The Ehrengraf Reverse

“I didn’t do it,” Blaine Starkey said.

“Of course you didn’t.”

“Everyone thinks I did it,” Starkey went on, “and I guess I can understand why. But I’m innocent.”

“Of course you are.”

“I’m not a murderer.”

“Of course you’re not.”

“Not this time,” the man said. “Mr. Ehrengraf, it’s not supposed to matter whether a lawyer thinks his client is guilty or innocent. But it matters to me. I really am innocent, and it’s important that you believe me.”

“I do.”

“I don’t know why it’s so important,” Starkey said, “but it just is, and—” He paused, and seemed to register for the first time what Ehrengraf had been saying all along. His big open face showed puzzlement. “You do?”

“Yes.”

“You believe I’m innocent.”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s pretty amazing, Mr. Ehrengraf. Nobody else believes me.”

Ehrengraf regarded his client. Indeed, if you looked at the man’s record you could hardly avoid presuming him guilty. But once you turned your gaze into his cornflower blue eyes, how could you fail to recognize the innocence gleaming there?

Even if you didn’t believe the man, how would you have he nerve to tell him so? Blaine Starkey’s was, to say the least, an imposing presence. When you saw him on the television screen, catching a pass and racing downfield, breaking tackles as effortlessly as a politician breaks his word, you didn’t appreciate the sheer size of him. All the men on the field were huge, and your eye learned to see them as normal.

In a jail cell, across a little pine table, you began to realize just how massive a man Blaine Starkey was. He stood as many inches over six feet as Ehrengraf stood under it, and was big in the shoulders and narrow in the waist, with thighs like tree trunks and arms like — well, words failed Ehrengraf. The man was enormous.

“The whole world thinks I killed Claureen,” Starkey said, “and it’s not hard to see why. I mean, look at my stats.”

His stats? Thousands of yards gained rushing. Hundreds of passes caught. No end of touchdowns scored. Ehrengraf, who was more interested in watching the action on the field than in crunching the numbers, knew nevertheless that the big man’s statistics were impressive.

He also knew Starkey meant another set of stats.

“I mean,” the man said, “it’s not like this never happened before. Three women, three coffins. Hell, Mr. Ehrengraf, if I was a hockey player they’d call it the hat trick.”

“But it’s not hockey,” Ehrengraf assured him, “and it’s not football, either. You’re an innocent man, and there’s no reason you should have to pay for a crime you didn’t commit.”

“You really think I’m innocent,” Starkey said.

“Absolutely.”

“That’s what everybody’s supposed to presume, until it’s proved otherwise. Is that what you mean? That I’m innocent for the time being, far as the law’s concerned?”

Ehrengraf shook his head. “That’s not what I mean.”

“You mean innocent no matter what the jury says.”

“I mean exactly what you meant earlier,” the little lawyer said. “You didn’t kill your wife. You’re entirely innocent of her death, and the jury should never be in a position to say anything on the subject, because you should never be brought to trial. You’re an innocent man, Mr. Starkey.”

The football player took a deep breath, and Ehrengraf was surprised that there was any air left in the cell. “That’s just so hard for me to believe.”

“That you’re innocent?”

“Hell, I know I’m innocent,” Starkey said. “What’s hard to believe is that you believe it.”

But how could Ehrengraf believe otherwise? He fingered the knot in his deep blue necktie and reflected on the presumption of innocence — not the one which had long served as a cardinal precept of Anglo-American jurisprudence, but a higher, more personal principle. The Ehrengraf presumption. Any client of Martin H. Ehrengraf’s was innocent. Not until proven guilty, but until the end of time.

But he didn’t want to get into a philosophical discussion with Blaine Starkey. He kept it simple, explaining that he only represented the innocent.

The football player took this in. His face fell. “Then if you change your mind,” he said, “you’ll drop me like a hot rock. Is that about right?”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“If you get to thinking I’m guilty—”

“I’ll never think that.”

“But—”

“We’re wasting time,” Ehrengraf told him. “We both know you’re innocent. Why dispute a point on which we’re already in agreement?”

“I guess I really found the one man who believes me,” Starkey said. “Now where are we gonna find twelve more?”

“It’s my earnest hope we won’t have to,” Ehrengraf said. “I rarely see the inside of a courtroom, Mr. Starkey. My fees are very high, but I have to earn them in order to receive them.”

Starkey scratched his head “That’s what I’m not too clear on.”

