House Rivals

by Mike Lawson

  “Okay, but don’t you say a goddamn thing to anybody, not to the cops and not to the guys you’re in a cell with, either.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen the movies, too, Marge. Get me a lawyer.”

  “You just keep your mouth shut,” she said, but Bill had already hung up.

  She thought for a minute. She and Bill didn’t work with attorneys who represented common criminals. The lawyers they worked with dealt with property and business issues. They knew dozens of lawyers who specialized in mineral rights and environmental law, but she couldn’t remember ever using the kind of lawyer that defended thugs who beat people up. Finally she called a woman who was a senior partner in a fair-sized firm in Bismarck; Marjorie was pretty sure she had a couple of criminal lawyers working for her. She was feeling kind of hysterical and almost laughed, thinking “criminal lawyers” was probably an oxymoron.

  After she talked to the lawyer, telling her to send the best guy she had down to the jail tonight to talk to Bill, she put on her slippers, grabbed her phone and her cigarettes from her purse, and left the bedroom. She walked through the living room where Dick was sitting on the couch looking at his laptop—probably visiting porn sites. She opened the hall closet and put on a long coat over her nightgown.

  “Where are you going?” Dick asked.

  “Just outside,” Marjorie said.

  He knew that meant she was going out for a smoke. She never smoked in the house and never in front of the boys. “You gotta knock that shit off,” Dick said as she was walking through the door.

  She walked down the driveway and stood on the curb to smoke, hoping none of the neighbors would see her. She’d been thinking about calling Curtis to let him know Bill had been arrested, but in the short distance from the front door to the curb, she realized that would be stupid. There was no point getting Curtis all upset until after she’d talked to Bill and found out what kind of case the cops had against him. Plus, there was nothing Curtis could do tonight, anyway. She would have to call him after the arraignment, however. It wouldn’t do for Curtis to learn from some other source that Bill had been arrested.

  Okay, that was it. She wasn’t going to panic and she wasn’t going to do anything tonight. She’d get a good night’s sleep and deal with all this crap in the morning after she had more information. She didn’t know exactly what the cops had on Bill, but she was almost positive that whatever they had, the likelihood of them having anything that could hurt her or Curtis was almost infinitesimal.

  She dropped the cigarette butt in the gutter, feeling like a litterbug, and walked back into the house. She put her coat back in the closet and turned to see Dick still sitting on the couch, looking at his laptop. What a pervert. Then, knowing that she was going to have a hard time falling asleep, she said, “Instead of looking at naked ladies on your computer why don’t you come to bed and look at a real naked lady?”

  “Okay,” Dick said, and closed the laptop.

  22

  Marjorie took a seat in the last row of the courtroom. Bill’s arraignment was scheduled for nine, and it was ten minutes before the hour.

  She didn’t know which lawyer was representing Bill, but he was probably one of the dozen guys wearing suits all bs-ing with each other near the courtroom rail. There were a few other people scattered about the room, mostly women who looked like they might be the mothers or wives of the guys who were going to appear in court that morning.

  At that moment, DeMarco and a slim woman with dark red hair walked into the courtroom and sat down at the end of the row where Marjorie was seated. She bet the slim woman was the FBI agent who was working with DeMarco. She was pretty, but as Heckler had said, she was also sort of hard-looking. DeMarco noticed Marjorie at that moment and smiled at her, a big shit-eating grin. Asshole!

  Eventually the judge appeared and six or seven guys, including Bill, came out one of the side doors. When Bill’s name was called, his ­lawyer—a man with a really bad comb-over—joined him at the defense table. A clerk rattled off the charges against Bill, Bill pleaded not guilty, and the judge set his bail at fifty grand. Bill’s lawyer started to argue that the bail was too high, that Bill was a respected member of the community and . . . The judge told the lawyer to shut up and set a trial date that was six months away.

  After Bill was taken away, Marjorie spoke to his lawyer to get his understanding of the case against Bill. When the lawyer said the cops had a recording of a man named Tim Sloan admitting that Bill had paid him to assault Sarah Johnson, Marjorie said, “Are you serious?”

