House Rivals

by Mike Lawson

  Next, Leonard Curtis did sue her for libel—and Johnson’s lawyers responded with a motion for discovery, asking for virtually every document Curtis’s businesses had generated in the last two years. Curtis’s lawyers were now fighting Johnson’s lawyers to keep her from getting the documents. Curtis also had courts in three states issue restraining orders against Johnson, specifying she couldn’t call him or come within a hundred yards of him. These orders were granted—and frankly, ­reasonable—because for a while Johnson was essentially stalking Curtis.

  When Curtis’s lawsuit didn’t stop her, they tried to scare her by having a crude, rough-sounding guy make harassing phone calls, saying he was going to kill her if he lost his job because of the things she was doing. They figured Johnson had to know there were violent yokels all over Montana and the Dakotas and they all owned guns. In other words, they thought she’d take the threats seriously—and maybe she did—but she didn’t stop going after Curtis.

  Then Marjorie had an idea she was sure would work. Using Curtis’s money, she convinced an editor at a major East Coast newspaper to offer Johnson a job investigating coal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky—places where they literally blew the tops off mountains to get at seams of coal. Marjorie figured that working for a legitimate newspaper on a big-time environmental issue would appeal to Johnson’s ego as well as her crusading nature. But that didn’t work either because by this point, Johnson’s primary focus wasn’t the environment—her mission was to nail Leonard Curtis.

  Marjorie and Bill’s next move was to have Gordy completely fuck up Johnson’s website, figuring she wouldn’t have the resources to fight off a cyberattack. They also had three more people file lawsuits against her, thinking that she wouldn’t have the money to fight four lawsuits simultaneously. And that’s when they found out that the twenty-two-year-old college dropout was extraordinarily rich thanks to her dead mother. Sarah’s lawyers were now doing everything they could to turn the lawsuits into jury trials where Leonard Curtis would be subpoenaed to testify.

  The last thing they did was send three guys to rough her up. This had been Bill’s idea. Marjorie said at the time she thought it was a mistake but Bill said that a young woman, all on her own, might be brave when it came to lawsuits and harassing phone calls but real, physical violence was a whole different story. So Bill told the guy he hired not to hurt her, but to do his best to scare the living shit out of her. But, as Marjorie had predicted, all the assault did was piss Johnson off and the cops were now looking for the people who had assaulted her.

  “So what are you going to do next?” Curtis asked, as they sat there drinking ice-cold coffee.

  “Mr. Curtis,” Marjorie said, “I know you don’t want to hear this but I really think we ought to just leave that crazy girl alone. Nobody’s listening to her. Nobody takes her seriously. Nobody reads her stupid blog.”

  “I read her damn blog!” Curtis said, smacking one of his small fists on the table. “I want her stopped.”

  “Okay,” Bill said, seeing that Marjorie was getting nowhere and just making Curtis angry. “We’ll regroup. We’ll come up with something.”

  “Yeah, well, if you don’t, I’ll find somebody who can,” Curtis said.

  That was the very last thing Bill and Marjorie wanted to hear. They knew Curtis was happy with their work, but they also knew he wouldn’t hesitate to fire them. Curtis fired people the way cats shed fur, and they knew they’d never find jobs that paid anywhere near what Curtis was paying them.

  7

  Curtis left the Pirogue Grille at nine thirty to go back to the Radisson. Curtis was a man who went to bed every night at ten p.m. and he allowed nothing to keep him up any later. As soon as he left, Marjorie and Bill ordered drinks—a Glenlivet neat for Bill, a glass of good Merlot for Marjorie. They never drank when they were with Curtis because Curtis didn’t drink.

  “What are we going to do?” Bill said.

  “I don’t know,” Marjorie said. They sat there for a couple of minutes, sipping their drinks, saying nothing, as they tried to come up with an idea to stop Johnson that might actually work. Finally Marjorie said, “There’s always Murdock.”

