Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf

by Lawrence Block

  “It is.”

  “A sumptuous and comfortable prison. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. It’s what I wanted. Or what I thought I wanted, which may amount to the same thing. I’d resigned myself to it—or thought I’d resigned myself to it.”

  “Which may amount to the same thing.”

  “Yes,” she said, and took a sip of coffee. “And then I met Bo.”

  “And that would be Tegrum Bogue.”

  “I thought we were careful,” she said. “I never had any intimation that Millard knew, or even suspected.” Her face clouded. “He was a lovely boy, you know. It’s still hard for me to believe he’s gone.”

  “And that your husband killed him.”

  “That part’s not difficult to believe,” she said. “Millard’s cold as ice and harder than stone. The part I can’t understand is how someone like him could care enough to want me.”

  “You’re a possession,” Ehrengraf suggested.

  “Yes, of course. There’s no other explanation.” Another sip of coffee; Ehrengraf, watching her mouth, found himself envying the bone china cup. “It wouldn’t have lasted,” she said. “I was too old for Bo, even as Millard is too old for me. Mr. Ehrengraf, I had resigned myself to living the life Millard wanted me to live. Then Bo came along, and a sunbeam brightened up my prison cell, so to speak, and the life to which I’d resigned myself was now transformed into one I could enjoy.”

  “Made so by trysts with your young lover.”

  “Trysts,” she said. “I like the word, it sounds permissibly naughty. But, you know, it also sounds like tristesse, which is sadness in French.”

  A woman who cared about words was very likely a woman on whom the charms of poetry would not be lost. Ehrengraf found himself wishing he’d quoted something rather more distinguished than Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater.

  “I don’t know how Millard found out about Bo,” she said. “Or how he contrived to face him mere steps from our house and shoot him down like a dog. But there seemed to be no question of his guilt, and I assumed he’d have to answer in some small way for what he’d done. He wouldn’t go to prison, rich men never do, but look at him now, Mr. Ehrengraf, proclaimed a defender of home and hearth who slew a rapist and murderer. To think that a sweet and gentle boy like Bo could have his reputation so blackened. It’s heartbreaking.”

  “There, there,” Ehrengraf said, and patted the back of her hand. The skin was remarkably soft, and it felt at once both warm and cool, which struck him as an insoluble paradox but one worth investigating. “There, there,” he said again, but omitted the pat this time.

  “I blame the police,” she said. “Millard donates to their fund-raising efforts and wields influence on their behalf, and I’d say it paid off for him.”

  Ehrengraf listened while Alicia Ravenstock speculated on just how the police, led by a man named Bainbridge, might have constructed a post-mortem frame for Tegrum Bogue. She had, he was pleased to note, an incisive imagination. When she’d finished he suggested more coffee, and she shook her head.

  “I have to end my marriage,” she said abruptly. “There’s nothing for it. I made a bad bargain, and for a time I thought I could live with it, and now I see the impossibility of so doing.”

  “A divorce, Mrs. Ravenstock—”

  She recoiled at the name, then forced a smile. “Please don’t call me that,” she said. “I don’t like being reminded that it’s my name. Call me Alicia, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

  “Then you must call me Martin, Alicia.”

  “Martin,” she said, testing the name on her pink tongue.

  “It’s not terribly difficult to obtain a divorce, Alicia. But of course you would know that. And you would know, too, that a specialist in matrimonial law would best serve your interests, and you wouldn’t come to me seeking a recommendation in that regard.”

  She smiled, letting him find his way.

  “A pre-nuptial agreement,” he said. “He insisted you sign one and you did.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve shown it to an attorney, who pronounced it iron-clad.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t want more coffee. But would you have a cordial? Benedictine? Chartreuse? Perhaps a Drambuie?”

  “It’s a Scotch-based liqueur,” Ehrengraf said, after his guest had sampled her drink and signified her approval.

  “I’ve never had it before, Martin. It’s very nice.”