  “I’m afraid so,” the lawyer said.

  Marjorie made sure the lawyer was dealing with all the bail stuff and told him to tell Bill to call her as soon as he was released. As she was leaving the courtroom, she was wondering how that damn DeMarco had found Sloan and forced him to testify against Bill. She pushed open the door to leave—and there was DeMarco, waiting out in the hall, leaning against the wall opposite the door.

  “What do you want?” she said to him.

  DeMarco smiled. “Your boy looked a little green around the gills to me. Are you sure he’s a stand-up guy?”

  “A stand-up guy? What the hell does that mean?”

  “It’s like I told you the day you invited me in for coffee, Marjorie. Eventually, one of you is going to give up the other one, and right now my money’s on Logan giving you up. And if the FBI can tie Logan to Sarah’s murder, he’ll sing like Pavarotti to avoid life in prison. But if you’re as bright as I think you are, you’ll make the first move.”

  “Nobody’s giving anybody up. And Bill’s going to get out from under these false charges against him.”

  “False charges?” DeMarco echoed and smiled.

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay. But I’m telling you, Marjorie, I’m not leaving Bismarck until somebody is in jail for killing Sarah.” DeMarco turned to leave, then turned back to her and said, “By the way, you got a guy following me, a fat guy who thinks if he changes cars and wears different hats I won’t notice him. I’m going to have my FBI agent arrest him if I see him again.”

  Marjorie stood there watching as DeMarco walked away. It seemed to her like he was swaggering, he was so fucking pleased with himself. She doubted that the FBI could arrest Heckler—she doubted that following somebody was a federal crime—but on the other hand, she didn’t want the FBI questioning Heckler, either. If Heckler admitted that she’d paid him to follow Sarah Johnson, that might cause her problems.

  Another thought was also beginning to form in the back of her mind—although she wasn’t ready to go there yet—and having Heckler watching DeMarco could complicate things later. On the way to her car she called Heckler, told him his services were no longer required, and that he should send her a bill. She almost told him that he ought to use the money to take a class on how to tail people and not get spotted.

  Marjorie met Bill an hour later at Denny’s. Bill had said he was hungry but when his breakfast arrived, he didn’t take more than two bites before he pushed the plate away.

  He looked like hell. Hair mussed, unshaven, his clothes all wrinkled like he’d slept in them, which he most likely had. And he smelled, some smell Marjorie couldn’t identify. She wondered if it was a generic jail smell—what you get when you put a bunch of men together in a cage.

  It took Bill fifteen minutes to tell her everything that had happened, the big news being what she already knew from the lawyer: how his idiot ex-brother-in-law had admitted, on tape, that Bill had paid him to assault Johnson. When Bill said that the FBI knew that he’d been to Denver just days before Johnson was killed and was now looking at suspected contract killers who operated out of that area, Marjorie dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand so hard she was surprised she didn’t bleed.

  “Now you listen to me, Bill,” she said. “They don’t have anything. They don’t have shit! They don’t know why you went to Den
ver. You just made a trip there and we’ll come up with a plausible explanation if we have to. They can’t prove you talked to Murdock, and Murdock sure as hell isn’t going to tell them. As for these contract killers who operate out of Denver, that sounds like total bullshit to me.”

  “I don’t know. DeMarco looked like he was telling the truth.”

  “He was bullshitting you! He specializes in bullshit! And they’re not even going to convict you on the assault charge.”

  “The hell they’re not,” he said.

  Marjorie had figured out how to deal with the assault charge on the way from the courthouse to Denny’s. “Bill, all they have is your lowlife ex-brother-in-law saying you paid him. It’s your word against his. If this thing actually goes to a trial, which I doubt it ever will, they’d never convict you based on that dumb shit saying you ordered him to do anything. The other thing is, if this goes to trial, we’ll just buy Sloan off.”

  “Buy him off?”

