The Man Offside Read online

  THE MAN OFFSIDE

  A. W. Gray

  The Man Offside

  A. W. Gray

  THE MAN OFFSIDE

  Copyright © 1991, by Gray Matter Inc.

  First ebook copyright © 2013 by AudioGO.

  All Rights Reserved.

  978-1-4821-0178-2 Trade

  978-0-62460-642-7 Library

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Martha, my Martha, my life, my love. Rough roads gettin’ behind us.

  Other eBooks by A. W. Gray

  The Best Defense (as Sarah Gregory)

  Bino

  Bino’s Blues

  Capitol Scandal (as Sarah Gregory)

  In Defense of Judges

  In Self Defense (as Sarah Gregory)

  Killings

  Lethal City

  Poisoned Dreams

  Prime Suspect

  Public Trust (as Sarah Gregory)

  Shares (as William Gray)

  Size

  Trombley’s Walk (as Crosland Brown)

  Venom (as Jeffrey Ames)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Sample Chapter: PRIME SUSPECT

  1

  Donna Brendy’s eyes weren’t quite blue. They weren’t quite gray, either. They seemed to change color depending on what she was wearing, which right now was a French-cut one-piece swimsuit that was dove gray bordered by royal blue. They were laughing eyes with little crinkles at the corners, and they narrowed some against the glare created by aqua water shimmering under the kind of buttermilk sky that comes to Texas in late August. And there was some hurt in those eyes that the laugh crinkles couldn’t quite hide. I’d helped put some of the hurt there a few years back. I didn’t feel really tall about that.

  She was seated poolside on a chaise longue made of cedar planks. She crossed one smooth, tanned leg over the other, then uncrossed her legs and recrossed them again, and adjusted the elastic at her hip with a red-nailed finger. She still was squirmy. That hadn’t changed.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said.

  “That makes two of us,” I said. “How’ve you been, Donna?”

  “How have I been? Since I’ve seen you I’ve been a lot of different ways. It’s been nine years, Rick.”

  It had. The last movie we’d seen together had been Chinatown. Elvis had been alive. There wasn’t much for me to say to that, so I folded my sport coat over my arm and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. She gestured toward a lawn chair, also cedar, which sat in shade cast by an enormous snow white beach umbrella. I sat down. My collar was damp. I loosened my tie. The knot was damp also.

  “I didn’t call you on my own,” she said.

  “You didn’t call me, period. How’d you know to get in touch with me through Sweaty Mathis? Bail bondsmen aren’t in your circle of friends, or at least they didn’t used to be.”

  There was a round cedar table at her elbow, and on it was a tall frosted glass with a lime wedge impaled on its edge. She picked up the glass and sipped from it. “I was just following instructions. Jack told me who to call—I don’t know how Jack knew. He’s so panicked.”

  Asking her to get in touch with me must have been tough on Jack. He would have thought that over for a long time. I said, “He has a good reason to be panicked, from what I’ve read. Does he know I’m meeting you over here, at the house?”

  There was the barest flicker in her gaze. I’d seen that look enough times to know she’d just been thinking about lying, then changed her mind. She said, “I didn’t tell him where. He’s hoping that we’re meeting someplace else, I suppose. He didn’t ask.”

  The back door was a solid nine-iron shot from the edge of the pool. A uniformed maid appeared on the redwood deck and set a tray on the top step. The tray was loaded down with glasses, ice, and throwaway bottles. The window at the maid’s back was stained glass. Jack had done well. The maid went inside. The pane in the door caught a flash of light as she closed it.

  Donna said, “Wouldn’t you rather go inside? You look awfully warm.” She still pronounced “inside” like “insahd.”

  Her swimsuit was cut away in a diamond pattern from just below her navel up to the point where a thin cloth string held it together between her breasts. She looked pretty warm herself. “It would be cooler,” I said.

  “Our talk may take awhile. I don’t want you passing out on me.” She put one foot on the treated Kool-Deck. “I’ll be just a minute. There’s a bar in the den, help yourself.”

