Ehrengraf for the Defense (23 page)

“I can imagine.”

“I’m his alone, you see. I can have anything
I want, except the least bit of freedom.”

“Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,” Ehrengraf
said, and when she looked puzzled he quoted the rhyme in full:

“
Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,

Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.

He put her in a pumpkin shell

And there he kept her very well.”

“Yes, of course. It’s a nursery rhyme, isn’t
it?”

Ehrengraf nodded. “I believe it began life
centuries ago as satirical political doggerel, but it’s lived on as
a rhyme for children.”

“Millard keeps me very well,” she said.
“You’ve been to the pumpkin shell, haven’t you? It’s a very elegant
one.”

“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 what 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?”