  “Aw, Jesus, Marjorie. Murdock? Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am. I don’t want to do that but . . . Johnson’s irrational. She’s insane! She’s been butting her head against a brick wall for two years, yet she refuses to stop. She’s too rich to buy off and she’s too crazy to scare off. I mean, she’s like those fucking Muslim suicide bombers: she’s willing to blow herself up to blow you up. How can you deal with a person like that?”

  “But Murdock?” Bill said.

  “Hey! If you got a better idea, spit it out.”

  When three men in ski masks terrorized Sarah Johnson in a dark parking lot, the short ringleader had been Bill’s ex-brother-in-law. His name was Tim Sloan, and Bill could understand why his sister had divorced him. Tim was a lazy, shiftless, useless slug whose primary source of income—after Bill’s sister divorced him—was a Social Security disability check for a nonexistent back problem. But Tim wasn’t totally stupid and he was always desperate for money as long as he didn’t have to work too hard for it, so Bill used him occasionally.

  Bill and Marjorie’s territory covered three large states, and Tim would be sent to pick up documents that they didn’t want emailed as emails left a traceable record. A couple of times, Bill had Tim volunteer to help out on the campaigns of candidates Curtis opposed hoping Tim might overhear something that would give Curtis’s guy an advantage. One time they had Tim deliver photos to a certain judge when they wanted to impress upon him the inadvisability of a ruling he’d been about to make. And Tim was the gravelly voiced man who had harassed Johnson with nasty phone calls, threatening to kill her if he lost a job that he didn’t have.

  But Murdock was in a completely different league than Tim Sloan.

  The first and only time Bill and Marjorie had used Murdock was six years ago. It was so long ago they could almost convince themselves they’d never used him at all. A lawsuit Curtis couldn’t afford to lose had made it all the way to the South Dakota Supreme Court and if the court ruled against him, it was going to cost him millions. To make matters worse, this occurred during the great recession of 2008 and even Curtis was having financial problems.

  The problem was that there were five justices on the South Dakota Supreme Court and Bill and Marjorie knew that two were going to rule against Curtis, two were going to rule in his favor, but they had no idea what the fifth justice was going to do. The swing judge was an unpredictable screwball named James Wainwright III who had no consistent record on anything. It was as if he flipped a coin every time he made a decision. To make matters worse, Bill and Marjorie hadn’t been able to find anything they could use to persuade Wainwright. He was rich and, as best as they’d been able to tell after having a private detective watch him for two months, had no vices they could use to control him.

  If Wainwright was gone, however, the governor would appoint his replacement. Curtis had no strong hold over the South Dakota governor but the governor was “gas-friendly” and Bill and Marjorie were about ninety percent sure he would pick a guy who would rule in Curtis’s favor. So they just had to get Wainwright off the bench—they had to—and after everything else they’d tried had failed, Curtis told them to call Murdock. They had no idea how Curtis knew Murdock and Curtis, being Curtis, wouldn’t tell them. It was apparent, however, that he’d used the man before.

  Bill met with Murdock in a steam room at a small gym in Denver clad in nothing but a white towel, a practical precaution to ensure Bill wasn’t wearing a wire. Murdock turned out to be an average-looking guy of indeterminate age; he could have been forty-five or a decade older. He had receding dark hair, brown eyes, a bony nose, and thin lips. He was in good shape but he wasn’t physically impressive; he wasn’t any more muscular than Bill. Nor did he look the way Bill
imagined a contract killer would look: evil, steely-eyed, cold as ice. If Murdock had said that he sold vacuum cleaners at Sears, Bill would have believed him.

  Bill told Murdock that Judge Wainwright of South Dakota needed to have a fatal accident within the next three months, but the judge couldn’t be obviously murdered. Murder could lead to all sorts of problems, and the last thing Curtis wanted was some hotshot law enforcement team investigating Wainwright’s death.

  Six weeks later, Wainwright drowned. He owned a cabin in the Black Hills and liked to fish for trout in the small streams near his place. His body was found lying in less than a foot of water in Spearfish Creek. It appeared as if he’d slipped, hit his head on a rock, fell into the water unconscious, and drowned. He was still holding his fishing rod in his hand when he was found. The rock that he’d smacked his head on was lying near him, his blood was on it, and there was no evidence that anyone else had been with the judge—such as fingerprints on the rock or footprints that didn’t belong to the judge or tire tracks from a second vehicle parked near the scene—at least no evidence that a local county sheriff could find.

