Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf

  “My God.”

  “There were other expenses, Mrs. Culhane, but as I pay them myself I don’t honestly think there’s any need for me to recount them to you, do you?”

  “My God. Dear God in heaven.”

  “Indeed. It would have been better all around, as I said a few moments ago, had you decided to pay my fee without hearing what you’ve just heard. Ignorance in this case would have been, if not bliss, at least a good deal closer to bliss than what you’re undoubtedly feeling at the moment.”

  “Clark didn’t kill that girl.”

  “Of course he didn’t, Mrs. Culhane. Of course he didn’t. I’m sure some rotter stole his tie and framed him. But that would have been an enormous chore to prove and all a lawyer could have done was persuade a jury that there was room for doubt, and poor Clark would have had a cloud over him all the days of his life. Of course you and I know he’s innocent—”

  “He is innocent,” she said. “He is.”

  “Of course he is, Mrs. Culhane. The killer was a homicidal maniac striking down young women who reminded him of his mother. Or his sister, or God knows whom. You’ll want to get out your checkbook, Mrs. Culhane, but don’t try to write the check just yet. Your hands are trembling. Just sit there, that’s the ticket, and I’ll get you a glass of water. Everything’s perfectly fine, Mrs. Culhane. That’s what you must remember. Everything’s perfectly fine and everything will continue to be fine. Here you are, a couple of ounces of water in a paper cup, just drink it down, there you are, there you are.”

  And when it was time to write out the check her hand did not shake a bit. Pay to the order of Martin H. Ehrengraf, seventy-five thousand dollars, signed Dorothy Rodgers Culhane. Signed with a ball-point pen, no need to blot it, and handed across the desk to the impeccably dressed little man.

  “Yes, thank you, thank you very much, my dear lady. And here is your dollar, the retainer you gave me. Go ahead and take it, please.”

  She took the dollar.

  “Very good. And you probably won’t want to repeat this conversation to anyone. What would be the point?”

  “No. No, I won’t say anything.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Four neckties.”

  He looked at her, raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch.

  “You said you bought four of the neckties. There were—there were three girls killed.”

  “Indeed there were.”

  “What happened to the fourth necktie?”

  “Why, it must be in my bureau drawer, don’t you suppose? And perhaps they’re all there, Mrs. Culhane. Perhaps all four neckties are in my bureau drawer, still in their original wrappings, and purchasing them was just a waste of time and money on my part. Perhaps that homicidal maniac had neckties of his own and the four in my drawer are just an interesting souvenir and a reminder of what might have been.”

  “Oh.”

  “And perhaps I’ve just told you a story out of the whole cloth, an interesting turn of phrase since we are speaking of silk neckties. Perhaps I never flew to London at all, never motored to Oxford, never purchased a single necktie of the Caedmon Society. Perhaps that was just something I trumped up on the spur of the moment to coax a fee out of you.”

  “But—”

  “Ah, my dear lady,” said Ehrengraf, moving to the side of her chair, taking her arm, helping her out of the chair, turning her, steering her toward the door. “We would do well, Mrs. Culhane, to believe that which it most pleases us to believe. I have my fee. You have your son. The police have another line of inquiry to pursue altogether. It would seem we’ve all come out of this well, wouldn’t you say? Put your mind at rest, Mrs. Culhane, dear Mrs. Culhane. There’s the elevator down the hall on your left. If you ever need my services you know where I am and how to reach me. And perhaps recommend me to your friends. But discreetly, dear lady. Discreetly. Discretion is everything in matters of this sort.”

  Mrs. Culhane walked very carefully down the hall to the elevator and rang the bell and waited. And she did not look back. Not once.

  THE EHRENGRAF

  Presumption

  * * *

  “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

  Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”

  —Oliver Goldsmith

  “Now let me get this straight,” Alvin Gort said. “You actually accept criminal cases on a contingency basis. Even homicide cases?”