“It’s simple enough. I take cases on a contingency basis. I don’t get paid unless and until you walk free.”

“I’ve heard of that in civil cases,” Starkey said, “but I didn’t know there were any criminal lawyers who operated that way.”

“As far as I know,” Ehrengraf said, “I am the only one. And I don’t depend on courtroom pyrotechnics. I represent the innocent, and through my efforts their innocence becomes undeniably clear to all concerned. Then and only then do I collect my fee.”

And what would that be? Ehrengraf named a number.

“Whole lot of zeroes at the end of it,” the football player said, “but it’s nothing to the check I wrote out for the Proud Crowd. Five of them, and they spent close to a year on the case, hiring experts and doing studies and surveys and I don’t know what else. A man can make a lot of money if he can run the ball and catch a pass now and then. I guess I can afford your fee, plus whatever the costs and expenses come to.”

“The fee is all-inclusive,” Ehrengraf said.

“If that’s so,” Starkey said, “I’d say it’s a bargain. And I only pay if I get off?”

“And you will, sir.”

“If I do, I don’t guess I’ll begrudge you your fee. And if I don’t, do I get my retainer back? Not that I’d have a great use for it, but—”

“There’ll be no retainer,” Ehrengraf said smoothly. “I like to earn my money before I receive it.”

“I never heard of anybody like you, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

“There isn’t anyone like me,” Ehrengraf said. “I’ve thrilled to watch you play, and I don’t believe there’s anyone like you, either. We’re both unique.”

“Well,” Starkey said.

“And yet you’re charged with killing your wife,” Ehrengraf said smoothly. “Hard to believe, but there it is.”

“Not so hard to believe. I’ve been tried twice for murder and got off both times. How many times can a man kill his wife and get away with it?”

It was a good question, but Ehrengraf chose not to address it. “The first woman wasn’t your wife,” he said.

“My girlfriend. Kate Waldecker. I was in my junior year at Texas State.” He looked at his hands. “We were in bed together, and one way or another my hands got around her neck.”

“You engaged Joel Daggett as your attorney, if I remember correctly.”

“The Bulldog,” Starkey said fondly. “He came up with this rough sex defense. Brought in witnesses to testify that Kate liked to be hurt while she was making love, liked to be choked half to death. Made her out to be real kinky, and a tramp in the bargain. I have to say I felt sorry for her folks. They were in tears through the trial.” He sighed. “But what else could he do? I mean, I got out of bed and called the cops, told everybody I did it. Daggett got the confession suppressed, but there was still plenty of evidence that I did it. He had to find a way to keep it from being murder.”

“And he was successful. You were found not guilty.”

“Yeah, but that was bullshit. Kate didn’t like it rough. Fact, she was always telling me to slow down, to be gentler with her.” He frowned. “Hard to say what happened that night. We’d been arguing earlier, but I thought I was over being mad about that. Next thing I knew she was dead and I was unhooking my hands from around her throat. I always figured the steroids I was taking might have had something to do with it, but maybe not. Maybe I just got carried away and killed her. Anyway, Daggett saw to it that I got away with it.”

“You didn’t go back for your senior year.”

“No, I turned pro right after the trial. I would have liked to get my degree, but I didn’t figure they’d cheer as hard for me after I’d killed a fellow student. Besides, I had a big legal bill to pay, and that’s where the signing bonus went.”

“You went with the Wranglers.”

“I was their first-round draft choice and I was with them for four seasons. Born in Texas, went to school in Texas, and I thought I’d play my whole career in Texas. Married a Texas girl, too. Jacey was beautiful, even if she was hell on wheels. High-strung, you know? Threw a glass ashtray at me once, hit me right here on the cheekbone. Another inch and I might have lost an eye.” He shook his head. “I figured we’d get divorced sooner or later. I just wanted to stay married to her until I got tired of, you know, goin’ to bed with her. But I never did get tired of her that way, or divorced from her, either, and then the next thing I knew she was dead.”

“She killed herself.”

“They found her in bed, with bruises on her neck. And they picked me up at the country club, where I was sitting by myself in the bar, hitting the bourbon pretty good. They hauled me downtown and charged me with murder.”

“You didn’t give a statement.”

