Ehrengraf for the Defense (16 page)

“I was framed, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

“And cleverly so, it would seem.”

“I never bought Cydonex. I never so much as
heard of Cydonex, not until people started dying of it.”

“Oh? You worked for the plastics company that
discovered the substance. That was before you took employment with
the Darnitol people.”

“It was also before Cydonex was invented. You
know those dogs people mount on their dashboards and the head bobs
up and down when you drive?”

“Not when I drive,” Ehrengraf said.

“Nor I either, but you know what I mean. My
job was finding a way to make the dogs’ eyes more realistic. If you
had a dog bobbing on your dashboard, would you even want the eyes
to be more realistic?”

“Well,” said Ehrengraf.

“Exactly. I quit that job and went to work
for the Darnitol folks, and then my previous employer found a
better way to kill rats, and so it looks as though I’m tied into
the murders in two different ways. But actually I’ve never had
anything to do with Cydonex and I’ve never so much as swallowed a
Darnitol, let alone paid good money for that worthless snake
oil.”

“Someone bought those pills.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t—”

“And someone purchased that Cydonex. And
forged your name to the ledger.”

“Yes.”

“And planted the bottles of Darnitol on
drugstore and supermarket shelves after fatally tampering with
their contents.”

“Yes.”

“And waited for the random victims to buy the
pills, to work their way through the bottle until they ingested the
deadly capsule, and to die in agony. And planted evidence to
incriminate you.”

“Yes.”

“And made an anonymous call to the police to
put them on your trail.” Ehrengraf permitted himself a slight
smile, one that did not quite reach his eyes. “And there he made
his mistake,” he said. “He could have waited for nature to take its
course, just as he had already waited for the Darnitol to do its
deadly work. The were checking on ex-employees of Triage
Corporation. They’d have gotten to you sooner or later. But he
wanted to hurry matters along, and that proves you were framed,
sir, because who but the man who framed you would ever think to
have called the police?”

“So the very phone call that got me on the
hook serves to get me off the hook?”

“Ah,” said Ehrengraf, “would that it were
that easy.”

* * *

Unlike Gardner Bridgewater, young Evans
Wheeler proved a model of repose. Instead of pacing back and forth
across Ehrengraf’s carpet, the chemist sat in Ehrengraf’s
overstuffed leather chair, one long leg crossed over the other. His
costume was virtually identical to the garb he had worn in prison,
although an eye as sharp as Ehrengraf’s could detect a different
pattern to the stains and acid burns that gave character to the
striped overalls. And this denim shirt, Ehrengraf noted, had no
patch upon its elbow. Yet.

Ehrengraf, seated at his desk, wore a
Dartmouth-green blazer over tan flannel slacks. As was his custom
on such occasions, his tie was once again the distinctive Caedmon
Society cravat.

“Ms. Joanna Pellatrice,” said. “A teacher of
seventh-and eighth-grade social studies at Junior High School.
Unmarried, twenty-eight years of age, and living alone in three
rooms on Deerhurst Avenue.”

“One of the killer’s first victims.”

“That she was. The very first victim, in
point of fact, although Ms. Pellatrice was not the first to die.
Her murderer took one of the capsules from her bottle of Darnitol,
pried it open, disposed of the innocent if ineffectual powder
within, and replaced it with the lethal Cydonex. Then he put it
back in her bottle, returned the bottle to her medicine cabinet or
purse, and waited for the unfortunate woman to get a headache or
cramps or whatever impelled her to swallow the capsules.”

“Whatever it was,” Wheeler said, “they
wouldn’t work.”

“This one did, when she finally got to it. In
the meantime, her intended murderer had already commenced spreading
little bottles of joy all over the metropolitan area, one capsule
to each bottle. There was danger in doing so, in that the toxic
nature of Darnitol might come to light before Ms. Pellatrice took
her pill and went to that big classroom in the sky. But he
reasoned, correctly it would seem, that a great many persons would
die before Darnitol was seen to be the cause of death. And indeed
this proved to be the case. Ms. Pellatrice was the fourth victim,
and there were to be many more.”

