Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “I fear you’ve confused a threat and a caution, Mr. Crowe, though I warrant the distinction’s a thin one. Are you fond of poetry, sir?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not surprised. It’s no criticism, sir. Some people have poetry in their souls and others do not. It’s predetermined, I suspect, like color blindness. I could recommend Thomas Hood, sir, or Christopher Smart, but would you read them? Or profit by them? Fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Crowe, and a check will do nicely.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “And I won’t be intimidated.”

  “Indeed you won’t,” Ehrengraf agreed. “But do you recall our initial interview, Mr. Crowe? I submit that you would do well to act as if—as if you were afraid of me, as if you were intimidated.”

  Ethan Crowe sat quite still for several seconds. A variety of expressions played over his generally unexpressive face. At length he drew a checkbook from the breast pocket of his morosely brown jacket and uncapped a silver fountain pen.

  “Payable to?”

  “Martin H. Ehrengraf.”

  The pen scratched away. Then, idly, “What’s the H. stand for?”

  “Herod.”

  “The store in England?”

  “The king,” said Ehrengraf. “The king in the Bible.”

  The Ehrengraf Obligation

  William Telliford gave his head a tentative scratch, in part because it itched, in part out of puzzlement. It itched because he had been unable to wash his lank brown hair during the four days he’d thus far spent in jail. He was puzzled because this dapper man before him was proposing to get him out of jail.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “The court appointed an attorney for me. A younger man, I think he said his name was Trabner. You’re not associated with him or anything, are you?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Your name is—”

  “Martin Ehrengraf.”

  “Well, I appreciate your coming to see me, Mr. Ehrengraf, but I’ve already got a lawyer, this Mr. Trabner, and—”

  “Are you satisfied with Mr. Trabner?”

  Telliford lowered his eyes, focusing his gaze upon the little lawyer’s shoes, a pair of highly polished black wing tips. “I suppose he’s all right,” he said slowly.

  “But?”

  “But he doesn’t believe I’m innocent. I mean he seems to take it for granted I’m guilty and the best thing I can do is plead guilty to manslaughter or something. He’s talking in terms of making some kind of deal with the district attorney, like it’s a foregone conclusion that I have to go to prison and the only question is how long.”

  “Then you’ve answered my question,” Ehrengraf said, a smile flickering on his thin lips. “You’re unsatisfied with your lawyer. The court has appointed him. It remains for you to disappoint him, as it were, and to engage me in his stead. You have the right to do this, you know.”

  “But I don’t have the money. Trabner was going to defend me for free, which is about as much as I can afford. I don’t know what kind of fees you charge for something like this but I’ll bet they’re substantial. That suit of yours didn’t come from the Salvation Army.”

  Ehrengraf beamed. His suit, charcoal gray flannel with a nipped-in waist, had been made for him by a most exclusive tailor. His shirt was pink, with a button-down collar. His vest was a tattersall check, red and black on a cream background, and his tie showed half-inch stripes of red and charcoal gray. “My fees are on the high side,” he allowed. “To undertake your defense I would ordinarily set a fee of eighty thousand dollars.”

  “Eighty dollars would strain my budget,” William Telliford said. “Eighty thousand, well, it might take me ten years to earn that much.”

  “But I propose to defend you free of charge, sir.”

  William Telliford stared, not least because he could not recall the last time anyone had thought to call him sir. He was, it must be said, a rather unprepossessing young man, tending to slouch and sprawl. His jeans needed patching at the knees. His plaid flannel shirt needed washing and ironing. His chukka boots needed soles and heels, and his socks needed replacement altogether.

  “But—”

  “But why?”

  Telliford nodded.

  “Because you are a poet,” said Martin Ehrengraf.

  “Poets,” said Ehrengraf, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe.”

  “That’s beautiful,” Robin Littlefield said. She didn’t know just what to make of this little man but he was certainly impressive. “Could you say that again? I want to remember it.”

  “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe. But don’t credit me with the observation. Shelley said it first.”

