House Rivals

by Mike Lawson

  “Is she a journalist?”

  “No, not really. She doesn’t have a job. She dropped out of college her sophomore year because she couldn’t figure out what she wanted to do, hooked up with some environmental group, and then started doing her own thing. I guess you’d call her an activist. But the thing about Sarah is she’s rich. Really rich.

  “My daughter was as smart as a whip and she bought stock in Microsoft and Apple and Starbucks and any other company you can think of that’s hit it big in the last thirty or forty years. Jenny just knew how to make money. She always managed to buy the stock when it was worth pennies and always sold it before it tanked. And real estate. She’d buy a plot of useless land and next thing you know somebody’s offering her ten times what she paid for it. Jenny was just an incredible woman; I don’t know why she married that idiot flyboy.

  “Well, Sarah’s smart, too. Not as smart as her mom, but smart. But the main thing about Sarah is she’s stubborn. And because she’s rich, she can afford to be as stubborn as she wants. My daughter was the smartest person I’ve ever known; Sarah’s the most hardheaded person I’ve ever known.”

  “You told Mahoney that someone was threatening to kill her?” ­DeMarco said.

  “Yeah. About a year ago, she must have hit a nerve with somebody and she started getting these harassing phone calls. This guy would call her two, three times a day and usually about two or three in the morning. He’d say she was telling lies that could cost people their jobs, and if he lost his job, he was going to kill her. The guy called her so much she changed her phone number, but somehow he was able to get her new number.”

  “How did he know she was telling anybody anything?” DeMarco said.

  “She’s got one of those blogs on the Internet and she writes about all the stuff she says is going on. I can’t imagine many people read it because . . . Well, please don’t tell Sarah I said this, but she’s a horrible writer. Anyway, she’s been harassed with phone calls, they’ve tried to buy her off, and they’ve filed lawsuits.” Thorpe laughed. “These guys must not know how rich Sarah is, because she was actually delighted when they filed the lawsuits. She said, bring ’em on. She was just looking for the opportunity to have her lawyers depose these guys or make them testify in court. The lawsuits are moving forward, but you know how the courts are. It’ll be months or even years before the suits are settled.”

  “Who’s they? Who filed the suits?” DeMarco asked.

  Thorpe waved the question away. “Talk to Sarah. She can give you the details, and I don’t really care about the lawsuits. If that’s all that was going on, I never would have called John. But a week ago it got serious.

  “She was leaving this diner late at night, and these three guys come up to her in the parking lot wearing ski masks. They drug her back behind the diner, knocked her down, touched her in places they shouldn’t have, and told her to quit telling all the lies she’s been telling. They said the next time they’d take her into the woods, have some fun with her, and leave her there for the animals to eat. They didn’t hurt her but they scared the hell out of her.”

  “Did she call the cops?”

  “Sure, but the cops couldn’t find ’em. If I ever find ’em, I’ll kill ’em.”

  He said this in a soft voice but DeMarco had no doubt the man meant what he’d just said. I’ll kill ’em wasn’t hyperbole, not when it came from Doug Thorpe.

  Thorpe crushed the beer can he was holding like it was made of paper. “I just want her to stop, DeMarco. I think she’s tilting at windmills and isn’t going to accomplish a damn thing. She’s been at this for almost two years, and as near as I can tell, nobody believes her. At least nobody with any authority, like a state attorney general or a federal prosecutor. But she’s not going to stop. I know her. She’ll keep pushing until somebody does kill her. What I’m hoping you can do is figure out what’s going on and then get John involved. John’s got the clout to force somebody with a badge to help her.”

  “I’ll go see her, Mr. Thorpe. Where does she live?”

  “She has a house in Billings. In fact, thanks to her mom, she’s got property all over the place. But she’s in Bismarck right now. She spends so much time there she leased an apartment.”

  “Oh,” DeMarco said. “How far is Bismarck from here?”

  “Four, four and a half hours.”

  “Four and a half hours?”