“And the killer—”

“Refused to leave well enough alone. His name
is George Grodek, and he’d had an affair with Ms. Pellatrice,
although married to another teacher all the while. The affair
evidently meant rather more to Mr. Grodek than it did to Ms.
Pellatrice. He had made scenes, once at her apartment, once at her
school during a midterm examination. The newspapers describe him as
a disappointed suitor, and I suppose the term’s as apt as any.”

“You say he refused to leave well enough
alone.”

“Indeed,” said Ehrengraf. “If he’d been
content with depopulating the area and sinking Triage Corporation,
I’m sure he’d have gotten away with it. The police would have had
their hands full checking people with a grudge against Triage,
known malcontents and mental cases, and the sort of chaps who get
themselves into messes of that variety. But he has a neat sort of
mind, has Mr. Grodek, and so he managed to learn of your existence
and decided to frame you for the chain of murders.”

Ehrengraf brushed a piece of lint from his
lapel. “He did a workmanlike job,” he said, “but it broke down on
close examination. That signature in the control book did turn out
to be a forgery, and matching forgeries of your name—trials, if you
will—turned up in a notebook hidden away in a dresser drawer in his
house.”

“That must been hard for him to explain.”

“So were the bottles of Darnitol in another
drawer of the dresser. So was the Cydonex, and so was the little
machine for filling and closing the capsules, and a whole batch of
broken capsules which evidently represented unsuccessful attempts
at pill-making.”

“Funny he didn’t flush it all down the
toilet.”

“Successful criminals become arrogant,”
Ehrengraf explained. “They believe themselves to be untouchable.
Grodek’s arrogance did him in. It led him to frame you, and to tip
the police to you.”

“And your investigation did what no police
investigation could do.”

“It did,” said Ehrengraf, “because mine
started from the premise of innocence. If you were innocent,
someone else was guilty. If someone else was guilty and had framed
you, that someone must have had a motive for the crime. If the
crime had a motive, the murderer must have had a reason to kill one
of the specific victims. And if that was the case, one had only to
look to the victims to find the killer.”

“You make it sound so simple,” said Wheeler.
“And yet if I hadn’t had the good fortune to engage your services,
I’d be spending the rest of my life in prison.”

“I’m glad you see it that way,” Ehrengraf
said, “because the size of my fee might otherwise seem excessive.”
He named a figure, whereupon the chemist promptly uncapped a pen
and wrote out a check.

“I’ve never written a check for so large a
sum,” he said reflectively.

“Few people have.”

“Nor have I ever gotten greater value for my
money. How fortunate I am that you believed in me, in my
innocence.”

“I never doubted it for a moment.”

“You know who else claims to be innocent?
Poor Grodek. I understand the madman’s screaming in his cell,
shouting to the world that he never killed anyone.” Wheeler flashed
a mischievous smile. “Perhaps he should hire you, Mr.
Ehrengraf.”

“Oh, dear,” said Ehrengraf. “No, I think not.
I can sometimes work miracles, Mr. Wheeler, or what have the
appearance of miracles, but I can work them only on behalf of the
innocent. And I don’t think the power exists to persuade me of poor
Mr. Grodek’s innocence. No, I fear the man is guilty, and I’m
afraid he’ll be forced to pay for what he’s done.” The little
lawyer shook his head. “Do you know Longfellow, Mr. Wheeler?”

“Old Henry Wadsworth, you mean? ‘By the
shores of Gitche Gumee, by the something Big-Sea-Water’? That
Longfellow?”

“The shining Big-Sea-Water,” said Ehrengraf.
“Another client reminded me of ‘The Village Blacksmith,’ and I’ve
been looking into Longfellow lately. Do you care for poetry, Mr.
Wheeler?”

“Not too much.”

“‘In the world’s broad field of battle, In
the bivouac of Life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in
the strife!’”

“Well,” said Evans Wheeler, “I suppose that’s
good advice, isn’t it?”

“None better, sir. ‘Let us then be up and
doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing,
learn to labor and to wait.’”

“Ah, yes,” said Wheeler.

“‘Learn to labor and to wait,’” said
Ehrengraf. “That’s the ticket, eh? ‘To labor and to wait.’
Longfellow, Mr. Wheeler. Listen to the poets, Mr. Wheeler. The
poets have the answers, haven’t they?” And Ehrengraf smiled, with
his lips and with his eyes.