  “Is she your wife?”

  The lawyer’s deeply set dark eyes narrowed perceptibly. “Percy Bysshe Shelley,” he said gently. “Born 1792, died 1822. The poet.”

  “Oh.”

  “So your young man is one of the world’s unacknowledged legislators. Or you might prefer the lines Arthur O’Shaughnessy wrote. ‘We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams.’ You know the poem?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I like the second stanza,” said Ehrengraf, and tilted his head to one side and quoted it:

  “With wonderful deathless ditties

  We build up the world’s greatest

  cities,

  And out of a fabulous story

  We fashion an empire’s glory:

  One man with a dream, at

  pleasure,

  Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

  And three with a new song’s

  measure

  Can trample an empire down.”

  “You have a wonderful way of speaking. But I, uh, I don’t really know much about poetry.”

  “You reserve your enthusiasm for Mr. Telliford’s poems, no doubt.”

  “Well, I like it when Bill reads them to me. I like the way they sound, but I’ll have to admit I don’t always know what he’s getting at.”

  Ehrengraf beamed, spread his hands. “But they sound good, don’t they? Miss Littlefield, dare we require more of a poem than it please our ears? I don’t read much modern poetry, Miss Littlefield. I prefer the bards of an earlier and more innocent age. Their verses are often simpler, but I don’t pretend to understand any number of my favorite poems. Half the time I don’t know just what Blake’s getting at, Miss Littlefield, but that doesn’t keep me from enjoying his work. That sonnet of your young man’s, that poem about riding a train across Kansas and looking at the moon. I’m sure you remember it.”

  “Sort of.”

  “He writes of the moon ‘stroking desperate tides in the liquid land.’ That’s a lovely line, Miss Littlefield, and who cares whether the poem itself is fully comprehensible? Who’d raise such a niggling point? William Telliford is a poet and I’m under an obligation to defend him. I’m certain he couldn’t have murdered that woman.”

  Robin gnawed a thumbnail. “The police are pretty sure he did it,” she said. “The fire axe was missing from the hallway of our building and the glass case where it was kept was smashed open. And Janice Penrose, he used to live with her before he met me, well, they say he was still going around her place sometimes when I was working at the diner. And they never found the fire axe, but Bill came home with his jeans and shirt covered with blood and couldn’t remember what happened. And he was seen in her neighborhood, and he’d been drinking, plus he smoked a lot of dope that afternoon and he was always taking pills. Ups and downs, like, plus some green capsules he stole from somebody’s medicine chest and we were never quite sure what they were, but they do weird things to your head.”

  “The artist is so often the subject of his own experiment,” Ehrengraf said sympathetically. “Think of De Quincey. Consider Coleridge, waking from an opium dream with all of ‘Kubla Khan’ fixed in his mind, just waiting for him to write it down. Of course he was
interrupted by that dashed man from Porlock, but the lines he did manage to save are so wonderful. You know the poem, Miss Littlefield?”

  “I think we had to read it in school.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Or didn’t he write something about an albatross? Some guy shot an albatross, something like that.”

  “Something like that.”

  “The thing is,” William Telliford said, “the more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that I must have killed Jan. I mean, who else would kill her?”

  “You’re innocent,” Ehrengraf told him.

  “You really think so? I can’t remember what happened that day. I was doing some drugs and hitting the wine pretty good, and then I found this bottle of bourbon that I didn’t think we still had, and I started drinking that, and that’s about the last thing I remember. I must have gone right into blackout and the next thing I knew I was walking around covered with blood. And I’ve got a way of being violent when I’m drunk. When I lived with Jan I beat her up a few times, and I did the same with Robin. That’s one of the reasons her father hates me.”

  “Her father hates you?”

  “Despises me. Oh, I can’t really blame him. He’s this self-made man with more money than God and I’m squeezing by on food stamps. There’s not much of a living in poetry.”

  “It’s an outrage.”

