Ehrengraf for the Defense (8 page)

Protter pumped the lawyer’s hand
enthusiastically. “Hey, listen,” he said, “you’re ace-high with me,
Mr. Ehrengraf. You believed in me when nobody else did, including
me myself. I’m just now trying to take all of this in. I tell you,
I never would have dreamed Agnes Mullane killed my wife.”

“It’s something neither of us suspected, Mr.
Protter.”

“It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of. Let
me see if I got the drift of it straight. My Gretchen was carrying
on with Gates after all. I thought it was just a way to get in a
dig at her, accusing her of carrying on with him, but actually it
was happening all the time.”

“So it would seem.”

“And that’s why she got so steamed when I
brought it up.” Protter nodded, wrapped up in thought. “Anyway,
Gates also had something going with Agnes Mullane. You know
something, Mr. Ehrengraf? He musta been nuts. Why would anybody who
was getting next to Agnes want to bother with Gretchen?”

“Artists perceive the world differently from
the rest of us, Mr. Protter.”

“If that’s a polite way of saying he was
cockeyed, I sure gotta go with you on that. So here he’s getting it
on with the both of them, and Agnes finds out and she’s jealous.
How do you figure she found out?”

“It’s always possible Gates told her,”
Ehrengraf suggested. “Or perhaps she heard you accusing your wife
of infidelity. You and Gretchen had both been drinking, and your
argument may have been a loud one.”

“Could be. A few boilermakers and I tend to
raise my voice.”

“Most people do. Or perhaps Miss Mullane saw
some of Gates’s sketches of your wife. I understand there were
several found in his apartment. He may have been an abstract
expressionist, but he seems to have been capable of realistic
sketches of nudes. Of course he’s denied they were his work, but
he’d be likely to say that, wouldn’t he?”

“I guess so,” Protter said. “Naked pictures
of Gretchen, gee, you never know, do you?”

“You never do,” Ehrengraf agreed. “In any
event, Miss Mullane had a key to your apartment. One was found
among her effects. Perhaps it was Gates’s key, perhaps Gretchen had
given it to him and Agnes Mullane stole it. She let herself into
your apartment, found you and your wife unconscious, and pounded
your wife on the head with an empty beer bottle. Your wife was
alive when Miss Mullane entered your apartment, Mr. Protter, and
dead when she left it.”

“So I didn’t kill her after all.”

“Indeed you did not.” Ehrengraf smiled for a
moment. Then his face turned grave. “Agnes Mullane was not cut out
for murder,” he said. “At heart she was a gentle soul. I realized
that at once when I spoke with her.”

“You went and talked to Agnes?”

The little lawyer nodded. “I suspect my
interview with her may have driven her over the edge,” he said.
“Perhaps she sensed that I was suspicious of her. She wrote out a
letter to the police, detailing what she had done. Then she must
have gone upstairs to Mr. Gates’s apartment, because she managed to
secure a twenty-five caliber automatic pistol registered to him.
She returned to her own apartment, put the weapon to her chest, and
shot herself in the heart.”

“She had some chest, too.”

Ehrengraf did not comment.

“I’ll tell you,” Protter said, “the whole
thing’s a little too complicated for a simple guy like me to take
it all in all at once. I can see why it was open and shut as far as
the cops were concerned. There’s me and the wife drinking, and
there’s me and the wife fighting, and the next thing you know she’s
dead and I’m sleeping it off. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be doing
time for killing her.”

“I played a part,” Ehrengraf said modestly.
“But it’s Agnes Mullane’s conscience that saved you from
prison.”

“Poor Agnes.”

“A tortured, tormented woman, Mr.
Protter.”

“I don’t know about that,” Protter said. “But
she had some body on her, I’ll say that for her.” He drew a breath.
“What about you, Mr. Ehrengraf? You did a real job for me. I wish I
could pay you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I guess the court pays you something,
huh?”

“There’s a set fee of a hundred and
seventy-five dollars,” Ehrengraf said, “but I don’t know that I’m
eligible to receive it in this instance because of the disposition
of the case. The argument may be raised that I didn’t really
perform any actions on your behalf, that charges were simply
dropped.”

“You mean you’ll get gypped out of your fee?
That’s a hell of a note, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” said Ehrengraf.
“It’s not important in the overall scheme of things.”

