Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf

by Lawrence Block

  “And on the night in question,” Ehrengraf said, “he was not actually on your property. He was, as I understand it, two doors away.”

  “In front of the Gissling home. Heading north toward Meadow Road, there’s this house, and then the Robert Townsend house, and then Madge and Bernard Gissling’s. So that would be two doors away.”

  “And when you shot him, he fell dead on the Gisslings’ lawn.”

  “They’d just resodded.”

  “That very day?”

  “No, a month ago. Why?”

  Ehrengraf smiled, a maneuver that had served him well over the years. “Mr. Bogue—that would be Tegrum Bogue—was unarmed.”

  “He had a knife in his pocket.”

  “An inch-long penknife, wasn’t it? Attached to his key ring?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. I never saw the knife. The police report mentioned it. It was only an inch long?”

  “Apparently.”

  “It doesn’t sound terribly formidable, does it? But Bogue’s was a menacing presence without a weapon in evidence. He was young and tall and vigorous and muscular and wild-eyed, and he uttered threats and put his hands on me and pushed me and struck me.”

  “You were armed.”

  “An automatic pistol, made by Gunnar & Swick. Their Kestrel model. It’s registered, and I’m licensed to carry it.”

  “You drew your weapon.”

  “I did. I thought the sight of it might stop Bogue in his tracks.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “He laughed,” Ravenstock recalled, “and said he’d take it away from me, and would stick it—well, you can imagine where he threatened to stick it.”

  Ehrengraf, who could actually imagine several possible destinations for the Kestrel, simply nodded.

  “And he rushed at me, and I might have been holding a water pistol for all the respect he showed it.”

  “You fired it.”

  “I was taught never to show a gun unless I was prepared to use it.”

  “Five times.”

  “I was taught to keep on firing until one’s gun was empty. Actually the Kestrel’s clip holds nine cartridges, but five seemed sufficient.”

  “‘To make assurance doubly sure,’” Ehrengraf said. “Stopping at five does show restraint.”

  “Well.”

  “And yet,” Ehrengraf said, “the traditional argument that the gun simply went off of its own accord comes a cropper, doesn’t it? It’s a rare weapon that fires itself five times in rapid succession. As a member of the Nottingham Vigilantes—”

  “The Vigilance Committee.”

  “Yes, of course. In that capacity, weren’t you supposed to report Bogue’s presence to the police rather than confront him?”

  Ravenstock came as close to hanging his head as his character would allow. “I never thought to make the call.”

  “The heat of the moment,” Ehrengraf suggested.

  “Just that. I acted precipitously.”

  “A Mrs. Kling was across the street, walking her Gordon setter. She told police the two of you were arguing, and it seemed to be about someone’s wife.”

  “He made remarks about my wife,” Ravenstock said. “Brutish remarks, designed to provoke me. About what he intended to do to and with her, after he’d taken the gun away from me and put it, well—”

  “Indeed.”

  “What’s worse, Mr. Ehrengraf, is the campaign of late to canonize Tegrum Bogue. Have you seen the picture his family released to the press? He doesn’t look very menacing, does it?”

  “Only if one finds choirboys threatening.”

  “It was taken nine years ago,” Ravenstock said, “when young Bogue was a first-form student at the Nichols School. Since then he shot up eight inches and put on forty or fifty pounds. I assure you, the cherub in the photo bears no resemblance to the hulking savage who attacked me steps from my own home.”

  “Unconscionable,” Ehrengraf said.

  “And now I’m certain to be questioned further, and very likely to be placed under arrest. My lawyer was nattering on about how unlikely it was that I’d ever have to spend a night in jail, and hinting at my pleading guilty to some reduced charge. That’s not good enough.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t want to skate on a technicality, my reputation in ruins. I don’t want to devote a few hundred hours to community service. How do you suppose they’d have me serve my community, Mr. Ehrengraf? Would they send me across the street to pick up litter in the park? Or would they regard a stick with a sharp bit of metal at its end as far too formidable a weapon to be placed in my irresponsible hands?”

