Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf

by Lawrence Block

  “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 EHRENGRAF

  Affirmation

  * * *

  “Let this be said between us here,

  One love grows green when one turns grey;

  This year knows nothing of last year;

  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.

  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.”
<
br />   “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 / I 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 c
ompletely 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.”