* * *

Ehrengraf, his blue pinstripe suit setting
off his Caedmon Society striped necktie, sipped daintily at a
Calvados. It was Indian Summer this afternoon, far too balmy for
hot apple pie with cheddar cheese. He was eating instead a piece of
cold apple pie topped with vanilla ice cream, and had discovered
that Calvados went every bit as nicely with that dish.

Across from him, Hudson Cutliffe sat with a
plate of lamb stew. When Cutliffe had ordered the dish, Ehrengraf
had refrained from commenting on the barbarity of slaughtering
lambs and stewing them. He had decided to ignore the contents of
Cutliffe’s plate. Whatever he’d ordered, Ehrengraf intended that
the man eat crow today.

“You,” said Cutliffe, “are the most
astonishingly fortunate lawyer who ever passed the bar.”

“‘Dame Fortune is a fickle gypsy, And always
blind, and often tipsy,’” Ehrengraf quoted. “Winthrop Mackworth
Praed, born eighteen-oh-two, died eighteen thirty-nine. But you
don’t care for poetry, do you? Perhaps you’d prefer the elder
Pliny’s observation upon the eruption of Vesuvius. He said that
Fortune favors the brave.”

“A cliché, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps it was rather less a cliché when
Pliny said it,” Ehrengraf said gently. “But that’s beside the
point. My client was innocent, just as I told you—”

“How on earth could you have known it?”

“I didn’t have to know it. I presumed it, Mr.
Cutliffe, as I always presume my clients to be innocent, and as in
time they are invariably proven to be. And, because you were so
incautious as to insist upon a wager—”

“Insist!”

“It was indeed your suggestion,” Ehrengraf
said. “
I
did not seek
you
out, Mr. Cutliffe.
I
did not seat myself unbidden at
your
table.”

“You came to this restaurant,” Cutliffe said
darkly. “You deliberately baited me, goaded me. You—”

“Oh, come now,” Ehrengraf said. “You make me
sound like what priests would call an occasion of sin or lawyers an
attractive nuisance. I came here for apple pie with cheese, Mr.
Cutliffe, and you proposed a wager. Now my client has been released
and all charges dropped, and I believe you owe me money.”

“It’s not as if you got him off. Fate got him
off.”

Ehrengraf rolled his eyes. “Oh, please, Mr.
Cutliffe,” he said. “I’ve had clients take that stance, you know,
and they change their minds in the end. My agreement with them has
always been that my fee is due and payable upon their release,
whether the case comes to court or not, whether or not I have
played any evident part in their salvation. I specified precisely
those terms when we arranged our little wager.”

“Of course gambling debts are not legally
collectible in this state.”

“Of course they are not, Mr. Cutliffe. Yours
is purely a debt of honor, an attribute which you may or may not be
said to possess in accordance with your willingness to write out a
check. But I trust you are an honorable man, Mr. Cutliffe.”

Their eyes met. After a long moment Cutliffe
drew a checkbook from his pocket. “I feel I’ve been manipulated in
some devious fashion,” he said, “but at the same time I can’t gloss
over the fact that I owe you money.” He opened the checkbook,
uncapped a pen, and filled out the check quickly, signing it with a
flourish. Ehrengraf smiled narrowly, placing the check in his own
wallet without noting the amount. It was, let it be said, an
impressive amount.

“An astonishing case,” Cutliffe said, “even
if you yourself had the smallest of parts in it. This morning’s
news was the most remarkable thing of all.”

“Oh?”

“I’m referring to Gates’s confession, of
course.”

“Gates’s confession?”

“You haven’t heard? Oh, this is rich. Harry
Gates is in jail. He went to the police and confessed to murdering
Gretchen Protter.”

“Gates murdered Gretchen Protter?”

“No question about it. It seems he shot her,
used the very same small-caliber automatic pistol that the Mullane
woman stole and used to kill herself. He was having an affair with
both the women, just as Agnes Mullane said in her suicide note. He
heard Protter accuse his wife of infidelity and was afraid Agnes
Mullane would find out he’d been carrying on with Gretchen Protter.
So he went down there looking to clear the air, and he had the gun
along for protection, and—are you sure you didn’t know about
this?”

