Play Dirty

CHAPTER 4

WHILE WAITING ON SPEAKMAN’S WIFE TO JOIN THEM, GRIFF had been studying the globe. Suspended within a polished brass stand, it was as large as a beach ball and made of semiprecious gems. It was quite a trinket. He speculated you could buy a damn good car for what it cost.

Funny how having money, or not, changed your perspective. Recalling the rarely used, superfluous items in his Toy Box, he couldn’t think too badly of Speakman for having a fancy globe he could well afford.

Griff turned toward the library doors when he heard them open. He expected to get his first look at Mrs. Speakman, but instead the stolid Manuelo came in.

He went straight to Speakman and extended a small silver tray. On it were a prescription bottle of tablets and a glass of water. Speakman took a pill, washing it down with three sips of water. They had a brief conversation in Spanish, then Speakman said to Griff, “While Manuelo is here, can he get you anything?”

Griff shook his head.

Speakman looked up at the Central American and dismissed him with a soft “Nada más. Gracias.”

Manuelo and Mrs. Speakman met in the open doorway. He stepped aside so she could come into the room, then he left, pulling the double doors closed behind him. But Griff was no longer interested in Manuelo. He was focused on Mrs. Speakman. Laura, her name was.

She didn’t give off crazy vibes. In fact, she seemed perfectly composed and in control of her faculties. She didn’t look toward Griff, although he created a sizable silhouette even in a large room like this one. Instead, she crossed to where her husband sat in his wheelchair. She placed her hand on his shoulder, leaned down, and kissed his cheek.

When they pulled apart, Speakman said, “Laura, this is Griff Burkett.”

Since she had ignored him up till now, he was surprised when she walked toward him, right hand extended. “Mr. Burkett. How do you do?” He met her halfway, and they shook hands. Like her husband’s, her handshake was dry and firm. A businesswoman’s handshake.

Griff limited his greeting to a simple “Hi.”

She dropped his hand but maintained eye contact. “Thank you for coming. Didn’t you get released just this morning?”

“We’ve been over that,” Speakman said, humor in his voice.

“Oh, sorry. I would ask you about the long drive, but I rather imagine that topic has been exhausted, too.”

“It has,” Griff said.

“Small talk sounds even smaller in this particular situation, doesn’t it?”

He wasn’t going to touch that with a ten-foot pole.

She said, “I’m sure you were offered something to drink.”

“I was. I’m fine.”

“If you change your mind, let me know.”

They might have been missing critical marbles, but their manners remained intact.

“Please sit down, Mr. Burkett.” She took the chair nearest her husband’s wheelchair.

Griff hadn’t had time to speculate on what Foster Speakman’s missus would be like, but if he had to define his initial reaction, it would be surprise. There was nothing in her handshake or straightforward gaze that could be interpreted as nervous, flirtatious, or coy. Nor did she seem embarrassed by the topic they now had in common. He could have been there to talk about cleaning their carpets.

She didn’t act submissive or browbeaten, either, like this was something her husband had cooked up for his own gratification and she had agreed to go along with it under duress.

Hell, he didn’t know what he had expected, but whatever it was, Laura Speakman wasn’t it.

She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a white shirt, sleeveless, with pleats-he thought that was what they were called-stitched in rows down the front. Like a tuxedo shirt. Low-heeled black shoes. A serviceable wristwatch, a plain wedding band. Some of the players on the football team had worn diamonds in their ears much bigger and flashier than the ones in hers.

Her hair was dark and cut short. Sort of…swirly. He figured it would curl if it were worn longer. She was on the tallish side of average, slender, and, judging by her bare biceps, fit. Tennis maybe. A couple of times a week, she probably did yoga or Pilates, one of those women’s workouts for toning and flexibility.

He tried to keep from staring, tried to avoid looking at the features of her face too closely, although his overall impression was that if he had spotted her in a crowd, he probably would have done a double take. She wasn’t a babe, not like the kind of silicone-fortified Dallas dolly who used to hang out in the nightclubs frequented by him and his teammates, single or not. But Laura Speakman wasn’t homely. Not by any stretch.

And another thing, she looked healthy enough to have a baby. Young enough, too, if she didn’t waste time. Mid-thirties, maybe. Around his age.