  “These are things you don’t want,” Ehrengraf said soothingly. “And whyever should you want them? But perhaps you could tell me what it is that you do want.”

  “What I want,” said Ravenstock, speaking as a man who generally got whatever it was that he wanted. “What I want, sir, is for all of this to go away. And my understanding is that you are a gentleman who is very good at making things go away.”

  Ehrengraf smiled.

  Ehrengraf gazed past the mound of clutter on his desk at his office door, with its window of frosted glass. What struck him about the door was that his client had not yet come through it. It was getting on for half past eleven, which made Millard Ravenstock almost thirty minutes late.

  Ehrengraf fingered the knot in his tie. It was a perfectly symmetrical knot, neither too large nor too small, which was as it should be. Whenever he wore this particular tie, with its navy field upon which a half-inch diagonal stripe of royal blue was flanked by two narrower stripes, one of gold, the other vividly green—whenever he put it on, he took considerable pains to get the knot exactly right.

  It was, of course, the tie of the Caedmon Society; Ehrengraf, not a member of that institution, had purchased the tie from a shop in Oxford’s Cranham Close. He’d owned it for some years now, and had been careful to avoid soiling it, extending its useful life by reserving it for special occasions.

  This morning had promised to be such an occasion. Now, as the minutes ticked away without producing Millard Ravenstock, he found himself less certain.

  The antique Regulator clock on the wall, which lost a minute a day, showed the time as 11:42 when Millard Ravenstock opened the door and stepped into Ehrengraf’s office. The little lawyer glanced first at the clock and then at his wristwatch, which read 11:48. Then he looked at his client, who looked not the least bit apologetic for his late arrival.

  “Ah, Ehrengraf,” the man said. “A fine day, wouldn’t you say?”

  You could see Niagara Square from Ehrengraf’s office window, and a quick look showed that the day was as it had been earlier—overcast and gloomy, with every likelihood of rain.

  “Glorious,” Ehrengraf agreed.

  Without waiting to be asked, Ravenstock pulled up a chair and settled his bulk into it. “Before I left my house,” he said, “I went into my den, got out my checkbook, and wrote two checks. One, you’ll be pleased to know, was for your fee.” He patted his breast pocket. “I’ve brought it with me.”

  Ehrengraf was pleased. But, he noted, cautiously so. He sensed there was another shoe just waiting to be dropped.

  “The other check is already in the mail. I made it payable to the Policemen’s Benevolent Association, and I assure you the sum is a generous one. I have always been a staunch proponent of the police, Ehrengraf, if only because the role they play is such a vital one. Without them we’d have the rabble at our throats, eh?”

  Ehrengraf, thought Ehrengraf. The Mister, present throughout their initial meeting, had evidently been left behind on Nottingham Terrace. Increasingly, Ehrengraf felt it had been an error to wear that particular tie on this particular morning.

  “Yet I’d given the police insufficient credit for their insight and their resolve. Walter Bainbridge, a thorough and diligent policeman and, I might add, a good friend, pressed an investigation along lines others might have left unexplored. I’ve been com
pletely exonerated, and it’s largely his doing.”

  “Indeed,” said Ehrengraf.

  “The police dug up evidence, unearthed facts. That housewife who was raped and murdered three weeks ago in Orchard Park. I’m sure you’re familiar with the case. The press called it the Milf Murder.”

  Ehrengraf nodded.

  “It took place outside city limits,” Ravenstock went on, “so it wasn’t their case at all, but they went through the house and found an unwashed sweatshirt stuffed into a trashcan in the garage. Nichols School Lacrosse, it said, big as life. That’s a curious expression isn’t it? Big as life?”

  “Curious,” Ehrengraf said.

  “Lacrosse seems to be the natural refuge of the preppy thug,” Ravenstock said. “Can you guess whose DNA soiled that sweatshirt?”

  Ehrengraf could guess, but saw no reason to do so. Nor did Ravenstock wait for a response.