“Didn’t say a word. I knew that much from my first trial. Of course I couldn’t get the Bulldog this time, on account of he was dead. Lee Waldecker walked up to him in a restaurant in Austin about a year after my acquittal, shot him in front of a whole roomful of people. I guess he never got over the job Daggett did on his sister’s reputation. He said he could almost forgive me, because all I did was kill Kate, but what Daggett did to her was worse than murder.”

“He’s still serving his sentence, isn’t he?”

“Life without parole. A jury might have cut him loose, or slapped him on the wrist with a short sentence, but he went and pleaded guilty. Said he did it in front of witnesses on purpose, so he wouldn’t have some lawyer twisting the truth.”

“So you got a whole team of lawyers,” Ehrengraf said. “The press made up a name for them.”

“The Proud Crowd. Each one thought he was the hottest thing going, and they spent a lot of time just cutting each other apart. And they sure weren’t shy about charging for their services. But I’d made a lot of money all those years, and I figured to make a lot more if I kept on playing, and the Wranglers wanted to make sure I had the best possible defense.”

“Not rough sex this time.”

“No, I don’t guess you can get by with that more than once. What’s funny is that Jacey did like it rough. Matter of fact, there weren’t too many ways she didn’t like it. If the Bulldog was around, and if I hadn’t already used that defense once already, rough sex would have had me home free. Jacey was everything Daggett tried to make Kate look like, and there would have been dozens of people willing to swear to it.”

“As it turned out,” Ehrengraf said, “it was suicide, wasn’t it? And the police tampered with the evidence?”

“That was the line the Proud Crowd took. There were impressions on her neck from a large pair of hands, but they dug up a forensics expert who testified that they’d been inflicted after death, like somebody’d strangled her after she’s already been dead for some time. And they had another expert testify that there were rope marks on her neck, underneath the hand prints, suggesting she’d hanged herself and been cut down. There were fibers found on and near the corpse, and another defense expert matched them to a rope that had been retrieved from a Dumpster. And they found residue of talcum powder on the rope, and another expert testified that it was the same kind of talcum powder Jacey used, and had used the day of her death.”

“So many experts,” Ehrengraf murmured.

“And every damn one of ‘em sent in a bill,” Starkey said, “but I can’t complain, because they earned their money. According to the Proud Crowd, Jacey hanged herself. I came home, saw her like that, and just couldn’t deal with it. I cut her down and tried to revive her, then lost it and went to the club to brace myself with a few drinks while I figured out what to do next. Meantime, a neighbor called the cops, and as far as they were concerned I was this old boy who made a couple million dollars a year playing a kid’s game, and already put one wife in the ground and got away with it. So they made sure I wouldn’t get away with it a second time by taking the rope and losing it in a Dumpster, and pressing their hands into her neck to make it look like manual strangulation.”

“And is that how it happened?”

Starkey rolled his eyes. “How it happened,” he said, “is we were having an argument, and I took this hunk of rope and put it around her neck and strangled the life out of her.”

Ehrengraf winced.

“Don’t worry,” his client went on. “Nobody can hear us, and what I tell you’s privileged anyway, and besides it’d be double jeopardy, because twelve people already decided they believed the Proud Crowd’s version. But they must have been the only twelve people in the country who bought it, because the rest of the world figured out that I did it. And got away with it again.”

“You were acquitted.”

“I was and I wasn’t,” he said. “Legally I was off the hook, but that didn’t mean I got my old life back. The Wranglers put out this press release about how glad they were that justice was served and an innocent man exonerated, but nobody would look me in the eye. First chance they got, they traded me.”

“And you’ve been with the Mastodons ever since.”

“And I love it here,” he said. “I don’t even mind the winters. Back when I played for the Wranglers I hated coming up here for late-season games, but I got so I liked the cold weather. You get used to it.”

Ehrengraf, a native, had never had to get used to the climate. But he nodded anyway.

“At first,” Starkey said, “I thought about quitting. But I owed all this money to the Proud Crowd, and how was I going to earn big money off a football field? I lost my endorsements, you know. I had this one commercial, I don’t know if you remember it, where Minnie Mouse is sitting on my lap and sort of flirting with me.”

“You were selling a toilet-bowl cleaner,” Ehrengraf recalled.

“Yeah, and when they dropped me I figured that meant I wasn’t good enough to clean toilets. But what choice did they have? People were saying things like you could just about see the marks on Minnie’s neck. Long story short, no more commercials. So what was I gonna do but play?”

“Of course.”