He felt awkward, standing there in the center of the room, the two of them looking at him as though waiting for him to entertain them.

“Mr. Burkett? Griff?” Speakman nodded toward the chair facing them.

He’d told himself that the first chance he got, he was going to say “Thanks, but no thanks” and bolt. But he felt compelled to stay. Hell if he knew why.

Well, there was the six hundred grand. The figure had a nice ring to it that was pretty damn compelling.

He walked over to the chair and sat down. Looking directly at Laura Speakman, he said, “Your husband told me you’re all for this. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

No hesitation. Not even a blink. “Okay. But, excuse me for saying, it’s…”

“Unorthodox?”

“I was going to say it’s freaking nuts. A guy asking another guy, paying another guy, to sleep with his wife.”

“Not sleep with, Mr. Burkett. Not in the context that implies. Impregnate. As for the freakiness of it, it’s not unprecedented. In fact, it’s scriptural. Genesis. Remember?”

In the household where Griff had grown up, there’d been no Bible. When he went to school and learned the Pledge of Allegiance, he was shocked to hear that it had the cussword God in it. He soon realized that God wasn’t always used in combination with damn.

In any case, it came as shocking news to him that anything like this was in the Bible.

“We want a baby very badly, Mr. Burkett,” she said.

“There are other ways to get pregnant.”

“There are, yes. Our reasons for doing it this way are personal and shouldn’t concern you.”

“They do.”

“They shouldn’t,” she repeated.

“We, uh, do our thing, I go home and sleep with a clear conscience. Is that it?”

“That’s what it amounts to, yes.”

He looked at her, wondering how she could speak so calmly about the two of them getting it on, when her husband was sitting right there holding her hand. Griff looked from her to Speakman, and the man seemed to read his mind.

“Before you joined us, Laura, Griff suggested that…well, that I would be observing the two of you while you perform.”

She’d been looking at her husband as he explained. Several seconds passed before she turned her gaze back to Griff, and he took exception to her affronted frown. “Hey, don’t look at me like I’m the pervert here.”

“You think this is perverted?”

“What do you call it?”

“Would you think it was perverted if we were asking you to donate a kidney? Or give blood?”

He laughed. “There’s a big difference. To donate a kidney you don’t have to…touch,” he said, quickly substituting the word he’d been about to say. “You never even have to meet.”

“Unfortunately, the reproductive physiology is such that touching is necessary.”

The hell it was. He didn’t have to plant the seed personally to yield the crop. But he’d already argued that point with her husband. Speakman was determined for her to conceive naturally. She didn’t seem to have an ethical or moral problem with it, so why was he making an issue of it? Mentally shrugging, he reached a decision: They wanted him to fuck her, he could fuck her. It wasn’t like she had three eyes or something.

He addressed Speakman. “A handshake and I get a hundred grand?”

Speakman rolled his chair over to a desk and opened the lap drawer. He took a manila envelope from it, and when he came back and extended it, Griff was reminded of having to accept a cash loan from his lawyer like a kid getting an allowance. The sooner he was no longer obligated to anyone, the better.

He took the envelope.

Speakman said, “Inside is a key to a safe-deposit box and a signature card. You sign it. I’ll see that the card gets returned to the bank tomorrow, where it will remain on file. While I’m there, I’ll deposit your cash in the box. You can pick it up, um, say anytime after two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Laura and I have a meeting in the morning with representatives of the flight attendants’ union to discuss their new contract.”

Hiring a stud was just another entry on their busy agenda.

Fine with him, so long as the money made it into that box.

Griff removed the signature card and glanced at it. “What about the physical? What if I flunk?”

The couple glanced at each other, but Foster spoke for both of them. “We’ll take it on faith that you won’t.”

“That’s a lot of faith.”

“If we anticipated a problem, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Okay, I get my advance, and you get my clean bill of health. And then?”

“And then you wait to be notified of where you need to be and when. Laura’s next ovulation.”

Griff looked at her. She was gazing back at him calmly, apparently not caring that her ovulation was being discussed. He would have liked some clarification on exactly what ovulation entailed, but he wasn’t going to ask. He didn’t need to know. He knew how to fuck, and that was all they were requiring of him.

