House Rivals

by Mike Lawson

  The bad news was that Curtis was a rich guy, and not a particularly likeable one. Juries tended not to side with unlikeable rich guys, and little Marjorie Dawkins, mother of two, was not only likeable but credible. The other bit of bad news was that at least a few members of any jury selected would have an axe to grind with natural gas drillers for environmental reasons. It would be impossible to impanel a jury without at least one tree hugger.

  So fifty-fifty, the lawyers said. Fortunately they’d have a lot of time to prepare for a trial. Curtis hadn’t been arrested yet and the FBI had a lot of things to do before they arrested him. They had to verify every­thing Dawkins might say at Curtis’s trial to make sure there were no holes in her testimony. Then they had to arrest three legislators and two judges and terrify those people into testifying against Curtis, too. At that point the FBI might arrest Curtis but then the government would subpoena a ton of records from Curtis’s companies to see if they could find a money trail supporting bribery, and they’d depose dozens of witnesses to see what else they might find to strengthen their case. Curtis’s lawyers were guessing a trial was at least two years away—and a lot could happen in two years.

  “What if Dawkins doesn’t testify against me?” Curtis asked.

  “Oh,” one of the lawyers said, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. “Then the likelihood of you being convicted would drop to about twenty percent.”

  Curtis left the lawyers’ office about seven p.m. and stopped and had a bowl of chicken soup before returning to the Radisson. When he got back to his room, he took a flask out of his suitcase. The flask contained cognac that sold for more than a hundred bucks a bottle. People thought he didn’t drink, and he usually didn’t, but every once in a while he’d have one. He poured an inch of cognac into one of the hotel’s plastic drinking glasses and stood looking out the window as he drank.

  A fifty percent chance he goes to jail if Dawkins testifies.

  An eighty percent chance he walks if she doesn’t.

  Hard to argue with arithmetic.

  He still had the option of paying Dawkins a million or so to take the fall for him and refusing to testify against him. But one, he didn’t want to shell out that kind of money and two, such a move could backfire on him. He could just see Dawkins coming wired to a meeting where he would agree to pay her.

  He tossed back the cognac, liking the way it spread its warmth through his chest. He took out the phone Murdock had given him and texted: Where is she?

  In her house.

  Stand by. Tonight may be the night.

  Curtis didn’t normally have a hard time making decisions. He usually made them fast and never second-guessed himself after he made one. But this decision . . . He needed to give it a little more thought—and maybe have one more glass of cognac.

  And that’s when the fire alarm went off.

  33

  A couple hours after he met with DeMarco, and after thinking all that time about what DeMarco had told him, Doug Thorpe called Curtis’s offices in Houston from a pay phone at a gas station a few miles from his cabin. He said he worked for the IRS and needed to see Curtis immediately. The woman he spoke to told him that Curtis wasn’t in Houston, he was in Bismarck, but if there was some sort of tax problem, he needed to talk to Curtis’s tax attorney first. She refused to tell him where Curtis was staying in Bismarck or to give him a phone number for Curtis—but that was okay. Thorpe took off for Bismarck and when he arrived there, five hours later, it was almost eight p.m. He went to a 7-Eleven, got ten dollars’ worth of quarters, and using a pay phone and the directory in the phone booth, he started calling hotels in Bismarck. It only took him forty minutes to learn that Curtis was a guest at the Radisson.

  Thorpe drove over to the Radisson. He knew what Curtis looked like, he’d found his picture on the Internet: a scrawny little guy with sparse, white cotton candy hair. The problem was he didn’t know what room Curtis was in. He thought about how to get that information and finally came up with an idea.

  Thorpe put on a battered, broad-brimmed Filson bush hat he kept in his truck to wear when it rained, and walked into the Radisson. He need not have bothered with the half-assed disguise as the kid at the front desk was busy with a couple complaining about how they’d been charged for a movie they’d never watched. He walked down the first-floor hallway until he found what he wanted: a fire alarm.

  He was standing outside the Radisson as all the guests came pouring outside, most of them acting surprisingly calm and in a pretty good mood. It helped that it was a pretty May night, clear and not too cold, and there were a million stars in the sky. It was almost ten p.m., so although some folks were still dressed, a lot of them were wearing pajamas or robes. Curtis was standing off by himself, apart from the other guests, a sour expression on his face, sipping brown liquid from a plastic cup.

  About half an hour after the fire alarm sounded, the kid who’d been at the front desk came out and told everybody that they could go back to their rooms, and Thorpe, still wearing his Filson hat, joined a small crowd of people and followed Curtis back to his room on the second floor. Thorpe walked past Curtis’s room but didn’t stop. There were still too many people wandering around because of the fire alarm.

  At the time the fire alarm went off at the Radisson in Bismarck, it was eleven p.m. in Washington, D.C., and John Mahoney was boarding a private plane at Reagan National. The plane was an executive jet with six first-class-style seats. It was a beauty.

