House Rivals

by Mike Lawson

  He thought about going to see Tim this afternoon, but then decided to put it off until tomorrow. Right now what he needed to do was relax so he could get some sleep. He thought about going for a walk, then decided to take Marge’s advice and go to the driving range.

  DeMarco was feeling okay about the way things stood, but knew that he needed to do more and he needed to do something soon.

  He’d been bullshitting Logan about the FBI having a list of suspected contract killers who operated out of Denver. There was no such list. And maybe Logan, to avoid a jail sentence, would give up Curtis and whoever had killed Sarah—but that seemed unlikely. First, the case against Logan was weak because the person who would be testifying against him was a loser who was currently defrauding the government out of a disability check for a nonexistent medical condition. So maybe Logan wouldn’t be convicted at all. And if he was convicted, DeMarco doubted that he’d be given a long prison sentence as Sarah hadn’t been hurt. So unless the judge sentenced him to years in jail, DeMarco doubted Logan would want to incur Leonard Curtis’s wrath by testifying against Curtis.

  In an effort to make a stronger case against Logan, DeMarco told Westerberg that he wanted her to pursue a couple of other angles. He wanted her to see if Bill Logan had wired a substantial amount of money to someplace that looked funny the week before Sarah’s death. An offshore account, for example. Then DeMarco wanted her to see if six years earlier, the last time Logan went to Denver, if money went to the same place.

  Westerberg said she’d need warrants to do what he wanted, and DeMarco gave her the same answer he’d given her once before: That’s your problem. Figure it out.

  The second thing DeMarco wanted was for Westerberg to pressure the IRS to audit Dawkins and Logan’s business tax returns. If he was lucky, the IRS might be able to get them for income tax evasion, which would place more pressure on Logan and maybe result in more jail time than an assault charge. The other purpose of the IRS audit would be to see if Dawkins and Logan’s so-called consulting firm distributed cash to various people—or simply couldn’t account for income or cash that had been disbursed. DeMarco figured that in their line of work, they were paying off some politicians with good old-fashioned greenbacks instead of some complicated, under-the-table deal that no one could prove was illegal—like forcing an insurance company to pay off a claim as a method of bribery. So DeMarco wanted D&L Consulting audited, hoping the IRS might find the start of a money trail that could lead to something bigger.

  Westerberg agreed and said she’d try to get the IRS to do what DeMarco wanted, but as the IRS was a large, practically immoveable federal bureaucracy that didn’t work for the Justice Department, that might not be possible.

  Westerberg also told DeMarco that, whether he liked it or not, she was returning briefly to Minneapolis. She was going home to talk to her boss face-to-face about the case and to pack up some more clothes so she wouldn’t have to wear the same thing almost every day. Her last reason for going home, she said, was to get laid. This comment actually shocked DeMarco, as Westerberg had struck him as being somewhat of a prude, or if not a prude exactly, too much of a straight arrow to talk about her sex life. He did tell her that she didn’t have to drive all the way to Minnesota if she had an itch that needed scratching. Nice guy that he was, he’d be happy to do the scratching. This almost made Westerberg smile. Almost.

  The bottom line was that DeMarco needed to put more pressure on Logan and he wasn’t satisfied that anything he’d done or that Westerberg might do in the future was going to be sufficient. He needed to think of something else. Something big.

  He finally decided that the best thing he could do was go play golf. Maybe something would occur to him while walking about, whacking a little white ball. Before going to the golf course, however, he called Mahoney and gave him an update so Mahoney would think he was actually working. While driving to the course he looked to see if someone was following him, but couldn’t spot anyone.

  DeMarco rented clubs—he wished again that he had his golf shoes so he wouldn’t have to play in tennis shoes—and walked over to the driving range. He’d hit a small bucket of balls before he teed off. And who should he see on the driving range but Bill Logan.