  “Tegrum Bogue’s. He’d been on the team, and it was beyond question his shirt. He’d raped that young housewife and snapped her neck when he was through with her. And he had similar plans for Alicia.”

  “Your wife.”

  “Yes. I don’t believe you’ve met her.”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  The expression that passed over Ravenstock’s face suggested that it was a pleasure Ehrengraf would have to live without. “She is a beautiful woman,” he said. “And quite a few years younger than I. I suppose there are those who would refer to her as my trophy wife.”

  The man paused, waiting for Ehrengraf to comment, then frowned at the lawyer’s continuing silence. “There are two ways to celebrate a trophy,” he went on. “One may carry it around, showing it off at every opportunity. Or one may place it on a shelf in one’s personal quarters, to be admired and savored in private.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Some men require that their taste have the approbation of others. They lack confidence, Ehrengraf.”

  Another pause. Some expression of assent seemed to be required of him, and Ehrengraf considered several, ranging from Right on, dude to Most def.

  “Indeed,” he said at length.

  “But somehow Alicia caught his interest. He was one of the mob given to loitering in the park, and sometimes she’d walk Kossuth there.”

  “Kossuth,” Ehrengraf said. “The Gordon setter?”

  “No, of course not. I wouldn’t own a Gordon. And why would anyone name a Gordon for Louis Kossuth? Our dog is a Viszla, and a fine and noble animal he is. He must have seen her walking Kossuth. Or—”

  “Or?”

  “I had my run-ins with him. In my patrol duty with the Vigilance Committee, I’d recommended that he and his fellows stay on their side of the street.”

  “In the park, and away from the houses.”

  “His response was not at all acquiescent,” Ravenstock recalled. “After that I made a point of monitoring his activities, and phoned in the occasional police report. I’d have to say I made an enemy, Ehrengraf.”

  “I doubt you were ever destined to be friends.”

  “No, but I erred in making myself the object of his hostility. I think that’s what may have put Alicia in his sights. I think he stalked me, and I think his reconnaissance got him a good look at Alicia, and of course to see her is to want her.”

  Ehrengraf, struck by the matter-of-fact tone of that last clause, touched the tips of two fingers to the Caedmon Society cravat.

  “And the police found evidence of his obsession,” Ravenstock said. “A roll of undeveloped film in his sock drawer, with photos for which my wife had served as an unwitting model. Crude fictional sketches, written in Bogue’s schoolboy hand, some written in the third person, some in the first. Clumsy mini-stories relating in pornographic detail the abduction, sexual savaging, and murder of my wife. Pencil drawings to illustrate them, as ill-fashioned as his prose. The scenarios varied as his fantasies evolved. Sometimes there was torture, mutilation, dismemberment. Sometimes I was present, bound and helpless, forced to witness what was being done to her. And I had to watch because I couldn’t close my eyes. I didn’t read his filth, so I can’t recall whether he’d glued my eyelids open or removed them surgically—”

  “Either would be effective.”

  “Well,” Ravenstock said, and went on, explaining that of course the several discoveries the police had made put paid to any notion that he, Millard Ravenstock, had done anything untoward, let alone criminal. He had not been charged, so there were no charges to dismiss, and what was at least as important was that he had been entirely exonerated in the court of public opinion.

  “So you can see why I felt moved to make a generous donation to the Policemen’s Benevolent Association,” he continued. “I feel they earned it. And I’ll find a way to express my private appreciation to Walter Bainbridge.”

  Ehrengraf waited, and refrained from touching his necktie.

  “As for yourself, Ehrengraf, I greatly appreciate your efforts on my behalf, and have no doubt that they’d have proved successful had not Fate and the police intervened and done your job for you. And I’m sure you’ll find this more than adequate compensation for your good work.”

  The check was in an envelope, which Ravenstock plucked from his inside breast pocket and extended with a flourish. The envelope was unsealed, and Ehrengraf drew the check from it and noted its amount, which was about what he’d come to expect.

  “The fee I quoted you—”

  “Was lofty,” Ravenstock said, “but would have been acceptable had the case not resolved itself independent of any action on your part.”