  “That’s right. We’ll pay him to retract his statement and take the fall. I mean, how much jail time could he possibly get for yelling at some girl? They didn’t hurt her. They didn’t hit her. And nobody can prove they made any death threats against her because she isn’t alive to testify. All they have is the statement a hysterical girl made to the cops after her so-called assault. Sloan wouldn’t even get six months, if he gets anything, but most likely he’d get a suspended sentence. But whatever he gets, we’ll pay him enough to make it worthwhile. So, like I said, they don’t have zip and you’re not going to jail.”

  Bill didn’t say anything for a moment, then smiled hesitantly. “I think you’re right. I just hadn’t thought it through, particularly the part about paying Tim. After they put those handcuffs on me, it was like my brain locked up. But what do we tell Curtis?”

  “Yeah, Curtis is the real problem,” Marjorie said. “Not DeMarco or the FBI or the Bismarck cops.”

  “Do you think Curtis might contact Murdock to have me—”

  “Oh, hell no! You think we’re in that movie Fargo? Curtis isn’t going to have Murdock come up here and feed you through a wood chipper. Curtis is a businessman and killing you doesn’t make sense.”

  “He thought killing Sarah Johnson made sense.”

  “No, he didn’t. He just got emotional about Johnson, which he doesn’t normally do. Curtis isn’t going to kill you but what he might do is fire us both. He’ll think that we can’t be much use to him if we’ve got the FBI breathing down our necks, watching every move we make. And he’ll be right. What I need to do is convince Curtis that this is just a minor speed bump in the road and won’t affect his business or our effectiveness.”

  “So do you want to call him or should we go see him?”

  “I’ll go see Curtis. I think it would be best if I talked to him without you there so he can rant a little about you, and then I’ll calm him down. What you need to do is go see Sloan. Don’t yell at him, don’t hit him. Be calm with him and tell him you don’t blame him for talking to the cops, that it was understandable that he was scared, but now what he has to do is look toward the future.”

  “I can do that,” Bill said.

  “I know you can.”

  Bill rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know about you, Marge, but I don’t know what I’d do if Curtis fired me.”

  “I’m in the same boat you are, Bill. Plus I’ve got two kids and a husband who’s basically no better than a kid. So I’m going to make sure he doesn’t fire us.”

  “What we could do—I mean if push comes to shove—is remind Curtis that we know a lot of things about him that could cause him big problems if we—”

  Marjorie slapped her hand on the table. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Don’t even think about blackmailing Curtis. You’ll get us both killed. Now you go home and take a shower and get some sleep. Then maybe you should go out to the driving range after you’ve had a nap and smack a few balls around. That always relaxes you. So tomorrow, you go talk to that moron your sister married and I’ll go see Curtis, wherever he is.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Bill said, and left the restaurant a few minutes later.

  Marjorie ordered another cup of coffee, then decided she wanted a cigarette. That was really becoming a problem: it was like she couldn’t think these days if she wasn’t smoking. She told the waitress she was just stepping outside for a moment and would bring the coffee cup back.

  She left the restaurant, lit a Marlboro, then saw a sign that said she couldn’t smoke near the door and the damn ash can was about fifty yards away, next to a bench covered with bird shit. What a bunch of crap. If the scientists were right, people oughta be more worried about all the fossil fuels that guys like Leonard Curtis sucked out of the earth and burned, overheating the entire planet, instead of a little secondhand cigarette smoke.

  She took out her phone and called Curtis’s office in Houston, having no idea where he might be. She told his secretary that she needed to see him in person, wherever he was, and right away. There was a serious problem, she said, and she didn’t want to talk to Curtis about it over the phone.

  Half an hour later, she was back at the office, hoping Curtis would call back soon so she could make travel plans. As she waited she thought some more about Bill.

  She’d told Bill the truth, that if he handled Tim Sloan correctly, she was sure he wouldn’t be convicted for assaulting Johnson. She’d also been telling him the truth when she’d said that it was damn unlikely that the FBI would find Murdock just because Bill had taken a trip to Denver. What she wasn’t sure of was how Curtis might react to the current situation.