  He watched Logan for a while. Logan was taller than him, in good shape, but DeMarco figured that he was stronger. Logan drove the ball about two hundred yards, most of the time fairly straight. DeMarco could drive the ball farther than Logan but more of his shots sliced right than Logan’s. Then he watched Logan pitch a few balls at a flag about fifty yards from where he was standing, and he came fairly close to the flag on almost every shot. Pitching was DeMarco’s biggest weakness. He was okay with a driver, good with the irons, not bad with his putter, but his pitching sucked. Nonetheless, he figured he might be able to beat Logan—not that beating him at golf mattered. It was just a guy thing.

  He walked up to Logan and said, “Want to play a round? My tee time is in twenty minutes.”

  Logan was shocked to see him, but then he recovered and smiled. “Are you still following me, DeMarco? I might have to get a restraining order against you.”

  DeMarco didn’t like that Logan sounded relaxed and wondered if Dawkins had convinced him that he didn’t have anything to worry about. That wouldn’t be good.

  In response to Logan’s question, DeMarco said, “No. Honest. I wasn’t following you. I just came here to play a round while I was thinking about other ways to screw you.”

  Logan laughed.

  “So. You wanna play?” DeMarco said.

  Logan hesitated. “Yeah, okay, why not? But on one condition. We don’t talk about the assault case or Sarah Johnson or anything like that.”

  “Deal,” DeMarco said.

  It turned out that he and Logan played at about the same level. ­DeMarco outdrove him, they were even with the irons, Logan was better at pitching. After nine holes, DeMarco was eight over par and Logan had two strokes on him mostly due to two extraordinary pitches where he landed about a foot from the cup.

  DeMarco couldn’t help it, but he actually kind of liked Logan. The guy had a sense of humor—told him two golf jokes he hadn’t heard before—and he didn’t come across as a total asshole. He certainly didn’t come across as a murderer. He found out that Logan, just like himself, was divorced and had spent his whole life on the fringes of politics. Again, DeMarco was struck by the fact that Logan was a guy a lot like him: single, easygoing, and engaged in a similar business. In a different universe, Logan might have been a friend.

  On the eighteenth hole, Logan was a one stroke ahead but DeMarco figured he still had a chance of winning because the eighteenth was a long par four and his driving ability gave him an advantage. They ended up with Logan lying four, sixty yards from the pin, and DeMarco lying three, thirty yards from the hole. Logan, once again, made a magnificent pitch, and ended up two feet from the pin. DeMarco pitched up onto the green, but his ball rolled fifteen feet past the hole—and ­DeMarco figured he was screwed.

  Then, whichever god is in charge of golf, decided to kiss DeMarco on the head—and he made a putt he couldn’t have made again if his life had depended on it. Logan sank his putt easily.

  “Well, I guess it’s a draw,” Logan said.

  Which pretty much summed up where things stood in general between DeMarco and Logan—unless DeMarco could come up with something that was equivalent to a fifteen-foot putt.

  24

  The first thing Curtis said when Marjorie walked into his office in Houston at eight a.m. was, “Why did you guys kill that girl? That was a stupid thing to do.”

  Marjorie’s started sputtering. “But, but, but you told us—”

  “Hey!” Curtis said, “I didn’t tell you to kill her. I just told you to make her quit writing about me.”

  Marjorie took a breath to calm herself. Technically, what Curtis had just said was true: he hadn’t ordered them
to kill Sarah Johnson. On the other hand, he’d made it pretty damn clear that if they didn’t do something about her, he was going to replace them. But arguing with Curtis about whose fault it was that Johnson was dead wasn’t going to help. Her whole purpose in coming to Houston was to tell Curtis where things stood—and things did not stand well—and then convince him that she had everything under control.

  Curtis sat like a gnome behind his big desk, dressed in one of his cheap suits, scowling at her, as she laid out the whole story: how Bill had been arrested, how DeMarco had gotten the FBI involved, and that the FBI knew that Logan had taken a trip to Denver before Johnson was killed. “Son of a gun,” Curtis muttered.

