Ehrengraf for the Defense (17 page)

McCandless frowned in thought. “Elizabeth
Borden,” he said. “I know Elsie Borden, she’s married to Elmer and
she gives condensed milk. Even if Elsie’s short for Elizabeth, I
don’t see how—”

“Lizzie,” Ehrengraf pointed out, “is also
short for Elizabeth.”

“Lizzie Borden,” McCandless said, and his
eyes lit up. “Oh, yeah. A long time ago, right? Took an axe and
gave her mother forty whacks?”

“So they say.”

“‘And when she saw what she had done, she
gave her father forty-one.’ I remember the poem.”

“Everybody remembers the poem,” Ehrengraf
said. “What everyone forgets is that Miss Borden was innocent.”

“You’re kidding. She got off?”

“Of course she did,” Ehrengraf said. “The
jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty. And how could they do
otherwise, Mr. McCandless? The woman was innocent.” He allowed
himself a small smile. “Even as you and I,” he said.

* * *

“Innocent,” Dale McCandless said. “What a
concept.”

“All my clients are innocent,” Ehrengraf told
him. “That’s what makes my work so gratifying. That and the fees,
of course.”

“Speaking of which,” McCandless said, “you
can set your mind to rest on that score. Even if they wind up
finding me guilty and that keeps me from inheriting from my
parents, I’ve still got more than enough to cover whatever you
charge me. See, I came into a nice piece of change when my
grandmother passed away.”

“Is that what enabled you to buy a house of
your own?”

“It set me up pretty good. I’ve got the house
and I’ve got money in the bank. See, I was her sole heir, so when
she took a tumble on the back staircase, everything she had came to
me.”

“She fell down the stairs?”

McCandless nodded. “They ought to do
something about that staircase,” he said. “Three months earlier, my
grandfather fell down those same stairs and broke his neck.”

“And left all his money to your grandmother,”
Ehrengraf said.

“Right.”

“Who in turn left it to you.”

“Yeah. Handy, huh?”

“Indeed,” said Ehrengraf. “It must have been
a frightening thing for an old woman, tumbling down a flight of
stairs.”

“Maybe not,” McCandless said. “According to
the autopsy, she was already dead when she fell. So what probably
happened is she had a heart attack while she was standing at the
top of the stairs and never felt a thing.”

“A heart attack.”

“Or a stroke or something,” McCandless said
carefully. “Or maybe she was sleeping and a pillow got stuck over
her face and suffocated her.”

“The pillow just got stuck on top of her
face?”

“Well, she was old,” McCandless said. “Who
knows what could happen?”

“And then, after the pillow smothered her,
how do you suppose she got from her bed to the staircase?”

“Sleepwalking,” McCandless said.

“Of course,” said Ehrengraf. “I should have
thought of that.”

“My parents lived in this ranch house,”
McCandless said. “Big sprawling thing, lots of square footage but
all of it on one level. No basement and no attic.” He sighed. “In
other words, no stairs.” He shook his head ruefully. “Point is,
there was never any problem about my grandparents’ death, so I’ve
got some money of my own. So you don’t have to worry about your
fee.”

Ehrengraf drew himself up straight. He was a
small man, but his perfect posture and impeccably-tailored raw silk
suit lent him stature beyond his height. “There will be no fee,” he
said, “unless you are found innocent.”

“Huh?”

“My longstanding policy, Mr. McCandless. My
fees are quite considerable, but they are payable only in the event
that my client is exonerated. As it happens, I rarely see the
inside of a courtroom. My clients are innocent, and their innocence
always wins out in the long run. I do what I can toward that end,
often working behind the scenes. And, when charges are dropped,
when the real killer confesses, when my client’s innocence has been
demonstrated to the satisfaction of the legal system, then and only
then do I profit from my efforts on his behalf.”

McCandless was silent for a long moment. At
length he fixed his eyes on the little lawyer. “We got ourselves a
problem,” he said. “See, just between you and me, I did it.”

* * *

“With stairs,” young McCandless was saying,
“it might have been entirely different. Especially with Mom in the
wheelchair. Good steep flight of stairs and it’s a piece of cake.
Instead I went out and got the gun, and then I bought the
gloves.”