“You’ll meet once a month for as long as it takes to conceive,” Speakman explained. He lifted his wife’s hand to his mouth and kissed the palm. “Hopefully it won’t take too many cycles.”

“Yeah, I hope that, too,” Griff said. “I’ll be half a million dollars richer.”

Feeling restless again, he got up and moved to one of the bookcases. He read a few of the titles, those that were in English, but they didn’t register with him. They sounded like philosophy and boring stuff. Not an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen among them.

“Something troubling you, Griff?”

He turned back to the couple. “Why me?”

“I explained that,” Speakman replied.

“There are a lot of blond, blue-eyed guys around.”

“But none with your particular genetic makeup. You have everything we could wish for our child. Strength, amazing stamina, speed, agility, even perfect eyesight and uncanny coordination. I could go on. There were articles written about you, published not just in sports magazines but in medical journals, about what an incredible specimen of the human male body you are.”

Griff remembered the articles, written by trainers and sports medicine experts, one of whom had dubbed him “a biologic masterpiece.” He’d caught hell over that in the locker room, his teammates taunting him about his so-called perfection and wanting to test it with the crudest physical contests they could devise. It was another matter when he took chicks to bed. They really got off on screwing a “masterpiece.”

But he also remembered the scathing editorials that had followed his fall from grace. In them he had been lambasted not only for his crime but for squandering his God-given attributes.

God-given, my ass, he thought.

Those who had marveled over him wouldn’t have thought he was so bloody perfect if they’d known the two who’d spawned him. If Mr. and Mrs. Speakman could have seen what he’d come from, they would have had second thoughts, too. Did they really want the blood of his parents flowing through the veins of their kid?

“You don’t know anything about my origins. Maybe I just lucked out, got a few good genes that stacked up right by sheer accident. My gene pool could be mucked up with any number of bad seeds.”

“We would take that chance no matter who the sperm donor was, even myself,” Speakman said. “Why are you trying to talk us out of this, Griff?”

“I’m not.” Actually, to some extent, he was. He’d spent five years in prison thinking about the bad choices he’d made. If he’d learned nothing else, he’d learned not to jump in headfirst until he knew exactly how deep the water was.

He said, “I just don’t want to get into the middle of this and then have something go wrong that I’ll be blamed for.”

“What could go wrong?” Laura asked.

He laughed bitterly. “You haven’t been around much, have you? Believe me, things can go wrong. For instance, what if I fire blanks?”

“You mean, what if you have a low sperm count?” Speakman asked.

Griff gave a brusque nod.

“Do you have reason to suspect that’s the case?”

“No. But I don’t know. I’m just asking, What if?”

“When you go for your medical exam, have it tested.” Speakman paused, then said, “I believe you’re experiencing a carryover of prison paranoia.”

“You’re goddamn right I am.”

A heavy silence followed. Speakman rubbed his jaw as though sorting through words to find the right ones. “Now that the subject has been broached, let’s talk about your incarceration.”

“What about it?”

“I’ll admit that it factored into our choosing you.”

Griff covered his heart with his hand, pretending to have had his feelings hurt. “You mean there was more to it than my being the ideal physical specimen?”

Speakman ignored his sarcasm. “You cheated your team, the league, and most of all your fans. Making you a persona non grata, Griff. I’m afraid you’ll be subject to insults.”

“I haven’t had any confrontations.”

“There hasn’t been time for any,” Laura said.

Her reasonable tone irritated him. “I’m not expecting to win any popularity contests, okay? I cheated and broke the law. I was punished for my crime. All that’s behind me.”

“But there’s also the matter of the bookmaker who died.”

Griff had wondered when that would come up. If they had any smarts at all, and he believed both did, they would inevitably have asked about Bandy. He was surprised only that it was the wife who had cracked open the delicate topic.

“Bill Bandy didn’t die, Mrs. Speakman. He was murdered.”

“You were a suspect.”

“I was questioned.”

“You were arrested.”

“But never charged.”

“Neither was anyone else.”

“So?”

“So the murder remains unsolved.”

“Not my problem.”

“I hope not.”

“What the hell-”

“Did you do it?”

“No!”

Their exchange was heated and rapid, followed by a tense silence that Griff refused to break. He’d said what he had to say. He didn’t kill Bill Bandy. Period. The end.

