House Rivals

by Mike Lawson

  DeMarco sat in his car and enviously watched through the windows of the restaurant as Logan ate breakfast. The waitress—who looked like she was about nineteen—stopped at his table three or four times, and DeMarco could tell by the way she was laughing and touching him on the shoulder that she was flirting with him. So much for Logan being gay.

  After an hour, Logan left the restaurant and DeMarco followed him to a small strip mall. There was a Subway shop, a HairMasters, and a FedEx-Kinko’s in the mall. The fourth storefront had a sign near the door too small for DeMarco to read from where he was parked, and the fifth office wasn’t identified in any way. It had a dark green door with a mail slot and a single large picture window but the blinds were closed so he couldn’t see inside. Logan parked next to a black Jeep Cherokee and entered the unmarked office.

  Now what?

  “Guess where he is now,” Heckler said.

  “I don’t want to guess,” Marjorie growled.

  “He’s parked across the street from your office. What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know. Just stay on him.” Marjorie disconnected the call.

  Now what? In the two years Sarah Johnson had been writing her pointless blog, she’d named Leonard Curtis and numerous lawmakers, lawyers, and judges—but Johnson had never, ever mentioned her or Bill. So Johnson, as near as Marjorie could tell, never had any idea that she and Bill worked for Curtis—but somehow this son of a bitch, DeMarco, had found them in less than a week.

  DeMarco locating them obviously had something to do with his trip to Great Falls because right after he returned from there, he started following Bill. Marjorie tried to think who DeMarco might have talked to in northwestern Montana but no one immediately came to mind. There were at least a dozen folks in the Great Falls area that they’d done business with over the years.

  In order to identify who DeMarco might have talked to, Marjorie would probably have to go through Johnson’s fucking blog again—hundreds and hundreds of pages, probably a million goddamn words. Marjorie had always thought that Johnson’s blog should have been used by the CIA to torture terrorists. She could envision some guy in a cell down there at Guantánamo Bay—strapped naked to a chair, dogs snapping at his nuts, a bag over his head—as Johnson’s blog was read to him until he either confessed or went insane.

  So what should she do? The right answer was probably: do nothing. If Johnson hadn’t been able to build a legal case against Curtis in two years, then DeMarco probably couldn’t, either. On the other hand, DeMarco was a guy who had some political clout. What if he got some law enforcement agency, or maybe the North Dakota attorney general, to start investigating her and Bill to see if they could be linked to any of the nonsense in Johnson’s blog? They probably wouldn’t be able to prove that she and Bill had done anything illegal, but if the cops were watching them and prying into their business then that could render them virtually useless insofar as working for Curtis—and then Curtis would fire them.

  She needed to find out what DeMarco was up to—and she was beginning to believe that having Heckler follow him wasn’t going to tell her what she needed to know. Then she thought: Why not just ask the damn guy what he was doing? What did she have to lose?

  She told Bill—who was acting more like his old self this morning, alert and cheerful and not hungover—that DeMarco had followed him from his home to their office this morning. She thought for a minute that Bill might throw up.

  “Do you think he knows what we did about . . . You know?”

  Bill was asking if DeMarco knew that they’d hired Murdock to kill Sarah Johnson—but he was afraid to say the words out loud.

  “Bill, if he knew anything the cops would be parked across the street, not him. So get a grip on yourself.” Marjorie stood up. “I’m going to ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing, following you around.”

  “Marge, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Marjorie didn’t care what he thought. She said, “I’m going to invite him into the office and talk to him but I want you to keep your mouth shut. Your head still isn’t screwed on right.”

  DeMarco saw a woman come out of the office that Logan had entered. She was about five foot four, busty, and had short brown hair. She was cute. She crossed the strip mall parking lot—she had a bouncy, energetic way of walking—stopped at the curb, looked both ways before she crossed the street, and came toward his car. She made a motion for him to roll down the window.