“Gloves?”

“A size too small,” McCandless said. “To
leave at the crime scene. I thought—well, never mind what I
thought. I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly. Hey, that reminds
me. You think maybe a Dim Cap defense would turn the trick?”

“Innocent by reason of diminished
capacity?”

“Yeah. See, I did a couple of lines of DTT
before I went out and bought the gloves.”

“Do you mean DDT? The insecticide?”

“Naw, DTT. It’s short for di-tetra thiazole,
it’s a tranquilizer for circus animals, but if you snort it it sort
of mellows you out. What I could do, though, is I could forget
about the DTT and tell people I ate a Twinkie.”

Court TV, Ehrengraf thought, had a lot to
answer for. “You got the gun,” he prompted his client, “and you
bought the gloves...”

“And I went over there and did what I had to
do. But of course I don’t remember that part.”

“You don’t?”

McCandless shook his head. “Not a thing, from
the time I parked the car in their driveway until I woke up hours
later in my own bed. See, I never remember. I don’t remember doing
my grandparents, either. It’s all because of the EKG.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” said Ehrengraf,
rather understating the matter. “You had an electrocardiogram?”

“That’s for your heart, isn’t it? My heart’s
fine. No, EKG’s this powder, you roll it up and smoke it. I
couldn’t tell you what the initials stand for, but it was
originally developed as a fertilizer for African violets. They had
to take it off the market when they found out what it did to
people.”

“What does it do?”

“I guess it gets you high,” McCandless said,
“but I don’t know for sure. See, what happens is you take it and
you black out. It’s the same story every time I smoke it. I light
up, I take the first puff, and the next thing I remember I’m waking
up in my own bed hours later. So I couldn’t tell you what it feels
like. All I know is what it lets me do while I’m operating behind
it. And so far it’s let me do my grandparents and my mother and
father.”

“I knew it,” Ehrengraf said.

“How’s that?”

“I knew you were innocent,” he said. “I knew
it. Mr. McCandless, you have no memory whatsoever of any of those
killings, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yeah, but—”

“You may have intended to do those persons
harm. But it was so much against your nature that you had to ingest
a dangerous controlled substance in order to gird yourself for the
task. Is that correct?”

“Well, more or less, but—”

“And you have no recollection of committing
any crimes whatsoever. You believe yourself to be guilty, and as a
result you are in a jail cell charged with a hideous crime. Do you
see the problem, sir? The problem is not what you have done,
because in fact you have done nothing. The problem is what you
believe.”

McCandless looked at him.

“If you don’t believe in your own innocence,”
Ehrengraf demanded, “how can the rest of the world believe in it?
Your thoughts are powerful, Mr. McCandless. And right now your own
negative thoughts are damning you as a murderer.”

“But—”

“You must affirm your innocence, sir.”

“Okay,” McCandless agreed. “‘I’m innocent.’
How’s that?”

“It’s a start,” Ehrengraf said. He opened his
briefcase, drew out a yellow legal pad, produced a pen. “But it
takes more than a simple declaration to change your own thoughts on
the matter. What I want you to do is affirm your innocence in
writing.”

“Just write ‘I’m innocent’ over and
over?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
Ehrengraf uncapped the pen and drew a vertical line down the center
of the page. “Here’s what you do,” he said. “Over here on the left
you write ‘I am completely innocent.’ Then on the right you
immediately write down the first negative response to that sentence
that pops into your mind.”

“Fair enough.” McCandless took the pad and
pen.
I am completely innocent
, he wrote in the left-hand
column.
What a load of crap
, he wrote at once on the
right.

“Excellent,” Ehrengraf assured him. “Now keep
going, but with a different response each time.”

“Just keep going?”

“Until you get to the bottom of the page,”
Ehrengraf said.

The pen raced over the paper, as McCandless
no sooner proclaimed his complete innocence than he dashed off a
repudiation of it. When he’d reached the bottom of the page,
Ehrengraf took the pad from him.

