Lawrence Block: The Ehrengraf Reverse

“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?”