Lawrence Block - The Ehrengraf Reverse

“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.”