The Big Book of Rogues and Villains

by Otto Penzler

  “Your innocence,” Ehrengraf said again. “Your innocence is not merely the innocence that is the opposite of guilt. It is the innocence that is the opposite of experience. Do you know Blake, Mr. Beale?”

  “Blake?”

  “William Blake, the poet. You wouldn’t know him personally, of course. He’s been dead for over a century. He wrote two groups of poems early in his career, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Each poem in the one book had a counterpart in the other. ‘Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ Perhaps that poem is familiar to you, Mr. Beale.”

  “I think I studied it in school.”

  “It’s not unlikely. Well, you don’t need a poetry lesson from me, sir, not in these depressing surroundings. Let me move a little more directly to the point. Innocence versus experience, Mr. Beale. You found yourself accused of a murder, sir, and you knew only that you had not committed it. And, being innocent not only of the murder itself but in Blake’s sense of the word, you simply engaged a competent attorney and assumed things would work themselves out in short order. We live in an enlightened democracy, Mr. Beale, and we grow up knowing that courts exist to free the innocent and punish the guilty, that no one gets away with murder.”

  “And that’s all nonsense, eh?” Grantham Beale smiled his second smile since hearing the jury’s verdict. If nothing else, he thought, the spiffy little lawyer improved a man’s spirits.

  “I wouldn’t call it nonsense,” Ehrengraf said. “But after all is said and done, you’re in prison and the real murderer is not.”

  “Walker Murchison.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The real murderer,” Beale said. “I’m in prison and Walker Gladstone Murchison is free.”

  “Precisely. Because it is not enough to be guiltless, Mr. Beale. One must also be able to convince a jury of one’s guiltlessness. In short, had you been less innocent and more experienced, you could have taken steps early on to assure you would not find yourself in your present condition right now.”

  “And what could I have done?”

  “What you have done, at long last,” said Martin Ehrengraf. “You could have called me immediately.”

  —

  “Albert Speldron,” Ehrengraf said. “The murder victim, shot three times in the heart at close range. The murder weapon was an unregistered handgun, a thirty-eight-caliber revolver. It was subsequently located in the spare tire well of your automobile.”

  “It wasn’t my gun. I never saw it in my life until the police showed it to me.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Ehrengraf said soothingly. “To continue. Albert Speldron was a loan shark. Not, however, the sort of gruff-voiced neckless thug who lends ten or twenty dollars at a time to longshoremen and factory hands and breaks their legs with a baseball bat if they’re late paying the vig.”

  “Paying the what?”

  “Ah, sweet innocence,” Ehrengraf said. “The vig. Short for vigorish. It’s a term used by the criminal element to describe the ongoing interest payments which a debtor must make to maintain his status.”

  “I never heard the term,” Beale said, “but I paid it well enough. I paid Speldron a thousand dollars a week and that didn’t touch the principal.”

  “And you had borrowed how much?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  “The jury apparently considered that a satisfactory motive for murder.”

  “Well, that’s crazy,” Beale said. “Why on earth would I want to kill Speldron? I didn’t hate the man. He’d done me a service by lending me that money. I had a chance to buy a valuable stamp collection. That’s my business, I buy and sell stamps, and I had an opportunity to get hold of an extraordinary collection, mostly U.S. and British Empire but a really exceptional lot of early German States as well, and there were also—well, before I get carried away, are you interested in stamps at all?”

  “Only when I’ve a letter to mail.”

  “Oh. Well, this was a fine collection, let me say that much and leave it at that. The seller had to have all cash and the transaction had to go unrecorded. Taxes, you understand.”

  “Indeed I do. The system of taxation makes criminals of us all.”

  “I don’t really think of it as criminal,” Beale said.

  “Few people do. But go on, sir.”

  “What more is there to say? I had to raise fifty thousand dollars on the quiet to close the deal on this fine lot of stamps. By dealing with Speldron, I was able to borrow the money without filling out a lot of forms or giving him anything but my word. I was quite confident I would triple my money by the time I broke up the collection and sold it in job lots to a variety of dealers and collectors. I’ll probably take in a total of fifty thousand out of the U.S. issues alone, and I know a buyer who will salivate when he gets a look at the German States issues.”

  “So it didn’t bother you to pay Speldron his thousand a week.”

  “Not a bit. I figured to have half the stamps sold within a couple of months, and the first thing I’d do would be to repay the fifty thousand dollars principal and close out the loan. I’d have paid eight or ten thousand dollars in interest, say, but what’s that compared to a profit of fifty or a hundred thousand dollars? Speldron was doing me a favor and I appreciated it. Oh, he was doing himself a favor too, two percent interest per week didn’t put him in the hardship category, but it was just good business for both of us, no question about it.”

  “You’ve dealt with him before?”

  “Maybe a dozen times over the years. I’ve borrowed sums ranging between ten and seventy thousand dollars. I never heard the interest payments called vigorish before, but I always paid them promptly. And no one ever threatened to break my legs. We did business together, Speldron and I. And it always worked out very well for both of us.”