  There was a small bathhouse behind the pool, in back of the diving board. She slipped her feet into rubber sandals, went around to the bathhouse, and went inside. I watched her bare, rounded hips disappear, then headed for the house, slinging my coat over my shoulder. A drop of sweat plopped into my eye. I brushed it away.

  Three little girls in sunsuits had appeared from the yard outside the pool and surrounded the maid’s tray of drinks. One child was clearly in charge, doling out the goodies on the top red brick step.

  “Hey. She’s got more’n I do,” said a freckled redhead with a front tooth missing.

  A brunette who had her hair tied into doggy ears made a face and stuck out her tongue at the redhead. “Do not!” the brunette said. “Jacqueline’s being fair.”

  The kiddie in charge was wearing a blue pair of shorts with a white bodice held up by shoulder straps. She took the glasses away from the brunette and the redhead, and held them out to me. “They’re even, aren’t they, mister?” She had wide, laughing eyes that were a color somewhere between blue and gray. Her hair was thick and hung nearly to her waist. It was a shiny mahogany color. More heredity.

  I bent and made a show out of eyeballing first one glass, then the other. Each was about half full of red sparkling punch. “Right on the button,” I said.

  “See there?” said Jacqueline Brendy. She handed the drinks to the other little girls—who held them side by side and checked up on me—then faced me again. “Aren’t you a friend of Daddy’s?”

  “An old friend. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “He’s not home,” she said.

  I wasn’t quite sure how to handle that one. “Oh. Well, I’m an old friend of your mother’s, too.”

  “My daddy’s in jail,” she said. The other little girls giggled. Jacqueline had used the same tone of voice she’d probably use in saying, “I’m six years old.” Which was about how old she was. She led the other girls, each one carrying a glass of punch in both hands, back through the wooden gate into the yard. A fancy swing set, complete with a tent-covered landing at the summit, was visible over the top of the gate. A jungle gym rose to one side of the swing set. I went into the house.

  The maid was dusting built-in, hand-carved bookcases in the den. Most of the books in the stacks were classics—Melville, Twain, Dickens—along with a couple of modern works by Michener. Not to my taste, which probably meant that it took some breeding to appreciate them. The maid was a chubby Hispanic, a Mama Rosa type. She stopped what she was doing, gave me a disapproving nod, and left the room.

  I made t
he fifty-foot journey from the back door to the bar. On the way I sidestepped a long, low-slung couch and a Wm R Knabe & Co baby grand piano. The piano was polished and its keys shone like flossed teeth.

  Jack’s bar was the only thing in the room that I recognized. It was dark-stained wood and sat on short legs that were carved into lion’s paws. Jack and I had lugged the thing up from Mexico one spring, placed it in the apartment that we were sharing at the time, and had parties around it. It was one of those things left over from bachelorhood that wives would like to get rid of but know better than to ask. The bar had stood up pretty well, considering some of the parties. I fixed W.L. Wellers over ice in a rock glass.

  On the wall behind the bar was an old Cowboy team photo in a silver frame—a good-sized picture, probably thirty by twenty. Jack was in the top row between a grinning Bob Lilly and a scowling Bob Hayes. I squinted and looked for myself in the picture, then noticed the banner hanging over the heads of the players which read, “SUPER BOWL CHAMPS.” I gave up the search. They’d traded me to the Rams two years before this picture was taken. Jack’s Super Bowl ring was mounted on a small gold atlas, inside a glass case on the bar. I’d always wanted one of those rings.

  I strolled around, sipping my sour mash whiskey and acting as though I belonged, enjoying the springy feel of the rich green carpet. Dimitri Vail had done the painting of Jack and Donna that hung over the mantel. She was in snug riding breeches astride a muscular palomino. He was leading the horse, and I thought that the horse looked a whole lot happier about it than Jack did. Donna would have really had to put on the pressure to get Jack to pose for that one. I was admiring the painting when Donna came in.