“Keep talking,” Ehrengraf urged.

“Well, he found the two of them out cold. At
first he thought Gretchen was dead but he saw she was breathing,
and he took a raw potato the refrigerator and used it as a
silencer, and he shot Gretchen in the heart. They never found the
bullet during postmortem examination because they weren’t looking
for it, just assumed massive skull injuries had caused her death.
But after he confessed they looked, and there was the bullet right
where he said it should be, and Gates is in jail charged with her
murder.”

“Why on earth did he confess?”

“He was in love with Agnes Mullane,” Cutliffe
said. “That’s why he killed Gretchen. Then Agnes Mullane killed
herself, taking the blame for a crime Gates committed, and he
cracked wide open. Figures her death was some sort of divine
retribution, and he has to clear things by paying the price for the
Protter woman’s death. The D.A. thinks perhaps he killed them both,
faked Agnes Mullane’s confession note, and then couldn’t win the
battle with his own conscience. He insists he didn’t, of course, as
he insists he didn’t draw nude sketches of either of the women, but
it seems there’s some question now about the validity of Agnes
Mullane’s suicide note, so it may well turn out that Gates killed
her, too. Because if Gates killed Gretchen, why would Agnes have
committed suicide?”

“I’m sure there are any number of possible
explanations,” Ehrengraf said, his fingers worrying the tips of his
trimmed mustache. “Any number of explanations. Do you know the
epitaph Andrew Marvell wrote for a lady?

“
To say—she lived a virgin chaste

In this age loose and all unlaced;

Nor was, when vice is so allowed,

Of virtue or ashamed or proud;

That her soul was on Heaven so bent,

No minute but it came and went;

That, ready her last debt to pay,

She summed her life every day;

Modest as morn, as mid-day bright,

Gentle as evening, cool as night:

—‘
Tis true; but all too weakly said;

‘
Twas more significant, she’s dead.

“She’s dead, Mr. Cutliffe, and we may leave
her to heaven, as another poet has said. My client was innocent.
That’s the only truly relevant point. My client was innocent.”

“As you somehow knew all along.”

“As I knew all along, yes. Yes, indeed, as I
knew all along.” Ehrengraf’s fingers drummed the tabletop. “Perhaps
you could get our waiter’s eye,” he suggested. “I think I might
enjoy another glass of Calvados.”

The End

“
Let Ross, house of Ross, rejoice with Obadiah,
and the rankle-dankle fish with hands.”

—
Christopher Smart

Martin Ehrengraf placed his hands on the top
of his exceedingly cluttered desk and looked across it. He was
seated, while the man at whom he gazed was standing, and indeed
looked incapable of remaining still, let alone seating himself on a
chair. He was a large man, tall and quite stout, balding, florid of
face, with a hawk’s-bill nose and a jutting chin. His hair, combed
straight back, was a rich and glossy dark-brown; his bushy eyebrows
were salted with gray. His suit, while of a particular shade of
blue that Ehrengraf would never have chosen for himself, was well
tailored and expensive. It was logical to assume that the man
within the suit was abundantly supplied with money, an assumption
the little lawyer liked to be able to make about all his
prospective clients.

Now he said, “Won’t you take a seat, Mr.
Crowe? You’ll be more comfortable.”

“I’d rather stand,” Ethan Crowe said. “I’m
too much on edge to sit still.”

“Hmmm. There’s something I’ve learned in my
practice, Mr. Crowe, and that’s the great advantage in acting
as
if
. When I’m to defend a client who gives every indication of
guilt, I act
as if
he were indeed innocent. And you know,
Mr. Crowe, it’s astonishing how often the client does in fact
prove
to be innocent, often to his own surprise.”

Martin Ehrengraf flashed a smile that showed
on his lips without altering the expression in his eyes. “All of
which is all-important to me, since I collect a fee only if my
client is judged to be innocent. Otherwise I go unpaid. Acting
as if
, Mr. Crowe, is uncannily helpful, and you might help
us both by sitting in that chair and acting as if you were at peace
with the world.”

Ehrengraf paused, and when Crowe had seated
himself he said, “You say you’ve been charged with murder. But
homicide is not usually a bailable offense, so how does it happen
that you are here in my office instead of locked in a cell?”