“Besides, I was in my mid-twenties and I loved the game. Now it’s ten years later and I still love it. I got Cletis Braden breathing down my neck, trying to take my job away, but I figure it’s gonna be a few more years before he can do it. Love the city, live here year round, wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Love the house I bought. Love the people, even love the winters. Snow? What’s so bad about snow?”

“It’s pretty,” Ehrengraf said.

“Damn pretty. It’s around for a while and then it melts. And then it’s gone.” He made a fist, opened it, looked at his palm. “Gone, like everything else. Like my career. Like my damn life.”

For a moment Ehrengraf thought the big man might burst into tears, and rather hoped he would not. The moment passed, and the little lawyer suggested they talk about the late Mrs. Starkey.

“Which one? No, I know you mean Claureen. Local girl, born and bred here. Went away to college and got on the cheerleading squad. I guess she got to know the players pretty good.” He rolled his eyes. “Came back home, went to work teaching school, but she found a way to hang around football players. I’d been here a couple of years by then, and the Mastodons don’t lack for feminine companionship, so I was doing okay in that department. But it was time to get married, and I figured she was the one.”

Romeo and Juliet, Ehrengraf thought. Tristan and Isolde. Blaine and Claureen.

“And it was okay,” Starkey said. “No kids, and that was disappointing, but we had a good life and we got along okay. I never ran around on her here in town, and what you do on the road don’t count. Everybody knows that.”

“And the day she died?”

“We had a home game coming up with the Leopards. I went out for a couple of beers after practice, but I left early because Clete Braden showed up and joined us and I can tire of his company pretty quick. I drove around for an hour or two. Went over to Boulevard Mall to see what playing at the multiplex. They had twelve movies, but nothing I wanted to see. I thought I’d walk around the mall, maybe buy something, but I can’t go anywhere without people recognizing me, and sometimes I just don’t want to deal with that. I drove around some more and went home.”

“And discovered her body.”

“In the living room, crumpled up on the rug next to the fireplace, bareass naked and stone cold dead. First thing I thought was she had a fainting spell. She’d get lightheaded if she went too long between meals, and she’d been trying to drop a few pounds. Don’t ask me why, she looked fine to me, but you know women.”

“Nobody does,” Ehrengraf said.

“Well, that’s the damn truth, but you know what I mean. Anyway, I knelt down and touched her, and right away I knew she was dead. And then I saw her head was all bloody, and I thought, well, here we go again.”

“You called the police.”

“Last thing I wanted to do. Wanted to get in the car and just drive, but I knew not to do that. And I wanted to pour a stiff drink and I didn’t let myself do that, either. I called 911 and I sat in a chair, and when the cops came I let ‘em in. I didn’t answer any of their questions. I barely heard them. I just kept my mouth shut, and they brought me here, and I wound up calling you.”

“And it’s good you did,” Ehrengraf told him. “You’re innocent, and soon the whole world will know it.”

Three days later the two men faced one another in the same cell across the same little table. Blaine Starkey looked weary. Part of it was the listless sallowness one saw in imprisoned men, but Ehrengraf noted as well the sag of the shoulders, the lines around the mouth. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn at their previous meeting. Ehrengraf, in a three piece suit with a banker’s stripe and a tie striped like a coral snake, wondered not for the first time if he ought to dress down on such occasions, to put his client at ease. As always, he decided that dressing down was not his sort of thing.

“I’ve done some investigation,” he reported. “Your wife’s blood sugar was low.”

“Well, she wasn’t eating. I told you that.”

“The Medical Examiner estimated the time of death at two to four hours before you reported discovering her body.”

“I said she felt cold to the touch.”

“She died,” Ehrengraf said, “sometime after football practice was over for the day. The prosecution is going to contend that you had time before you met your teammates for drinks—”

“To race home, hit Claureen upside the head, and then rush out to grab a beer?”

“—or afterward, during the time you were driving around and trying to decide on a movie.”

“I had the time then,” Starkey allowed, “but that’s not how I spent it.”

“I know that. When you got home, was the door locked?”

“Sure. We keep it so it locks when you pull it shut.”

“Did you use your key?”

“Easier than ringing the bell and waiting. Her car was there, so I knew she was home. I let myself in and keyed in the code so the burglar alarm wouldn’t go off, and then I walked into the living room, and you know the rest.”