  She smiled at him. “Hi. Why don’t you come on into the office so we can talk, Mr. DeMarco? There’s no point in you sitting out here in your car or following my partner around.”

  How the hell did she know who he was? And how did she know that he’d been following Logan? But instead of asking those questions, he said, “Sure. Let’s talk.”

  He was thinking: This could actually be a good thing as he hadn’t been sure what to do next. Plus, it would give him a chance to see how hard it would be to break into the office if he decided to do that.

  He followed her into her office. Bill Logan was sitting behind a desk, and he raised his hand in a little hello gesture when he saw DeMarco. Logan was trying to act as if he didn’t have a worry in the world, but ­DeMarco could see the tension in his eyes. His partner, however, seemed genuinely relaxed.

  He noticed that the office was a lot like his office in the Capitol: cheap furniture, not much of it, and nothing fancy. The file cabinets they had were identical to the one in his office: four drawers, constructed of sheet metal, and the same shade of gunmetal gray.

  When DeMarco first went to work for Mahoney, he apprenticed under a guy named Jake, an ex-Boston cop who used to do for Mahoney what DeMarco now did. Jake died of a well-deserved heart attack about six months after DeMarco was hired. One day, DeMarco discovered that the file cabinet in their shared office contained nothing but a bottle of Maker’s Mark and phone directories. When he asked why there wasn’t anything in it, Jake’s response was: “They can’t subpoena air.” ­DeMarco was willing to bet that the file cabinets in Logan and Dawkins’s office were similar: there’d be nothing in them that would cause them a problem if the cops obtained a warrant to examine their contents.

  DeMarco wondered how much else he might have in common with Logan and Dawkins.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. DeMarco?” Dawkins asked.

  “Sure,” DeMarco said.

  Dawkins poured him a cup and said, “Well, you already know Bill and I’m assuming you know who I am as well. I’m Marjorie. And would you mind if I called you Joe?”

  “Joe would be fine,” DeMarco said.

  “So, Joe, what’s going on?”

  “How do you know who I am?” DeMarco asked.

  Marjorie smiled; she had a great smile. “Joe, as the sports guys say, you’re in our ballpark. We’re the home team. We have the home field advantage.”

  DeMarco nodded. “Okay, I’ll tell you what’s going on. There’s a guy named Doug Thorpe over in Montana. He’s a fly-fishing guide. He also served with John Mahoney in Vietnam and saved Mahoney’s life a couple of times. I assume you know the John Mahoney I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah, but so what?” Marjorie said.

  “Doug Thorpe is—or was—Sarah Johnson’s grandfather. He called Mahoney last week and said that somebody had assaulted Sarah and made death threats against her because she was accusing Leonard ­Curtis—your boss—of bribing politicians.”

  “What makes you think we work for Leonard Curtis?” Marjorie said.

  DeMarco laughed. “I can tell you I didn’t find out from reading your website. What a pile of bullshit that is. So I had someone take a peek at your tax returns and found out that Curtis is the guy who pays your salaries.”

  “What authority do you have for looking at our returns?” Logan said and Marjorie whipped her head around to face Logan and said, “Bill!”—a
nd to DeMarco that sounded like: Bill, keep your mouth shut.

  DeMarco didn’t answer Logan’s question. Instead he said, “Anyway, Mahoney sent me out here to find out what was going on, and the only reason he did was because Thorpe’s his friend. Then Sarah was killed, which was the stupidest thing you people could have done.”

  “Hey! You watch your mouth,” Marjorie said. “We didn’t have anything to do with that poor girl’s death. We knew about all the wild accusations she’d made against Mr. Curtis, of course, and he sued her because she was saying things about him that were untrue. A couple other people sued her as well. But that’s all Mr. Curtis did and nobody who works for Curtis, including me or Bill, made any death threats and we sure as hell didn’t kill her.”

  Before DeMarco could speak, she lowered her voice and said in a calmer tone, “Joe, Bill and I are political consultants. We keep our eye on state politics. We advise Mr. Curtis about pending legislation. We try to convince politicians to support his businesses, and we support politicians who feel the same way we do about certain issues. And that’s it. That’s all we do. We don’t go around killing people. We talk to people.”

