House Rivals

by Mike Lawson

  “So you have a problem, young lady, and I’d suggest you resolve it quickly. And until you do, my company is not going to be paying your consulting fee.”

  Curtis took her arm and walked her to the door. “I’ve got to get over to the governor’s place. Don’t call me again until this mess is settled.”

  After Marjorie left, Curtis pulled out the phone he used to communicate with Murdock.

  28

  DeMarco had been hoping that after someone made an attempt on Bill Logan’s life that Logan would buckle. The guy had been arrested for assault, was looking at jail time, and then someone tries to kill him. That should have been enough to make Logan want to testify against his partner or Curtis, but it didn’t work—and DeMarco couldn’t figure out what to do next, other than harass Westerberg.

  After confronting Logan at the cabin on the Knife River and getting nowhere, Westerberg went back to work in earnest. She pushed again on the IRS to audit Logan and Dawkins—but the taxmen said that wasn’t going to happen. They were still feeling the tongue lashing they got from Congress for auditing Tea Party organizations and were avoiding any audit that might appear to support someone’s political agenda. Westerberg said she didn’t have a political agenda—but the stubborn bean counters remained obdurate.

  Next Westerberg, even though she knew it was an exercise in futility, started contacting people that Sarah named in her blog as having been bribed. Westerberg told these people that if they didn’t admit that they’d been bribed and agree to testify against Logan, Dawkins, or Curtis, the federal government was going to huff and puff and blow their houses down. No one, however, was sufficiently intimidated by the government’s big bad wolf to admit to anything.

  Finally, Westerberg went through Sarah’s blog again, looking for things that, with some really creative legal spin, could be used to obtain a warrant to monitor Logan’s and Dawkins’s phone calls. She’d told DeMarco that there was no valid justification for a warrant—and she knew there almost certainly wasn’t—but Westerberg was getting desperate. So she spent twenty-four sleepless hours putting together an affidavit for a warrant based on Sarah’s conclusions—doing her best to make it sound like Sarah’s assumptions were the same as evidence—and then she and a fast-talking assistant U.S. attorney paid a visit to a federal judge, laying out their case.

  The judge told them to go shit in their hats.

  Since Westerberg was doing all the work and DeMarco couldn’t think of anything better to do, he decided to expand his cultural horizon by visiting one of North Dakota’s more bizarre tourist attractions: the Enchanted Highway. The Enchanted Highway is a thirty-two mile stretch of road eighty-five miles west of Bismarck where a local artist named Gary Greff had assembled the world’s largest collection of scrap-metal sculptures.

  There was Geese in Flight, consisting of ten metal geese with wingspans of thirty feet. The sculpture weighted seventy-eight tons and was listed in Guinness World Records because of its size. There was Pheasants on the Prairie, five birds constructed of pipe-and-wire mesh, one pecking the ground, the largest fowl being forty feet tall and weighing thirteen thousand pounds. And then there was DeMarco’s favorite: Grasshoppers in the Field, showing a number of grasshoppers made from fuel-oil tanks, one of them sixty feet long, sitting in a field of wheat also made from metal.

  That night, he went to the American Grill for dinner. He took a seat at the bar, ordered a martini, and started to watch the ball game on the TV over the bar. Mariners versus Yankees. Go Mariners. He hated the Yankees.

  About fifteen minutes after he arrived, a tall, raven-haired woman took a seat at the bar, a few stools away from him. She was wearing a short cocktail dress; she had legs that went on forever. She smiled at DeMarco and he smiled back. Things were looking up.

  The brunette ordered a drink and looked over at DeMarco again. She was definitely coming on to him. He stood up, planning to walk over and say hello to her, when a voice said, “Hi. Remember me?”

  Aw, Geez, it was the fifth-grade teacher he’d spent the night with. He said, “Hey, how you doin’? It’s good to see you.” He then explained that he hadn’t lied to her, that he really had been planning to leave town, but something happened and he had to stay a couple more days.

  “So you gonna buy me a drink?” the teacher asked. DeMarco was trying like crazy to remember her name. What the hell was it? Amy? Amanda? No! It was Amelia. Thank God, he remembered.

  He looked down the bar. The brunette was staring at him, a pretty pout on her face, making it clear she was disappointed. DeMarco gave her a little Hey-what-can-you-do? shrug.

  The teacher was actually a lot of fun. She knew about a thousand dirty jokes and she cracked him up talking about the fifth-graders she taught. She said every kid in her class had a cell phone and when they had math problems to solve, they used the calculators on their phones. She didn’t think there were two kids in her entire class that could actually do long division. She started to tell him a story about this one kid—a kid who was certain to be a future member of the United States Congress—using his phone to email pictures of his little weenie to girls in the class. As she was talking, DeMarco noticed the long-legged brunette had left.

  Oh, well, maybe he’d get lucky and see her again before he left Bismarck. In the meantime, another night with the teacher wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  Marjorie didn’t tell her husband that she’d been fired and that he might have to find a job. One reason she didn’t tell him was because Curtis hadn’t actually fired her—it was more like he’d suspended her until she had Bill Logan back under her thumb.