  “Right. When Robin and I moved in together, well, her old man had a fit. Up to then he was laying a pretty heavy check on her the first of every month, but as soon as she moved in with me that was the end of that song. No more money for her. Here’s her little brother going to this fancy private school and her mother dripping in sables and emeralds and diamonds and mink, and here’s Robin slinging hash in a greasy spoon because her father doesn’t care for the company she’s keeping.”

  “Interesting.”

  “The man really hates me. Some people take to me and some people don’t, but he just couldn’t stomach me. Thought I was the lowest of the low. It really grinds a person down, you know. All the pressure he was putting on Robin, and both of us being as broke as we were, I’ll tell you, it reached the point where I couldn’t get any writing done.”

  “That’s terrible,” Ehrengraf said, his face clouded with concern. “The poetry left you?”

  “That’s what happened. It just wouldn’t come to me. I’d sit there all day staring at a blank sheet of paper, and finally I’d say the hell with it and fire up a joint or get into the wine, and there’s another day down the old chute. And then finally I found that bottle of bourbon and the next thing I knew—” the poet managed a brave smile “—well, according to you, I’m innocent.”

  “Of course you are innocent, sir.”

  “I wish I was convinced of that, Mr. Ehrengraf. I don’t even see how you can be convinced.”

  “Because you are a poet,” the diminutive attorney said. “Because, further, you are a client of Martin H. Ehrengraf. My clients are always innocent. That is the Ehrengraf presumption. Indeed, my income depends upon the innocence of my clients.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “It’s simple enough. My fees, as we’ve said, are quite high. But I collect them only if my efforts are successful. If a client of mine goes to prison, Mr. Telliford, he pays me nothing. I’m not even reimbursed for my expenses.”

  “That’s incredible,” Telliford said. “I never heard of anything like that. Do many lawyers work that way?”

  “I believe I’m the only one. It’s a pity more don’t take up the custom. Other professionals as well, for that matter. Consider how much higher the percentage of successful operations might be if surgeons were paid on the basis of their results.”

  “Isn’t that the truth. Hey, you know what’s ironic?”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Littlefield. Robin’s father. He could pay you that eighty thousand out of petty cash and never miss it. That’s the kind of money he’s got. But the way he feels about me, he’d pay to send me to prison, not to keep me out of it. In other words, if you worked for him you’d only get paid if you lost your case. Don’t you think that’s ironic?”

  “Yes,” said Ehrengraf. “I do indeed.”

  When William Telliford stepped into Ehrengraf’s office, the lawyer scarcely recognized him. The poet’s beard was gone and his hair had received the attention of a fashionable barber. His jacket was black velvet, his trousers a cream-colored flannel. He was wearing a raw silk shirt and a bold paisley ascot.

  He smiled broadly at Ehrengraf’s reaction. “I guess I look different,” he said.

  “Different,” Ehrengraf agreed.

  “Well, I don’t have to live like a slob now.” The young man sat down in one of Ehrengraf’s chairs, shot his cuff, and checked the time on an oversized gold watch. “Robin’ll be coming by for me in half an hour,” he said, “but I wanted to take the time to let you know how much I appreciated what you tried to do for me. You believed in my innocence when I didn’t even have that much faith in myself. And I’m sure you would have been terrific in the courtroom if it had come to that.”

  “Fortunately it didn’t.”

  “Right, but whoever would have guessed how it would turn out? Imagine old Jasper Littlefield killing Jan to frame me and get me out of his daughter’s life. That’s really a tough one to swallow. But he came over looking for Robin, and he found me drunk, and then it was evidently just a matter of taking the fire axe out of the case and taking me along with him to Jan’s place and killing her and smearing her blood all over me. I must have been in worse than a blackout when it happened. I must have been passed out cold for him to be sure I wouldn’t remember any of it.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “The police never did find the fire axe, and I wondered about that at the time. What I’d done with it, I mean, because deep down inside I really figured I must have been guilty. But what happened was Mr. Littlefield took the axe along with him, and then when he went crazy it was there for him to use.”