  “More appropriate as an after-dinner drink, some might say. But it brightens an afternoon, especially one with weather that might have swept in from the Scottish Highlands.”

  He might have quoted Robert Burns, but nothing came to mind. “Alicia,” he said, “I made a great mistake when I agreed to act as your husband’s attorney. I violated one of my own cardinal principles. I have made a career of representing the innocent, the blameless, the unjustly accused. When I am able to believe in a client’s innocence, no matter how damning the apparent evidence of his guilt, then I feel justified in committing myself unreservedly to his defense.”

  “And if you can’t believe him to be innocent?”

  “Then I decline the case.” A sigh escaped the lawyer’s lips. “Your husband admitted his guilt. He seemed quite unrepentant, he asserted his moral right to act as he had done. And, because at the time I could see some justification for his behavior, I enlisted in his service.” He set his jaw. “Perhaps it’s just as well,” he said, “that he declined to pay the fee upon which we’d agreed.”

  “He boasted about that, Martin.”

  How sweet his name sounded on those plump lips!

  “Did he indeed.”

  “‘I gave him a tenth of what he wanted,’ he said, ‘and he was lucky to get anything at all from me.’ Of course he wasn’t just bragging, he was letting me know just how tightfisted I could expect him to be.”

  “Yes, he’d have that in mind.”

  “You asked if I’d shown the pre-nup to an attorney. I had trouble finding one who’d look at it, or even let me into his office. What I discovered was that Millard had consulted every matrimonial lawyer within a radius of five hundred miles. He’d had each of them review the agreement and spend five minutes discussing it with him, and as a result they were ethically enjoined from representing me.”

  “For perhaps a thousand dollars a man, he’d made it impossible for you to secure representation.” Ehrengraf frowned. “He did all this after discovering about you and young Bogue?”

  “He began these consultations when we returned from our honeymoon.”

  “Had your discontent already become evident?”

  “Not even to me, Martin. Millard was simply taking precautions.” She finished her Drambuie, set down the empty glass. “And I did find a lawyer, a young man with a general practice, who took a look at the agreement I’d signed. He kept telling me it wasn’t his area of expertise. But he said it looked rock-solid to him.”

  “Ah,” said Ehrengraf. “Well, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”

  It was three weeks and a day later when Ehrengraf emerged from his morning shower and toweled himself dry. He shaved, and spent a moment or two trimming a few errant hairs from his beard, a Van Dyke that came to a precise point.

  Beards had come and go in Ehrengraf’s life, and upon his chin, and he felt this latest incarnation was the most successful to date. There was just the least hint of gray in it, even as there was the slightest touch of gray at his temples.

  He hoped it would stay that way, at least for a while. With gray, as with so many things, a little was an asset, a lot a liability. Nor could one successfully command time to stand still, anymore than King Canute could order a cessation of the tidal flow. There would be more gray, and the day would come when he would either accept it (and, by implication, all the slings and arrows of the aging process) or reach for the bottle of hair coloring.

  Neither prospect was appealing. But both were off in the future, and did not bear thinking about. Certainly not on w
hat was to be a day of triumph, a triumph all the sweeter for having been delayed.

  He took his time dressing, choosing his newest suit, a three-piece navy pinstripe from Peller & Mure. He considered several shirts and settled on a spread-collar broadcloth in French blue, not least of all for the way it would complement his tie.

  And the choice of tie was foreordained. It was, of course, that of the Caedmon Society.

  The spread collar called for a Double Windsor, and Ehrengraf’s fingers were equal to the task. He slipped his feet into black monk-strap loafers, then considered the suit’s third piece, the vest. The only argument against it was that it would conceal much of his tie, but the tie and its significance were important only to the wearer.

  He decided to go with the vest.

  And now? It was getting on for nine, and his appointment was at his office, at half-past ten. He’d had his light breakfast, and the day was clear and bright and neither too warm nor too cold. He could walk to his office, taking his time, stopping along the way for a cup of coffee.