  But Bill didn’t want to bring in Murdock to deal with Sarah Johnson. He’d lost ten pounds and didn’t sleep soundly for three months after Wainwright’s accident. “Goddamnit, there has to be another way,” he said to Marjorie.

  “Bill,” Marjorie said, “I don’t want to do this either, but I’ve got two boys to send to college one day, and my house isn’t going to be paid off for another fifteen years. I am not going to let that girl destroy my life.”

  Before Bill could respond, Marjorie’s phone beeped the signal for a text message. “It’s Heckler,” she told Bill. “Let me see what he wants.” Marjorie left the bar to call Heckler, and the reason she did was because she needed a cigarette. She never smoked around her kids but she’d sneak one every once in a while when she was under stress.

  Heckler was a local private detective who they were paying to watch Sarah Johnson. He’d been following her for the last three months, although he couldn’t stick with her twenty-four hours a day as he needed to sleep sometime. Heckler also recorded her cell phone calls and used the GPS feature in Johnson’s phone to keep tabs on her location. When it came to technology, Heckler was a dinosaur but Gordy—Bill and Marjorie’s grass-smoking associate—had downloaded the necessary spyware onto Johnson’s phone.

  Marjorie had actually been amazed to learn that there were companies that legally sold software that could be used to monitor cell phone calls and track people’s movements. According to these companies’ websites, you had to have physical access to the phone you wanted to monitor and, of course, the owner’s permission, but Gordy was smart enough to load the spyware onto Johnson’s phone by embedding the software in an email he sent to her. Marjorie had told Bill she was thinking about having Gordy put the software on her kids’ phones so she’d always know where they were and what sort of mischief they might be planning.

  Thinking about getting Murdock involved, Bill decided to have another scotch. He looked around for the waitress and didn’t see her, so he walked up to the bar. He ordered a drink from the bartender, then glanced down the bar. Aw, shit. There was a woman sitting there—glaring at him. He’d slept with her once, couldn’t remember her name, and he hadn’t ever called her back after the one time. He was trying to make up his mind if he should go say hello or just ignore her when Marjorie came back into the bar. She walked over to him and said, “Come on. We don’t have time for you to get laid.”

  They sat back down at the table and Marjorie said, “Johnson met with a guy tonight.”

  “You mean she had a date?”

  “No. Heckler said the guy was older than her. Heckler said he was a hard-looking SOB. Those were his words. He said Johnson and the guy had a drink together and she left an hour later. Heckler said it didn’t look like a social thing.”

  “So who is he?”

  “His name’s Joe DeMarco. Heckler got his name when he called Johnson. Then Heckler followed him back to his motel and paid a clerk to get a peek at the registration form.” Marjorie paused before she said, “DeMarco’s from Washington, Bill. I mean, D.C. not the state.”

  “D.C.?”

  “Yeah. We better find out who he is before you talk to Murdock.”

  Bill didn’t bother to say that he hadn’t yet agreed to talk to Murdock. All he said was, “I think you’re right. I just hope he isn’t carrying a badge. Curtis will go through the roof if he is.”

  8

  DeMarco stopped at a liquor store after his meeting with Sarah, bought a bottle of Grey Goose, and went back to his room at the Holiday Inn Express. The ice machine on his floor wasn’t working and he had to go up two floors before he found one that was. He dropped ice into a plastic glass, added two ounces of vodka, and plopped onto the bed with his laptop.

  For the next hour he read Sarah Johnson’s blog. He stopped when it felt like his brain cells were turning to mush and starting to dissolve. The girl may have been smart but she couldn’t tell a story. She wrote in convoluted sentences that went on forever and sometimes a single paragraph would fill an entire page. She was repetitive—making the same argument over and over again in case the reader didn’t understand it the first time—and her stories were filled with trivial details that she apparently thought were necessary to prove she’d done her research or to validate whatever she was saying. She used capital letters to emphasize her points, and every other sentence had some phrase or word capitalized and, as if that wasn’t enough, sometimes double exclamation points served for periods.

