Rough Trade

any.”
    “Lots of people have money,” I replied. “You and Jeff have something that’s much more desirable. Just think about it, Chrissy. Do you have any idea how many people would kill for an NFL franchise?”
     
    As I waited in the dead man’s house I wandered from room to room gathering up empty glasses and dumping out ashtrays. The phone kept ringing, but I was tired of answering it. After a while I turned the ringer off and just let the machine pick up. Then I made one last foray through the food baskets and, armed with an apple, a pear, and a stick of smoked sausage (for protein), I went into the library and made myself comfortable.
    A copy of that morning’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel lay on the coffee table, and I looked through it while I ate. The morning’s headline was about a threatened teachers’ strike. There was also an above-the-fold story about a toddler who’d accidentally locked himself in a Porta-John at a flea market over the weekend. On the sports page the articles consisted mostly of a series of scathing postmortems of the Monarchs’ defeat at the hands of the Vikings that alternately blamed Bennato and Jeff for the rout. There was also an article about the city’s proposed stadium renovation plan. In it Beau was quoted as saying, “I’m very excited about this project.” I sighed, thinking of what tomorrow’s headlines would bring.
    Jeff Rendell came into the room so quietly that I jumped at the sight of him. His clothes were rumpled, and his eyes were still heavy with sleep behind the tortoiseshell frames of his glasses. The wrinkled bed sheets had left their imprint on his cheek, and his hair stood up at the back of his head in an absurd cowlick.
    “Where is everybody?” he asked, his voice still thick with sleep.
    “They all left around dinnertime. Chrissy finally went home about an hour ago to be with the baby. She wanted to stay, but she was just exhausted, so I sent her home.”
    Jeff sank down into an armchair and buried his face in his hands. “I can’t believe it,” he groaned, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “I can’t believe I killed him.”
    “What?” I demanded. Two things went through my head in rapid succession: that anything he told me would be protected by attorney-client privilege, and why I had decided early on not to go into criminal law. This was the kind of confession I never wanted to hear, especially from my best friend’s husband.
    “What do you mean when you say you killed him?” I asked, willing myself to keep my expression neutral. “He’d be alive right now if it weren’t for me.”
    “How do you figure that?”
    “You must have heard by now about the big fight I had with him this morning.”
    “A day didn’t go by without your father having a big fight with somebody. You know what your dad was like. He was the kind of guy who would never whisper if he could get away with shouting instead. It was his personality.”
    “Yeah, but this time it was different.”
    “Different in what way?”
    “He had a heart attack and died afterward,” he replied bitterly.
    “Is that all?” I demanded, unable to suppress an audible sigh of relief.
    “What do you mean, is that all?” repeated Jeff, sounding shocked.
    “I thought you were going to tell me something else, that’s all,” I said quickly. “What did you and your dad fight about?”
    “I told him I was quitting.”
    “Quitting as GM?”
    “Quitting the team. I told him I was fed up with losing, sick of being treated like an errand boy, and I wasn’t going to hang around and watch him destroy the team that he’d spent his whole life building.”
    “What made you decide you were going to quit? Why today?”
    “I don’t really know. I guess things have been coming to a head for a long time. The money, the bank, the fact that Coach Bennato seems to have forgotten how to win football games—suddenly it all seemed impossible. It didn’t help that Dad still refused to even discuss the Los Angeles offer. I guess I was just feeling angry and frustrated.”
    “So that’s what you went in there to talk to him about? The fact that you were quitting?”
    “No. I wasn’t planning anything. He buzzed me to come into his office. He wanted me to run down to the bank and pick up some contracts he wanted from the safe-deposit box.”
    “What kind of contracts?”
    “We keep the player contracts locked up. That’s what got me started. I mean, here I am, the general