Ehrengraf for the Defense (19 page)

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 been 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’d
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 was 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.”