  “Yeah. If you leave now you can be there by supper time. I’ll send her an email and tell her you’re coming.” Thorpe shook his head. “I’d call her but she’s become so paranoid she thinks her calls are being monitored. And, hell, maybe she’s right.”

  4

  Bill and Marjorie met Curtis at a restaurant called the Pirogue Grille near the Radisson where Curtis was staying. The Pirogue Grille was an elegant place with old redbrick walls, dark furnishings, intricate brass chandeliers, and eye-catching artwork on the walls. It had an excellent wine list and a menu that included venison and buffalo as well as more traditional fare. But the menu and the elegance were wasted on Curtis, a man who usually had a bowl of soup for dinner. If a restaurant had a children’s menu, Curtis would often order from it not only because the portions were small but because the kiddie meals cost less.

  Curtis was a complete mystery to Bill and Marjorie. The man was seventy-four years old, worth over a billion dollars, and if the insurance actuaries were right, he was most likely entering his last decade. A man with that much money and that little time left on earth ought to be enjoying all the money he’d made, but it seemed as if Curtis had only one interest in life: making more money.

  He stayed in modestly priced hotels like the Radisson. He didn’t drive a luxury car. He didn’t own a yacht. He did own a jet, but only because he needed one to get around the country and didn’t like to be tied to the airlines’ schedules. His clothes looked like the sort you’d buy at Macy’s—nice enough but nothing fancy; Bill spent more on his clothes every year than Curtis did. In the time they’d worked for him, as far as they knew, he’d never taken a vacation. He didn’t go on cruises. He didn’t play golf. He didn’t have any hobbies. He spent most of his life on his plane or in conference rooms and law offices. What in the hell was the point of living that way?

  When they first met him, Marjorie tried to get him to talk about himself and his family. They knew he was married and had been married to the same poor woman for almost fifty years. He had two children. His son was still a bachelor and a doctor in Austin. His daughter was the mother of two, like Marjorie, and owned an art gallery in Dallas. But even as good as Marjorie was at getting people to talk about themselves, she couldn’t draw Curtis out. When he was with them the only thing he wanted to talk about was whatever problem he was having at the time that was preventing him from making more money. Marjorie eventually stopped asking how his wife, kids, and grandkids were doing. She came to the conclusion that Curtis honestly didn’t care how they were doing.

  Curtis was a small, thin man, about five foot six. His body was almost bird-like and his head seemed disproportionately large in comparison to his slight frame. The little hair he had left was white and wispy, his eyes were watery and pale blue. He had hearing aids in both ears. He almost always wore suits but instead of a dress shirt he usually wore polo shirts or golf shirts under the suit jacket. He’d been born and raised in Texas—his home and headquarters were in Houston—but he didn’t have a Texas accent and didn’t wear a Stetson or cowboy boots. His shoes were soft, black Dr. Scholl’s.

  His first name was Leonard and they imagined his wife must call him Leonard or Len or Lenny or something, but the only thing they ever called him was Mr. Curtis. Most often when they met him he was alone but sometimes he was accompanied by a couple of lawyers—and the lawyers always called him Mr. Curtis, too. He was a miserable, miserly, sour old son of a bitch but he paid Bill and Marjorie so damn much that he could have beaten them with a hickor
y stick and they wouldn’t have cared.

  Curtis sipped his coffee, made a face as if it didn’t taste right, and got down to business. “So what’s happening with Morris?”

  Walter Morris was a circuit court judge representing the second judicial district in South Dakota. Circuit court judges in South Dakota ran for election every eight years but Morris was planning to retire when his term was up. This meant that Marjorie and Bill couldn’t use campaign contributions to sway him. Morris also made a decent salary—he wasn’t rich but he was comfortable—and didn’t have any debt.

  Nor did Morris have any vices that they had been able to find, such as cross-dressing or philandering. Marjorie even had Gordy look at his Internet history; if Morris had been looking at child pornography, they would have owned the judge for life—but no such luck.

