Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf

by Lawrence Block

  A young woman occupied one of the chairs and looked up at the little lawyer’s approach. She was tall and slender, with nut-brown hair framing an oval face that would have delighted Modigliani. Mentally, Ehrengraf supplied her with the color and sparkle of which recent events had deprived her. He could tell that she’d be a beauty.

  “Mr. Ehrengraf,” she said.

  “Ms. Plumley.”

  “Can we talk here?”

  “That’s the room’s purpose,” Ehrengraf said. “It’s supposed to be preferable to meeting in a cell.”

  “And I suppose it is. But can what we say be heard?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.

  Which, he thought, was accurate, if not entirely responsive. Sitting in that room, breathing its stale air, Ehrengraf recalled a very different room, one he’d encountered a few years ago when business had called him to New York. There, a pebble’s throw from Carnegie Hall, he dined in a restaurant with an interior designed by the artist Milton Glaser. He recalled patterned tile rugs set into the tiled floor, but more than that he remembered the motif of super-sized representations of the human anatomy, sculpted and hanging on the walls. Here a disembodied nose, there a pair of sculpted lips. And, most memorably, an enormous ear.

  The room’s décor was as over-the-top as this room’s was austere, even non-existent. But Ehrengraf imagined its walls covered with ears, thousands of ears, big ears and little ears, all of them listening, for what else did ears do?

  But he wouldn’t worry about it.

  “Actually,” Cheryl Plumley said, “there’s no reason for me to worry about it. Everyone knows I did it.”

  Responses sprang up in Ehrengraf’s mind and dematerialized before they reached his lips. He waited.

  “That’s why I insisted they call you,” she went on. “‘You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney.’ I felt as though I was in a crime show on television. Reading me my rights. I mean, I was ready to change my name to Miranda.”

  “You were right to call me.”

  “Oh, I knew that was the thing to do. I don’t remember who it was I heard it from, but I’ve never forgotten. ‘If you ever kill somebody, if you’re guilty as sin, the man to call is Martin H. Ehrengraf.’”

  “Indeed,” said Ehrengraf, and sighed a small sigh. “It pains me to hear you say that,” he said, “because it could not be further from the truth. My role, Ms. Plumley, is that of defender of the innocent. I have never represented a guilty client.”

  Her face, already jailhouse pale, nevertheless managed to lose color. “Then I’ve made a mistake,” she said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Because if you only represent innocent people—”

  “As indeed I do.”

  “—then you can’t represent me, can you?”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Because I’m guilty. Why are you shaking your head?”

  “Because I don’t agree. Ms. Plumley, my dear Ms. Plumley, I know you to be innocent.”

  “Innocent,” said Cheryl Plumley. “I just learned how much I want to believe that. When you said what you said, when I heard those words, a surge of emotion shot through me. And now I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  “If you’re not certain,” Ehrengraf said, “it’s probably best to do neither. I’ll say it again, dear lady. I know you to be innocent.”

  “How can you? The whole world knows me to be guilty. And yet—”

  “Yes?”

  “Even though I did it, even though I fired the pistol that killed those people, I could argue that I wasn’t truly responsible for what happened in that house on Woodbridge Avenue. It wouldn’t make any difference in a court of law, and I’m not sure I really believe it myself. But it’s an argument I could make.”

  “Then make it.”

  She lowered her eyes, then raised them almost defiantly. “Very well,” she said. “The Devil made me do it.”

  “Believe me,” Cheryl Plumley said, “I know how that sounds. You must think I’m barking mad.”

  Neither barking nor mad, Ehrengraf thought. But possessed of an interesting turn of mind, certainly, and one which presented possibilities.

  “I don’t even believe in the Devil,” she went on. “At least I don’t think I do.”

  “Unlike the Deity,” Ehrengraf said, “the Devil doesn’t seem to require that one believe in him. One can but wonder why. But let’s put that question aside for the moment, shall we? And why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “I don’t remember everything. I suppose that’s evidence of guilt in and of itself, wouldn’t you say? My guilty conscience must have erased the memory.”

  That struck Ehrengraf as rather more of a stretch than believing in the Devil, or even the Tooth Fairy.

  “I don’t know where to begin, Mr. Ehrengraf. I woke up that morning, I prepared my own breakfast, I watched a news program on television. I left my house around ten-thirty and drove to my gym, where I took a yoga class from eleven to twelve. I had lunch with a friend at the Hour Glass, and she told me about a shop on Englewood with a good selection of ceramic tiles imported from Italy. I’ve been thinking about doing some renovation and, well, I thought it would be good to see what they had.”

  “So you drove there?”

  “I must have.”

  “But you don’t remember?”

  She shook her head. “I remember leaving the restaurant,” she said, “and I remember getting in my car, and then everything’s just gone.”

  “Gone.”

  “The slate wiped clean. The next thing I knew—”

  “Yes?”

  “I was in that house.”

  “The Kuhldreyer home.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time. I must have driven past that house dozens of times, it’s right there on Woodbridge between Starin and Voorhees, but I’d never paid any particular attention to it.”

  “And you didn’t know the Kuhldreyers.”