  She’d put on a yellow terry robe that was open at the throat. The opening extended downward far enough that I should have been able to see the string which held the top of her swimsuit together, but the string wasn’t there. There was a faint tan line across her breastbone. Her smallish feet were still in rubber sandals, her long, dark hair slightly tousled. “Dimi painted it at the ranch,” she said. “Two models actually posed for him, and then he drew our faces in later. You know how Jack is about being still for anything.”

  “I was wondering about that,” I said. “You thirsty?”

  “Nothing alcoholic. I can’t take liquor during the day. My dizzy spells.”

  I knew all about Donna’s dizzy spells. Nothing really serious, something she’d have to live with. They used to come to her in the afternoon; one in particular I remembered during the year I’d held out until September and Jack had been in training camp at Thousand Oaks, California. I’d revived her and barely gotten her steady on her feet in time to meet Jack’s plane. I fixed her ginger ale. We sat on the couch.

  “How’s he holding up?” I said.

  “About as well as you could expect. He’s putting up a front, trying to be funny. He says he’s kingpin of the cell block. Oh, Rick . . .”

  I gave her a handkerchief. She blew her nose and sneezed a little sneeze.

  “The paper says he’s having a bond hearing,” I said. “What, Thursday? Two days from now?”

  She nodded. Her eyes were slightly red from crying.

  “He’s not going to have it easy,” I said. “Believe me, I’ve been through it.”

  “That might be why he wants to talk to you,” she said.

  “Might be?”

  “I don’t really know the reason,” she said. She raised her hand Girl Scout fashion. “Honest. Things are happening so fast I can’t keep up. All I know is that Jack wants you to talk to his lawyer, then come to see him. After I give you some money.”

  I absently brushed my thigh, where my total liquid assets lay folded in my pants pocket. Two twenty-dollar bills. “Give me money for what?” I said.

  “That’s for Fred to tell you. Fred Cassel, he’s Jack’s lawyer.”

  I leaned forward, took a slug of the bourbon, and rested my forearms on my thighs. There was an ivory statuette of a stampeding longhorn on the coffee table, and I watched it as I said, “This isn’t making any sense, Donna. Me? Give money to me, to talk to a lawyer? Are you sure you’ve got the right guy? Do you even know what I’m doing for a living these days?”

  “I’ve heard rumors. Aren’t you some sort of gambler?”

  “Some sort of gambler.” I laughed, and hoped that the laugh didn’t sound as bitter to Donna as it did to me. “I’m a second-rate runner for some bookmakers, which means that I collect from guys who bet more than they can afford to lose. Oh, yeah, I also do some work for Sweaty Mathis, chasing guys that’ve skipped out on Sweaty’s bonds. None of it’s any fun, but it keeps me eating. Or usually it does, not always, which is more than I can say for a lot of the guys I knew in prison. But none of my credentials are anything that’re going to help Jack. Not in the fix he’s in.”

  She nervously rubbed her forehead. “I’m telling you all I know.”

  I’d been angling for her sympathy over what poor little me was doing for a living, but was glad she hadn’t taken the bait. I was giving myself all the sympathy that one man could handle. My face muscles relaxed. “If you think that was good,” I said, “then you should hear my shower soliloquy. Straight from Hamlet, How are you taking all this, Donna?”

  She adjusted her position, curling her legs up underneath and sitting on her ankles. The robe parted slightly, revealing fine dark hairs on her inner thigh. She said, “I don’t have time to wonder about me. I’m too caught up with how Jacqueline’s taking it.”

  “She’s a straight-out young lady.”

  Donna looked puzzled for just an instant, then her features smoothed. “Oh. She hit you with the jail bit. She’s too young, really, for what’s happening to sink in. Right now she likes the shock value of telling about it. It’s Jack’s idea, he says not to hide anything from her. If it was me I’d do it differently.”

  “You don’t have any say-so?” I said.