  “The prosecution argued that by killing Speldron you erased your debt to him. That’s certainly a motive a jury can understand, Mr. Beale. In a world where men are commonly killed for the price of a bottle of whiskey, fifty thousand dollars does seem enough to kill a man over.”

  “But I’d be crazy to kill for that sum. I’m not a pauper. If I was having trouble paying Speldron all I had to do was sell the stamps.”

  “Suppose you had trouble selling them.”

  “Then I could have liquidated other merchandise from my stock. I could have mortgaged my home. Why, I could have raised enough on the house to pay Speldron off three times over. That car they found the gun in, that’s an Antonelli Scorpion. The car alone is worth half of what I owed Speldron.”

  “Indeed,” Martin Ehrengraf said. “But this Walker Murchison. How does he come into the picture?”

  “He killed Speldron.”

  “How do we know this, Mr. Beale?”

  Beale got to his feet. He’d been sitting on his iron cot, leaving the cell’s one chair for the lawyer. Now he stood up, stretched and walked to the rear of the cell. For a moment he stood regarding some graffito on the cell wall. Then he turned and looked at Ehrengraf.

  “Speldron and Murchison were partners,” he said. “I only dealt with Speldron because he was the only one who dealt in unsecured loans. And Murchison had an insurance business in which Speldron did not participate. Their joint ventures included real estate, investments, and other activities where large sums of money moved around quickly with few records kept of exactly what took place.”

  “Shady operations,” Ehrengraf said.

  “For the most part. Not always illegal, not entirely illegal, but, yes, I like your word. Shady.”

  “So they were partners, and it is not unheard of for one to kill one’s partner. To dissolve a partnership by the most direct means available, as it were. But why this partnership? Why should Murchison kill Speldron?”

  Beale shrugged. “Money,” he suggested. “With all that cash floating around, you can bet Murchison made out handsomely on Speldron’s death.
I’ll bet he put a lot more than fifty thousand unrecorded dollars into his pocket.”

  “That’s your only reason for suspecting him?”

  Beale shook his head. “The partnership had a secretary,” he said. “Her name’s Felicia. Young, long dark hair, flashing dark eyes, a body like a magazine centerfold and a face like a Chanel ad. Both of the partners were sleeping with her.”

  “Perhaps this was not a source of enmity.”

  “But it was. Murchison’s married to her.”

  “Ah.”

  “But there’s an important reason why I know it was Murchison who killed Speldron.” Beale stepped forward, stood over the seated attorney. “The gun was found in the boot of my car,” he said. “Wrapped in a filthy towel and stuffed in the spare tire well. There were no fingerprints on the gun and it wasn’t registered to me but there it was in my car.”

  “The Antonelli Scorpion?”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “No matter.”

  Beale frowned momentarily, then drew a breath and plunged onward. “It was put there to frame me,” he said.

  “So it would seem.”

  “It had to be put there by somebody who knew I owed Speldron money. Somebody with inside information. The two of them were partners. I met Murchison any number of times when I went to the office to pay the interest, or vigorish as you called it. Why do they call it that?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Murchison knew I owed money. And Murchison and I never liked each other.”

  “Why?”

  “We just didn’t get along. The reason’s not important. And there’s more, I’m not just grasping at straws. It was Murchison who suggested I might have killed Speldron. A lot of men owed Speldron money and there were probably several of them who were in much stickier shape financially than I, but Murchison told the police I’d had a loud and bitter argument with Speldron two days before he was killed!”

  “And had you?”

  “No! Why, I never in my life argued with Speldron.”

  “Interesting.” The little lawyer raised his hand to his mustache, smoothing its tips delicately. His nails were manicured, Grantham Beale noted, and was there colorless nail polish on them? No, he observed, there was not. The little man might be something of a dandy but he was evidently not a fop.

  “Did you indeed meet with Mr. Speldron on the day in question?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I did. I made the interest payment and we exchanged pleasantries. There was nothing anyone could mistake for an argument.”

  “Ah.”

  “And even if there had been, Murchison wouldn’t have known about it. He wasn’t even in the office.”

  “Still more interesting,” Ehrengraf said thoughtfully.

  “It certainly is. But how can you possibly prove that he murdered his partner and framed me for it? You can’t trap him into confessing, can you?”

  “Murderers do confess.”

  “Not Murchison. You could try tracing the gun to him, I suppose, but the police tried to trace it to me and found they couldn’t trace it at all. I just don’t see—”

  “Mr. Beale.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Beale. Here, take this chair, I’m sure it’s more comfortable than the edge of the bed. I’ll stand for a moment. Mr. Beale, do you have a dollar?”

  “They don’t let us have money in here.”

  “Then take this. It’s a dollar which I’m lending to you.” The lawyer’s dark eyes glinted. “No interest, Mr. Beale. A personal loan, not a business transaction. Now, sir, please give me the dollar which I’ve just lent to you.”

  “Give it to you?”