  “I knew her in high school. Knew who she was, anyway. I don’t think we ever had an actual conversation.”

  “Mrs. Kuhldreyer.”

  “Not at the time. She was Mary Beth Dooley, and she was two years behind me at Bennett, and she giggled.”

  “She giggled.”

  “A lot of girls do,” she said, “at that age. That’s about as much as I ever knew about her, and then all of a sudden I was in her house, and I had a gun in my hand.” She looked at her hand, as if it still held the weapon. “It was very heavy,” she said.

  “The gun.”

  “Yes. It was in my hand, and my finger was on the trigger, and they were all dead.”

  “And did you know who they were?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t recognize her,” she said. “Mary Beth. I barely knew her in high school and hadn’t seen her since. And I’d never met him.”

  “Richard Kuhldreyer.”

  “He was lying on the rug in front of the fireplace,” she said. “I guess he was standing when I shot him, and he fell down there. She was on the sofa, it was one of those Victorian love seats, and I’d shot her once in the face and once in the chest. And then there was another woman.”

  “Patricia Munk.”

  “Another person I’d never heard of until I killed her with a single shot to the head. She lived across the street from the Kuhldreyers, and I don’t know what she was doing at their house that afternoon.”

  Keeping an appointment in Samarra, Ehrengraf supposed.

  “Before the event,” he said, “the last thing you remember is getting in your car.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then the next thing you recall—”

  “Is standing in their living room with a gun in my hand.”

  “A gun which you’d already fired.”

  “Yes, although I have no recollection of firing it.”

  “And the people in the room—”

  “Are lying there dead. I’m s
eeing them for the first time, and they’re dead, because I’ve killed them.”

  “By pointing the gun in your hand and pulling the trigger, but you don’t remember so doing.”

  “No, but who else could have done it? I was all alone in the room. Except for three people who could hardly have done it, because they were all dead.”

  Ehrengraf thought it over, and made a little tent of his fingers. Or might it better be a church? He extended both index fingers, interlaced the others. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and see all the people—

  “Lunch,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You had lunch,” he said. “At the Hour Glass, with a friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you have to eat?”

  “What did I have to eat? Why on earth is that important?”

  “What might be important,” he said, “is your recollection of it.”

  “Fish,” she said. “Filet of sole almandine. With a green salad. I had the house dressing on the salad.”

  “And your companion,” Ehrengraf said.

  “I don’t remember what she had. Maybe if I concentrate—”

  “I don’t care what she had. Tell me about her.”

  “Hypnotized,” Cheryl Plumley said.

  Ehrengraf marked his place in a book of Swinburne’s verse and regarded his client, who sat in the red leather chair to the side of his chronically untidy desk. At their initial meeting the little lawyer had sensed the beauty damped down by imprisonment. Now, her anxiety dispelled with the restoration of her freedom, the woman positively glowed.

  “Barring Satanic intervention,” Ehrengraf said, “no other explanation came to mind. You had acted in an uncharacteristic manner, taking the lives of a man and two women, for no discernible reason, and with no recollection of having done so. What more obvious explanation than that you had been hypnotized?”

  “By Maureen McClintock.”

  “The woman with whom you’d lunched at the Hour Glass. Not a close friend, merely a casual acquaintance—and yet after an hour in her company, you’d returned abruptly to consciousness in a strange house with a smoking gun in your hand.”

  “I thought I must have fired it. And killed those people.”

  “A natural conclusion, to be sure. There you were, after all, gun in hand. And there they were, shot dead. Hypnosis, as I understand it, can’t lead one to commit an act against one’s nature. I could not hypnotize you and compel you to beat your infant son to death with a tire iron.”

  “I don’t have a son.”

  “Or a tire iron, Ms. Plumley, but that’s neither here nor there. Supposing you had both, hypnosis would not lead you to use one upon the other. But if you were encouraged to believe that the tire iron was in fact a fly swatter, and the child a pesky mosquito—”

  “Oh. And that’s what happened in the house on Woodbridge Avenue?”

  Ehrengraf shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “They never gave you a paraffin test.”

  “A paraffin test?”

  “To detect nitrate particles on your skin, a natural consequence of firing a gun. It’s routinely performed in such cases, when someone is suspected of firing a gun, but they didn’t bother in your case because it seemed superfluous. There you were with the gun in your hand, and they assumed you’d fired it, and you didn’t deny it.”

  “Because I didn’t remember.” She brightened. “But if they didn’t do the test, that meant I didn’t fire the gun!”

  It meant no such thing, Ehrengraf knew, but he let it go.

  “If you didn’t,” he said, “then someone else did. And even if you had in fact gunned those people down, you could only have done so under the impression that they were flies and the handgun was a fly swatter.”

  “How could I think—”

  “Oh, not literally,” he said, and fingered the knot in his tie. It was his Caedmon Society necktie, his usual choice for moments of triumph, and was this not a triumphant occasion? Had he not once again snatched an innocent client from the jaws of what the media persistently called the criminal justice system?

  “But—”

  “Perhaps the suggestion implanted under hypnosis was that you were playing a violent video game, and that Patricia Munk and the Kuhldreyers were images on an Xbox screen; by zapping them with your ray gun, you’d advance to the next level of the game.”

