?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Come on, everybody tells me he was known as ‘Flashpaper’ Sam because he kept his books written on
dissolvable paper that he could drop into a pan of water when the cops showed up.”

“I knew he’d had trouble with the law. I knew he was trying to go straight. I bought a paper from him every morning for five years. Other than that, his business was his, mine was mine.”

“But he was reputed to be a member of the Rina Crime Family, wasn’t he? And—”

“Objection, Your Honor! What the heck is Ms. Hart talking about? What Rina Crime Family? My client has never even been on trial before!”

“Joe Rina’s been arrested ten times,” Victoria shot back.

“Sloppy police work and lies by crooked, police-bought informants are not
proof
of crimes, Miss Hart. … Show me your convictions.”

Judge Goldstone turned to Gino Delafore and threw a judicial slow pitch. “Do you think you can decide this case on the merits, Mr. Delafore?” he asked.