  Curtis had been willing to kill three times that Marjorie knew of to protect his interests. There’d been the swing judge, Wainwright, in South Dakota and Sarah Johnson, but there was at least one other person he’d ordered killed. How else would he have known about Murdock if he hadn’t used him before? But would he kill Bill because he’d been arrested and was being hounded by the FBI? She didn’t think so—­unless Bill did something stupid.

  She hadn’t liked what she’d seen this morning after Bill left the jail. She didn’t like the way he’d looked, all sweaty and scared. She didn’t like, as he’d admitted, that his brain froze up when they arrested him. And what she really didn’t like was the dumb comment he’d made about threatening Curtis, which could get her killed as well.

  What she’d always admired about Bill, and what made him so good at his job, was that he had the ability to make people like him. He was charming and funny and he was really good at acting sincere—which also explained why he got laid so much. The trick to convincing a politician to take a bribe was a lot like trying to talk some woman into the sack: the politician had to be romanced, he had to be wooed—and Bill Logan was a master at that.

  But in all the time they’d worked together, she’d never seen him in a situation where he was under as much pressure as he was now. He’d never before been in a go-to-jail situation much less a life-threatening situation—and from what she’d seen this morning, he didn’t handle pressure well at all. Bill could be a major liability.

  There was one bit of good news: all the heat was on Bill. Bill was the one who’d made the trip to Denver. Bill was the guy who’d been arrested for assault. But Marjorie . . . She was pristine. No one had accused her of doing anything. So one possible outcome was that she might have to find a new partner or work without a partner, and Bill . . . Bill just might have to go away.

  Curtis’s secretary finally called her back and said Mr. Curtis would see her at eight a.m. tomorrow at his office in Houston. Marjorie got online, booked a flight, and then went home to pack a bag.

  Dick was sitting in the living room, watching the Ellen DeGeneres Show when Marjorie walked through the door. He was turning into a regular housewife. When she said she had to fly to Houston that evening, he whined, “But tonight’s my poker night.”
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  “I don’t want to hear it, Dick,” she said. “And don’t even think about taking the boys with you to your poker game.” She didn’t see any point in reminding him that he was no better at poker than he was at day trading.

  23

  Bill Logan went home after having breakfast with Marjorie at Denny’s, took a shower to get the smell of the Bismarck jail off his skin, then tried to sleep but couldn’t. He was too anxious to sleep but was actually feeling better about his situation after talking to Marjorie. She might be right about him winning at trial if they tried to convict him for assaulting Johnson based on Tim’s testimony, but he didn’t want to take the risk and end up with a felony record. He really liked her idea of paying Tim to recant his testimony and take the fall for him.

  He also thought about DeMarco’s one-brick-in-the-wall speech, how Janet Tyler was going to testify that he’d fixed her son’s case so her son wouldn’t go to jail. All he had said to Tyler was that if she dropped the lawsuit against Curtis, he might be able to help her son—and she wouldn’t be able to prove otherwise, and she sure as hell wouldn’t know about the deal he’d made with the Great Falls prosecutor. As for the FBI squeezing politicians mentioned in Johnson’s blog, they could squeeze as hard as they wanted. Those politicians weren’t going to incriminate themselves.

  Last night in jail, surrounded by drunks and thieves and meth addicts, he’d been more depressed than he’d ever been in his life. He could just see himself spending months in jail for the assault, surrounded by violent thugs. And he would obviously lose his high-paying job; Curtis wasn’t going to employ a felon. But worse than the assault charge and the possibility of unemployment was DeMarco saying how the FBI was using all its considerable resources to prove he’d committed bribery and been an accomplice to murder. Then it wouldn’t be months in jail, it would be years, maybe even life. But now, after talking to Marjorie and thinking things through . . . It was like that old saying about how it was always darkest before the dawn. Last night had been his darkest hour, but today . . . Well, things didn’t seem so bad now. Thank God, Marjorie was on his side.