  “I’ve never played a video game.”

  “Nor did you play this one,” Ehrengraf said smoothly, “because in fact you didn’t shoot anyone. It was Maureen McClintock who did the shooting, then pressed the gun into your hand and slipped out the door. Perhaps she told you that you’d wake up when you heard a doorbell, and rang it just before getting into her car and driving away. You heard it, you returned to full consciousness, and what else were you to believe but that you’d caused the mayhem before you?”

  “So you were right, Mr. Ehrengraf. I really was innocent. But the police—”

  “Did everything one might have hoped for, once they were steered in the right direction. They’d never had reason to take a good look at Maureen McClintock, whose connection to the matter seemed limited to her having shared a table with you earlier. But once they did, they found no end of evidence to implicate her and exonerate you.”

  “She’d studied hypnotism.”

  “She owned over a dozen books on the subject,” he said, “all of them well-thumbed, along with a fifteen-lesson correspondence course. And they weren’t out on display where anyone might have noticed them. They were tucked away out of sight, as if she didn’t want anyone to know of her interest in the subject.”

  “Which she denied, according to the papers.”

  “Stoutly,” said Ehrengraf. “Maintained she’d never seen them before in her life.”

  “Then how did she explain them?”

  “She couldn’t. She also maintained she’d never had any contact with the Kuhldreyers, or with Patricia Munk. And yet there was a newspaper clipping, news of a promotion Mr. Kuhldreyer had received. And a photograph of the couple, and a rather startling letter from Patricia Munk.”

  “I read as much in the paper. But they didn’t go into detail.”

  “They couldn’t,” Ehrengraf said. “It was quite graphic in nature. Evidently Munk and McClintock had had an affair, and Munk wrote about it at some length, and in some detail. You couldn’t reproduce it in a family newspaper.”

  “I didn’t know Maureen well,” Cheryl Plumley said, “but I had no idea she was gay.”

  “Something else she denies, but her denial is severely compromised, not only by Munk’s letter to her but by several letters she seems to have written to Munk, found in a hat box in the dead woman’s closet. Of course she swears she never wrote those letters. Oh, it’s a sad case indeed, Ms. Plumley. What did she have against the Kuhldreyers? Was it some sort of love triangle, or quadrangle? And why choose you as a cat’s-paw for her adventure in triple homicide?”

  “So many questions, Mr. Ehrengraf, and I can’t answer any of them. But I’ll have to, won’t I?”

  “Oh?”

  “For the book.”

  “Ah, the book,” said Ehrengraf, and drew a document of several pages from a manila folder. “I’ve looked this over, Ms. Plumley, and I believe it’s ready for your signature. The publisher has agreed to improve his terms, and they’re now quite generous. You’ll work with an accomplished author, a very talented and personable young woman named Nan Fassbinder, and I’ll vet the final document to make sure the words she puts in your mouth are acceptable. Now if you could sign your name here, Cheryl Jonellen Plumley, that’s right, and here, and here as well. And now you’ll be able to tell your story to the world.”

  “The part I remember,” she said, “which isn’t very much at all, but the wonderful part is that now I’ll be able to pay your fee. I was worried about that, you know, but you told me not to worry, and I had a thought that, well, it seems embarrassin
g now. I don’t know if I should mention it.”

  In Ehrengraf’s experience, a mere pause was often all it took to prompt a fuller explanation. Such was the case now.

  “What struck me on our first meeting,” Cheryl Plumley said, “was what an attractive man you are. When you told me I was innocent, I quivered with a sensation that was more than mere relief. And then, when you rescued me from what looked to be an absolutely hopeless situation, I was overcome by the desire to express my gratitude in, um—”

  “Physical form?”

  “Yes. But to do so when I was unable to pay your fee, well, that wouldn’t be proper, would it? It would look as though, well, you know how it would look.”

  “Yes.”

  “But now, with the book deal taking care of your compensation, and, oh, this is so awkward, Mr. Ehrengraf, but—”

  “My dear Ms. Plumley,” Ehrengraf said, and took her hand, and brushed it with his lips. What a sweet little hand it was, so soft, with tapering fingers. “I do believe,” he said, “that we’d be more comfortable on the sofa.”

  Ehrengraf had just finished knotting his Caedmon Society necktie when his client returned from the lavatory. She was nicely dressed once again, after having been ever so nicely undressed. He looked at her, and his gaze brought a blush to her cheeks even as it put a smile on her lips.

  “I feel quite wonderful,” she said. “Everything’s worked out perfectly, hasn’t it?”

  “It has.”

  “For everyone but Maureen McClintock,” Cheryl Plumley said. “I don’t suppose I should sympathize with her, after what she did to those people and what she tried to do to me. But I was locked up myself until very recently, and I know how awful that is.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And while I never knew her terribly well, she always seemed like such a nice person. I ask myself how she could have done what she did, and the answer that pops into my head—well, you’ll just think it’s silly.”

  “Oh?”

  “Maybe the Devil made her do it,” she said. “But that’s perfectly ridiculous, isn’t it?”