“She died,” Ehrengraf said, “as a result of massive trauma to the skull. There were two blows, one to the temple, the other to the back of the head. The first may have resulted from her fall, when she struck herself upon the sharp corner of the fireplace surround. The second blow was almost certainly inflicted by a massive bronze statue of a horse.”

“She picked it out,” Starkey said. “It was French, about a hundred and fifty years old. I didn’t think it looked like any horse a reasonable man would want to place a bet on, but she fell in love with it and said it’d be perfect on the mantle.”

Ehrengraf fingered the knot of his tie. “Your wife was nude,” he said.

“Maybe she just got out of the shower,” the big man said. “Or you know what I bet it was? She was on her way to the shower.”

“By way of the living room?”

“If she was on the stair machine, which was what she would do when she decided she was getting fat. An apple for breakfast and an enema for lunch, and hopping on and off the stair machine all day long. She’d exercise naked if she was warm, or if she wore a sweat suit she’d leave it there in the exercise room and parade through the house naked.”

“Then it all falls into place,” Ehrengraf said. “She wasn’t eating enough and was exercising excessively. She completed an ill?advised session on the stair climber, shed her exercise clothes if in fact she’d been wearing any in the first place, and walked through the living room on her way to the shower.”

“She’d do that, all right.”

“Her blood sugar was dangerously low. She got dizzy, and felt faint. She started to fall, and reached out to steady herself, grabbing the bronze horse. Then she lost consciousness and fell, dragging the horse from its perch on the mantelpiece as she did so. She went down hard, hitting her forehead on the bricks, and the horse came down hard as well, striking her on the head. And, alone in the house, the unfortunate woman died an accidental death.”

“That’s got to be it,” Starkey said. “I couldn’t put it together. All I knew was I didn’t kill her. You can push that argument, right? You can get me off?”

But Ehrengraf was shaking his head. “If you had spent the twelve hours preceding her death in the company of an archbishop and a Supreme Court justice,” he said, “and if both of those worthies were at your side when you discovered your wife’s body, then it might be possible to advance that theory successfully in court.”

“But—”

“The whole world thinks of you as a man who got away with murder twice already. Do you think a jury is going to let you get away with it a third time?”

“The prosecution can’t introduce either of those earlier cases as evidence, can they?”

“They can’t even mention them,” Ehrengraf said, “or it’s immediate grounds for a mistrial. But why mention them when everyone already knows all about them? If they didn’t know to begin with, they’re reading the full story every day in the newspaper and watching clips of your two trials on television.”

“Then it’s hopeless.”

“Only if you go to trial.”

“What else can I do? I could try fleeing the country, but where would I hide? What would I do, play professional football in Iraq or North Korea? And I can’t even try, because they won’t let me out on bail.”

Ehrengraf put the tips of his fingers together. “I’ve no intention of letting this case go to trial,” he said. “I don’t much care for the whole idea of leaving a man’s fate in the hands of twelve people, not one of them clever enough to get out of jury duty.”

Puzzlement showed in Starkey’s face.

“I remember a run you made against the Jackals,” Ehrengraf said. “The quarterback gave the ball to that other fellow—”

“Clete Braden,” Starkey said heavily.

“—and he began running to his right, and you were running toward him, and he handed the ball to you, and you swept around to the left, after all the Jackals had shifted over to stop Braden’s run to the right.”

Starkey brightened. “I remember the play,” he said. “The reverse. When it works, it’s one of the prettiest plays in football.”

“It worked against the Jackals.”

“I ran it in. Better than sixty yards from scrimmage, and once I was past midfield no one had a shot at me.”

Ehrengraf beamed. “Ah, yes. The reverse. It is something to see, the reverse.”

It was a new Blaine Starkey that walked into Martin Ehrengraf’s office. He was dressed differently, for one thing, his double-breasted tan suit clearly the work of an accomplished tailor, his maroon silk shirt open at its flowing collar, his cordovan wing tips buffed to a high sheen. His skin had thrown off the jailhouse pallor and glowed with the ruddy health of a live lived outdoors. There was a sparkle in his eyes, spring in his step, a set to his shoulders. It did the little lawyer’s heart good to see him.

He was holding a football, passing it from hand to hand as he approached Ehrengraf’s desk. How small it looked, Ehrengraf thought, in those big hands. And with what ease could those hands encircle a throat...

Ehrengraf pushed the thought aside, and his hand went to his necktie. It was his Caedmon Society tie, his inevitable choice on triumphant occasions, and a nice complement to his cocoa brown blazer and fawn slacks.