  But why not wait and see if the phone might chance to ring?

  And it did, just after nine o’clock. Ehrengraf smiled when it rang, and his smile broadened at the sound of the caller’s voice, and broadened further as he listened. “Yes, of course,” he said. “I’d like that.”

  “When we spoke yesterday,” Alicia Ravenstock said, “I automatically suggested a meeting at your office. Because I’d been uncomfortable going there before, and now the reason for that discomfort had been removed.”

  “So you wanted to exercise your new freedom.”

  “Then I remembered what a nice apartment you have, and what good coffee I enjoyed on my previous visit.”

  “When you called,” Ehrengraf said, “the first thing I did was make a fresh pot.”

  He fetched a cup for each of them, and watched her purse her lips and take a first sip.

  “Just right,” she said. “There’s so much to talk about, Martin, but I’d like to get the business part out of the way.”

  She drew an envelope from her purse, and Ehrengraf held his breath, at least metaphorically, while he opened it. This was the second time he’d received an envelope from someone with Ravenstock for a surname, and the first time had proved profoundly disappointing.

  Still, she’d used his first name, and moved their meeting from his office to his residence. Those ought to be favorable omens.

  The check, he saw at a glance, had the correct number of zeroes. His eyes widened when he took a second look at it.

  “This is higher than the sum we agreed on,” he said.

  “By ten percent. I’ve suddenly become a wealthy woman, Martin, and I felt a bonus was in order. I hope you don’t regard it as an insult—”

  Money? An insult? He assured her that it was nothing of the sort.

  “It’s really quite remarkable,” she said. “Millard is in jail, where he’s being held without bail. I’ve filed suit for divorce, and my attorney assures me that the pre-nup is essentially null and void. Martin, I knew the evidence against Bo was bogus. But I had no idea it would all come to light as it has.”

  “It was an interesting chain of events,” he agreed.

  “It was a tissue of lies,” she said, “and it started to unravel when someone called Channel Seven’s investigative reporter, pointing out that Bo was at a hockey game when the Milf Murder took place. How could he be in two places at the same time?”

  “How indeed?”

  “And then there was the damning physical evidence, the lacrosse shirt with Bo’s DNA. They found a receipt among the boy’s effects for a bag of clothes donated to Goodwill Industries, and among the several items mentioned was one Nichols School lacrosse jersey. How Millard knew about the donation and got his hands on the shirt—”

  “We may never know, Alicia. And it may not have been Millard himself who found the shirt.”

  “It was probably Bainbridge. But we won’t know that, either, now that he’s dead.”

  “Suicide is a terrible thing,” Ehrengraf said. “And sometimes it seems to ask as many questions as it answers. Though this particular act did answer quite a few.”

  “Walter Bainbridge was Millard’s closest friend in the police department, and I thought it was awfully convenient the way he came up with all the evidence against Bo. But I guess Channel Seven’s investigation convinced him he’d gone too far, and when the truth about the lacrosse shirt came to light, he could see the walls closing in. How desperate he must have been to put his service revolver in his mouth and blow his brains out.”

  “It was more than the evidence he faked. The note he left suggests he himself may have committed the Milf Murder. You see, it’s almost certain he committed a similar rape and murder in Kenmore just days before he took his own life.”

  “The nurse,” she remembered. “There was no physical evidence at the crime scene, but his note alluded to ‘other bad things I’ve done,’ and didn’t they find something of hers in Bainbridge’s desk at police headquarters?”

  “A pair of soiled panties.”

  “The pervert. So he had ample reason to pin the Milf Murder on Bo. To help Millard, and to divert any possible suspicion from himself. This really is superb coffee.”

  “May I bring you a fresh cup?”

  “Not quite yet, Martin. Those notebooks of Bo’s, with the crude drawings and the fantasies? They seemed so unlikely to me, so much at variance with the Tegrum Bogue I knew, and well they might have done.”