  She didn’t bother to go to the office. She stayed home and spent the time thinking, almost nonstop, about what to do about Bill and waiting for the gutless bastard to call again. While she was waiting, she harassed her husband into cleaning up the garage and fixing the back gate that was falling off the hinges, then sent him to Walmart to stock up on things they needed. She screamed at her sons about the state of their bedrooms and playing video games and the sorry-ass report cards they brought home. Sometimes she wished she’d had a daughter.

  Marjorie’s mood didn’t improve when Christie called and informed her that she’d struck out with DeMarco. Christie said that Heckler had called her the night before, told her that DeMarco was at the American Grill, and she hustled right on down there to seduce him. But then, just when DeMarco was about to come over and talk to her—he actually was sort of hunky, Christie said—this short blond woman sat down next to DeMarco and it was obvious that she and DeMarco knew each other.

  Damn it all, Marjorie thought. That fucking teacher! Did she spend every night at the American Grill? It seemed like nothing was going right these days. Marjorie told Christie to stay home the next couple of nights, that maybe there would be another chance to get DeMarco.

  While Marjorie was terrifying her family and Westerberg was working and DeMarco was enjoying artwork on the prairie and getting laid, Bill Logan checked into a motel in Washburn that would take cash and didn’t ask for a credit card. He went to a nearby store, bought a Big Chief tablet like grade-school kids use, a couple of pens, a bottle of Glenlivet, half a dozen sandwiches, and returned to his shitty motel room. Then he wrote down five of the most incriminating, underhanded things he could think of that he and Marjorie had done for Leonard Curtis—with two exceptions. He didn’t include in his manifesto that he’d contracted Murdock to kill Judge Wainwright or Sarah Johnson. The idea was to incriminate Curtis, not himself.

  The reason he documented only five instances of bribery, blackmail, and political corruption was because those were instances when he and Marjorie had met with Curtis to discuss the issues. Bill had checked the calendar in his smart phone before he’d dumped the phone and copied down the times and dates when they’d met with Curtis so Curtis couldn’t claim to have been somewhere else. He’d also, to the best of his ability, wrote down exactly
what Curtis had said on those occasions. Okay, he did embellish the quotations a bit to make Curtis sound more guilty. He also wrote down the amounts of money paid to certain politicians so the FBI could squeeze them as necessary to corroborate Bill’s statements.

  When he finished, he’d filled thirty pages in the tablet. In places it was hard to read his handwriting as the legibility of his writing was directly proportional to the amount of scotch he’d consumed.

  He checked out of the motel and drove back to Bismarck. The first place he stopped was a FedEx store. He made a copy of his thirty-page masterpiece, placed the original in a manila envelope he bought there in the store, and then wrote a note to his big brother, George.

  George was an engineer who worked for Alcoa in Cleveland. Bill liked George well enough, but he didn’t have a damn thing in common with the guy and the last time he’d seen him was three years ago. But George was the only one he could trust and, more important, George was named as the executor of his will. In the note, Bill said, “George, I know this is going to sound weird but if I die or disappear any time in the near future—even if my death looks accidental or I have a heart attack or something—there’s a document in an envelope in my safe deposit box at the Wells Fargo bank on Broadway in Bismarck. I want you to deliver it to the FBI if anything happens to me. As my executor, you’ll be able to get into the deposit box. Your brother, Bill.”

  After he’d FedExed the note to George, his next stop was the Wells Fargo bank, where he placed the original of the document in his safe deposit box. He kept the copy with him. He wanted to go home but he was afraid to in case Murdock or Sarah Johnson’s grandfather or anybody else was still looking to kill him. He checked into a motel in Bismarck and took a shower for the first time in two days. He thought about calling Marjorie to set up a meeting with her, but then decided he needed a nap. He’d call her later when he was rested—but he was feeling pretty good about where things currently stood.

  Bill had come to a conclusion in the last two days. He’d decided to quit working for Leonard Curtis and at the same time he was going to protect himself against Curtis. Working for Curtis—and working with Marjorie—had become too dangerous and stressful. Not only that, Bill felt terrible about what had happened to Sarah Johnson, and he didn’t ever want to have to do something like that again. The way he looked at it, it was Marjorie’s fault that Johnson had been killed. She was the one who forced him to contact Murdock. So he wanted to be done with both Curtis and Marjorie Dawkins—but at the same time, he wanted to maintain his lifestyle and keep doing the kind of work he enjoyed.

  The lawyer in Fargo that Bill had called from the pay phone at the gas station near Stanton was a man named Clarence Penrose. Penrose worked for Concordia Oil, an independent that was rumored to be two to three times bigger than Curtis’s company. Penrose did the same sort of things Bill and Marjorie did for Curtis, and Bill and Penrose had crossed paths numerous times in the last ten years when Concordia’s interests coincided with Curtis’s.

  Penrose was a lot older than Bill, about Curtis’s age, but he and Bill had always hit it off and Penrose was impressed by some of the things he knew Bill had done. The last time Bill had dinner with Penrose in Fargo, Penrose had said that he was thinking about retiring in a few years and Bill would be a good man to replace him.