  Mahoney had found out earlier that day that Montana congressman Sam Erhart was flying back to his home state that night to attend a prayer breakfast the following morning in Helena. It was a four-and-a-half-hour flight from D.C. to Billings and the jet would drop Mahoney off there, then continue on to Helena. It was almost like taking a taxi. Mahoney had no idea which rich guy had loaned Erhart the sleek jet—and he had no intention of asking.

  Erhart was already onboard the plane when Mahoney arrived, talking to someone on the phone. Erhart was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and impossible to work with, but he really wasn’t a bad guy. In fact, when they weren’t talking politics, Mahoney actually liked the man.

  Erhart hung up on whomever he’d been blabbing with and said, “You want a drink, John? The guy who owns this plane’s got a bottle of scotch onboard that’s older than you.”

  At ten p.m. Bismarck time, as Mahoney’s jet was taking off from National, Marjorie was sitting in a folding lawn chair near the roll-up garage doors, flicking her cigarette ashes into a Folgers coffee can. Her sons weren’t home and at this point, she didn’t give a hoot if the neighbors saw her smoking.

  Two hours earlier, she’d kicked Dick and the boys out of the house. After she was released from jail, Dick started to drive her nuts. “How could you have done this, Marge? I mean, did you really bribe those guys? How much is the lawyer going to cost? Jesus, what are the boys going to say to their friends at school!” Finally, she just couldn’t take it anymore, and she exploded. She told him to take the boys to his mom’s place and stay there for a couple of days.

  As for the boys, she could see they were scared. Bobby had started crying a couple of times and Tommy . . . He just looked mad, like she’d betrayed him or something. As they were getting into the car to leave, she hugged them both and told them that everything was going to be all right—even though she knew everything wasn’t going to be all right.

  Sitting there puffing on the cigarette, looking up at the night sky, she knew life would never be the same. She was almost positive that she wouldn’t serve time for bribing anyone because she was going to be the star witness against Curtis and everyone she’d bribed. The public—and the FBI—would much rather see a few greasy politicians and a rich guy like Curtis in jail than her.

  But what would she and her family do after all the trials were over? They were definitely going to have to sell the house and get something smaller and would have to move away fr
om Bismarck, which would kill the boys, leaving all their friends. And Dick would never find a decent-paying job. It would all be on her—just like it had always been.

  Murdock sat in his car, watching Dawkins smoke. She’d been coming out of her house about every twenty minutes to have a cigarette. A couple hours earlier, Murdock had seen a man and two boys throw backpacks and a roll-on suitcase into an SUV and leave the house. Dawkins’s husband and children, he assumed. It looked to him like they were going someplace to stay for a few days—which meant that Dawkins would be alone in her house tonight.

  Murdock had been surprised when Dawkins killed Logan—and impressed. Curtis had sent him to Bismarck to watch Logan but when he arrived in Bismarck, he couldn’t find the man. He had fled the city after somebody took a couple of shots at him. So Murdock decided to start following Marjorie Dawkins, hoping she’d lead him to Logan.

  He watched one day when she went to a tavern and made a high-speed trip to a nearby park—and he couldn’t figure out what she was doing. Then he figured it out, the night she killed Logan: the high-speed drive to the park had been a dry run for Logan’s murder. And that impressed him: the planning that went into Logan’s assassination.

  He was watching her the night she went to a school for a PTA ­meeting—there was a reader board outside the school that announced the meeting—and he followed her to a tavern after the PTA meeting ended, thinking he was just wasting his time. But then she came out of the tavern, practically running, and drove to the same park as fast as she could, so fast she almost lost him. He arrived just in time to see the double flashes from her gun as she shot Logan, then she raced back to the tavern. Later, he figured out she was giving herself an alibi because the cops would most likely think—if they suspected her at all—that she’d been in the tavern with all those PTA ladies when Logan was killed.

  So he couldn’t help but admire Dawkins’s ability to plan and professionally execute her partner’s murder. He couldn’t have done any better himself. But if Curtis gave him the order to kill the woman, his admiration for her wouldn’t stop him. He’d just be careful not to underestimate her. And the job itself should be fairly easy since she was alone in her house. It would be as easy as killing Sarah Johnson.

  Doug Thorpe stood over by the big ashtray where all the smokers gathered, although right now he was standing by himself. From where he was standing, he could see the kid clerk at the front desk.

  Thorpe had noticed that since the fire alarm—and because it was now almost eleven p.m.—the kid was hanging out in a room behind the front desk and he only came out to answer the phone. He was probably back there watching TV.

  The kid had just answered the phone again—some guest complaining about something or maybe somebody making a reservation. He hung up the phone and went back to the room behind the desk—and Thorpe decided it was time to move.

  Still wearing his floppy-brimmed Filson hat, he walked quickly through the lobby, and took the stairs just off the lobby up to Curtis’s room on the second floor.

  Okay, Curtis thought. Time to get this done with. And time to get to bed.

  He picked up the encrypted burner cell phone—technology these days was goldarn marvelous—but he would get rid of the phone first thing tomorrow.

  He typed: Take care of her. But she has to disappear. The body can’t be found.

  Curtis thought that would be best: Marjorie Dawkins just vanishes, like she’d decided to skip before her trial. He was about to hit the send button when there was a knock on the door.