  “I came here,” Marjorie said, “so you’d know what was going on but also to tell you that you don’t have anything to worry about.” She then told him that she’d gotten Bill a good lawyer and her plan was to pay off Tim Sloan so he wouldn’t testify against Bill. As for Johnson’s murder, DeMarco and the FBI didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of finding Murdock and proving that Logan had anything to do with her death. One thing Marjorie did intentionally was make sure that Curtis understood that Bill was the one who was in trouble and not her.

  When she finished, Curtis said, “I don’t like this one damn bit.”

  “I don’t like it either, Mr. Curtis. But you need to understand that you don’t have a problem and Bill and I can still do our jobs. We’ll take things slow for a couple of months, being very careful, and then it will be back to business as usual. You have my word on that.”

  “Are you sure Logan isn’t going to talk?”

  “Yes. Why would he talk? The very worst thing that could happen to him is that he gets probation or a couple months in jail for this assault on Johnson, but even that’s not going to happen. He’s not going to talk about anything he and I have done for you, and he sure as hell isn’t going to talk about Murdock.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Curtis said, “but the thing about Logan is that boy’s never really been tested, he’s never been under fire. I almost wish you were the one who was in trouble because I know you got the grit to hang tough. But Logan . . . He’s all bullshit and blarney and good at schmoozing folks, and I’m not too sure about the size of his balls.”

  “His balls are big enough,” Marjorie said. “And I’ll make sure they stay that way.” But she was really thinking that it was pretty amazing how Curtis had instantly come to the same conclusion that she had about Bill, and Curtis hadn’t even seen the way Bill looked after he got out of jail. She was also flattered that Curtis recognized that she was stronger than Bill.

  “All right,” Curtis finally said. “You did the right thing coming here.”

  “I know. And one other reason I came, instead of calling you, is that we need to be careful for a while about what we say on the phone. I don’t think the FBI can get a warrant to tap our phones, but we need to be cautious.”

  “Okay. You keep me informed.” Then he added, “Oh, and one other thing. If you and Logan have to buy off this Sloan character to keep him quiet, that’s coming out of your pocket, not mine.”

  Why you cheap son of a bitch, Marjorie thought.

  She had a taxi take her back to the Houston airport, called Dick to make sure everything was okay with the boys and to tell him when to pick her up at the Bismarck airport. She also asked him if he’d remembered to call the guy to come look at the washing machine, which was squealing like somebody had stepped on a cat. She was going to go ballistic if he’d forgotten again. But he hadn’t. He said the guy was coming tomorrow.

  She had a glass of Chablis while she waited for her flight and thought about old man Curtis’s reaction to everything she’d told him. The problem with Curtis was that he was hard to read. He hadn’t been happy but he’d seemed satisfied that she was managing things. She was willing to bet, however, that he’d have somebody in Bismarck watch Bill’s case closely to see how things were progressing. She also knew that if he got even a whiff that Bill might point the finger at him for Johnson’s murder, Curtis was very likely to contact Murdock and have Bill disappeared. And maybe her, too. She had to make sure—she just had to—that Bill didn’t buckle under the pressure. Which made her think: the guy who was causing all the problems was DeMarco. There had to be some way to neutralize that slick bastard.

  Curtis sat there after Dawkins left his office, wondering if he should take some sort of independent action or trust Dawkins to handle things. He liked the woman, and she and Logan had done well in the ten years they’d been working for him. Including their salaries, their operation cost him two, three million a year, but they’d made or saved him a hundred times that amount. It would be a shame to lose them, especially Dawkins. It would be hard to find anybody who knew the playing field in Montana and the Dakotas the way those two did.

  He wished they hadn’t killed that girl. He hadn’t really expected them to do that—and he sure as hell hadn’t ordered them to. He thought they’d come up with something more creative than murder. On the other hand, he was glad that pain-in-the-ass girl was gone and there was no way they could tie him into what Logan and Murdock had done. Logan may have used his money to pay Murdock but Curtis could show that he didn’t control every dime he paid Logan and Dawkins as consultants.