  She smiled helplessly. “Confessions of a rooster-pecked wife. Look, Rick, there isn’t any reason for you to believe this, but except for—except for the times I was with you I’ve been a protected hausfrau. Jack makes all the decisions. All of them.”

  It was the first time either of us had spoken it aloud. The mention of us—of Donna and me—started some vibes in my temples, and I hoped that the subject didn’t come up again. Not right now, anyway. I said, probably too quickly, “Look, it’s really none of my business. But this house, plus a ranch yet. Paintings by Dimitri Vail. What’s paying for all of this? All Jack’s ever told me was that he had an investment company. Investments in what? You don’t buy homes in Bent Tree on what Jack made playing football. Maybe at today’s wages, but not when Jack and I played. I’ve got some experience with that.”

  She wiggled and extended one leg straight out in front of her on the sofa. “You know as much about it as I do. Investments, that’s all he’s said for years. Oh, he talks some at parties—oil deals, a couple of movies. But you know what? I think he was just trying to impress people with whatall he knew about different things. He’s tried so hard to shake the dumb jockstrap image, he’s obsessed with it. Do you think . . . ?”

  “I don’t think anything until I know,” I said. “But they’re going to try to prove that all of this came from drugs. Cocaine. If they prove it you’ll lose it all.” The afternoon sun was sinking on the horizon, and a few slanted rays were making outlines on the carpet. She got up and closed some flowered drapes over a window and switched on a lamp. “So? Naked I came into the world,” she said.

  “None of which explains why anybody wants to see me about it,” I said.

  “You don’t have any idea? Funny, I thought you would.”

  “Well, Jack and I were tight once upon a time,” I said. “And I’d do about anything to help. But I don’t have any money, and I’m sure as hell not going to have any clout with the U.S. prosecutor’s office. Not with my record.”

  She strolled thoughtfully to an antique rolltop desk, rolled the top open, and sat
down. She picked up a thick brown envelope with a rubber band around it. “I’m supposed to give you this. It’s five thousand dollars.”

  My throat went dry. That morning I’d asked Sweaty Mathis for an advance on my five-hundred-dollar fee for locating a skipped burglar. I’d been looking for the guy for more than a month. Sweaty had laughed. I said, “That’s a lot of money just for going to see Jack’s lawyer.”

  “Do you know Fred Cassel?” she said.

  “No. Know of him. Jack’s got the best, from what I hear.”

  She slid the rubber band to one side and peeked in the envelope. “There’s a card in here with Fred’s address and number. He’s expecting you this afternoon.” She popped the rubber band back into place and held the envelope out to me.

  For a couple of seconds I just stood and watched her. A ray of light glistened on her soft lower lip. I knew better than to take the money, of course, just as I’d known better than to do a lot of the things I had done in the past. Donna’s looks hadn’t changed much; if anything, they’d gotten even better. I thought about an old Harry Chapin tune, about a taxi driver who picks up a long-lost love in the rain.

  I took the envelope from Donna and stashed it in the pocket of my sport coat, then went downtown to see Fred Cassel. Harry Chapin would have been proud.

  2

  I stood in Texas Bank Plaza’s clear plastic bubble of an elevator car and pressed the button. Sudden increased gravity sank my feet deep into plush carpet, and the people in the lobby shrunk in seconds into scurrying army ants. Down there in the cavernous lobby was a fountain spraying water over an oblong pool. An artsy cluster of stainless steel balls was suspended over the pool, and its green tile bottom was nearly covered in wishing coins. As I rode upward, a kid of about ten, wearing faded jeans, jammed his arm up to his shoulder in the water and came up with a handful of change. Earlier in the day I might’ve joined him.

  An auburn-haired girl who was sharing the elevator with me was carrying a paper shopping bag by cord handles. She wore a red mini that struck her about four inches above round, dimpled knees. The car came to a hair-standing halt on the seventh floor. The girl uttered a tiny “Eek!” and jiggled on her way. I went up two more levels, got off, took two strides down the corridor, and halted in my tracks.