  As if she hadn’t spoken, DeMarco said, “The reason why killing Sarah was so dumb was because she couldn’t prove anything. She had no evidence that any crimes had been committed. She couldn’t get anybody with a badge to listen to her. But now things have changed. Drastically.

  “Right now, thanks to Mahoney, I have my very own FBI agent looking into Sarah’s murder. In other words, I have a pit bull with a badge and a gun. And Mahoney is going to call up the governor of Montana, who’s a Democrat, and tell him to get his attorney general to take a look at what Curtis has been doing.

  “Unfortunately, for Mahoney that is, the governors of North and South Dakota are currently Republicans, but all three states have U.S. senators who are Democrats, and Mahoney’s going to talk to these senators and tell them to get engaged. And in the end, because of all the pressure being brought to bear on the local cops and the FBI, they’re going to break someone.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Logan said.

  “With Sarah Johnson,” DeMarco said, “you had a young woman with no professional credentials, who hadn’t even graduated from college, and who couldn’t get anyone to take her seriously. But now it’s a whole different ball game. The FBI is now poring over Sarah’s blog like it’s the fucking Warren Report. They’re going to start looking at people’s finances and phone calls and emails because, unlike Sarah, they have the power to get subpoenas and search warrants. Eventually, they’ll find somebody who’s committed a crime and they’ll break that person and he’ll point the finger at you two to keep from going to jail. Then guess what’s going to happen next?”

  Neither Bill nor Marjorie guessed. Logan just sat there looking scared; Dawkins had a little smile on her face, as if she found DeMarco amusing.

  “What’s going to happen,” DeMarco said, “is one of you is going to turn on the other one to keep from going to jail. That’s what always happens because the FBI is a master at this sort of thing. They get one guy to give up the guy he works for, then that guy gives up the guy he works for. That’s how they get all the mafia guys. That’s how they get the guys who engage in insider trading and bank fraud and shit like that. And that’s how they’re going to get you. One of you is going to crack and give up the other one, and then that person is going to give up Curtis—unless Curtis has that person killed first.”

  DeMarco stood up. “Let me tell you one other little thing. The FBI and the Justice Department care about the law and they follow the rules when it comes to obtaining evidence and interrogating folks. Well, I don’t give a shit about the law. The only thing I care about is that I liked Sarah and I like her grandfather, and I’m going to nail you two and I don’t care how I do it. Thanks for the coffee, Marjorie.”

  17

  “We’re fucked,” Bill said.

  Marge had been sitting there, about to call Heckler to tell him to stick with DeMarco. Now she shot up from her chair like it was spring loaded. For just an instant, she considered picking up the stapler on her desk and flinging it at Bill’s head as hard as she could.

  “Listen to me, Bill.” She almost said, Listen to me, you idiot. “That little speech that DeMarco just made was total bullshit, and the only reason he made it is because he’s hoping one of us will panic. DeMarco has nothing! And the FBI will find nothing. The kind of things we do for Curtis are nowhere near as bad as the crap that goes on in D.C. They have more lobbyists in Washington than they have politicians, and they throw millions at those politicians. When was the last time a D.C. lobbyist was arrested? And what the hell have we done? Arranged for some guy to get his septic system fixed without a permit? Big fucking deal. Nobody’s going to jail.”

  “Yeah, but he knows who we are.”

  “Shut up and come outside with me.”

  “Can’t you wait until we’ve finished talking to have a cigarette?”

  “That’s not why we’re going outside.”

  Once they got outside, Marjorie did light up a Marlboro, however. “We need to be careful about what we say in the office. Thanks to DeMarco, those FBI weasels might try to tap our phones or bug the office.”

  “But they’d have to get a warrant to do that.”