  “Especially homicide cases.”

  “If your client is acquitted he pays your fee. If he’s found guilty, then your efforts on his behalf cost him nothing whatsoever. Except expenses, I assume.”

  “That’s very true,” Martin Ehrengraf said. The little lawyer supplied a smile which blossomed briefly on his thin lips while leaving his eyes quite uninvolved. “Shall I explain in detail?”

  “By all means.”

  “To take your last point first, I pay my own expenses and furnish no accounting of them to my client. My fees are thus all-inclusive. By the same token, should a client of mine be convicted he would owe me nothing. I would absorb such expenses as I might incur acting on his behalf.”

  “That’s remarkable.”

  “It’s surely unusual, if not unique. Now the rest of what you’ve said is essentially true. It’s not uncommon for attorneys to take on negligence cases on a contingency basis, participating handsomely in the settlement when they win, sharing their clients’ losses when they do not. The principle has always made eminent good sense to me. Why shouldn’t a client give substantial value for value received? Why should he be simply charged for service, whether or not the service does him any good? When I pay out money, Mr. Gort, I like to get what I pay for. And I don’t mind paying for what I get.”

  “It certainly makes sense to me,” Alvin Gort said. He dug a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, scratched a match, drew smoke into his lungs. This was his first experience in a jail cell and he’d been quite surprised to learn that he was allowed to have matches on his person, to wear his own clothes rather than prison garb, to keep money in his pocket and a watch on his wrist.

  No doubt all this would change if and when he were convicted of murdering his wife. Then he’d be in an actual prison and the rules would most likely be more severe. Here they had taken his belt as a precaution against suicide, and they would have taken the laces from his shoes had he not been wearing loafers at the time of his arrest. But it could have been worse.

  And unless Ehrengraf pulled off a small miracle, it would be worse.

  “Sometimes my clients never see the inside of a courtroom,” Ehrengraf was saying now. “I’m always happiest when I can save them not merely from prison but from going to trial in the first place. So you should understand that whether or not I collect my fee hinges on your fate, on the disposition of your case—and not on how much work I put in or how much time it takes me to liberate you. In other words, from the moment you retain me I have an interest in your future, and the moment you are released and all charges dropped, my fee becomes due and payable in full.”

  “And your fee will be—?”

  “One hundred thousand dollars,” Ehrengraf said crisply.

  Alvin Gort considered the sum, then nodded thoughtfully. It was not difficult to believe that the diminutive attorney commanded and received large fees. Alvin Gort recognized good clothing when he saw it, and the clothing Martin Ehrengraf wore was good indeed. The man was well turned out. His suit, a bronze sharkskin number with a nipped-in waist, was clearly not off the rack. His brown wing-tip shoes had been polished to a high gloss. His tie, a rich teak in hue with an unobtrusive below-the-knot design, bore the reasonably discreet trademark of a genuine countess. And his hair had received the attention of a good barber while his neatly trimmed mustache served as a focal point for a face otherwise devoid of any single dominating feature. The overall impression thus created was one of a man who could announce a six-figure fee and make you feel that such a sum was altogether fitting and
proper.

  “I’m reasonably well off,” Gort said.

  “I know. It’s a commendable quality in clients.”

  “And I’d certainly be glad to pay one hundred thousand dollars for my freedom. On the other hand, if you don’t get me off then I don’t owe you a dime. Is that right?”

  “Quite right.”

  Gort considered again, nodded again. “Then I’ve got no reservations,” he said. “But—”

  “Yes?”

  Alvin Gort’s eyes measured the lawyer. Gort was accustomed to making rapid decisions. He made one now.

  “You might have reservations,” he said. “There’s one problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “I did it,” Gort said. “I killed her.”