  “I was very specific,” Ehrengraf pointed out. “I said my work would cost you nothing unless your innocence was established and all charges dropped. But if that were to come about, my fee was due and payable in full. You do remember my saying that, don’t you?”

  “But you didn’t do anything, Ehrengraf.”

  “You agreed to the arrangement I spelled out, sir, and—”

  “I repeat, you did nothing, or if you did do anything it had no bearing on the outcome of the matter. The payment I just gave you is a settlement, and I pay it gladly in order to put the matter to rest.”

  “A settlement,” Ehrengraf said, testing the word on his tongue.

  “And no mere token settlement, either. It’s hardly an insignificant amount, and my personal attorney hastened to tell me I’m being overly generous. He says all you’re entitled to, legally and morally, is a reasonable return on whatever billable hours you’ve put in, and—”

  “Your attorney.”

  “One of the region’s top men, I assure you.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Would this be the same attorney who’d have had you armed with a sharp stick to pick up litter in Delaware Park? After pleading you guilty to a murder for which you bore no guilt?”

  Even as he marshaled his arguments, Ehrengraf sensed that they would prove fruitless. The man’s mind, such as it was, was made up. Nothing would sway him.

  There was a time, Ehrengraf recalled, when he had longed for a house like Millard Ravenstock’s—on Nottingham Terrace, or Meadow Road, or Middlesex. Something at once tasteful and baronial, something with pillars and a center hall, something that would proclaim to one and all that its owner had unquestionably come to amount to something.

  True success, he had learned, meant one no longer required its accoutrements. His penthouse apartment at the Park Lane provided all the space and luxury he could want, and a better view than any house could offer. The building, immaculately maintained and impeccably staffed, even had a name that suited him; it managed to be as resolutely British as Nottingham or Middlesex without sounding pretentious.

  And it was closer to downtown. When time and good weather permitted, Ehrengraf could walk to and from his office.

  But not today. There was a cold wind blowing off the lake, and the handicappers in the weather bureau had pegged rain at even money. The little lawyer had arrived at his office a few minutes after ten
. He made one phone call, and as he rang off he realized he could have saved himself the trip.

  He went downstairs, retrieved his car, and returned to the Park Lane to await his guest.

  Ehrengraf, opening the door, was careful not to stare. The woman whom the concierge had announced as a Ms. Philips was stunning, and Ehrengraf worked to conceal the extent to which he was stunned. She was taller than Ehrengraf by several inches, with dark hair that someone very skilled had cut to look as though she took no trouble with it. She had great big Bambi eyes, the facial planes of a supermodel, and a full-lipped mouth that stopped just short of obscenity.

  “Ms. Philips,” Ehrengraf said, and motioned her inside.

  “I didn’t want to leave my name at the desk.”

  “I assumed as much. Come in, come in. A drink? A cup of coffee?”

  “Coffee, if it’s no trouble.”

  It was no trouble at all; Ehrengraf had made a fresh pot upon his return, and he filled two cups and brought them to the living room, where Alicia Ravenstock had chosen the Sheraton wing chair. Ehrengraf sat opposite her, and they sipped their coffee and discussed the beans and brewing method before giving a few minutes’ attention to the weather.

  Then she said, “You’re very good to see me here. I was afraid to come to your office. There are enough people who know me by sight, and if word got back to him that I went to a lawyer’s office, or even into a building where lawyers had offices—”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I’m his alone, you see. I can have anything I want, except the least bit of freedom.”

  “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,” Ehrengraf said, and when she looked puzzled he quoted the rhyme in full:

  “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,

  Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.

  He put her in a pumpkin shell

  And there he kept her very well.”

  “Yes, of course. It’s a nursery rhyme, isn’t it?”

  Ehrengraf nodded. “I believe it began life centuries ago as satirical political doggerel, but it’s lived on as a rhyme for children.”

  “Millard keeps me very well,” she said. “You’ve been to the pumpkin shell, haven’t you? It’s a very elegant one.”