Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“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.”