  Curtis opened the door holding a cell phone in his hand, the phone down by the side of his leg.

  Thorpe said, “This is for Sarah, you little shit”—and he shot Curtis in the face.

  He was surprised that the old .38 didn’t make as much noise as he’d expected.

  He dragged Curtis’s body into the room, along with a cell phone that Curtis had dropped. He used a handkerchief to wipe his prints off the cell phone and again when he opened the door, then made sure nobody was out in the hallway to see him coming out of Curtis’s room. He didn’t really care if he was caught—in fact, he expected he would be caught—but he wasn’t going to make it easy for the cops.

  He figured the body wouldn’t be discovered until tomorrow morning. He glanced at his watch: it was getting close to midnight, but that was okay. He’d be back home in five hours, plenty of time to get there before Mahoney arrived from Washington.

  He walked to the stairwell at the end of the hallway—not the stairwell that came out near the lobby, but one of the fire-escape stairways that exited on the side of the building—and left the hotel. He noticed again, as he was walking to his pickup, that it was a beautiful spring night. He didn’t notice the tears streaming down his face.

  It was funny. In Vietnam, he’d actually felt bad about the men he’d killed, and he’d killed quite a few. He’d always believed that those Viet Cong soldiers were just guys like him: they weren’t evil, they were kids that a bunch of politicians sent off to war. But he didn’t feel bad at all about killing Leonard Curtis. The tears were for Sarah.

  An hour out of Bismarck—and still about four hours from home—he came to a small creek and stopped and threw in the .38. Five minutes later, in case anyone at the Radisson had noticed an old man wearing a Filson hat, he let the hat fly out the window and it blew into an alfalfa field.

  Ten minutes later, the right front tire blew out.

  It took him over two hours to change the tire. It was pitch black outside, the batteries in the flashlight he had in the glove compartment were old, and the flashlight beam was so weak he could barely see what he was doing. To make matters worse, the spare tire was up under the bed of the truck, and the nut holding it in place was frozen with mud and rust. He had to hunt for almost thirty minutes to find a rock big enough to hammer on the lug wrench so he could break the nut loose holding the spare in place. It didn’t help that he was seventy-two years old and not as strong as he used to be.

  He remembered teaching Sarah how to change a tire. They’d gone fishing on the Yellowstone that day—Sarah caught a five-pound ­rainbow—and on the way home, they got a flat. Sarah was sixteen at the time, had just gotten her driver’s license, and he made her change the tire by herself so she’d know what to do. And he remembered that thick-headed girl arguing with him that she had a cell phone and she had AAA, and if she ever got a flat she’d make the AAA guy change the tire.

  That girl had been so stubborn.

  God, he was going to miss her.

  34

  Leonard Curtis’s body was found by a disgruntled lawyer at six thirty a.m. The lawyer—who was a senior partner in his law firm—had been ordered by Curtis to pick him up at six at the Radisson. Curtis wanted to have breakfast with the lawyer, talk some more about the Dawkins case, after which Curtis would get on his plane and fly off to God knows where.

  When Curtis hadn’t shown up in the lobby by six twenty, the lawyer grew anxious. Curtis was an obnoxious, demanding asshole of a client but he was almost always punctual. He called Curtis’s room and didn’t receive an answer. He knew that Curtis was an old man. Maybe he’d slipped in the shower. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. He convinced the sleepy kid at the front desk to let him into Curtis’s room where they discovered Curtis’s body. He’d been shot in the head.

  The lawyer told the kid to go call the cops and as he stood there looking down at the dead man, he saw a phone near Curtis’s hand. From where he was standing he could see the screen—it was the text message screen of an iPhone—but he couldn’t read the words. He knew he shouldn’t touch the phone so he knelt down and looked at the message on the screen: Take care of her. But she has to disappear. The body can’t be found.

  Whoa!

  The lawyer figured he only had a couple of minutes to make a decision. He had to decide if there was any disadvantage to his law firm if the police should discove
r a text message that sounded like his client—Leonard Curtis—was ordering a woman’s murder. And most likely the intended victim was Marjorie Dawkins, also a client of his firm.

  If the police got their hands on Curtis’s phone they might be able to identify the person Curtis had been about to send the message to and catch that person. But how did catching a murderer help his law firm? Curtis had children, a son and daughter, and he remembered that Curtis’s daughter was a businesswoman. She would most likely take over her father’s enterprise now that Curtis was dead. If her father was known to be in cahoots with a killer, would that be good for the business—a business that would most likely continue to retain him and his law firm? He suspected not. Furthermore, Curtis hadn’t hit the send button, so it wasn’t like he’d really ordered anybody to do anything.

  He picked up the phone and put it in his pocket.

  Harold Fredericks, Bismarck’s most overworked homicide detective, called Westerberg to tell her that Curtis had been killed. “It happened last night, around midnight, but the ME can’t pin down the time any better than that.”

  “You got any leads?” Westerberg asked.

  “No, not really. He was shot with a .38, so it wasn’t the same gun used to kill Logan or Sarah Johnson.”

  “I assume you looked at security cameras.”