  The problem with Morris was a pending case having to do with sales tax. One of the many businesses Curtis owned was a company involved in the transportation of refined petroleum products—a pipeline, in other words—that covered thirteen states, including South Dakota. It was a complicated case and the laws governing pipeline taxes were poorly written, but the bottom line was that the company hadn’t been charging sales tax for some of its services and the state treasurer said they should have—meaning the company now owed back taxes. Curtis, naturally, didn’t want to pay the back taxes—Curtis didn’t want to pay taxes on anything—and he and two other pipeline companies filed a lawsuit. The next stop for the lawsuit was Judge Morris’s bench. Win or lose, the case would go to the South Dakota Supreme Court, but Curtis wanted a win in Morris’s court because he was confident the state Supreme Court wouldn’t reverse Morris.

  “He’s been taken care of,” Marjorie said.

  “How?” Curtis asked.

  “The judge,” Marjorie said, “has been looking online at condos in Palm Springs.” Gordy had discovered this while examining the judge’s Internet history. “Apparently he and the missus have a hankering to go south in the winter.”

  “How much will it cost me?” Curtis said.

  “Fifty-two,” Marjorie said.

  “Shit, is that all?” Curtis said.

  It had actually been pretty easy to deal with Morris, a lot easier than Marjorie had expected. She simply sent him an email. In the email, she said she’d heard that he was looking for a California condo, she included a link showing a condo that was much nicer than the ones he’d been looking at on the Internet, and said the owner might be willing to sell for fifteen percent less than the listed price. Curtis would pay the fifteen percent—which was about fifty-two thousand on a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar condo—but she didn’t say that in the email. Marjorie said that if Morris was interested, she’d be happy to meet him for a drink and fill him in on the details.

  When Marjorie met with Morris she went straight at him. The fact that he’d shown up for the meeting was enough for her to know that she didn’t have to pussyfoot around with the guy. She told him that she was hoping for a favorable outcome on the pipeline sales tax case as the man she represented—who she never named—thought that being required to pay back taxes because of a confusing law was not only unfair, but in order to scrape up the money to pay the state, her employer might have to let a few people go.

  “Are you trying to bribe me?” the judge said, trying to act all stern and righteous and shocked—but he couldn’t have been that shocked. He had to know before he met with Marjorie that she was going to want something in return for the great price on the condo.

  “Of course not, Your Honor,” Marjorie had said. “No one is offering you any money. I’m just telling you that you can get a good deal on a Palm Springs condo, a deal you could probably get for yourself if you negotiated hard enough.”

  “And if I don’t rule the way you want?” the judge said.

  “The real estate market in California is pretty volatile, Your Honor. You can never tell what will happen. Why don’t we wait until after you rule on the case and if you’re still interested, give me a call. I can promise you that the buyer won’t sell until after your ruling.”

  The judge didn’t say yes or no. He just sat there scowling as if he smelled something foul in the room, then said he was late for a meeting and left the bar—a bar he’d picked that was about as far from his normal watering hole as it could get. But Marjorie knew what was going to happen next. She had no doubt. Morris would find a way to convince himself that the right thing to do was rule against the tax-grabbing state of South Dakota.

  Ninety percent of the time, Bill and Marjorie behaved the same as most people representing a special interest group or a particular business: They paid attention to legislation that could cost Curtis money or make him money; they supported, through legitimate campaign contributions, politicians likely to favor Curtis; they pooled their resources with like-minded folks to pay for television ads to pass or defeat various bills and get the right people elected; they hired lawyers to throw monkey wrenches into the machinery when a monkey wrench was needed. In other words, just politics as usual. But every once in a while a little extra effort was needed to solve a problem, as was the case with Judge Morris—and this was why Curtis paid them so well.

  You can’t teach people to do what Marjorie and Bill did. They had a God-given instinct, guided by experience, to know who was corruptible and who wasn’t—and then the ability to persuade those people to take a bribe in such a manner that the person wouldn’t feel that he or she had really been bribed at all. Like with Morris.