  So Bill had called Penrose, said he’d decided to part ways with Curtis, and asked if the job offer was still on the table. Penrose said it was. Bill asked about the salary and Penrose told him that he made three to four hundred grand a year depending on his annual bonus, but Bill would start off at seventy since he’d basically be acting as Penrose’s helper. Bill said that seemed kind of low, but Penrose said, “Kid, I’ll be retiring in exactly two years. My wife wants to move to Florida. She’s sick of Fargo. So in two years, the job will be yours.” Bill decided that he could live off seventy grand for a couple of years because it sounded like if he did the job well, he’d eventually make more working for Concordia than he’d been making working for Curtis.

  Once again, Marjorie didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID. She was in the garage, with all the doors shut, smoking. “Hello,” she said.

  “It’s me,” Bill said.

  “Where the fuck are you?” she screamed.

  “Here in Bismarck. We need to meet.”

  “No shit,” Marjorie said. “But I don’t want to meet at the office. I’m worried because of all the, you know, stuff going on that the FBI could be bugging us or something.”

  “So where do you want to meet?”

  “Let me think about that for a minute,” she said, although she didn’t really have to think about it at all. “You remember the place where Dick and I met you and that blonde you were dating a couple of years ago? I think her name was Terri, Sherri, something like that. She worked in the governor’s office.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “We had a picnic and threw a Frisbee around.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bill said. “Her name was Randi.”

  “Whatever. You remember where we went?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you there at nine tomorrow night. I can’t make it any earlier.”

  “Why do you want to meet there?”

  “I want to meet there because it’s the first place I thought of where I could tell you where I wanted to meet but wouldn’t have to say the name out loud.”

  Bill hesitated as if he was suspicious, then said, “Okay, I’ll see you there. But I’m warning you, Marge, if Murdock shows up instead of you—”

  “Shut up! Quit flapping your mouth. I’m talking on a fucking radio here. I’ll see you at nine and if I’m late, you just wait for me.”

  After Marjorie disconnected the call, she lit another cigarette and at that moment, wouldn’t you know, Bobby opened the door to the garage. She dropped the cigarette on the floor behind her and said, “What are you doing in here?”

  “Getting my skateboard.”

  “You’re not going skateboarding. Get back in the house and finish your homework.”

  “I already finished.”

  “Then go back in the house and pick up all the crap in the family room.”

  “It smells like cigarette smoke in here.”

  “Bobby, if you don’t get out of my sight in the next two seconds . . .”

  “Jeez, all right. Are you on the rag or something?”

  “What did you just say?” She could feel her eyes practically popping out of her head.

  Bobby vanished like Houdini.

  She found the cigarette she’d dropped. She was lucky it hadn’t started a fire since it had landed next to a bunch of dirty rags that Dick hadn’t put back in the rag box. She took a couple more puffs on the cigarette, then crushed it out and went back into the house. Dick was making dinner and he glanced over at her as she passed through the kitchen but had the good sense not to say anything. She was going to tell him what Bobby had said about her being on the rag and jump all over his ass—she knew Bobby had heard that expression from him—but not right now. She found her purse sitting on the dining room table, extracted her key ring, and went back to the garage.

  There was a metal box on a shelf in the garage that was too high for the boys to reach without a ladder. The box had a padlock on it and she was the only one who had the key. Since she wasn’t much taller than her oldest son, she got the stepladder, climbed up, and took the box off the shelf and put it on the workbench that Dick rarely used.

  Inside the box were three pistols. The first was a nine millimeter SIG Sauer P226 that Dick had bought before they were married. The second gun was a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver that her father had given her one Christmas when he read about a rapist running around Bismarck. The .357 kicked like a mule and was so damn heavy it was like carrying a brick in her purse. The final gun in the box was a li
ttle two-shot Derringer that fired .32 caliber bullets. It weighed less than a pound and was about three and half inches long.

  She bought the Derringer when she’d been running all around the Dakotas on Curtis’s behalf. She’d been in Beulah, a small North Dakota town in a gas-rich area, having dinner alone one night when some drunken ape started hitting on her—and then followed her back to her motel room. She was able to get into her room and lock the door, but the ape started pounding on it and didn’t leave until she called the cops, who took twenty minutes to get there. She purchased the Derringer at an estate sale after her experience in Beulah, so she’d have some protection in the future when she was traveling alone. She thought it was cute and she liked that she could easily hold it in her small right hand.

  But when her oldest son started walking and getting into every drawer and cabinet in the house, she decided she didn’t want the guns in the house or the cars or anyplace where her boys could even remotely get at them. So she took all the guns they owned, dumped them into the lockbox in the garage, and she kept the only key.

  The Derringer was perfect for what she had in mind. It was easy to conceal, it wasn’t registered, and, since it was like a revolver, she didn’t have to worry about shell casings.

  She slipped the Derringer into her back pocket and headed back into the house. When she saw Dick still at the counter making dinner, she took a breath and told herself she needed to quit acting like such a bitch.

  “Honey, is there anything I can do to help?” she said.

  29