  “They’ve turned out to be forgeries.”

  “Rather skillful forgeries,” she said, “but forgeries all the same. Bainbridge had imitated Bo’s handwriting, and he’d left behind a notebook in which he’d written out drafts of the material in his own hand, then practiced copying them in Bo’s. And do you know what else they found?”

  “Something of your husband’s, I believe.”

  “Millard supplied those fantasies for Bainbridge. He wrote them out in his own cramped hand, and gave them to Bainbridge to save his policeman friend the necessity of using his imagination. But before he did this he made photocopies, which he kept. They turned up in a strongbox in his closet, and they were a perfect match for the originals that had been among Bainbridge’s effects.”

  “Desperate men do desperate things,” he said. “I’m sure he denies everything.”

  “Of course. It won’t do him any good. The police came out of this looking very bad, and it’s no help to blame Walter Bainbridge, as he’s beyond their punishment. So they blame Millard for everything Bainbridge did, and for tempting Bainbridge in the first place. They were quite rough with him when they arrested him. You know how on television they always put a hand on a perpetrator’s head when they’re helping him get into the back seat of the squad car?”

  “So that he won’t bump his head on the roof.”

  “Well, this police detective put his hand on Millard’s head,” she said, “and then slammed it into the roof.”

  “I’ve often wondered if that ever happens.”

  “I saw it happen, Martin. The policeman said he was sorry.”

  “It must have been an accident.”

  “Then he did it again.”

  “Oh.”

  “I wish I had a tape of it,” she said. “I’d watch it over and over.”

  The woman had heart, Ehrengraf marveled. Her beauty was exceptional, but ultimately it was merely a component of a truly remarkable spirit. He could think of things to say, but he was content for now to leave them unsaid, content merely to bask in the glow of her presence.

  And Alicia seemed comfortable with the silence. Their eyes met, and it seemed to Ehrengraf that their breathing took on the same cadence, deepening their wordless intimacy.

  “You don’t want more coffee,” he said at length.

  She shook her head.

  “The last time you were here—”

  “You gave me a Drambuie.”

  “Would you like one now?”r />
  “Not just now. Do you know what I almost suggested last time?”

  He did not.

  “It was after you’d brought me the Drambuie, but before I’d tasted it. The thought came to me that we should go to your bedroom and make love, and afterward we could drink the Drambuie.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. I knew you wanted me, I could tell by the way you looked at me.”

  “I didn’t mean to stare.”

  “I didn’t find it objectionable, Martin. It wasn’t a coarse or lecherous look. It was admiring. I found it exciting.”

  “I see.”

  “Add in the fact that you’re a very attractive man, Martin, and one in whose presence I feel safe and secure, and, well, I found myself overcome by a very strong desire to go to bed with you.”

  “My dear lady.”

  “But the timing was wrong,” she said. “And how would you take it? Might it seem like a harlot’s trick to bind you more strongly to my service? So the moment came and went, and we drained our little snifters of Drambuie, and I went home to Nottingham Terrace.”

  Ehrengraf waited.

  “Now everything’s resolved,” she said. “I wanted to give you the check first thing, so that would be out of the way. And we’ve said what we needed to say about my awful husband and that wretched policeman. And I find I want you more than ever. And you still want me, don’t you, Martin?”

  “More than ever.”

  “Afterward,” she said, “we’ll have the Drambuie.”

  THE EHRENGRAF

  Fandango

  * * *

  “Love had gone and left me—and the neighbors knock and borrow

  And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse,

  And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

  There’s this little street and this little house.”

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Ehrengraf, wearing a cocoa brown blazer over a pair of cream-colored flannel trousers, stepped gingerly over the threshold and into the little room reserved for attorney-client meetings. In its center stood a table, bolted to the floor, and on either side of the table was a chair, rendered immobile in the same fashion.