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.