  “I can see how you would think that,” Martin Ehrengraf said. “The weight of circumstantial evidence piled up against you. Long-suppressed unconscious resentment of your wife, perhaps even a hidden desire to see her dead. All manner of guilt feelings stored up since early childhood. Plus, of course, the natural idea that things do not happen without a good reason for their occurrence. You are in prison, charged with murder; therefore it stands to reason that you did something to deserve all this, that you did in fact murder your wife.”

  “But I did,” Gort said.

  “Nonsense. Palpable nonsense.”

  “But I was there,” Gort said. “I’m not making this up. For God’s sake, man, I’m not a psychiatric basket case. Unless you’re thinking about an insanity defense? I suppose I could go along with that, scream out hysterically in the middle of the night, strip naked and sit gibbering in the corner of my cell. I can’t say I’d enjoy it but I’d go along with it if you think that’s the answer. But—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ehrengraf said, wrinkling his nose with distaste. “I mean to get you acquitted, Mr. Gort. Not committed to an asylum.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gort said. He frowned, looked around craftily. “You think the place is bugged,” he whispered. “That’s it, eh?”

  “You can use your normal tone of voice. No, they don’t employ hidden microphones in this jail. It’s not only illegal but against policy as well.”

  “Then I don’t understand. Look, I’m the guy who fastened the dynamite under the hood of Ginnie’s Pontiac. I hooked up a cable to the starter. I set things up so that she would be blown into the next world. Now how do you propose to—”

  “Mr. Gort.” Ehrengraf held up a hand like a stop sign. “Please, Mr. Gort.”

  Alvin Gort subsided.

  “Mr. Gort,” Ehrengraf continued, “I defend the innocent and leave it to more clever men than myself to employ trickery in the cause of the guilty. And I find this very easy to do because all my clients are innocent. There is, you know, a legal principle involved.”

  “A legal principle?”

  “The presumption of innocence.”

  “The presumption of—? Oh, you mean a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty.”

  “A tenet of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence,” Ehrengraf said. “The French presume guilt until innocence is proven. And the totalitarian countries, of course, presume guilt and do not allow innocence to be proved, taking it for granted that their police would not dream of wasting their time arresting the innocent in the first place. But I refer, Mr. Gort, to something more far-reaching than the legal presumption of innocence.” Ehrengraf drew himself up to his full height, such as it was, and his back went ramrod straight. “I refer,” he said, “to the Ehrengraf Presumption.”

  “The Ehrengraf Presumption?”

  “Any client of Martin H. Ehrengraf,” said Martin Ehrengraf, “is presumed by Ehrengraf to be innocent, which presumption is invariably confirmed in due course, the preconceptions of the client himself notwithstanding.” The little lawyer smiled with his lips. “Now,” he said, “shall we get down to business?”

  Half an hour later Alvin Gort was still sitting on the edge of his cot. Martin Ehrengraf, however, was pacing briskly in the manner of a caged lion. With the thumb and forefinger of his right hand he smoothed the ends of his neat mustache. His left hand was at his side, its thumb hooked into his trouser pocket. He continued to pace while Gort smoked a cigarette almost to the filter. Then, as Gort ground the butt under his heel, Ehrengraf turned on his own heel and fixed his eyes on his client.

  “The evidence is damning,” he conceded. “A man of your description purchased dynamite and blasting caps from Tattersall Demolition Supply just ten days before your wife’s death. Your signature is on the purchase order. A clerk remembers waiting on you and reports that you were nervous.”

  “Damn right I was nervous,” Gort said. “I never killed anyone before.”

  “Please, Mr. Gort. If you must maintain the facade of having committed murder, at least keep your illusion to yourself. Don’t share it with me. At the moment I’m concerned with evidence. We have your signature on the purchase order and we have you identified by the clerk. The man even remembers what you were wearing. Most customers come to Tattersall in work clothes, it would seem, while you wore a rather distinctive burgundy blazer and white flannel slacks. And tasseled loafers,” he added, clearly not approving of them.

  “It’s hard to find casual loafers without tassels or braid these days.”