“However,” Speakman said in the soft and conciliatory tone of an undertaker, “the shadow of suspicion was cast on you, Griff. You were eventually released for lack of evidence, but that doesn’t vindicate you.”

“Look, if you think I killed Bandy, then what the hell am I doing here?” He flung his arms wide to encompass the room, the house. “Why would you want me to father your kid?”

“We don’t think you committed murder,” Speakman said. “Absolutely not.”

Griff shifted his angry gaze over to Laura to see if she shared her husband’s belief in his innocence. Her expression remained impassive, not accusatory, but sure as hell not exonerating.

Then why was she hiring him to go to bed with her? Did he really need this kind of abuse?

Yeah, unfortunately he did. He needed the money. He had to get back on his feet, and six hundred grand was a better than fair shot at doing so. To hell with them, with her, if she thought he’d clobbered Bandy. They must not have felt too ambiguous about it, either way, or he wouldn’t be here. On top of being crazy, they were hypocrites.

“The matter of Bandy’s homicide as well as the federal crimes for which you were convicted remain black marks against your name, Griff,” Speakman said.

“I’m aware of that.”

“So how realistic is it that someone around here will hire you? How realistic is it that someone will hire you for any amount, much less for what Laura and I are offering?”

The answer was obvious. When Griff declined to waste his breath on it, Speakman continued. “Your prospects are bleak. You can’t play football. You can’t coach football. You can’t write about or talk about football, because none of the media outlets will hire you to do so. You admitted having to liquidate all your assets to pay your debts, indicating to me that you didn’t save for a rainy day.”

Speakman seemed to enjoy highlighting his shortcomings. Maybe, Griff thought, he should challenge him to a footrace. See who was better at that. “I made three million a year from the Cowboys, plus endorsements,” he said tightly. “Everybody got a chunk of it, starting with my agent and the IRS, but what I got to keep, I spent, and had a whale of a great time doing it. What’s your point?”

“My point is that you seem to have no head for business or you would have appropriated your income differently. It also appears you had no talent for larceny, or you wouldn’t have got caught.”

“A trap was laid for me. I walked into it.”

“Nevertheless.” After a beat, Speakman said, “I’m not trying to insult you, Griff.”

“Really?”

Again Speakman ignored his caustic tone. “You asked why you were chosen.”

“I’d almost forgotten the question.”

“It required a long explanation. And I wanted to be brutally honest about our reasons for extending you this offer. Primarily, you have the genetic makeup to create the child we desire. Second, for reasons just discussed, you’re in urgent need of the money we’re offering to pay. Last, you’re totally independent.

“You have no family, no real friends, no attachments, no one to whom you must account, and that is a tremendous benefit to us. We’ve emphasized the confidentiality this arrangement demands. We’re the only three people who will ever know that I didn’t sire the child Laura will conceive.”

Griff was somewhat placated. Besides, he couldn’t afford to get huffy. Especially over the bald truth. He moved to the desk, picked up a crystal paperweight, weighed it in his palm. “You’re putting a lot of trust in me to keep my mouth shut.”

Speakman chuckled. “Actually, we’re not. We’re putting a lot of trust in greed.”

“Six hundred thousand?” Griff set down the paperweight and grinned at Speakman. “Not all that much when you think about it. Not what I’d call greedy.”

Laura looked at her husband. “You haven’t told him the rest?”

“We hadn’t got that far,” Speakman replied.

Griff said, “The rest?”

Speakman rolled his chair over to the desk and picked up the paperweight. Taking a handkerchief from his pants pocket, he used it to polish the crystal as he smiled up at Griff. “It’s not that we question your integrity.”

“Bullshit. You’d be fools not to question it.”

“Right,” Speakman said, laughing softly. “We would.” With the handkerchief still wrapped around the paperweight, he replaced it on the desk, moved it an eighth of an inch to the left, then slowly withdrew the handkerchief, which he refolded into a perfect square before returning it to his pocket.

“So, for my and Laura’s peace of mind, and to ensure your silence, you’ll be paid one million dollars upon the birth of our child. Additionally, you’ll receive one million dollars each year on his birthday. And all you have to do in return is forget you ever knew us.”