  “That’s right. Thank you. You have retained me, Mr. Beale, to look after your interests. The day you are released unconditionally from this prison you will owe me a fee of ninety thousand dollars. The fee will be all inclusive. Any expenses will be mine to bear. Should I fail to secure your release you will owe me nothing.”

  “But—”

  “Is that agreeable, sir?”

  “But what are you going to do? Engage detectives? File an appeal? Try to get the case reopened?”

  “When a man engages to save your life, Mr. Beale, do you require that he first outline his plans for you?”

  “No, but—”

  “Ninety thousand dollars. Payable only if I succeed. Are the terms agreeable?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Mr. Beale, when next we meet you will owe me ninety thousand dollars, plus whatever emotional gratitude comes naturally to you. Until then, sir, you owe me one dollar.” The thin lips curled in a shadowy smile. “ ‘The cut worm forgives the plow,’ Mr. Beale. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. ‘The cut worm forgives the plow.’ You might think about that, sir, until we meet again.”

  —

  The second meeting of Martin Ehrengraf and Grantham Beale took place five weeks and four days later. On this occasion the lawyer wore a navy two-button suit with a subtle vertical stripe. His shoes were highly polished black wing tips, his shirt a pale blue broadcloth with contrasting white collar and cuffs. His necktie bore a half-inch wide stripe of royal blue flanked by two narrower strips, one gold and the other a rather bright green, all on a navy field.

  And this time Ehrengraf’s client was also rather nicely turned out, although his tweed jacket and baggy flannels were hardly a match for the lawyer’s suit. But Beale’s dress was a great improvement over the shapeless gray prison garb he had worn previously, just as his office, a room filled with jumbled books and boxes, a desk covered with books and albums and stamps in and out of glassine envelopes, two worn leather chairs and a matching sagging sofa—just as all of this comfortable disarray was a vast improvement over the spartan prison cell which had been the site of their earlier meeting.

  Beale, seated behind his desk, gazed thoughtfully at Ehrengraf, who stood ramrod straight, one hand on the desk top, the other at his side. “Ninety thousand dollars,” Beale said levelly. “You must admit that’s a bit rich, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

  “We agreed on the price.”

  “No argument. We did agree, and I’m a firm believer in the sanctity of verbal agreements. But it was my understanding that your fee would be payable if my liberty came about as a result of your efforts.”

  “You are free today.”

  “I am indeed, and I’ll be free tomorrow, but I can’t see how it was any of your doing.”

  “Ah,” Ehrengraf said. His face bore an expression of infinite disappointment, a disappointment felt not so much with this particular client as with the entire human race. “You feel I did nothing for you.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Perhaps you were taking steps to file an appeal. Perhaps you engaged detectives or did some detective work of your own. Perhaps in due course you would have found a way to get me out of prison, but in the meantime the unexpected happened and your services turned out to be unnecessary.”

  “The unexpected happened?”

  “Well, who could have possibly anticipated it?” Beale shook his head in wonder. “Just think of it. Murchison went and got an attack of conscience. The bounder didn’t have enough of a conscience to step forward and admit what he’d done, but he got to wondering what would happen if he died suddenly and I had to go on serving a life sentence for a crime he had committed. He wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize his liberty while he lived but he wanted to be able to make amends if and when he died.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he prepared a letter,” Beale went on. “Typed out a long letter explaining just why he had wanted his partner dead and how the unregistered gun had actually belonged to Speldron in the first place, and how he’d shot him and wrapped the gun in a towel and planted it in my car. Then he’d made up a story about my having had a fight with Albert Speldron, and of course that got the police looking in my direction, and the next thing I knew I was in jail. I saw the letter Murchison wrote. The police let me look at
it. He went into complete detail.”

  “Considerate of him.”

  “And then he did the usual thing. Gave the letter to a lawyer with instructions that it be kept in his safe and opened only in the event of his death.” Beale found a pair of stamp tongs in the clutter atop his desk, used them to lift a stamp, frowned at it for a moment, then set it down and looked directly at Martin Ehrengraf. “Do you suppose he had a premonition? For God’s sake, Murchison was a young man, his health was good, and why should he anticipate dying? Maybe he did have a premonition.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then it’s certainly a remarkable coincidence. A matter of weeks after turning this letter over to a lawyer, Murchison lost control of his car on a curve. Smashed right through the guard rail, plunged a couple of hundred feet, exploded on impact. I don’t suppose the man knew what had happened to him.”

  “I suspect you’re right.”

  “He was always a safe driver,” Beale mused. “Perhaps he’d been drinking.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And if he hadn’t been decent enough to write that letter, I might be spending the rest of my life behind bars.”

  “How fortunate for you things turned out as they did.”

  “Exactly,” said Beale. “And so, although I truly appreciate what you’ve done on my behalf, whatever that may be, and although I don’t doubt you could have secured my liberty in due course, although I’m sure I don’t know how you might have managed it, nevertheless as far as your fee is concerned—”

  “Mr. Beale.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you really believe that a detestable troll like W. G. Murchison would take pains to arrange for your liberty in the event of his death?”