  “Hard, yes. But scarcely impossible. Now you say your wife had a lover, a Mr. Barry Lattimore.”

  “That toad Lattimore!”

  “You knew of this affair and disapproved.”

  “Disapproved! I hated them. I wanted to strangle both of them. I wanted—”

  “Please, Mr. Gort.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Ehrengraf sighed. “Now your wife seems to have written a letter to her sister in New Mexico. She did in fact have a sister in New Mexico?”

  “Her sister Grace. In Socorro.”

  “She posted the letter four days before her death. In it she stated that you knew about her affair with Lattimore.”

  “I’d known for weeks.”

  “She went on to say that she feared for her life. ‘The situation is deteriorating and I don’t know what to do. You know what a temper he has. I’m afraid he might be capable of anything, anything at all. I’m defenseless and I don’t know what to do.’”

  “Defenseless as a cobra,” Gort muttered.

  “No doubt. That was from memory but it’s a fair approximation. Of course I’ll have to examine the original. And I’ll want specimens of your wife’s handwriting.”

  “You can’t think the letter’s a forgery?”

  “We never know, do we? But I’m sure you can tell me where I can get hold of samples. Now what other evidence do we have to contend with? There was a neighbor who saw you doing something under the hood of your wife’s car some four or five hours before her death.”

  “Mrs. Boerland. Damned old crone. Vicious gossiping busybody.”

  “You seem to have been in the garage shortly before dawn. You had a light on and the garage door was open, and you had the hood of the car up and were doing something.”

  “Damned right I was doing something. I was—”

  “Please, Mr. Gort. Between tasseled loafers and these constant interjections—”

  “Won’t happen again, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

  “Yes. Now just let me see. There were two cars in the garage, were there not? Your Buick and your wife’s Pontiac. Your car was parked on the left-hand side, your wife’s on the right.”

  “That was so that she could back straight out. When you’re parked on the left side you have to back out in a sort of squiggly way. When Ginnie tried to do that she always ran over a corner of the lawn.”

  “Ah.”

  “Some people just don’t give a damn about a lawn,” Gort said, “and some people do.”

  “As with so many aspects of human endeavor, Mr. Gort. Now Mrs. Boerland observed you in the garage shortly before dawn, and the actual explosion which claimed your wife’s life took place a few hours later while you w
ere having your breakfast.”

  “Toasted English muffin and coffee. Years ago Ginnie made scrambled eggs and squeezed fresh orange juice for me. But with the passage of time—”

  “Did she normally start her car at that hour?”

  “No,” Gort said. He sat up straight, frowned. “No, of course not. Dammit, why didn’t I think of that? I figured she’d sit around the house until noon. I wanted to be well away from the place when it happened—”

  “Mr. Gort.”

  “Well, I did. All of a sudden there was this shock wave and a thunderclap right on top of it and I’ll tell you, Mr. Ehrengraf, I didn’t even know what it was.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “I mean—”

  “I wonder why your wife left the house at that hour. She said nothing to you?”

  “No. There was a phone call and—”

  “From whom?”

  Gort frowned again. “Damned if I know. But she got the call just before she left. I wonder if there’s a connection.”

  “I shouldn’t doubt it. Who was your wife’s heir, Mr. Gort? Who would inherit her money?”

  “Money?” Gort grinned. “Ginnie didn’t have a dime. I was her legal heir just as she was mine, but I was the one who had the money. All she left was the jewelry and clothing that my money paid for.”

  “Any insurance?”

  “Exactly enough to pay your fee,” Gort said, and grinned this time rather like a shark. “Except that I won’t see a penny of it. Fifty thousand dollars, double indemnity for accidental death, and I think the insurance companies call murder an accident, although it’s always struck me as rather purposeful. That makes one hundred thousand dollars, your fee to the penny, but none of it’ll come my way.”

  “It’s true that one cannot profit financially from a crime,” Ehrengraf said. “But if you’re found innocent—”