“The game ball,” Starkey announced, reaching to place it on the one clear spot on the little lawyer’s cluttered desk. “They gave it to me after Sunday’s game with the Ocelots. See, all the players signed it. All but Cletis Braden, but I don’t guess he’ll be signing too many game balls from here on.”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“And here’s where I wrote something myself,” he said, pointing.

Ehrengraf read: “To Marty Ehrengraf, who made it all possible. From your buddy, Blaine Starkey.”

“Marty,” Ehrengraf said.

Starkey lowered his eyes. “I didn’t know about that,” he admitted. “If people called you Marty or Martin or what. I mean, all I ever called you was ‘Mr. Ehrengraf.’ But with sports memorabilia, people generally like it to look like, you know, like them and the athlete are good buddies. Do they call you Marty?”

They never had, but Ehrengraf merely smiled at the question and took the ball in his hands. “I shall treasure this,” he said simply.

“Here’s something else to treasure,” Starkey said. “It’s autographed, too.”

“Ah,” Ehrengraf said, and took the check, and raised his eyebrows at the amount. It was not the sum he had mentioned at their initial meeting. This had happened before, when a client’s gratitude gave way to innate penuriousness, and Ehrengraf routinely made short work of such attempts to reduce his fee. But this check was for more than he had demanded, and that had not happened before.

“It’s a bonus,” Starkey said, anticipating the question. “I don’t know if there’s such a thing in your profession. We get them all the time in the NFL. It’s not insulting, is it? Like tipping the owner of the restaurant? Because I surely didn’t intend it that way.”

Ehrengraf, nonplused, shook his head. “Money is only insulting,” he managed, “when there’s too little of it.” He beamed, and stowed the check in his wallet.

“I’ll tell you,” Starkey said, “writing checks isn’t generally my favorite thing in the whole world, but I couldn’t have been happier when I was writing out that one. Couple of weeks ago I was the worst thing since Jack the Ripper, and now I’m everybody’s hero. Who was it said there’s no second half in the game of life?”

“Scott Fitzgerald wrote something along those lines,” Ehrengraf said, “but I believe he phrased it a little differently.”

“Well, he was wrong,” Starkey said, “and you proved it. And who would have dreamed it would turn out this way?”

Ehrengraf smiled.

“Clete Braden,” Starkey said. “I knew the sonofabitch was after my job, but who’d have guessed he was after my wife, too? I swear I never had a clue those two were slipping around behind my back. It’s still hard to believe Claureen was cheating on me when I wasn’t even on a road trip.”

“They must have been very clever in their deceit.”

“But stupid at the same time,” Starkey said. “Taking her to a motel and signing in as Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland Brassman. Same initials, plus he used his own handwriting on the registration card. Made up a fake address but used his real license plate number, just switching two digits around.” He rolled his eyes. “And then leaving a pair of her panties in the room. Where was it they found them? Wedged under the chair cushion or some such?”

“I believe so.”

“All that time and the maids never found them. I guess they don’t knock themselves out cleaning the rooms in a place like that, but I’d still have to call it a piece of luck the panties were still there.”

“Luck,” Ehrengraf agreed.

“And no question they were hers, either. Matched the ones in her dresser drawer, and had her DNA all over ‘em. It’s a wonderful thing, DNA.”

“A miracle of modern forensic science.”

“Why’d they even go to a motel in the first place? Why not take her to his place? He wasn’t married, he had women in and out of his apartment all the time.”

“Perhaps he didn’t want to be seen with her.”

“Long as I wasn’t the one doing the seeing, what difference could it make?”

“None,” Ehrengraf said, “unless he was afraid of what people might remember afterward.”

Starkey thought about that. Then his eyes widened. “He planned it all along,” he said.

“It certainly seems that way.”

“Wanted to make damn sure he got my job, by seeing to it that I wasn’t around to compete for it. He didn’t just lose his temper when he smashed her head with that horse. It was all part of the plan — kill her and frame me for it.”

“Diabolical,” Ehrengraf said.

“That explains what he wrote on that note,” Starkey said. “The one they found at the very back of her underwear drawer, arranging to meet that last day after practice. ‘Make sure you burn this,’ he wrote. And he didn’t even sign it. But it was in his handwriting.”

“So the experts say.”

“And on a piece of his stationery. The top part was torn off, with his name and address on it, but it was the same brand of bond paper. It would have been nice if they could have found the piece he tore off and matched them up, but I guess you can’t have everything.”