  So the problem wasn’t the girl’s death; that was unfortunate but not a game changer. The game changer was this guy, DeMarco, who had gotten the FBI involved. A couple dozen FBI agents looking at everything he was doing could grind things to a halt and tie him up in court for years on all sorts of bullshit.

  He called a lawyer in Bismarck and told the lawyer he wanted him to stay on top of Bill Logan’s assault charge and he also wanted the lawyer to sniff around to see if a judge had granted the FBI a warrant to tap phones and such. Then he stood and looked out the window, and thought some more.

  Like he’d told Dawkins, he was worried about Logan. People were like lumps of coal. Some lumps turned into diamonds under pressure; others just crumbled. He had the feeling that Logan was a crumbler. He wanted Logan watched to make sure he didn’t start taking meetings with the FBI—and if he did start doing that sort of thing, he wanted to be able to act quickly.

  He looked at his watch. It was already nine a.m. He’d spent an hour talking to Dawkins and then stewing about what to do. But nine was plenty early enough to set up a meeting with the man he needed to see. He took out a cell phone he used when he didn’t want calls traced to him and punched in a number.

  Ian Perry could hear a phone ringing in his office; there were four cell phones there. He thought for a moment about ignoring the call, but then he thought about the house next door. He wanted that house gone. He padded in stocking feet toward his office and the ringing phone. He never wore shoes in his house.

  He picked up the phone and said, “Yes?”

  The caller said, “This is Longhorn. I need to see you today. You still using the same place for meeting people?”

  “Yes,” Perry said.

  “Can you be there in three hours? I’ll pay top dollar for the job and give you ten just for taking the meeting.”

  “Okay,” Perry said. “I’ll see you at noon.”

  Perry stood for a moment looking out at his garden. He had a house in Colorado Springs, the second-largest city in Colorado, sixty-some miles south of Denver. The house sat on a hill, and from the front of his house, he had an unobstructed view of the chapel at the United States Air Force Academy. The academy chapel was one of the most striking works of architecture in the state of Colorado with its seventeen rows of spires that rise one hundred and fifty feet into the sky. The spires were like silver hands joined together in prayer, the fingers raised to God.

  The view from the back of Perry’s home was, in his opinion, just as magnificent. Perry had been stationed in Japan for a while and although he didn’t particularly like the Japanese, their food, or their culture, he’d fal
len in love with their gardens. His backyard garden was identical to one he’d seen in Kyoto. It was enclosed by a bamboo fence, and had winding, crushed gravel walkways. Two ponds were connected by a small stream that burbled over boulders. There were Japanese maples and cedars, holly leaf osmanthus, partridge berry, black mondo grass, Kyushu azalea, small empress trees, and one lone Japanese black pine. It was simple yet stunning, and he spent hours tending to the plants and hours more simply sitting on a stone bench in the garden. It was the most serene place on earth. The only flaw was that he could see his neighbor’s house looming over his fence and he wanted to destroy that house. He’d asked the neighbors if they would be willing to sell and they’d smirked and said they would for eight hundred fifty thousand—which was why he’d agreed to meet Longhorn in Denver.

  Curtis’s father-in-law had introduced him to the man he knew as Murdock.

  Curtis had never liked his father-in-law and his father-in-law hadn’t liked him much, either. His father-in-law was a man named Jim Baker—who they called Big Jim, of course. He’d been born and raised in Arkansas but developed into a caricature of a Texas oilman: a tall, heavy-gutted man with a loud voice who wore cowboy boots and Stetsons and smoked cigars. He had a Texas twang like a country western singer. Curtis had worked for Big Jim early in his career and ended up marrying his daughter—which was the main reason Big Jim tolerated him and later helped him out. Curtis was a good husband to Big Jim’s daughter and a good father to his grandchildren, and unlike Big Jim, he didn’t screw every whore in Houston.