The End

“
One love grows green,

One love turns grey;

Tomorrow has no more to say

To Yesterday.”

—
Algernon Charles Swinburne

“I’ve been giving this a lot of thought,”
Dale McCandless said. “Actually, there’s not much you can do around
here but think.”

Ehrengraf glanced around the cell, wondering
to what extent it was conducive to thought. There were, it seemed
to him, no end of other activities to which the little room would
lend itself. There was a bed on which you could sleep, a chair in
which you could read, a desk at which you might write the Great
American Jailhouse Novel. There was enough floor space to permit
pushups or sit-ups or running in place, and, high overhead, there
was the pipe that supported the light fixture, and that would as
easily support you, should you contrive to braid strips of bedsheet
into a rope and hang yourself.

Ehrengraf rather hoped the young man wouldn’t
attempt the last-named pursuit. He was, after all, innocent of the
crimes of which he stood accused. All you had to do was look at him
to know as much, and the little lawyer had not even needed to do
that. He’d been convinced of his client’s innocence the instant the
young man had become a client. No client of Martin H. Ehrengraf
could ever be other than innocent. This was more than a presumption
for Ehrengraf. It was an article of faith.

“What I think would work for me,” young
McCandless continued, “is the good old Abuse Excuse.”

“The Abuse Excuse?”

“Like those rich kids in California,”
McCandless said. “My father was all the time beating up on me and
making me do stuff, and I was in fear for my life, blah blah blah,
so what else could I do?”

“Your only recourse was to whip out a
semiautomatic assault rifle,” Ehrengraf said, “and empty a clip
into the man.”

“Those clips empty out in no time at all. You
touch the trigger and the next thing you know the gun’s empty and
there’s fifteen bullets in the target.”

“Fortunately, however, you had another
clip.”

“For Mom,” McCandless agreed. “Hey, she was
as abusive as he was.”

“And you were afraid of her.”

“Sure.”

“Your mother was in a wheelchair,” Ehrengraf
said gently. “She suffered from multiple sclerosis. Your father
walked with a cane as the result of a series of small strokes.
You’re a big, strapping lad. Hulking, one might even say. It might
be difficult to convince a jury that you were in fear for your
life.”

“That’s a point.”

“If you’d been living with your parents,”
Ehrengraf added, “people might wonder why you didn’t just move out.
But you had in fact moved out some time ago, hadn’t you? You have
your own home on the other side of town.”

Dale McCandless nodded thoughtfully. “I guess
the only thing to do,” he said, “is play the Race Card.”

“The Race Card?”

“Racist cops framed me,” he said. “They
planted the evidence.”

“The evidence?”

“The assault rifle with my prints on it. The
blood spatters on my clothes. The gloves.”

“The gloves?”

“They found a pair of gloves on the scene,”
McCandless said. “But I’ll tell you something nobody else knows. If
I were to try on those gloves, you’d see that they’re actually a
size too small for me. I couldn’t get my hands into them.”

“And racist cops planted them.”

“You bet.”

Ehrengraf put the tips of his fingers
together. “It’s a little difficult for me to see the racial angle
here,” he said gently. “You’re white, Mr. McCandless.”

“Yeah, right.”

“And both your parents were white. And all of
the police officers involved in the investigation are white. All of
your parents’ known associates are white, and everyone living in
that neighborhood is white. If there were a woodpile at the scene,
I’ve no doubt we’d find a Caucasian in it. This is an all-white
case, Mr. McCandless, and I just don’t see a race card for us to
play.”

“Rats,” Dale McCandless said. “If the Abuse
Excuse is out and there’s no way to play the Race Card, I don’t
know how I’m going to get out of this. The only thing left is the
Rough Sex defense, and I suppose you’ve got some objection to that,
too.”

“I think it would be a hard sell,” Ehrengraf
said.

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“It seems to me you’re trying to draw
inspiration from some high-profile cases that don’t fit the present
circumstances. But there is one case that does.”

“What’s that?”

“Miss Elizabeth Borden,” Ehrengraf said.