  Morris could, legitimately, rule either way with regard to the sales tax issue. He just needed to come up with a basis for his ruling that would morally satisfy himself that his decision had nothing to do with the condo but was instead in accordance with the constitution of the great state of South Dakota. In his own mind, Morris wouldn’t even connect his good fortune to the ruling he made. He was a righteous and honorable man—and just lucky when it came to real estate.

  “Now what about the goddamn kid?” Curtis said. “I’ve had enough of that little bitch.”

  5

  Two hours after leaving Doug Thorpe’s cabin, driving eastward on I-94, DeMarco crossed the Montana-North Dakota border and stopped at a scenic vista near Medora, North Dakota (population 112). A sign informed him that he was looking out at the badlands of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. He’d always thought that badlands was just a name for the places where outlaws like Butch Cassidy and Sundance went to hide, but learned that it was a geological term for rocky terrain extensively eroded by wind and water. The sign also said he might see—although he didn’t—bison, feral horses, elk, and prairie dogs. He wanted to see a prairie dog, having never seen one before.

  An hour or so later he stopped again to get the kinks out of his back and to be treated to the sight of Salem Sue: the world’s largest black-and white Holstein cow. It was made of fiberglass, stood thirty-eight feet high, and was fifty feet long. Not a sight he would have seen had he not traveled fifteen hundred miles from Washington, D.C.

  He crossed the Missouri River and drove into Bismarck, almost five hours after leaving Thorpe’s place. The white, nineteen-story state capital building, the tallest structure in the city, dominated the view. He checked into another Holiday Inn Express and his room seemed identical to the one he’d had in Billings. Even the abstract art over the bed was the same.

  He called the number Thorpe had given him for Sarah Johnson and she answered on the second ring. “Hi. This is Joe DeMarco. Would you like to get together to talk?”

  “Yeah, you bet. There’s a Starbucks—”

  “How ’bout picking a place that serves a decent martini. It’s been a long day. I need alcohol, not caffeine.”

  “Oh, well, let’s see.” After a long pause she said, “We could go to Minervas, I guess. It’s near the Capitol. I don’t drink much, but I’ve heard it’s okay.”

  “I’ll find
it,” DeMarco said. “I’ll see you in an hour.” DeMarco figured in a city the size of Bismarck he could get anywhere in an hour. “How will I recognize you?”

  With a name like Minervas, DeMarco had been expecting a traditional tavern: neon Budweiser signs in the windows, photos of the softball team Minveras sponsored behind the bar. Or even better, maybe Minerva was the name of a famous madam back when they were building the railroads across the Great Plains, and the bar would be located in a historical brothel with embossed red wallpaper and portraits of plump naked ladies on the walls. It turned out, however, that Minervas was in a low brick building with a green roof and was a family-friendly restaurant with a well-lit bar, tables set with white cloth napkins, large comfortable booths, and a wholesome girl-next-door-type bartender.

  DeMarco ordered a martini, and about five minutes after his drink arrived, Sarah Johnson walked through the door dressed as she’d told him she would be: blue jeans, a white turtleneck, and a woolly green vest. When he saw her eyes scanning the patrons looking for him, he raised a hand.

  Sarah was six feet tall and according to her grandfather, twenty-two years old. She had alabaster-white skin, blue eyes, a flawless complexion, and butterscotch-blond hair reaching halfway to her shoulders. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was striking because she was young and tall and had a nice figure and just glowed with good health.

  She took a seat across from DeMarco and started off by saying, “Grandpa’s email said you work for John Mahoney and might be able to help me, but he didn’t tell me exactly what you do.”

  “You want a drink?” DeMarco asked.

  “Uh, not really. I’ve got a lot to do tonight, and would just as soon get to the point.”

  “Okay. Well, as for what I do, I don’t actually work for Mahoney. I mean, I’m not on his staff.”