  Marjorie just looked at him for a moment, then shook her head. “Sometimes I wonder what planet you live on. The FBI will use the Patriot Act or anything else they can think of to get a warrant if John Mahoney is pressuring them. So I don’t want you to say anything on the phone or in the office about Sarah Johnson or Murdock or Curtis or anything else that somebody could consider the least bit illegal. We’re going to keep doing what we’ve always done but we’re going to be as squeaky clean as . . . Well, as I don’t know what, but squeaky clean. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah. But what do we tell Curtis?”

  “I don’t know. I have to think about that. But at some point, we need to let him know about DeMarco.” She dropped her cigarette on the ground and crushed it out. “It’s Curtis’s fault we’re in this mess. We never would have done anything about Johnson if he hadn’t forced us. But that’s water under the bridge, so you get your head on straight. You don’t do anything out of the ordinary. You just go about your business. If the FBI tries to talk to you, you don’t talk. They can’t force you to talk to them. If they drag you in for questioning, you say you want a lawyer, then you call me and after that you keep your mouth shut.”

  Bill went back inside looking uncertain and queasy. Marjorie lit another cigarette—she was smoking way too much lately—and called Heckler. She told him to stick with DeMarco then asked, “You know anybody who can tell if our phones or our office is bugged?”

  “Maybe. There’s a guy I know in Minneapolis who used to do stuff like that. I mean, he used to bug phones and offices for the cops. He was a contractor, I guess. You want me to call him?”

  “Yeah, do that.”

  Marjorie knew, however, that their office being bugged wasn’t her biggest problem. Even DeMarco and the FBI weren’t her biggest problems. The big problems were Bill and Curtis. Bill was a weak link. He was drinking too much and he was a nervous wreck because he was an accomplice to Johnson’s murder and was terrified he might get caught.

  Curtis was a different story. There wasn’t anything weak about him. He might call Murdock himself if he thought she and Bill had become liabilities.

  18

  “Agent, it’s Joe DeMarco. I was thinking maybe we could meet for lunch and compare notes.”

  “Is that right?” Westerberg said. “Does this mean you’re going to tell me why you wanted Bill Logan’s address?”

  “Yeah, sure,” DeMarco said, like he was the most reasonable guy in the world.

  “Well, we may as well meet because if I keep reading this blog my eyes are going to start bleeding.”
>
  DeMarco met Westerberg at a place called the Blarney Stone Pub on Main Street, about a mile from the Capitol. The Blarney Stone had redbrick walls, old hardwood floors, a long, dark bar, and twenty different beers on tap. Behind the bar was a painting of a cheerful-looking bearded Irishman wearing a red beret and toasting the patrons with a frothy pint of Guinness.

  DeMarco arrived before Westerberg, took a seat at a table near the bar, and she arrived five minutes later. As she came toward him, DeMarco couldn’t help but appreciate that she had a nice, trim figure and outstanding legs. She was probably a jogger. She also looked tired, and DeMarco suspected she was working hard because she wanted to go home. She was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing the evening DeMarco first met her: dark suit, white blouse, except the tie-like scarf was absent. She was probably wearing the same clothes because when she flew or drove to Bismarck from Minneapolis she hadn’t been expecting to stay for long.

  DeMarco ordered a cheeseburger for lunch; Westerberg asked for a chicken salad. As much as DeMarco wanted to sample one of the many beers the Blarney Stone offered, he followed Westerberg’s lead and had an ice tea. After the waitress had taken their order, she said to DeMarco: “So? What’s going on?”

  DeMarco told her about Janet Tyler and how Logan convinced her to stop pursuing a lawsuit against Curtis in return for keeping her son out of jail, and that Tyler was the one who gave him Logan’s name. He concluded, saying: “Bill Logan and Marjorie Dawkins are Curtis’s go-to guys. They’re the ones who have been going around bribing people.”

  “Yeah, I figured that might be the case when I found out they were lobbyists and worked for Curtis. But what Tyler told you isn’t proof that Logan did anything illegal or that he conspired in Johnson’s death?”