I am completely innocent/I murdered both my
parents

I am completely innocent/Killed Grandma and
Grampa

I am completely innocent/I deserve the gas
chamber

I am completely innocent/I’m guilty as sin

I am completely innocent/They ought to hang me

I am completely innocent/I’m a murderer

I am completely innocent/I killed a girl last year
and there wasn’t even any money in it for me

I am completely innocent/I’m a born killer

I am completely innocent/I am bad, bad, bad!

“Excellent,” Ehrengraf said.

“You think so? If the District Attorney got a
hold of that...”

“Ah, but he won’t, will he?” Ehrengraf
crumpled the paper, stuffed it into a pocket, handed the legal pad
back to his client. “All of those negative thoughts,” he explained,
“have been festering in your mind and soul, preventing you from
believing in your own untarnished innocence. By letting them
surface this way, we can stamp them out and affirm your own true
nature.”

“My own true nature’s nothing to brag about,”
McCandless said.

“That’s your negativity talking,” Ehrengraf
told him. “At heart you’re an innocent child of God.” He pointed to
the legal pad, made scribbling motions in the air. “You’ve got work
to do,” he said.

* * *

“I hope you got another of those yellow pads
there,” Dale McCandless said. “It’s a funny thing. I was never much
of a writer, and in school it was torture for me to write a
two-page composition for English class. You know, ‘
How I Spent
My Summer Vacation
?’”

Ehrengraf, who could well imagine how a young
McCandless might have spent his summer vacation, was diplomatically
silent.

“But this time around,” McCandless said,
“I’ve been writing up a storm. What’s it been, five days since you
got me started? Well, I ran through that pad you gave me, and I got
one of the guards to bring me this little notebook, but I like the
pads better. Here, look at what I wrote this morning.”

Ehrengraf unfolded a sheet of unlined white
paper. McCandless had drawn a line down its center, writing his
affirmation over and over again in the left-hand column, jotting
down his responses to the right.

I am completely innocent/I’ve been in trouble all my
life

I am completely innocent/Maybe it wasn’t always my
fault

I am completely innocent/I don’t remember doing
anything bad

I am completely innocent/In my heart I am

I am completely innocent/How great it would be if it
was true!

“You’ve come a long way,” Ehrengraf told his
client. “You see how the nature of your responses is changing.”

“It seems like magic,” McCandless said.

“The magic of affirmation.”

“All along, I would just write down the first
thing that popped into my head. But the old bad stuff just stopped
popping in.”

“You cleared it away.”

“I don’t know what I did,” McCandless said.
“Maybe I just wore it out. But it got to the point where it didn’t
seem natural to write that I was a born killer.”

“Because you’re not.”

“I guess.”

“And how do you feel now, Mr. McCandless?
Without a pen in your hand, just talking face to face? Are you
innocent of the crimes of which you stand accused?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“It’s almost too much to hope for,” the young
man said. “but maybe I am. I could be, couldn’t I? I really could
be.”

Ehrengraf beamed. “Indeed you are,” he said,
“and it’s my job to prove it. And yours—” he opened his briefcase,
provided his client with a fresh legal pad “—yours to further
affirm that innocence until there is no room in your consciousness
for doubt and negativity. You’ve got work to do, Mr. McCandless.
Are you up for it?”

Eagerly, McCandless reached for the pad.

* * *

“Little Bobby Bickerstaff,” McCandless said,
shaking his head in wonder.

Ehrengraf’s hand went to the knot of his
necktie, adjusting it imperceptibly. The tie was that of the
Caedmon Society, and Ehrengraf was not entitled to wear it, never
having been a member of that organization. It was, however, his
invariable choice for occasions of triumph, and this was just such
an occasion.

“I never would have dreamed it,” McCandless
said. “Not in a million years.”

“You knew him, then?”

“We went to grade school together. In fact we
were in the same class until I got held back. You know something?
That’s
hard to believe, too.”

“That you’d be held back? I must say I find
it hard to believe myself. You’re an intelligent young man.”

“Oh, it wasn’t for that. It was for
deportment. You know, talking in class, throwing chalk.”

“High spirits,” Ehrengraf said.