  But the gist of the blog was basically what she’d told him in Minervas: Leonard Curtis, and the many companies he owned, had incredible luck when it came to state laws and rulings handed down in various courtrooms. However, there was nothing even close to proof that Curtis had done anything illegal. In one case, Sarah concluded a state legislator in Montana—who was also a wheat farmer—had changed his vote based solely on the fact that the man got a good deal on a farm implement called a seed drill.

  DeMarco had no idea what a seed drill was, but the story about the legislator and the seed drill illustrated the depths Sarah went to in order to get information and, at the same time, how tentative her conclusions could be. In this case, Sarah learned a Democrat named Reynolds had strayed from the party line and changed his vote on a bill proposing to increase taxes on natural gas to aid school funding. She went to see Reynolds and asked him why—and he refused to talk to her.

  So Sarah started talking to other Democrats who had a stake in the bill to see if they could explain Reynolds’s treachery. One of the legislators, a man named Franklin, who was also a farmer, was quoted in Sarah’s blog saying: “I actually wonder if it had anything to do with that seed drill he got at Colson’s for ten grand. I mean, I’ve never heard of a guy getting a deal like that, and he was bragging about it, so it wasn’t like he was trying to keep it secret, but it was right after that he started arguing against the bill.”

  When Sarah asked Franklin if he was saying that he thought Reynolds had been bribed, Franklin started backpedaling, saying he wasn’t about to accuse a fellow Democrat of doing anything illegal.

  It took Sarah a week to learn that Colson’s was a farm that had gone into foreclosure, and that Curtis had bought the land and then hired a broker to sell off the farm equipment. One of the items being sold was a practically new White 8186 seed drill that would normally sell for about twenty-five thousand. Based solely on this information—the fact that Reynolds changed his vote on a bill Curtis didn’t want passed and was given an extraordinary deal on a piece of equipment that Curtis owned—she concluded the seed drill was a bribe.

  The problem, DeMarco immediately realized, as would any other lawyer, was that no one could prove that Reynolds had done anything illegal. Reynolds would argue that he was just a shrewd negotiator and Curtis’s broker didn’t understand
the value of the item he was selling but, whatever the case, the price he got for the used seed drill had nothing to do with his vote.

  In another section of her rambling blog, Sarah listed by name every politician and law enforcement person she’d contacted in an attempt to get these individuals to investigate Curtis. She called them obtuse, lazy, and blatantly corrupt. The girl did not know how to make friends and influence people, and DeMarco had another image of Sarah as Joan of Arc on a big white stallion, dressed in chain mail, wielding a broadsword, whacking the heads off English horsemen. And a few French horsemen, too, if they got in her way.

  Which reminded him: he needed to tell Sarah not to mention him or Mahoney in her blog. He’d tell her if she did, that he’d walk and she’d be on her own again. The last thing DeMarco needed was to have his presence in Bismarck advertised, and Mahoney would go ballistic if his name appeared in her blog without his permission. The problem was, DeMarco wasn’t sure he could control Sarah; he wasn’t sure anyone could.

  Tall, pretty, blond Sarah reminded him in some ways of dark, dour Ralph Nader. Nader was old now, around eighty, but he came to national prominence at the young age of thirty-one when he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed. Like Sarah, Nader was passionate, fearless, insensitive, and didn’t care whose feet he stepped on. But in spite of a tendency toward bluntness that bordered on rudeness, DeMarco liked the girl. When he was her age, he was still in college and spent more time chasing coeds and drinking than he did studying, while here was Sarah, trying to make the world a better place. However, he had no idea how to help her. Nor did he have any idea how to keep her from getting killed if somebody really wanted to kill her. And after spending only one hour with Sarah Johnson, he knew she wasn’t going to give up until either she was dead or Curtis was in jail.