  “And use it he did.”

  “He sure did,” Telliford said. “According to some psychologist they interviewed for one of the papers, he must have been repressing his basic instincts all his life. When he killed Jan for the purpose of framing me, it set something off inside him, some undercurrent of violence he’d been smothering for years and years. And then finally he up and dug out the fire axe, and he did a job on his wife and his son, chopped them both to hell and gone, and then he made a phone call to the police and confessed what he’d done and told about murdering Jan at the same time.”

  “Considerate of him,” said Ehrengraf, “to make that phone call.”

  “I’ll have to give him that,” the poet said. “And then, before the cops could get there and pick him up, he took the fire axe and chopped through the veins in his wrists and bled to death.”

  “And you’re a free man.”

  “And glad of it,” Telliford said. “I’ll tell you, it looks to me as though I’m sitting on top of the world. Robin’s crazy about me and I’m all she’s got in the world—me and the couple of million bucks her father left her. With the rest of the family dead, she inherits every penny. No more slinging hash. No more starving in a garret. No more dressing like a slob. You like my new wardrobe?”

  “It’s quite a change,” Ehrengraf said diplomatically.

  “Well, I realize now that I was getting sick of the way I looked, the life I was leading. Now I can live the way I want. I’ve got the freedom to do as I please with my life.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “And you’re the man who believed in me when nobody else did, myself included.” Telliford smiled with genuine warmth. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I was talking with Robin, and I had the idea that we ought to pay you your fee. You didn’t actually get me off, of course, but your system is that you get paid no matter how your client gets off, just so he doesn’t wind up in jail. That’s how you explained it, isn’t it?”


  “That’s right.”

  “That’s what I said to Robin. But she said we didn’t have any agreement to pay you eighty thousand dollars, as a matter of fact we didn’t have any agreement to pay you anything, because you volunteered your services. In fact I would have gotten off the same way with my court-appointed attorney. I said that wasn’t the point, but Robin said after all it’s her money and she didn’t see the point of giving you an eighty-thousand-dollar handout, that you were obviously well off and didn’t need charity.”

  “Her father’s daughter, I’d say.”

  “Huh? Anyway, it’s her money and her decision to make, but I got her to agree that we’d pay for any expenses you had. So if you can come up with a figure—”

  Ehrengraf shook his head. “You don’t owe me a cent,” he insisted. “I took your case out of a sense of obligation. And your lady friend is quite correct—I am not a charity case. Furthermore, my expenses on your behalf were extremely low, and in any case I should be more than happy to stand the cost myself.”

  “Well, if you’re absolutely certain—”

  “Quite certain, thank you.” Ehrengraf smiled. “I’m most satisfied with the outcome of the case. Of course I regret the loss of Miss Littlefield’s mother and brother, but at least there’s a happy ending to it all. You’re out of prison, you have no worries about money, your future is assured, and you can return to the serious business of writing poetry.”

  “Yeah,” Telliford said.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Not really. Just what you said about poetry.”

  “Oh?”

  “I suppose I’ll get back to it sooner or later.”

  “Don’t tell me your muse has deserted you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the young man said nervously. “It’s just that, oh, I don’t really seem to care much about poetry now, you know what I mean?”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  “Well, I’ve got everything I want, you know? I’ve got the money to go all over the world and try all the things I’ve always wanted to try, and, oh, poetry just doesn’t seem very important anymore.” He laughed. “I remember what a kick I used to get when I’d check the mailbox and some little magazine would send me a check for one of my poems. Now what I usually got was fifty cents a line for poems, and that’s from the magazines that paid anything, and most of them just gave you copies of the issue with the poem in it and that was that. That sonnet you liked, ‘On a Train Through Kansas,’ the magazine that took it paid me twenty-five cents a line. So I made three dollars and fifty cents for that poem, and by the time I submitted it here and there and everywhere, hell, my postage came to pretty nearly as much as I got for it.”