“Perhaps they haven’t looked hard enough,” Ehrengraf murmured. “There was another note as well, as I recall. One that she wrote.”

“On one of the printed memo slips with her name on it. A little love note from her to him, and he didn’t have the sense to throw it out. Carried it around in his wallet.”

“It was probably from early in their relationship,” Ehrengraf said, “and very likely he’d forgotten it was there.”

“He must have. It surprised the hell out of him when the cops went through his wallet and there it was.”

“I imagine it did.”

“He must have gone to my house straight from practice. Wouldn’t have been a trick to get her out of her clothes, seeing as he’d been managing that all along. ‘My, Claureen, isn’t that a cute little horse.’ ‘Yes, it’s French, it’s over a hundred years old.’ ‘Is that right? Let me just get the feel of it.’ And that’s the end of Claureen. A shame he didn’t leave a fingerprint or two on the horse just for good measure.”

“You can’t have everything,” Ehrengraf said. “Wiping his prints off the horse would seem to be one of the few intelligent things Mr. Braden managed. But they can make a good case against him without it. Of course much depends on his choice of an attorney.”

“Maybe he’ll call you,” Starkey said with a wink. “But I guess that wouldn’t do him any good, seeing as you only represent the innocent. What I hear, he’s fixing to put together a Proud Crowd of his own. Figure they’ll get him off?”

“It may be difficult to convict him,” Ehrengraf allowed, “but he’s already been tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion.”

“The league suspended him, and of course he’s off the Mastodons’ roster. But what’s really amazing is the way everybody’s turned around as far as I’m concerned. Before, I was a man who got away with killing two women, but they could live with that as long as I could put it all together on the field. Then I killed a third woman, and they flat out hated me, and then it turns out I didn’t kill Claureen, I was an innocent man framed for it, and they did a full-scale turnaround, and the talk is maybe I really was innocent those other two times, just the way the two juries decided I was. All of a sudden there’s a whole lot of people telling each other the system works and feeling real good about it.”

“As well they might,” said Ehrengraf.

“They cheer you when you catch a pass,” Starkey said philosophically, “and they boo you when you drop one. Except for you, Mr. Ehrengraf, there wasn’t a person around who believed I didn’t do it. But you did, and you figured out how the evidence showed Claureen’s death was accidental. Low blood sugar, too much exercise, and she got dizzy and fell and pulled the horse down on top of her.”

“Yes.”

“And then you figured out they’d never buy that, true or false. So you dug deeper.”

“It was the only chance,” Ehrengraf said modestly.

“And they might not buy that Claureen killed herself by accident, but they loved the idea that she was cheating on me and Clete killed her so I’d be nailed for it.”

“The Ehrengraf reverse.”

“How’s that?”

“The Ehrengraf reverse. When the evidence is all running one way, you hand off the ball and sweep around the other end.” He spread his hands. “And streak down the sideline and into the end zone.”

“Touchdown,” Starkey said. “We win, and Braden’s the goat and I’m the hero.”

“As you clearly were on Sunday.”

“I guess I had a pretty decent game.”

“Eight pass receptions, almost two hundred yards rushing — yes, I’d say you had a good game.”

“Say, were those seats okay?”

“Row M on the fifty-yard line? They were the best seats in the stadium.”

“It was a beautiful day for it, too, wasn’t it? And I couldn’t do a thing wrong. Oh, next week I’ll probably fumble three times and run into my own blockers a lot, but I’ll have this one to remember.”

Ehrengraf took the game ball in his hands. “And so will I,” he said.

“Well, I wanted you to have a souvenir. And the bonus, well, I got more money coming in these days than I ever figured to see. Every time the phone rings it’s another product endorsement coming my way, and I don’t have to wait too long between rings, either. Hey, speaking of the reverse, how’d you like the one we ran Sunday?”

“Beautiful,” Ehrengraf said fervently. “A work of art.”

“You know, I was thinking of you when they called it in the huddle. Fact, when the defense was on the field I asked the coach if we couldn’t run that play. Would have served me right if I’d been dumped for a loss, but that’s not what happened.”

“You gained forty yards,” Ehrengraf said, “and if that one man hadn’t missed a downfield block, you’d have had another touchdown.”

“Well, it’s a pretty play,” Blaine Starkey said. “There’s really nothing like the reverse.”