Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf

  “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.”

&nb
sp; “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.”

  “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 mantel.”

  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—”